I’ve owed this blog a CPC discussion for a while now. Here it is.

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ARE YOU SURE IT REACHES YOUR AUDIENCE?

Traditional advertising has lost a lot of it’d audience. News papers have lost their audiences. Billboards are practically overlooked! Nobody watches local tv anymore. On top of all that all these are expensive mediums in which to advertise and there is a good chance you won’t hit your target market even if you do advertise in the local paper.

So if all these mediums are expensive and they don’t hit your target market as effectively as you would like, what medium brings the best, cheapest, most targeted traffic? Paid Search.

What is Paid Search?

Paid Search is anywhere where you pay a sight such as a search engine to place a little ad and a link that will drive internet traffic to your site.

Who offers paid search?

Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, blogs, you name it the site probably provides a form of  paid search and there a many forms of paid search.

What are the forms of paid search?

There are a number of forms of online advertising such as cpc (Cost per click) you only pay when someone clicks on your add, CPM(cost per thousand)- cost per thousand impressions,   CPL (Cost per lead) – you pay for leads in a more traditional form of lead generation and you don’t own the customer right out but the service can be very effective ie. Service Magic, there is also affiliate advertising but I consider that a completely different animal and not necessarily useful to the small business guy.

What should I use and How Do I use it?

Assuming you have a web site and it does a good job of converting browsers to customers, then CPC – cost per click is by far the cheapest form of advertising available other than word of mouth. We’ll explore CPC later this week in another post. The other advantage of CPC advertising is that usually you can target it to only show to people in a specific postal code who search for a specific term at a specific time of day. This is great if you have a limited budget to spend on advertising and you want to drive extremely targeted traffic. Traffic of this type is often looking to buy. Can you get any better than that?

Using CPM also assumes that you have a web site and it does a good job converting browsers to customers. The problem with CPM is that you will pay for the number of impressions (Number of times users of a web site see the ad) no matter how many clicks you get. The one traditional advantage over cpc is that you can control your costs. However in recent years you can now control you cpc costs much more effectively and generally target your audience much more effectively. However if you find a blog that speaks about your industry and seems to target your local market then CPM might be effective but generally I’d recommend against it.

CPL – cost per lead advertising is generally much more expensive and while you may find some platforms that don’t require you to have a web site most web-based CPL programs will expect that you do have a web site and it should generally be good about converting browsers to customers. The best CPL programs work by consolidating a group of businesses such as home improvement assuring that you meet a set of standards and then offer a number of programs to provide you leads to gain their customer’s business. These sites gamble that they can use other forms of advertising to drive traffic to their site cheaply and then turn over the lead to you to follow-up on. The real value to you is the lead is truly pre-qualified. There are companies out there that don’t do a good job of pre-qualification and you’ll end up wasting money so be careful when using this type of service and check it out thoroughly.

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Last week we covered an overview of local search and how to register with the local feature of each of the big three search engines. If you want a review on how to register see: Google, Yahoo, Bing.

Today we’ll discuss other local search directories. These directories provide a large amount of local search traffic and are growing in popularity. Each of them has different features and are attractive for various reasons. Today’s blog is simply a listing of the options available. It doesn’t hurt to get listed in all or most of these forms depending on what your business does and the value the local search provides.

1. Yelp
2. Kudzu
3. CitySearch
4. Craig’s List
5. Local.com
6. Service Magic
7. ibegin
8. insider pages
9. Judy’s book
10. infoUSA
11. MagicYellow
12. MetroBot
13. Search Site
14. Yellowpages.com
15. yp.com
16. YellowUSA.com
17. acxiom.com
18. Discoverourtown.com
19. pinpointpages.com
20. merchantcircle.com

While these sites aren’t necessarily the most heavily searched sites they are targeting local people who are performing local searches and looking to buy. So when a customer does find your business on these sites converting that person to a buying customer becomes easier. Registering at these sites expands your reach and your personal web.

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I promised Saturday  that I would get these videos up on Sunday but I guess I missed my deadline. Here they are a few minutes late. I expect tomorrow’s blog (late Monday night, early  Tuesday morning) to discuss a friends use of networking and the awesome opportunity he has for someone looking to buy an internet franchise in the Atlanta area.

Anyway, Here a brief overview of how to register with Google local.

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And here is a short video on creating a coupon.

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Google Local Search

Local search is a fast easy and free way to ensure your business is findable on the web. The major sites that provide local search are Google, Yahoo and now Bing. They all have their own sing up method and none are difficult to complete. The local search feature will not drive huge amounts of traffic to your site but it’s an important first step. The local search registration will be valuable when a customer is looking for you and is foundational to completing the three-step process I outlined yesterday. Lets take an example.

I’m Joe Average and I live in Marietta Ga. When I search the web using Google for “Flowers” from my computer located in Marietta. Google knows I’m in Marietta because I have either previously entered the information or they look at the IP address of my computer which will provide them a proximity. When Google presents the search results one of the first listings will be a Google map with local businesses that might sell flowers in Marietta or the surrounding area. If I’m looking for your particular Flower shop and you don’t show then I’m likely to find another Flower shop.

Two other important points 1) customers have the opportunity to rate your business via local search engines and 2) You can offer a coupon via the local search. These are two opportunities you don’t want to miss. Encourage your customers to rate your business and mention that there is a coupon out there to help encourage them. People love coupons and you can customize it any way you want.

As I mention above this step is a foundational necessity. The Adwords and social networking will truly begin to drive traffic but you want to be sure that you are findable through local search. Additionally on Google you’ll want to complete a profile so if someone searches for your name they can always find you on the first page of Google although it will be at the bottom.

Finally, I’ll post a few short instructional video’s running through the sign-up process for each of these sights. In another up coming post we’ll spend some time reviewing other local search options that will drive traffic such as Kudzu and citysearch.

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I randomly dropped into a conversation the other day with someone who had just had a “beautiful” new website built for them. They were very excited about the site and awarded a free Adwords campaign. Being diligent about their business and loving their new “pretty” web site they were excited about taking advantage of the campaign and driving traffic to the site, they have picked excellent key words targeted the correct market and built a strong strategy for driving traffic from the campaign.

unfortunately there are a few, well maybe a bit more than a few details missing. I’m dividing the following information into basic and advanced. Lets start with the basics.
Basics:
1) Make sure that you own the URL.

2) Have the web site hosted on a server that will be accessable to you directly and any other professionals that you might decide to use to replace a previous vendor.

3) Make sure you have a unique user ID and password that you do not have to share with your vendors and if you do have to share the id and password change it after the work is complete.

4) When referring to a web site you’ll often here the term “look and feel.” This means that a web site has to look pretty but also “feel” pretty. You want your web site to be easy to use. The main menu should be accessable from every page on the site.

5) The background on a web site should be flat and bright. If you have white text on a patterned dark colored background you are going to turn people away.

Advanced:
6) There are too many free easy to use content management systems out there to pay someone to build you a static site that you have no control over and can not add content to easily. A content management systems allows you the business owner to easily add or change content on existing pages or even create new pages without much effort and with minimal knowledge.

7) Understand why you are building a web site. The web has changed in the past five years. You can no longer throw up a brochure and expect to get business from it. Actually this type of web site has never really worked period. At a minimum your web site should bring the customer one step closer to making a purchase. That means you need to get the customer to giver you their contact information in a form – Don’t expect the customers to call you just because they visited your web site. They aren’t even lead until they’ve given you some type of information. You can encourage customers to give you their contact information by asking them to fill out a form for a free consult or by offering a free newsletter of some sort. You can even just say if you’d like me to contact you please provide your information here.

measure the success of your site. How long are users staying on your site? What pages do they click on most? Which pages don’t they see? Which pages do they see? Where are your customers coming to your site from? Where do they go when they leave? All these questions can be easily answered by a free program from Google called Google Analytics. There are other web stat tracking programs available as well. The fact is that you need to know this information if you want your site to drive business.

9) Just putting a web site on line does nothing for you. You will not gain any traffic especially if you haven’t created a web site that meets feature 6 above because search engines won’t like your site. Here I’m going to offer a word of caution. You don’t need SEO. It helps buy you don’t need it. As a small business the cost of SEO can be too high. But you obviously still want to drive traffic to your site. This is where paid search, see my article on Adwords, and social media make the big payoff. You can also read my article on Tweet Strategy Conversion and measurement for more detail here.

10) Make sure that whomever creates your web site also goes to the effort of submitting the web site to the search engines. You probably want to be sure they have submitted you on the local search functions as well as the general search.

Never hire someone to build your web site that can’t articulate an understanding of the principles expressed in this blog.

September 18th – Seth Godin just wrote an excellent blog that is well worth reading about building web sites. The questions he posses are of primary importance. You can find his article here here.

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It seems like the new hot topic is bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is starting up a business with minimum cash. Well this can be difficult if you have to buy a computer and all the Microsoft products to get your current. I know many people have heard that there are other products out there that are free but some folks are still hesitant to use them. They fear compatibility issues, or think it will be difficult to learn a new tool. This post will give you a few quick office type tools you can use for free that work just a good if not better than Microsoft Office and are completely compatible with someone who uses MS Office applications. Hey you can even smile politely when someone tells you how great your work is know that you didn’t pay those incredibly high licensing fees for Microsoft.

Google – Google has just evolved tremendously over the last five years so that now you can have an integrated email, calendar, task management list, document producer, spread sheet application, presentation builder and web based form builder. This set of applications is easy to use and pretty much completely integrated. Additionally you can store your documents on Google’s cloud (Google’s servers) and access them from anywhere in the world. On top of that you can actually share your Google docs with select individuals so they can edit from remote locations as well. This function can be very powerful if you work with virtual assistant or even remote employees. I personally believe Google is fairly safe and do use their services which can be found at http://docs.google.com and http://mail.google.com. If you are not comfortable storing your documents on line then you’ll want to go with another free option.

Open Office is the leading provider of alternative office software. Their programs are excellent and they offer document, presentation, graphics, database, and spread sheet applications. This program allows the user work locally on their computer and store documents just like MS Office. Additionally Open Office allows users to store documents as PDF’s without any additional work.

So now you can go out and buy your $300 netbook and not spend another dime to be in business.

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Google has started an add campaign on the radio to encourage people to advertise with Google. I have never previously heard any advertising for Google outside of the web and certainly not for their service. This is likely an early sign that BING is beginning to hurt their ad revenue. Non the less AdWords can be a very powerful tool for a business that does not have front page placement in the natural search results. I’ve put together a short video explaining how to sign up for AdWords and how to use it effectively to drive traffic to your site. The campaign I demonstrate is for local businesses that want to drive local traffic to their sites for advertising purposes.

Sign up Process

Click here to view the embedded video.

Create Local Ad

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you as a business have a web site that promotes your business but you do not rank high in the search engines then running local ads with Google AdWords is an extremely effective strategy.

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Today I wanted to discuss a technique that almost guarantees fist page search results when someone is searching for your name. This strategy is very valuable for individuals involved in sales.

Search for Kevin Metzger

To test the strategy I had to do a search for my name and as you can see I come up in 5 places on the first page of Google although none of the results go directly to my blog sites. The first result that is related to me is video results. I have some videos posted to YouTube so I come up when the user clicks on that page. The next site that shows me is a network that I maintain a profile on and sometime blog at. Then there is LinkedIn my radio show profile page and finally you see a picture of me at the very bottom of the search page. This picture and profile was created 2 minutes before I did this search. It was done on the Google Profile page and this is a very valuable tool.

If a searcher chooses to click on my profile they now have access to both my blog’s, my twitter profile page, my LinkedIn profile page, and my Facebook profile page. They can also see a personal bio I put together and some limited information about me. Here is a quick look at the profile page.

Kevin Metzger profile page

This page took 5 minutes to create and put me on Google’s front page with my picture in no time. If you think anyone will ever search for you and you want to be found. Then this is a simple strategy that you must follow to guarantee your spot on Google’s fist page. You can create your profile at Google Profiles. It’s as simple as filling out a form and following directions.

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