Here are a few quick hitter tips for getting the most out of your Google Adwords campaign.

Google rewards for relevancy. If you have an ad that gets a lot of click throughs, it will begin to rise in the ranks without increasing the cost per click to you. So you can get more value or essentially a lower cost per click if you focus on writing good ads that people are interested in clicking on.

However, keep in mind that those ads still need to be targeted to your audience or your spend will not be worth anything because the ads will produce traffic that is not interested in your product of service.

If keywords are in an ad, they appear as bold words in the ad.

Put your targeted keywords up front in your ad. When people scan from left to right they will see your target keywords first instead of later. Capitalize the first letter of every word in your ad to improve response rates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Listen To This Article Podcast

Recently I had the opportunity to share some Internet Marketing resources with local business owners. What I learned from them concerned me so much that I felt it was extremely important to write about it here so that the information would help as many people as possible.

It seems that some of these small business owners are still using Outlook to send out commercial email campaigns (email blasts). They are chopping up their email lists into small 30 person chunks so they can fly under the radar and still send out 200 emails without getting slapped by their Internet Service Providers (ISP) as spammers.

If these smart business savvy business owners are still using Outlook to send out email campaigns, then I am sure there is still a large number of people out there who are doing the same thing. There are many issues that surround this topic and there are several problems with running an email campaign this way.

Before we get into the reasons why using Outlook to run email campaigns is a bad idea and before I share the solution I recommend to avoid the threat of penalty, let’s take a look at what the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has to say about commercial email and the requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Read the rest of this entry »

Listen To This Article Podcast

Recently I had the pleasure of hosting the Frisco Internet Entrepreneurs Meet Up in Frisco Texas. The topic of discussion was how to drive traffic to your website using Web 2.0 sites or social media sites. We also discussed a number of other ways to successfully drive traffic to websites. One recommended traffic generator was podcasting.

Podcasting can bring great exposure to a website through publishing iTunes and many other podcast directories. Podcasting is also being used in a variety of ways to enrich offline businesses as well.

To illustrate some of the ideas I would like to share this video with you about podcasting and what it can do to change the way you may be looking at your business and how you might use podcasting to drive traffic to your website.

Also, be sure to leave me a comment and let me know if this video gave you any ideas.

Keep reaching for success,

Charles McKeever
charlesmckeever.com

P.S. Be sure to check back tomorrow when I give you three great tips for how to optimize your adword campaigns to increase click through rates and decrease ad costs.

- cm

Listen To This Article Podcast

Summary: Learn why you should test, test, test everything in Internet Marketing to find out what works.

There are a ton of “proven techniques” that are promoted in the Internet Marketing arena. But, no matter what you might read or who you might listen to one thing is certain. Testing your marketing methods is a fundamental activity that must be done on a regular basis.

Here’s the deal. We can’t assume that what works for one group of prospects will work for another group. We can’t assume that because it has been “proven” that it will work for us. We can’t assume that what has worked for us in the past will work for us in the future.

I know what you are thinking, “If I can’t depend on these things, then what can I do”. Well, here it is in three simple words; test, test, test.

Testing of your marketing methods should simply be a part of the way we do business. We should want to know if option A produces more results than option B. We should want to know if we are getting traffic from those paid clicks or if we are just paying out money for no reason. We should have some form of insight into what is going on in our marketing efforts and how we can improve their results. We should, test everything.

So how do we do this testing? One simple method is split testing. Let’ take newsletter sign up forms as an example. Split testing a sign up form is a simple way to know if one form gets better results than another form. Let’s say your two forms are exactly alike in all respects, except one form is placed within the home page of your site and the other form is included in a popup on that same page. Over a period of time, say a week or even a month, you see that more people sign up through the pop up form than through the inline form on the page. Now you know that the pop up form is the way to go.

Read the rest of this entry »

Listen To This Article Podcast

Summary: Learn why you should offer an ethical bribe to get people to take action.

The incentive technique you are about to read about is as common these days as Starbucks stores, but the principle is applicable whether you are asking people to join your mailing list or trying to get them to complete their online orders.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the “Ethical Bribe”. Offering someone an incentive to take some form of action. Sign up for a mailing list, complete and online order, tell a friend, you name it.

You’ve seen it hundreds of times. Amazon offers free shipping. TracFone offers free minutes for referring a friend. You get a free report, a free trial, etc. This form of freebie incentive has been around offline for ever.

It’s the same online. You do this and I will give you that. Only, online the give away is usally something that doesn’t “cost” anything. It’s a free report, or free access, or a free service. Online, the incentive can be anything that is perceived to have value to the prospect.


Read the rest of this entry »

Listen To This Article Podcast