Web Business Resource

by Wayne Wu

Google AdWords is an effective means of pulling in targeted traffic to your website. It allows you to get your site listed on the first page of the search results on Google and its advertising network for virtually any keyword phrase you can imagine. I’m convieced that Google is the best advertising channel that can generate consistent and quality traffic day in and day out.

Before tapping into a new market segment, you should test it with Google first, and then move on to experiment with other advertising methods using the data and statistics of traffic patterns you get through Google AdWords. However, you’d better do it right because advertising on Google is not something you can afford to screw up. If you don’t know the proper way to implement Google’s system, you’ll end up spending 50% more than you should be buying their clicks.

After working with Google AdWords for the several years, I have pretty much experienced every mistake one could make when using Google AdWords. Below is a list of the top 6 mistakes that you should avoid.

1. Bidding too high for the top position:
When it comes to bidding on keywords, it seems like you should bid for the top placement. However, the biggest problem with the top spot is that there are many Internet surfers who click on ads without reading them first. Top ads are most likely to receive unqualified clicks. Also, you may overbid relative to profit potential. Unless you have predetermined data indicating a high bid will return a positive ROI, you need to keep your bids low. You may not be able to attract lots of traffic, but you can collect CPC and conversion data before going deeper into the niche you are exploring.

2. Implying that the promoted product or service is free:
Inexperienced advertisers tend to lure in visitors by implying that the product they are promoting is free. Bad idea! Traffic alone doesn’t mean anything. Only sales pay your bills. Doing so will only attract tire kickers who are not interested in buying anything from you, and you’ll be paying for each one of them. A good Google ad is all about striking a balance and attracting the right type of traffic.

3. Bidding on generalized keywords:
Common keyword phrases can suck up a lot of ad spending without producing any conversions. Those people who search very broad terms like “make money” don’t know what they want. They are still in the research phase of the buying lifecycle. Your advertising should be tailored to your market’s buying habits.

4. Setting a low daily budget:
The daily budget for your campaign is the ceiling on your daily spending. You can set this number at whatever you want. Some people say it is a good idea to start out with a low daily budget while you refine your AdWords effectiveness. However, my experience tells me if you set your daily budget too low, your ad won’t get served with every search query that is made with your keywords. Google’s system takes your daily budget, as well as other factors, into consideration and serves your ad accordingly. Set your daily budget about 5 times the amount that Google suggests, and monitor your campaign regularly.

5. Leaving the content network on:
Probably the most common mistake people make is using the content network. Unless you have great experience, you should turn off the content network. You can incur a large amount of advertising dollars on the content network very quickly while getting very low quality traffic from it.

6. Linking directly to merchant’s website:
Direct linking is easy to be set up, but it doesn’t allow for the opportunity of pre-selling your visitors. You could be wasting your money if your merchant’s website doesn’t convert. If you’re promoting a specific product or service, you may want to create a landing page where you can pre-sell and promote more than one similar products at the same time to produce higher conversions.

These are just some of the mistakes that are easily made by advertisers while working with Google AdWords. PPC advertising is pretty competitive, and it’s impossible to achieve success with mistake ridden AdWords campaigns. Making as less mistakes as you can is the first step of avoiding being taken out of the Internet marketing game.

By Rasheed Ali

These days, anyone who wants to start an Internet business can download a template and fill in their information. However, are these cookie cutter web sites really the image you want to present to your potential customers? Using a template can cut costs, but it can also make you look unimaginative and unprofessional.

Templates can have coding errors that make your web site work incorrectly, the graphics can be inappropriate for your business, and the layout may not be the best one to promote your products and services. So how do you get a great web site? Follow these basic tips for setting up a web site and you’ll be on your way to an attractive and useful marketing tool.

Choosing a Suitable Domain Name

The domain name of your web site is the address that points visitors to your site. One example of a domain name would be www.yourbusiness.com. You can use your domain name to your advantage in two ways. One way to effectively use your domain for marketing purposes is to use your business name as your domain. If you start a business called “Joe’s Printing,” try to see if www.joesprinting.com is available. You can also use keywords in your domain to help your web site get ranked higher in the search engines. Joe’s Printing might use www.affordableprinting.com if “affordable printing” is a popular search phrase. No matter how you choose your domain name, remember to keep the name easy to remember and easy to spell. Inventive spellings might show your creativity, but they won’t help people remember how to get to your web site.

Keeping Layout and Graphics Simple and Professional

Unless you are a graphic designer or other creative professional, your web site does not need many graphics. The layout should also be kept as simple as possible to keep people from having difficulty navigating to the areas of the site that they want to visit. According to many web studies, people want to find the information they need within 8 seconds of visiting your site. If they have to wait for large graphics to load or for long Flash intros to play, they’re going to get frustrated and go to another site. Colors are also important in designing an effective web site. Don’t you just hate it when you visit a site and you can’t read the text against the background or the whole site is neon yellow and you need to squint? People will hate your web site if it looks like that too. Use professional colors that can be seen easily by many users. If you really want to make your site accessible, use colors that can be read by those who are colorblind. If you make your site accessible for everyone, you’ll increase the opportunities you have for making sales and building customer relationships.

Providing Informative and Accurate Content

If you get past having a great domain name and getting a good design, you’ll need to provide visitors with content that they can use to keep them coming back to your site. No one will visit your site again and again if there is no information to keep them interested. Good content will keep customers informed and let them know about any advances or new products and services in your industry. An added bonus of providing informative content is that you’ll create a professional image for yourself as an expert in your business.

Your web site speaks volumes about your business, your level of professionalism, and your experience. Taking the time to build a great site will boost your profits and skyrocket your online business success.

Copyright 2006 Rasheed Ali

by Taz Martin

I will let you into a secret, one that will allow you to directly advertise to thousands of people. This isn’t another “rent an email list”-esque technique. If done right this could give you 100% targeted, interested visitors.

The secret lies in Social Networking.

WAIT!!! I hear your groans of discontentment, but please hear me out. Social networking sites and services hold the key to free, and much more importantly, targeted advertising. This is such a powerful medium that when done right it can get you valuable and recurring traffic.

Take the largest Social Networking site, at the time of writing, myspace. According to various sources myspace, as of March 2006, has over 61 million users, and 21 million unique visitors, with 220,000 new members joining daily. These statistics are amazing, and also, at time of writing, about 6 months old, meaning that the current day statistics are liable to be much higher. It is one of the fastest growing, and most popular websites out there on the internet. Many people have been quoted as boasting 1000s of “friends” within the first week of registration, with many more people visiting their space.

Now that is said, you can see my point. This is a fantastic, and lucrative, promotional technique, for any website, although it is usually more useful to owners of “hobby” based websites.

The technique is basically, sign up to myspace, create a profile - based around your site and collect a list of friends. It is almost like building an opt in email list, except the members are all there, and are out to be your friend, rather than you having to coax people into joining your mailing list.

Take a car forum for instance. If you were to go onto myspace and register, you would want to base your profile around cars. In fact, you really want to write your profile from the perspective of your target audience, that way you are more likely to attract more targeted traffic.

With the help of the various myspace profile builders and generators out there on the internet, it has never been easier to set up a myspace profile. Now all you need to do is start getting “friends”.

A “friend” is someone who has seen your profile, and likes you as a person, and wants to join your “friends” list. Usually a myspace user will choose people with the same or similar interests as them to be their friends.

Friends have the access to post messages on other user’s profile pages, ie: leave them a comment. This is one place you want to advertise. Do not make your advert too blatant, or formal. Be informal and friendly. Remember, this message will not only be seen by your friend, but also my everyone who visit’s your friend’s myspace profile.

There are hundreds of other ways of advertising to potential users and customers using myspace, that is just one. You can send out messages to people, and even include your link on your profile itself. You just need to take time to browse the plethora of different features myspace, and other such social networking websites, have to offer.

by Chris Walker

Many people do anything and everything to get traffic to their website. But what are actually the best ways to get traffic to your website? Well, I decided to narrow it down to two strategies: SEO and PPC. People tend to use one or the other, but throughout this article I want to discuss the benefits of both and why you should use both methods to your advantage.

Lets kick things off with SEO…

When building the pages of your website, you must choose targeted keywords that represents your website’s theme (remember to make sure your keyword appears high on the page, preferably within the first 100 characters—the spiders love it). Search engine optimization is the way you present those keywords to all the search engines. With seo, you are basically optimizing your pages to make sure that all the search engines know what your pages are about (optimizing your pages also ensures that you will be listed as high as possible on the search results pages for your keywords). Since we want to optimize our pages so that the search engines can find our keywords easier and faster, we must write pages that include the following: