Local Business Mistake #5: Not Advertising
Brandon Clay | April 16, 2010
Online advertising is one of the best ways to get visitors to your website. Websites that offer advertising reserve their most prominent online real estate for advertising. You can rent the internet’s most valuable space by advertising.
The goal in local business online advertising is to put your message in front of the right people at the right time to get conversions. Conversions can be anything from a getting a phone call to having a prospect download a white paper.
Click for more Local Business Mistake #5: Not AdvertisingStop Depending on PPC
Brandon Clay | March 5, 2010
Pay per click advertising (aka cost per click, paid search, and sometimes search marketing) is a great source of targeted traffic. You can start with a no-name site, with little marketing experience in that vertical, and start making money with your pay per click (PPC) skills. You can buy clicks, turn them into actions, and get paid in the process. As long as you sell your actions for more money than you pay for clicks, you’re a happy marketer.
It’s hard to argue with the model. No retail store can boast the same effectiveness with their advertising. How many stores can hang a shingle and get consumers to come to their store for less than a dollar per visit? That’s why PPC is a great form of advertising.
Click for more Stop Depending on PPCGoogle Killed the Yellow Pages
Brandon Clay | February 26, 2010
The internet revolutionized the local business world.
In 1989 you could place a Yellow Pages advertisement and get targeted calls from prospects. Sure it was expensive, but it didn’t matter. Consumers trusted the Yellow Pages for the information they needed. Business owners paid for what worked.
The Yellow Pages were effective. Local business advertising budgets were well spent in the Yellow Pages. To grow your business, that’s where you had to be. The same can be said for newspaper advertisements. People trusted newspapers in a similar way they trusted the big yellow book.
Click for more Google Killed the Yellow PagesMining the Search Query Report
Brandon Clay | February 19, 2010
The search query report is the search engine’s gift to search marketers.
Keywords are what you bid on as an advertiser, but search queries are what searchers type into the search engine. The Search Query Report provides you with actual queries and data associated with those queries.
Click for more Mining the Search Query ReportRelevance Rules in PPC
Brandon Clay | January 29, 2010
Search works because of relevance. Searchers return to the engines because their questions are answered with the engine’s relevant results.
If the searcher agrees with the answer, the engine is rewarded by trust and returning visits. If the engine fails to provide relevant results, then searchers find another place to search. The engine loses a customer and the searcher goes to Google. That’s the way it works for a search engine customer.
It’s no different for your customers.
Click for more Relevance Rules in PPC