If you are using PPC (pay per click) advertising, you should use conversion tracking to understand and calculate your ROI (return on investment).
Here’s a blog with some good tips.
There is a key reason as to why Google beat out the competition about 10 years ago to become the #1 search engine on the net. Relevancy. Relevancy is defined as relation to the matter at hand. Basically, that means if someone is searching for grandma’s buttery biscuits. They expect to click on your link and find grandma’s buttery biscuits. Simple enough right? Not so much… too many marketers today don’t apply that simple principle and they waste money and potential sales every day because of it. Let me give an example of how to apply this simple technique.
Let’s say you using your traffic source (PPC, SEO, articles, etc) you are driving people to your landing page using keywords based on the niche “People Search”. So, you have all of your articles, ads, etc based on people search. The user clicks on your ad and heads over to your page to find a generic landing page talking about Net Detective being the best place to run background checks. You just lost a sale. Sure you might get some sales. But, you are losing the majority of the ones you could be getting. Now let’s say instead of finding a page talking about Background Checks they see this page that talks about how to find people with Net Detective. It goes on to show practical ways that Net Detective has helped others to find people. Now you’ve sold them. You’ve given them exactly what they are looking for. That’s why HD Publishing has started cranking out some keyword specific landing pages. They are targeted toward keyword niches like Background Checks, People Search, Court Records and many more. The goal is to help you convert your traffic. That’s what it’s all about right? If there is a niche of keywords you are trying to convert email or call Jan today and get yourself setup with a specific keyword page. I’ve personally seen this work and have seen as high as a 300% improvement in conversions just by making things relative to what the user is looking for.
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Overview of Google Conversion Optimizer
Earlier this year Google’s AdWords team quietly introduced a new feature that has received very little attention or press: Conversion Optimizer. Since Google knows every detail about your campaigns as well as those of your competitors—conversion rates per keyword bid… per CTR… per ad quality score… per geographical location… per time of day—it became clear to us that no human could ever analyze all that data in a short amount of time daily. After all, we marketers move quickly!
So, if Google could automatically find missed opportunities and correct unnoticed problems, and do all of that behind the scenes while we focused more on marketing, we knew this would be a big hit as long as it worked.
And it worked! We have recently tested Conversion Optimizer and can say without question our conversions have increased 10-20% across most niches in our testing.
4 Steps to a Successful Campaign with Conversion Optimizer
Here are some things we’ve learned along the way that should help get you started profitably and stay profitable.
- Getting Started
To turn on this feature, all that is required is to navigate to your campaign settings, find the Bidding and Budget section, and change your bidding option to Conversion Optimizer. But to really use this feature, you will need to adopt a new approach to bidding, which for many of us represents a whole new way of thinking. This new approach is known as CPA bidding, or cost per acquisition. Bye-bye, keyword bidding!
(This is not to be confused with cost per action (also CPA), another recent adoption by Google that is a platform for affiliate marketing where conversions correspond to actions—such as email signups—rather than sales.)
Ok, so are you ready? Go ahead and turn on Conversion Optimizer now!
- Set a Starting CPA
You probably want to understand how it works before going much further. Google takes historical data from your account to calculate a recommended starting CPA. If your campaign has been running for many months or even years, great! Start with Google’s recommended CPA. Just make sure you actively monitor your ad spend.
However, if your campaigns have been running for less than 3 months, we recommend you set your CPA about 50% higher than your target cost per conversion. For example, if your targeted cost per conversion is $26.00, you might try a CPA of $39.00, and see how it goes.
Keep in mind, the higher your CPA, the more impressions and conversions you’ll receive, and the more money you’ll spend. So be careful when you first get started!
- Tweak, tweak, and more tweak
Monitor daily and adjust your CPA until you find the sweet spot. But make changes in small increments. It’s best to play it safe from the start. - Possible Ad Group Restructuring
If you notice an ad group witha bunch of keywords performing erratically, you might consider removingsome of those keywords and creating new, tighter ad groups devoted just to them. Monitor the cost per conversion column and make sure your keywords are all performing similarly.
Final Word
The last bit worth mentioning is you can always go back to your previous CPC bidding approach. Just click campaign settings, uncheck Conversion Optimizer, and your previous CPC values will be restored in an instant. But we think once you turn it on you’ll leave it on!
Good luck!
Overview of Google “Slap” Prevention
Google often changes the rules of their own game. One week, your AdWords campaigns are flying along, generating nice profits. The next week, you log in only to find traffic has been cut in half. Before the day is over, traffic comes to a screeching halt, and it leaves you scratching your head.
What in the world happened?
Well, sorry, but you just got SLAPPED! Don’t worry,it happens, and it’s fixable.
This step-by-step guide is an accurate, up-to-date “slap-prevention” tool designed to:
- Bring your slapped campaigns back to life or
- Create slap-proof campaigns from the beginning
6 Steps to a Slap-Proof Campaign
We have tested these steps ourselves across numerous campaigns, and so far, Google has had no issues with them. If things change, or if Google tightens their grip, as they tend to do once or twice a year, we’ll do our best to stay on top of it and update you here on this page.
The real challenge with a Google Slap is that Google changes their standards from time to time and usually does not announce when or what changes will happen. So we’re all left scrambling, trying to plug up the holes in our sinking campaigns.
The following 6 steps will either help get you out of a slapped situation or help prevent one from happening in the first place:
Step 1
Create mini-sites. Mini-sites have proven to be more resistant to slaps than single landing pages. A mini-site consists of no less than 5-8 pages and should contain the following:
- About us
- Privacy policy
- Terms and conditions
- Contact us (including address, phone number and email)
- Sitemap (for a free Google-compliant sitemap generator, visit: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com)
Step 2
Make your mini-site navigable. Make links to all of the pages from each page on the site. Bottom line here: Google wants your site to be legit. As a result, you will build visitor loyalty and create a compelling visitor experience, thereby improving the advertising model altogether.If your visitors are happy, Google is happy!
Step 3
Make your mini-site transparent. What does transparency have to do with affiliate marketing? A lot! Always state your site’s mission clearly and up front so your visitors know exactly why they are there. Don’t try to trick them or force them into signing up or clicking something that will turn them away forever. These tactics add little value to building long-term customer loyalty.
Step 4
Use well-formed HTML. By well-formed, we mean code that checks out well when put through a webpage validator. Google doesn’t read webpages like humans do. They have automated webbots to do that for them. If the webbot comes to a page that doesn’t check out well, it will basically say, no thanks. This page, and your whole site, could be dinged! (Visit this validator: http://validator.w3.org.)
Step 5
Pay attention to SEO. This will ensure that Google finds your pages relevant to your campaigns. Always use the same keywords from your ads in your landing pages. Use them in the title, meta description, meta keywords, and H1, H2, and H3 headings. Then scatter them about the content. But be careful not to overdo it! Google’s bots are programmed to spot keyword-stuffing, which results in–you guessed it–a ding!
Step 6
This final step is a list of good practices every advertiser should follow. Coming up short on just one of these may not be enough to get the slap, but failing to deliver well on a few of these may be!
- Write good ad copy
- Use keywords in the headline, copy, and display url
- Use domain names with your keywords whenever possible
- Break large groups of keywords into smaller adgroups
- Create “tight” adgroups by not going too “wide” with keywords
- Don’t use different destination urls in the same adgroup
- Check keyword density for your main keywords. Is it high? Good!
- Use Google’s webmaster tools to upload your sitemap and monitor 404s
- Pay attention to Google’s suggestions for improving your Quality Score
Final Word
If you get enough dings on your site, you may be slapped. Using this guide will help you steer clear of problems and help with conversions. So, it pays to play by the rules.
PS. If you feel you have been slapped for no legitimate reason, you are welcome to call the AdWords department toll-free: 1-866-2-GOOGLE.
Good luck!
Article Marketing Made Easy
1. Choosing A Niche
But before you grab your tools, have you decided what you want to grow? This can be tricky, and you can probably bet you’ll make some mistakes or take the long way around at least once or twice. So don’t be overly concerned with making mistakes. Your best bet is to follow one simple rule: follow your passion.
You’ve heard that a million times. And it really applies here. After all, you’re going to be writing terrific, unique content from scratch. Then you’ll promote it all over the web. Finally, you’ll monitor, tweak, add, and subtract. In some cases, you’ll start all over with fresh ideas and a new plan. The point is, if you’re excited about the topic, all this work will be that much more fun!
Not to mention your readers will also dig your articles if they sense your passion. So, do yourself a favor and stop to think about what moves you. For many people this is an easy task; for others it is more challenging. Sooner or later, it will hit you, and when it does you had better go grab a pen!
A final tip for choosing a niche: take time to read articles already out there. You’ll get a sense of effective writing styles, and it will foster more ideas. You might also learn a few things you didn’t already know.
2. Putting Pen To Paper
Well, you probably will not use a pen at all. (Or maybe you will!) Regardless, this is where most people get stuck.
Do you know how professional writers do it? I’m talking about the Agatha Christies, the Stephen Kings and the John Grishams, to name just a few of my favorites. They write every day, religiously. They have a routine, and they stick to it. They may not have a productive go at it on a given day, but that is all part of the process. Other days will be great! And it will be like this for you, too.
General guidelines for effective article writing are:
- Start each paragraph with a topic sentence
- Follow with a supporting sentence
- End with a concluding sentence
If you use a computer to write it will be easy to copy and paste your articles right onto the web, literally. Just make sure you read and re-read the web version because some software tools, like Microsoft Word, leave little “gremlins” embedded in the code. These aren’t harmful in any way. They’re just character mismatches that wreak havoc on apostrophes, quotation marks, and dashes.
Finally, pay attention to the word count of your articles. You will want to keep articles in chunks of around 250-300 words. This improves readability and maximizes your effectiveness. If you’ve already got some articles written but they’re much longer than 300 words, try splitting them into separate articles.
3. Keying In on Keywords
Simply getting 300 or so words down on paper is not the end-game necessarily. The words themselves are extremely important, hence the name “Keywords.”
For a given article, jot down the 10 most popular topics or sub-topics. Then head over to a free keyword tool (see below), plug in your keywords, and carefully look over the results.
What words are most popular this month? Which ones have the highest competition? What new keywords come up that you hadn’t thought of? From this you might easily spot opportunities for new articles.
There are positives and negatives for using the most popular keywords. The positive: your chances of reaching millions of people are better. The negative: getting close to page one of Google’s search results page is going to be very tough!
Keyword research is a never-ending cycle. Make sure each article has one primary keyword that appears more than any other keyword. Support that with a secondary keywords and tertiary keywords. Use them in your page titles and descriptions (called meta tags in html), h1, h2, and h3 headings, and in your resource box. A well-written article is only as effective as its use of keywords.
Here are some free keyword tools to help you get started with your keywords:
- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
- http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
- http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
4. Outsourcing Writers
If this all sounds a bit too daunting, or perhaps you KNOW you just don’t have time to write, there are plenty of freelance copywriters willing to help. These folks work for you. They may even be better writers than you! (In some cases, they will not be.) But before you enter into an agreement, make sure you’ve read enough of their portfolio to make an educated guess.
How do you find good ghostwriters? Luckily there are websites devoted to connecting you with freelance talent. Most sites take a small fee after all is said and done, but is usually reasonable.
How much will writers charge? It depends on their experience. But in these desperate economic times, you will probably find a good writer for around $10-$30 per article.
Below are just a few freelance connection sites that cater to writers:
5. Putting Seeds In The Bank
OK, so you’ve got a few articles under your belt. Congrats! Now what?
This is where you methodically distribute your seeds, and then… wait, watch, and grow.
There are a bunch of sites that will take your articles and distribute them to all kinds of organizations for non-exclusive rights to reprint. These sites are known as Article Banks.
Here’s how they work: you submit an article to a distribution site, it goes under technical and semantic review, and once it checks out okay your article is made available to webmasters, ezine publishers, newsletter publishers, and offline publications.
Some sites charge a monthly fee, some a per-posting fee, while others are free. New services are popping up all over the place, so head over to Google and search for “article bank”.
Below are 13 Article Banks that will be of tremendous help to you. But before you go signing up anywhere, be sure to read the next section (Leave A Mark In Each Seed) as it plays an important role in your overall marketing plan.
- www.prweb.com (paid PR service)
- www.i-newswire.com (free PR service)
- www.pr.com (free PR service)
[A note about the PR services listed above: This is a great way to get in the press release game without paying big PR bucks! If your company did something newsworthy--took on a big client, relocated, or reorganized in some way--let the world know about it!]
6. Leave A Mark In Each Seed
This section is extremely important. Arguably, this is the sole reason you’re writing articles in the first place.
You want to monetize these articles, right? Right! Well each article marketing site or Article Bank recognizes this by allowing you an opportunity or two to take advantage of this mass distribution of your articles.
What do they do? They provide a “resource box” in the signature of every article you submit. The resource box is where you will provide a URL link back to your site (appropriately called a “backlink”). It might look something like this:
or
http://Your-Company-Name.com/niche/article.html
This helps you in at least three ways:
a. You receive a backlink from each site where your article lives, thereby boosting your organic search engine rankings.
b. You gain targeted traffic which you can monetize in endless ways, thereby improving your bottom line.
c. Readers may see you as a credible expert in your field, thereby enhancing your reputation cloud and attracting more business.
As you can see, articles are not only sources of news and information. They’re also vehicles for monetization. It’s their job to bring people to you. It is your job to turn this traffic into money. But that’s a whole different topic about which many books have been written!
Demographics are one of the best tools a marketer can use to find out where and how to market to those people searching for a product. So, I wanted to get you to check out the demographics for our corporate Net Detective (ND) page.
We’ve set up a Facebook page and a Twitter page for HD Publishing Group affiliates. Both of these are private pages just for us. These are new and small at this time, but I’m sure we’ll grow & grow & grow & grow. Hope to see you there!!
Follow us on Twitter.
Check out Facebook notes for helpful hints and top affiliate sales (from affiliate newsletters).
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