Content Site System

Paid search is a fantastic way to drive web traffic to our site from the major search engines. It can also suck our marketing budget dry in just a couple of days if not done properly. The bottom line is someone is going to profit by implementing paid search. The question is, is it going to be us or the search engines? The goal of the search engines is more clicks. The more people click on our ads the more money the search engines make. Their strategy is to get as many clicks as possible within our budget are willing to do that all day long. The real goal should be “fewer clicks, lower cost with more conversions”. Let’s take a few minutes to look at some strategies that should make a difference in our campaigns.

1. Do not use Content Network in Google when you first set up a campaign default setting is set “on”. There are two things that you need to consider before turning on the content match. The first is: “The website that is hosting our ad gets paid every time someone clicks on the ad”. Most click fraud happens is when an owner of a site clicks on these ads. The second is: “Individuals who click on these ads are most often, at the research end of the buying cycle. Limit those who click on your ads to those who are on the buying side of the cycle.

2. Search Terms. The more general the term, less qualified the lead and the more the cost. What I try to think about what terms are going to get my ideal customer to my site.

3. Keyword “types” There are three types of keywords “Broad”, “Phrase” and “Exact”. The rule of thumb that I use is: for single word phrases, use exact match and for search phrases that are two to three words, used “phrase matching”. I am also experimenting with using “exact” matching for these terms as well. The more specific the search term is to what you are offering and who your ideal client is, the more qualified to lead will be. Better a small number of qualified leads than a large number of leads that waste your time and ultimately cost a lot more money.

4. Just a couple thoughts on writing creatives (ad copy). Use the following in your “headline” box: {keyword: “your main keyword}. This will put your keyword phrase into the headline. You want to attract only your ideal client (someone who is looking for exactly what you have to offer) so be specific. Add at least one of your “unique selling propositions”. This can be very challenging because of the space limitations. Rule of thumb, find out what your competitors are doing and do something different. For example, if everyone is offering free shipping, use one of your other unique selling propositions.

5. Landing pages require a great deal of thought. Landing page have one purpus, answer the questions that are on the mind of the searcher, the reason for the search. He entered his search terms because he has a problem, needs a solution or is in some kind of “pain”. You have about two seconds to convince him that you understand what he is going through and what he needs. You must show him that you possess the answers to his needs. Don’t just send them to your home page unless your home page can accomplish the above. Once you connect with your searcher you must have a call to action. You must be very specific and clear about the next steps. Have your “phone number” or “contact us button” on every page.

6. Tracking. Finally, track everything. Paid search is not an exact science. It takes time to set up and optimized your campaigns to get the results that you are looking for. You must monitor your campaigns at least weekly in order to catch market changes. Google, Yahoo and MSN have free tracking tools that work great.

There is good money in paid search, if done correctly. If you are new to this or do not have several hours a week, it might be a lot cheaper to find someone who knows what they are doing to help you rather than lose thousands of dollars trying to figure it out yourself.

Right now, the most explosive way to make money on Internet sales is with article marketing. There must be a few thousand article directories online right now trying to cash in on this boom market. There also must be over a zillion articles in all of the directories combined, but this is not stopping this Internet method of making money.

Article writing is the most popular way of providing information to people and at the same time pitch a product. Simply stated, if you want exposure of any kind on the Internet, then writing articles and submitting them to solid article directories will put you in the driver’s seat.

Many people jump on board when it comes to Internet marketing, including large online businesses, affiliate marketers or network marketers. These people are utilizing articles to get people to come to their websites. In fact, this isn’t a difficult process if you understand it. If you have a product or service, or if you want to market one, simply write articles about it. Your articles need to be informative, and that information must be relevant to your market. For example, if you market dog food, write some articles about how substandard and nutritionally poor national brand dog foods are, and why this is a problem. When you write your articles, give specific and compelling information, then provide a solution via the food you sell; in this way, consumers will be much more likely to go to your website and buy your product, thus providing a healthy diet for their pets.

Once your articles are written, there are many article directories that you can join and submit them for indexing. From here, Google, Yahoo and other search engines will index the article directory site. When this happens, your articles are now a part of this site and get indexed into the search engines. When someone is looking for information about healthy dog food, they will see your article, “A Healthy Dog, Is A Happy Pet!” The search engine visitor now clicks on your link to read your article. Within every article, you have provided your link at the bottom of it for your natural healthy dog food. The reader clicks on your link, goes to your pet supply website and not only buys some dog food, but also purchases some dog toys you are selling. Whew.. This is one way that businesses are using article marketing to make money on Internet sales.

One of the main objectives for anyone that is writing articles for submission to the article directories is to have their articles show up with high rankings in the major search engines. If your articles are only showing up on the second page of Google, then hardly anyone will see your valuable information. If you are going to be a great article writer, then you need to learn SEO, search engine optimization. This is not as hard to learn as it might sound.

There is an Internet full of free information about how to use keywords correctly and what the search engines base their objectives for ranking are. You could be the next Stephen King of article writers, but no one will find you if you do not learn the basics of SEO. Once you have learned what Google is looking for, you are pretty much on your way. SEO is not rocket science like so many others believe it to be. Keywords, relevancy and some talent at writing. This is SEO’s general idea.

When you are ready to begin writing and submitting these articles, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, your articles should be somewhere between 500 and 1,200 words. Secondly, keep them relevant ? it may seem we’re overemphasizing this point, but trust us: relevancy is important. Readers are looking for specific information, so keep it on topic.

It’s easy to make money on the internet using article marketing. Just know your market and your product. A lot of would be article marketers fail here. You have to know a lot, as much as possible about your product and the market. If you can manage this, you will be the go-to guy or gal whose articles are in high demand.

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when consumers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them purchase. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all required information about this, may be by keeping the  information at a n alternate page. By providing convenient and easily discernible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract customers, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they require to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing consumers and ask them to complete a sounding or even while they’re browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions [better]? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to conclude a modest contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, conclude with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to an alternative email address if you do not check your website mailbox recurringly. When customer wants to purchase online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

It is the search engines that in the end get your website noticed by clients. Hence it is important to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.   

There are on the whole two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their wanted submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automatic program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the definite site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the definitive content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example:  Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce diverse rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword [stuffing] or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

The first thing you’ll need to do is decide what to write about. You should choose a subject for your content site. That’s not to say you can’t write about anything you want to, but it makes sense to focus your content on a particular topic. If you try to appeal to everybody, you’ll most likely end up appealing to nobody.

Think about the things that interest you, or which have interested you in the past. Your hobbies, the clubs you’ve been a member of, the magazines you read, the books you read, the subjects you enjoyed most at school, the parts of your job that satisfy you most - any of these could be a good subject for your site. Write down a list of ten or more possible subjects. They should be topics you could envisage yourself writing a short article about every day.

Once you have your list, and assuming that you want to make money with your website, you’ll need to see if a market exists for the information you’ll be putting on your site. A market is much like a subject or a topic, but it suggests that people are buying and selling something. You might have an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of French crochet work of the 19th century, but if no-one shares your interest, there’s no market.

There are two somewhat conflicting approaches to markets. One is that you should aim at the largest possible market - for instance, golfers. Golfers spend a fortune on their sport - golf clubs, golf balls, clothing, tools, green fees, magazines, videos. But it’s an incredibly competitive market - as I write this, Google lists 318,000,000 sites which contain the word “golf”. It would be very difficult to get into the top 10 sites on Google. And most people don’t bother to click through to the next page on Google - if your site is number 318,000,001, there’s a good chance no-one will ever see it. At least not by looking it up on Google.

The second approach is to target “niche” markets. A niche is a small segment of a market. “Golf balls” might qualify - there are “only” 2,980,000 pages for “golf balls” without the quote marks, and 1,370,000 for “golf balls” with the quote marks.

A quick aside - not many people would be typing “golf balls” into Google and surrounding the words with quote marks. But without the quote marks, Google looks for the two words anywhere on the page. They could be separated by a sentence or a paragraph, like this: “His dad used to play golf every Wednesday afternoon. Terence had the red balls poised over the pockets as he…”. Putting in the quote marks makes Google look for the specific phrase “golf balls”.

So now we know what the competition is for our particular market. How do we find out what people are actually looking for?

There are a number of free tools which show the demand for any keyword phrase, as well as offering suggestions for related keyword phrases. Here are some of them:

Nichebot Classic
Wordtracker
Keyword Discovery
Google Adwords External Keyword Tool
SEOBook Keyword Tool

All of these tools use different databases, which results in dramatically different results for any specific keyword or key phrase. However, the specifics are not that important. What we’re looking for is just an indication that people are actually searching for our topic.

We also need to make sure that people are paying money for items in our market. A sure-fire way to check this is by looking at the Google Adwords ads. If people are paying Google to advertise for your keyword phrase, then there must be customers willing to pay for whatever products they’re selling.

Go to Google.com and type in the keyword phrase. Adwords ads appear down the right hand side of the page, and sometimes above the results as well. The more Adwords ads there are, the more likely it is that there’s money to be made in the market.