This article is part 2 of 3 in a series written by Matt Walker, VP Technology Services for the SBA Network. You may contact him at mwalker@sbanetwork.org with any questions on the issues raised.

Last week we discussed Search Engine Optimization and how it fits into an overall Internet Marketing strategy. This week we’re taking a look at an element of Pay-Per-Click advertising. To recap, last week’s article gave tips on getting listed by search engines, optimizing your content, finding link partners, and testing. We also mentioned the three most important areas of Internet Marketing:

1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Pay-Per-Click Marketing
3. Internet Viral Marketing

When prospects are looking for solutions to their problems, they often start with the Internet. Using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN, these prospects are presented with regular search results (as discussed last week) and also small text ads that appear alongside the search results. These ads are inexpensive, highly targeted, and turned Google into a multi-billion dollar company, pennies at a time.

How do they work? An advertiser uses the search engine’s website to select specific keywords for which their ad will be displayed. They create their all text ad with a link back to a website. They also enter the price they are willing to pay each time the ad gets clicked on. Then when the keywords specified are searched upon, the ad is displayed, and if clicked on, the advertiser pays the search engine for the traffic. Because the search engine gets paid each time the ad is clicked on, instead of each time the ad is displayed, this is known as Pay-Per-Click advertising. When implemented properly, this can be one of the most cost effective ways to generate business online.
Overall it’s a simple process, but generally takes knowledge of best practices, experience, and testing to have a successful campaign. The most important tasks in maintaining a successful new campaign are:

• Selecting Proper Keywords
• Creating Compelling Ads
• Proper Bidding
• Testing
• Refining Landing Pages

For the rest of this article we’ll focus most of our attention on selecting keywords using Google’s AdWords program, but the techniques discussed work with all Pay-Per-Click providers.Warning- the below content may be too technical for some readers. If this is you, don’t feel bad- you can e-mail me for answers to any questions you have about these techniques at mwalker@sbanetwork.org. We are also presenting a hands-on Internet Marketing Workshop on November 7th in Long Beach, CA. At this workshop, we will be teaching how to implement these techniques. Contact Cory Halbardier atcory@sbanetwork.org to get more details about this event.Proper keywords are the bedrock of any successful pay-per-click campaign. To research keywords, I recommend using the Keyword Tool built into Google AdWords. This tool allows you to seed a search with a website address (it will analyze the content and find relevant keywords) or a brief description of the website you will be advertising. Perform this search, and you will be presented with a list of potential keywords. This list provides estimates on advertiser competition and approximate monthly search volume. The ideal keyword will have little advertiser competition, and a high search volume. Add all keywords that you feel represent terms on which your prospects will search. You should use the drop down box for “Match Type” and add each keyword twice more to ensure that each word is entered as a broad match, phrase match, and exact match. The reasons for using these match types and what they mean are beyond the scope of this article, but if you’d like to know more e-mail me or come to our Internet Marketing Seminar on November 7th where we will be discussing this in far greater detail. At this stage, you want as many keywords as possible- we will refine these later in the process (usually discarding 99% of them). So if you think your list is unwieldy, don’t worry, we will be shrinking it very soon.

Now that you have your keywords, create an ad and use a moderate bid to get things started. Where this ad links on your website is not important…yet. At this stage you want to get your ad running for as many keywords as possible, just to gather information about keywords. Let these ads run for a bit to gather data about search volumes.Now that your ads have been running for a few days, use Google’s reporting tools to see which keywords generate the greatest amount of searches (this will be reflected by the number of impressions your ad garners). At this point, you should keep the keywords with the greatest number of impressions, and focus your efforts on these (since they generate far more searches than the rest of the keywords on your list). The rest of the keywords can either be paused or deleted, whichever you prefer.It is typical for a campaign to start with a hundreds or thousands of keywords that are pared down to less than ten.Take the best performing keywords and create separate ad groups for each one. Each ad group should contain the keyword with the broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Now you should write ads that are tailored specifically for each of these ad groups. Use the search term in your ad copy if you can, and make this ad link to a landing page on your website that is specifically about the keyword.This may seem like a lot of work just on refining keywords, but it is imperative to follow this process for your AdWords campaign to be a success. This process will allow you to create highly targeted ads that achieve very high clickthrough rates, allowing you to purchase traffic for less than your competitors (and also present prospects with content that matches with what they are looking.)Using the proper keywords can help you follow rule 1 of Mark Deo’s Rules of Attraction- Become a bigger fish in a smaller pond. By finding the keywords that generate the greatest search volume, and focusing our efforts on areas in which prospects express interest, we are able to refine ads that dominate small groups of keywords, instead of spreading our effort across large numbers of keywords that generate few searches.To learn more about this process, and how to refine your ads to dominate these small keyword groups, please come to our Internet Marking Seminar on November 7th in Long Beach. Go to:http://www.sbanetwork.org/classes/upcoming_classes.asp for more details.

Next week we’ll explore Internet based Viral Marketing, and how it can be used in conjunction with SEO and Pay-Per-Click to generate business online.

For detailed advice on any of the techniques mentioned, or for an analysis of your website and some specific recommendations on what you can do, please contact Matt Walker atmwalker@sbanetwork.org.

For more information about the Internet Marketing Workshop being held November 7th in Long Beach, go to: http://www.sbanetwork.org/classes/upcoming_classes.asp or contact Cory Halbardier at cory@sbanetwork.org.

This article is part 1 of 3 in a series written by Matt Walker, VP Technology Services for the SBA Network. You may contact him at mwalker@sbanetwork.org with any questions on the issues raised.

Facing an ever changing economy, businesses are spending more resources online now than ever before. As with the economy, the techniques that are most effective online are also evolving on a constant basis. Many businesses find themselves facing diminishing returns for their online marketing efforts.

If this describes your business, there are three areas on which to focus to see improvement:

1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Pay-Per-Click Marketing
3. Internet Viral Marketing

When your prospects are looking for information on the Internet, they most likely start with a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. When they enter what they are looking for, they are presented with a list of websites that match their criteria, and some ads that are targeted toward their search terms. The three techniques mentioned above can help make sure that your site is one that attracts visitors.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making changes to your website for the purpose of making search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) rank your site higher for a specific term. As a brief example, if you search on Google for “small business coaching”, there are 724,000 possible results. Our website ranks 9th out of these possible matches, due to our SEO efforts on this term. For a more specific search such as “small business coach southern california”, we are ranked 2nd out of 452,000 results.

How did we achieve this? There are five major areas on which we’ve spent our efforts:

• Getting and Staying Listed
• Optimizing Content
• Engaging Link Partners
• Testing
• Statistical Analysis

Warning- the below content may be too technical for some readers. If this is you, don’t feel bad- you can e-mail me for answers to any questions you have about these techniques at mwalker@sbanetwork.org. We are also presenting a hands-on Internet Marketing Workshop on November 7th in Long Beach, CA. At this workshop, we will be teaching how to implement these techniques. Contact Cory Halbardier atcory@sbanetwork.org to get more details about this event.To get your site listed and keep it listed, your site needs to be found by the appropriate search engines. For the most important search engine (Google), you can start by listing your site in the Open Directory that Google uses to seed many of its searches. Go to www.dmoz.org, find an appropriate category, and use the submission form on the site to ask for its inclusion. To keep your site listed, on your website you should have an XML sitemap- this is a file that lists all the pages you wish to have Google index and how recently they have been updated. To learn more about the use of site maps and Google’s guidelines, go to: www.google.com/webmasters/tools

Now you should focus on optimizing your content. Your pages should discuss the terms for which you are trying to get ranked. Relevant content will make your site rank higher than sites with content that doesn’t closely match the search terms. One area to make sure you address are the title tags used on your pages. These should be unique, descriptive, and reflect the content on the page. The page title is what a potential site visitor will see first when your site is listed on a search engine, and influences your site rankings.

You also need to engage in a link building campaign. Having other websites link to yours is how search engines decide the importance of your website. Google uses these links to assign a “page rank” to each page in its index. The more inbound links you have, the higher your site will be listed in search results. Having sites with high page ranks link to your site helps more than sites with low page ranks linking to yours. There are thousands of resources you can find online to help you find link trade partners, paid inbound links, and automated software to manage the link building process. Your link building campaign should be ongoing for as long as your site exists. Inbound links are generally considered the most important factor in having a highly ranked site.

If you’ve done a good job on these 4 tasks, you should have some traffic coming to your site. Now you need to analyze that traffic to discover trends about your site. Statistical analysis can show you which pages on your site attract the most visitors and which are indexed the most by search engines. You can then use this knowledge to fine-tune your efforts on the other pages on your site, helping improve the search ranking for every page you maintain.

Next week we’ll explore Pay-Per-Click Marketing, and how it can be used to attract prospects to your website.

For detailed advice on any of the techniques mentioned, or for an analysis of your website and some specific recommendations on what you can do, please contact Matt Walker atmwalker@sbanetwork.org.

For more information about the Internet Marketing Workshop being held November 7th in Long Beach, go to: http://www.sbanetwork.org/classes/upcoming_classes.asp or contact Cory Halbardier at cory@sbanetwork.org.

I’ve been sending out this business update now for almost 6 years, to thousands of subscribers. I have received feedback from thousands of you, sharing your successes with me. This message you’re reading is an example of e-mail marketing, yet ironically, this is one topic we’ve rarely discussed. It has taken us years to learn a system that works for successful e-mail marketing, and we’d like to share it with you. Before we get into this subject in depth, I’d like to invite you to share your thoughts about this newsletter with us by clicking here to take our brief survey. To show our appreciation for your feedback, you will gain access to our audio file on Why Most Marketing Fails.

E-mail can be an extremely cost effective means of maintaining contact with prospects and customers, marketing your business, and providing customer service. There are a few rules you should adhere to when considering using e-mail in your business, to ensure that you don’t actually generate negative feedback from your contacts.

1. No spam. Ever.
   Spam is the term used for unsolicited, unwanted, e-mail. Notice that I didn’t say “commercial” e-mail. Any unwanted e-mail is considered spam. If you are sending an e-mail message to someone, make sure that it is something worth sending first.
2. Get their permission first.
   Don’t send someone an e-mail message unless they have given you permission to contact them by e-mail, or you have been in contact with them previously. If your first communication with someone is by e-mail, you will likely get a negative response, regardless of how relevant, compelling, and important your message may be.
3. Don’t sell or give away their information.
   If you have someone’s e-mail address, guard it. Don’t send it to other people, don’t have a huge carbon copy list that you make their address publicly visible on, and make sure that you guard their privacy as you would your own.
4. Keep it professional.
   If you are sending people business e-mails, don’t pass on jokes, funny movies, political or religious statements, etc. Save these things for your family and friends (even though they probably don’t want them either!)
5. Learn how to use your e-mail program.
   Make sure you know the difference between to, cc, and bcc. If you don’t, read the help files on your e-mail program. These very important distinctions affect how an e-mail message is received, viewed, and presented to a recipient. They also help you guard the privacy of your messages.
6. Obey the law!
   There are many new legislated requirements for sending commercial e-mail. While it is unlikely that someone will complain to authorities about e-mails you send, make sure that you obey all regulations about having your contact information on your e-mail, a method for being removed from your mailing list, etc.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get into how to best use e-mail in your business! If you do not currently have an e-mail newsletter, you’re passing up an amazing opportunity to connect with your prospects and customers. It is truly the most cost effective means of positive outreach that small businesses have at their disposal. I highly recommend that you start a newsletter to maintain contact with your database as soon as is feasible.
Email – Extension of Direct Mail?
Email marketing is NOT the electronic version of direct mail. It is a far more personal form of communication. Go to your mailbox. Count how many uninvited guests you find every day. Circulars from advertisers, retailer ads, announcements and so on jam your mailbox. In fact, if you’re like me, you have more junk mail than REAL mail. Does it make you mad? No. Do you get on the phone, call these folks, and yell at them for Snail-mail spamming you? No. Do you lobby Congress? No! Then why do consumers do all of these things and MORE to put a stop to SPAM email? No one really knows why, but it is a fact that some people will react negatively to any unsolicited e-mail. So you must make sure that your e-mail marketing efforts are not the same type of sales pitch you might send out by other means.

Getting Personal
Email is a very personal form of communication. Typically, people read their email messages with greater care and more deliberation than postal mail. Many folks read their email messages at home and therefore have more time to digest them and put the message in perspective. When they receive an uninvited message, it is received as a personal intrusion. While Email creates a tremendous opportunity for us as marketers, it also leaves the door open for abuse.

A Powerful Messaging Vehicle
Some marketers see Email as a powerful form of “push marketing.” It is far less expensive than traditional media, is ten times faster to implement, and known to generate a higher response than it’s alternatives. No wonder marketers aggressively leverage it to push their marketing message as frequently as humanly possible. The real challenge is to allow “true” communication to take place. No relationship can exist without two-way communication. My advice is “Don’t turn email into a bullhorn. It’s about encouraging and facilitating a dialogue.” Push yourself to help your customers; don’t push your product or service on your customers. Find out what is important to them, then give them something of value. Educate, inform, and inspire them. Help them to do something that they have been trying to do. Eliminate their pain. Make their lives easier. Invite them to give you feedback. Open the gates to questions, comments, and suggestions. Engage customers in a dialogue. Nowhere is the “attraction” mindset as appropriate and effective as it is with email marketing. It’s about building lasting relationships and creating memorable brand value.
A Collaborative Media
Email is one of the only marketing vehicles that is NOT a successful standalone communication tool. Email will be only as effective as its integration with other media. Most email campaigns today are run as isolated marketing initiatives. Companies hire email-marketing firms to run their email strategies because traditional agencies are unable to provide the quality of service and necessary technology that email pure-plays provide. The problem is an unbroken sequence of communications that do not capitalize on the sum of the parts. The outcome is a confused and possibly dissatisfied customer, victim of your unorganized and untimely messages. Sure, the creative may look the same, but production schedules rarely match, and the integration of media is an afterthought.

One Strike and You’re Out.
Email may be cheap, personal, and powerful but it is an unforgiving media. Even in baseball, you get three strikes. Email customers can fire us in a single click. It just takes those dreaded words “REMOVE ME” in the Subject Box and the fun’s over. My recommendation is to empower customers, and talk to them wisely. Savvy marketers empower customers by asking them what content they want to receive, when they want to receive it, how often, and in what format. Then they follow through. To avoid burning out customers and scoring double-digit unsubscribe rates, consider customer preferences, and carefully plan the frequency with which you communicate to various customer segments.

Measure Right
Click-through, like Web traffic, has never been a good indicator of performance. Chances are that your short-term revenue forecast and long-term profitability are made up of more tangible, quantifiable data. A more accurate measure of the success of a campaign is sales or leads conversion. Some people just want customers who click. You want customers who buy. Stay away from short-term objectives, however, that may force you to over-communicate at the expense of long-term customer value. Create a customer satisfaction index and regularly track results via online surveys. Ignoring customer satisfaction is always a deadly mistake in business. And believe me, your competitors know it. So will you be the diner? Or the dinner?

The Future is Here
Email marketing is the future of direct marketing. Think about it, with Email you avoid printing costs, postage, carriers, paper, stuffing, envelopes and the licking thereof! Never resort to SPAM or unsolicited email lists. Build your own email database. Opt-in email campaigns produce the best result in marketing campaigns.

“Opt-in” & “opt-out”; what do they mean?
Quite simply, spammers utilize “opt-out” marketing. Opt-out means that a marketer can send a message at will and the recipient must contact them and “opt-out” to prevent future mailings. I do not believe in this approach. “Opt-In” means consumers have expressed interest in your topic. In my case, these folks have called in to my radio show, visited my website, attended one of my classes, or purchased one of my products or services.

E-mail Example
Let’s look at a brief example. For our business, we send out a weekly “Business Update” e-mail with FREE business advice. We have been sending this e-mail out for over six years to a subscriber base made up strictly of prospects, partners, and clients that have requested it. People subscribe to our list by going to our website and entering their e-mail address in a form that explicitly states what they will receive. We give them instructions on how to be removed from the list at any time if they choose. These e-mail messages are made up of advice and examples. They are NOT sales pitches. Let me repeat that. They are NOT sales pitches. This ensures that people get our message while we establish closer relationships on a continual basis with prospects. Our meme is seen weekly by thousands of people, and it doesn’t take any more effort to reach 50,000 than it does 500!
Get to Work!I encourage everyone reading this to consider how they might plan an e-mail campaign for their business. Whom do you wish to reach? What can you offer them of value so that they look forward to receiving your message instead of viewing it as an intrusion? How frequently should you contact them? How will you encourage them to respond to your message to foster an ongoing dialogue? Please let us know how your e-mail efforts go.