by Karl Hudson | Mar 31, 2013 | Pay Per Click Marketing
Using the internet to advertise products and services is not only extremely effective, it is also very competitive. When it comes to getting traffic (viewers/potential customers) to a website there are many options. Two of the most popular are pay-per-click and search-engine-optimization (SEO).
Getting your website to the top of the rankings in the search engines is the name of the game and pay-per-click and SEO are targeted for doing just that. There is one big difference between the two methods; time. With pay-per-click you can have a campaign up and in the sponsored listings in minutes; SEO on the other hand can take several weeks or months to get your website ranked.
Pay-per-click is quite simply one of the easiest and cheapest ways to advertise on the internet today, as long as you do your research. Most search engines offer some form of pay-per-click advertising program. While they may differ in the user interface and how ads are ranked they all have one thing in common. Every time a web surfer clicks an the ad that advertiser has to pay a fee.
There are pros and con’s when it comes to a pay-per-click marketing campaign. If you monitor your campaigns closely and continually learn from you mistakes it can be a very effective money maker. One of its biggest pros is you don’t have to fine tune your web pages to adjust your position in the search engines. It is all based on how much you are bidding and how well your page converts.
One of the biggest pros is how quickly and easily you can get an ad up and diverting traffic to your web site. Once you set up your ad, your bids and the link to your website you are up and running. There is nothing too technical about it; it just comes down to learning about your market and giving them what they want.
The con of a pay-per-click business is that you are essentially engaging in a bidding war. The higher bidder gets the higher position in the search results. If you are outbid your position will drop. To regain your position you will have to raise your bid which can result in less profit. The more popular the keywords you’re bidding on the higher the bids are going to be.
All it takes is some simple math to figure out if your pay-per-click campaign is cost effective. What you need to figure out is what the cost per click of each visitor to your site is and how much profit per click you are or will be expecting to make is. Most marketers base this on 100 clicks and a 1% conversion rate. If your product costs $25 then you need to figure what the break even point is for your highest bid. For every 100 clicks you get one sale worth $25. That breaks down to a profit per click of 25 cents to break even. But this is a business and the idea is to make a profit. Any bid under 25 cents will be profitable and the lower you can bid and keep a good position the bigger the return on investment (ROI).
Learning everything you can about keyword research and how they relate to the market you are targeting is the key to pay-per-click success. There is no limit to the amount of keywords you can use and the more targeted means a bigger ROI.
Your ad copy is the most crucial part of your pay-per-click marketing. Your description of what product you are offering needs to be as specific as possible to attract visitors who are looking to buy what you are offering. Keep it in mind that pay-per-click ads are short and to the point. The words you use must be specific, to the point and enticing to potential buyers.
Once you have a pay-per-click campaign up and running it is vitally important that you monitor your bids and ad placement. Trying to get a top ranking is not always necessary, but you do want to be in the middle of the first page. By keeping close track of your bids you can keep the battle going for the prime positions and create the greatest return on investment. The whole purpose of pay-per-click marketing is to make money, not win the bidding war. In many ways you would rather win the battle than the War with PPC advertising.
To win at pay-per-click marketing you must not only monitor your campaigns closely but you must also analyze and research visitor behavior and the markets you are engaged in. You must take all these considerations into account to insure that your pay-per-click campaigns are a success.
by Karl Hudson | Mar 29, 2013 | Social Media Marketing
Increasing the traffic to your business website is extremely beneficial to the growth of your business. Listed below are the five best and most effective ways of growing your business online.
Market Research Specific to your Business
Identify a keyword specific to your business using the Google keyword tool. The highest ranked domains in Google for this keyword should be noted. By using Quantcast, an accurate demographic understanding of your market is possible. Next, use Google analytics to get a detailed picture of traffic to your website. Information about bounce rates, length of visits, and other media referrals can be obtained by the use of Google analytics.
Link Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts to your Business
If you have not yet linked your Facebook and Twitter accounts to your business, it is essential that you do them immediately. These two accounts are indispensable to growing your business online. Further, you should style your Facebook page with your business logo, and also integrate your business brand. Your presence in the social media builds trust with business clients.
Start Your Own Blogs
The traffic to your business website can be improved dramatically by posting your blogs on your Blogger page in WordPress. You can visually integrate your blogs to your website to improve traffic further. Take care to input the main keyword in the title of your blogs. You must have your keyword preferably at least one time in the body of the blog as well. For continued good traffic to your business website, your blog must be updated once in a week or once in two weeks.
Integrate Search Engine Optimisation Copywriting for Your Business Website
Re-write and re-design your business website to be more suitable for SEO. This will help to improve the Google rankings of your website. An improvement in the Google rankings automatically leads to an increase in your business turn-over.
Hire a Virtual Assistant
Hiring a Virtual Assistant will give you more time to concentrate on critical business engagements. The Virtual Assistant can do the blog posting on various sites for you. Further, your article marketing can also be taken care of by the same person.
To summarise, it can be said that by adopting these five strategies, you can increase your business online. Moreover, hiring a Virtual Assistant ensures that you have more time and freedom to concentrate on your business activities.
by Karl Hudson | Mar 15, 2013 | Social Media Marketing
There are plenty of examples in nature where symmetry and proportions rule. They have been used since time immemorial in various fields including art and architecture. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is perhaps the best example of how nature celebrates symmetry. Today, graphic designers all over the world use symmetry and proportions through the grid based design theory. The main idea behind a grid based design is to create a solid visual and structural balance in websites. When the layout appears structured, websites seem to be visually appealing can easy to follow. The New York Times website and Yahoo! are some of the best examples of grid based designs
Although the grid based system was a product of the Constructivist Art, it slowly yet steadily moved into the domain of commercial design. When it comes to using the grid based approach, it is all about using mathematics where ratios and equations dominate the design. As a student interested in this approach, you will have to be familiar with ratios and proportions; from rational, whole number ratios, and irrational proportions. These ratios will have to be used to come up with designs that are functional, coherent, yet aesthetically appealing. Thus as you can see grids are not always about squares, it is about proportions. Graphic designers today have access to several tools to design their own grid based design. Some of these include:
phiRatio e67: This is an iOS tool that helps designers to calculate the different proportions including the ‘Golden Proportion’. For the uninitiated, the ‘Golden Proportion’ refers to a rule that if you were to divide a line into two parts, the longer part divided by the smaller part is equal to the sum of the two parts divided by the longer part. This tool is very useful when designing layouts, defining canvas sizes, and deciding typographical proportions.
Fluid Baseline Grid System: This is an HTML & CSS3 development kit that provides a foundation to design websites with ease. They can be used create a visual rhythm and structural balance to help the experience of predictable patterns.
Guide: This is a column, rows and midpoint tool for Photoshop CS4 and CS5. And best of all, this is free.
There are several other tools that can help graphic designers come up with designs that help in designing a layout. While this is an effective tool to help designers come up with effective layouts for their website designs, it is also important for them to embrace asymmetry and chaos with equal enthusiasm. Chaos when used effectively adds more character to a design than order and balance. It should be the effort of the designer to excel in designs of both these characters.
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