Would You Buy Your Website a Drink?

Ten Ways to Win the “Speed Dating” Test

Finding a mate can be a laborious process when you think about how many single people exist.  So speed dating was developed to eliminate some of the time out of this process.

If you think about it, every time you search for something you go through a sort of speed dating process.  You know what you want, but then millions of potential matches appear.  So, you speed date the landing pages on the first one-to-two pages of the search results to see if you can quickly find a website you’re are willing to give your personal information to in hopes that there might be a future there that satisfies your needs.

We’ve compiled ten tips to make sure your landing page can pass the speed dating test and get you…

Ethics in the Search Marketing World

…and How to Keep Your Nose Clean

The search marketing world creates interesting situations where ethical lines can get stretched quite a bit. For instance, in the search marketing world information is public. Yet unscrupulous actions can be taken anonymously — a scenario too tempting for many a desperate competitor. We run into many clients who have been unethically pursued by a competitor. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive policing capabilities out there, and complaints about suspected competition fraud are frequently ignored.  Still there are things you can do to protect yourself and you should never stoop to the level of an unethical competitor to retaliate — in the long run, there are always consequences for unethical behavior.

First, let’s look at some all-too-common non-ethical examples. These just don’t pass the red-face test:

Competitors clicking on your pay-per-click ads.

First,…

Step by Step Guide to Building a Great PPC Keyword List

A Four-Step Process to Get You on Your Way

A great pay-per-click (PPC) keyword strategy is central to any campaign’s success, so getting your list right is absolutely critical. Once your campaign is live, the Yield Web Marketing Suite works every day to make recommendations to you about new keywords you might consider together with negative keyword recommendations. This guide, then, will help you create a great keyword list in advance of launching a new campaign in four easy steps: 1) Questions; 2) Keyword Tools; 3) Variations; and 4) Assembly.

1) Questions.

Use the following question categories to start making your list. As you go through and answer these questions, keep your thoughts organized into the different buckets – we’ll keep using these categories in future steps. Throughout this guide we’ll use an example of a restaurant for…

When Your Conversion Rate Plummets

Twelve Diagnostic Questions to Get Answers

We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in today’s economy, panic ensues.

Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to the root of the problem.

We’ll start at the “front” of the line with our problem-solving and work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line changes are much easier to address.

1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?

Check out your pay per click (PPC) advertising keywords bringing in traffic.…

Seven Steps to Get Your Website Caffeinated

Preparing for Google Caffeine

In 2010, Google’s search results are becoming more focused on results that are fast, fresh and visual.   Now is your chance to get your website ready to make sure you are part of Google’s first page crowd in 2010.

1) Are You Fast?

Google is going to judge you based on how fast your web pages load.  You should aim to have your page load in 3 seconds or less.

If you are clocking in at over 3 seconds you might try some of the following techniques (which your web master or website designer can help you with):  use CSS; limit the amount of Flash on the site; use image heights and widths; check for broken links; compress your JavaScript and CSS; cut back on cookies; review server or hosting provider performance; and remove…

Social Media Marketing Part 3: Industry Examples

Outline a Strategy and an Objective

In our first post in this series, we discussed the underlying basics of social media marketing.  And in the second post, we covered the avenues you should use when executing a social media marketing strategy.  In this, our third and final post in this series, let’s go through a couple of examples to help spark some more ideas. What follows is a few sample business types with a list of items for them to tweet, post, blog and provide guides and tools about, while also encouraging community comments, photos and participation.

As you’ll see from the examples below, it would be easy to apply these suggestion to virtually any business (particularly any consumer-oriented business), so use your imagination and insert your own company into the examples that follow:

Real Estate Social Marketing

Be the…

Social Media Marketing Part 2: Social Media Avenues

Or: What Goes Where?

In Part One of our Social Media Marketing Series, we covered the fundamentals.  What follows is a checklist of great social sites to leverage along with how to get it going and the content you can put into each spot:

If you haven’t done it already, create a Facebook Page for your business (type “Facebook Pages” into the search box when in your personal Facebook account page to find the section, and then click on the “+ Create Page” button to get started).  Once this is done, the obvious next step is to get people to become “Fans” of your business:

- Ask all of your friends and family

- Run a contest to past customers, complementary businesses, or local organizations to get some fans

- Offer a promotional rate to Facebook fans

- Promote your Page in your…

Baby Steps to Social Media Marketing

Part I: How to Talk and What to Say

Lots of folks are all aflutter about leveraging social media. When you run a business, you will frequently get lots of comments from everyone you talk with (friends, family, neighbors, new acquaintances, employees, partners) about how you should really be using social marketing. Social media advice has become akin to parenting advice – lots of blanket statements from people who you barely know and who may not even be doing it!

Most of the business owners we talk to are game for any form of “free” website traffic and customers, but just don’t know where to start. They’ve all heard about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and community website content, but they don’t understand how their business could use them.

We’ve put together a quick guide to help you take those…

AdWords Excluded Locations: Secret Double Agents

The geographical area in which you want your Adwords ads to display is a very important factor to consider, not only for local businesses but also for national businesses.

One common scenario we run into is a business that is located in a particular area, but provides service to people across the country, or multiple countries.  A few examples here include real estate agents, travel guides and hotels – pretty much any business that focuses on relocation or visitors.

For these types of advertisers we find that running campaigns targeted toward their local area is often not productive.  We’ll use the real estate agency as an example here – many people like to check out photos of houses on the market and what they are listed at in their own neighborhood, but they have no intention of…

All that Google Stuff is Too Technical for Me

or “If I had a dollar for every time I heard this…”

But we say Hogwash!

Yes, there are lots of advanced features and complexities to online advertising, but you don’t have to use them. You can get started in a very simple and quick manner.

Here’s your step-by-step guide for using Google to start getting more business today:

1) Go to Google’s Keyword Tool

a.  Select the “Website Content” option
b.  Enter the URL of your home page
c.  Scroll to the bottom and click the link to export the results to Excel

2) Create a Google AdWords Account (if you don’t have one)

3) Create your first campaign in your AdWords Account

a. Create Ad Groups from your Excel export

i. The common terms column translates into your ad groups – create one ad group for each unique common term

b. Put Keywords into your Ad Groups

i.…