Web Design Galway – Web Design, SEO, and Internet Marketing

Archive for April, 2011

If you’re interested in profiting from Adwords, this may be the most important article you read today.

Here’s why: I started a few years ago promoting one of my own business sites through Adwords and made a few thousand dollars every month, but at this time, Adwords was still in its infancy. However, the Adwords playing field has changed since those days and now there are two types of Adwords user, the savvy, and the losers. The losers will quickly figure out that dumping a load of Overture collected keywords into an Adgroup and setting a general CPC on all the keywords at once is definitely not the right way to go about it, and they complain claiming “Adwords is too difficult” and this is where many of them leave. However, those who decide to find out why their Adwords aren’t pulling as well they want them to, will found out that the key to success is RELEVANCY. I will say this again, RELEVANCY is key, especially with Google.

Laser-targeted bring sales my friend, not traffic. This fact is pivotal in Adwords, and if you are targetting high traffic relevant keywords you are well on your way to raking in many sales with your Adwords campaigns.

Here is what you can do to find these highly targetted keywords:

1. Go to Google suggest: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

2. The Google suggest tool will show you relevant results as you type in a search term. Try it and see what you get. For example if I type in ‘online dating’, the tool will return a list of other keyword related to ‘online dating’. However, the keywords are also shown in the order they are being searched.

3. Select the keyword which are relevant to what you are selling and put them into overture – http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ – and Overture will give you a few more related terms.

4. Add all of the relevant keywords to a separate Adgroup and create a new Ad for this specific Adgroup.

5. Watch the relevant traffic roll in and your sales increase ‘many-fold’!

Follow this method and you won’t go far wrong.

There are some keyword research tools which facilitate this research process and automatically weed out the very low traffic keywords and help you in creating high click-thru ads and keywords. A few of these are very good, but many are useless.

What if, What if, What if. This question comes at us every day. What if I said this, What if I did that or what if I didn’t. It comes down to decisions. We all have decisions to make every day of our lives. We all make good and bad decisions. That’s life. When you look back on your life you can think of some really great decisions that you made, decisions that have altered the course of your life. You can also remember some really bad ones that have affected you in a negative way.

Life is never static, it’s always changing and opportunities come and go. Doors open and we have to decide whether to step through and seize the opportunity or not. When you are standing in front of that open door of opportunity the question arises “What if?” do I or don’t I. We need to make a decision. How do we make decisions? This depends on our background, education, life experiences and sometimes advice from others.

We don’t know each other, but I would like to give you some advice. Suppose I said that I knew something that could change your life forever for the better. Would you be interested? Suppose I said I knew someone that was showing other people how to acquire something like real estate for free. Suppose you could also learn how to build on your “land” something like a five star hotel. You would also learn how to market your “hotel” and collect rent from guests that pay to stay. Would you be interested?

What am I talking about? It’s called virtual real estate. Your own space on the World Wide Web or Internet if you prefer. If you own a space there it can turn out to be very valuable property.

The most expensive house in the world is a 12 bedroom mansion in London England for which an Indian steel tycoon paid $128 million.

The most valuable web page in history, to date, will probably be thesixmilliondollarpage by Alejandro Saavedra and Robert Kanaat. Now here’s the difference. The tycoon paid $128 million for the house. How much did these two guys pay for the page. Next to nothing. Maybe a couple hundred bucks at the most depending on how they went about it.

I am going to open a door for you that could literally change your life. The only cost is your time and effort. Now you must decide! Ask yourself the following question:-

“What if” I click on this link:

It could make all the difference.

Over the past few years, research has continued to prove the benefits of e-mail marketing for business: low costs, high conversion rates and detailed tracking are all notable features. But e-mail marketing is becoming much more than just a tool for spammers and e-businesses. Consumers are becoming increasingly savvy on the differences between spam and permission-based emails, and more and more of them are accepting permission-based e-mail marketing as a positive replacement for direct mail.

The best news is that the majority of people who receive permission-based e-mails open, on average, 78% of them.

Jupiter Research reports effective email marketing campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and 18 times the profits of broadcast mailings. But crafting an effective business email is both an art and a science. Here is a list of factors, potential problems and effective solutions to keep in mind:

1. Spam! Spam! Spam! I don’t need any Viagra!
The average consumer receives more than 300 emails a week, 62% of which are spam. No wonder there’s such hostility towards the industry. But spam filters, bulk folders and “report spam” features are helping consumers become more at ease about the perils of spam. While 89% of users cited spam as a major concern in 2003, that number dropped to 85% in 2004, proportionally to an increase in the use of spam-fighting tools.

So as a permission-based business email marketer, what can you do? One tip is to remind your subscribers to add you to their “safe senders” list. The second, and most important, tactic is to make sure your email marketing service provider has a good relationship with ISPs. This will ensure that your email marketing campaigns go into your subscribers’ inboxes, not their junk mail folders. When choosing an email marketing software, make sure the company has strict anti-spam policies and complies with the guidelines of Can-Spam.

2. Images and formatting: Why do my emails look broken?
Broken email campaigns are an increasing concern among email marketers, especially since several companies and web-based email providers now block graphics as a measure to combat spam. In fact, according to ClickZ, 40% of email marketing messages delivered to inboxes are “broken.”

This was actually something that came up during Eliteweb’s beta-testing phases, as we had a client in the Canadian Government whose recipients were mostly using highly secure email programs. The solution we came up has now become one of our key competitive advantages.

What Eliteweb does is it publishes every single email marketing campaign sent to a secure location on the web (a location only original recipients of the email can access, thanks to encrypted technology that automatically authenticates the user). The technology also ensures you can track your users’ behaviors, even if they are reading your email campaign at the secure web location.

3. Personalization and relevant content: In a business e-mail, one size does not fit all.
In a recent study by DoubleClick, email users were 72% more likely to respond to a business e-mail if its content was based on the interests they had specified. That number points out the absolute importance of allowing users to choose their own interest groups and have control over which business e-mails they receive. The most popular interest categories, according to the study, are coupons and household goods.

But your coupon is no good unless the user opens the email. Users in the study said the most compelling reason for them to open a business email is the name in the “from” field. So it’s a good idea to make sure your company name is clearly stated there. Another major factor is the “subject” line. Users cite discount offers and interesting news as the most compelling subject lines, followed by new product announcements and free shipping offers.

4. Click-through and conversion: Show me the money!
So the user has opened your email and read the content. Great. But where’s the sale? There’s good news here. For one, consumers are increasingly likely to make purchases as a direct result of a business email campaign. One-third of users in the DoubleClick study had purchased something by clicking a link on an email. Another 42% clicked on an email link for more information, then purchased the product at a later time. Second, online couponing is booming: 73% of consumers have redeemed an online coupon for an online purchase, and 59% have redeemed an online coupon offline.

In terms of industries, the top performers are travel, hardware/software, electronics, apparel, food, home furnishings, gifts/flowers and sporting goods. All companies sending business emails in those categories said between 71% and 80% of recipients have purchased their products because of an email campaign.

There’s no need to fret if your company doesn’t fit in to one of those industries. The overall landscape for email marketing conversions is looking brighter every day. The average click-to-purchase rate has increased nearly 30% since 2004 and the average orders-per-email-delivered rate has increased more than 18% since last year.

5. Stats tracking: who are my real consumers?
E-mail marketing is an increasingly popular tool in effective CRM, and it’s about time more businesses recognize that. First off, if your provider’s email services for business do not include detailed, real-time tracking, you’re getting a raw deal. Real-time tracking is now an industry standard, and it’s highly valuable, as it allows you to see the exact moment a user opens your campaign, clicks on your link and makes that purchase. Studying your users can help you improve your communications efforts, so each campaign performs better than the last (several email service providers also let you compare the performance of your campaigns).

But many marketers are still in the dark. According to a recent WebTrends research, only 5% of marketers are very confident in the measurement of their online marketing efforts, while 26% admit they’re “flying blind.” WebTrends says the low confidence comes from a lack of knowledge when it comes to measurement, which means there’s still a lot of work to be done.

In email marketing, a blind shot won’t take you very far. But if you aim properly by following these essential rules of play, you should soon be reaping the same major results as so many online and offline businesses.