Internet Marketing and Advertising

All selling starts with self-promotion. Before anyone will give you money, they have to know something about you. They need to feel comfortable with you and to trust you. This means that they have to get used to seeing your name and your story.

When you’re starting out with a new small business, you may feel uneasy about self-promotion. After all, bragging is wrong, right?

If this is you, that’s fine. You can become a superb self-promoter without changing who you are. You find it difficult because you’ve been told stuff like: “Good work speaks for itself”, and “Do a good job and recognition will come”, and “Don’t blow your own horn”. Those aphorisms may have worked 150 years ago. They don’t work today.

There’s a reason Pizza Hut and Macdonald’s advertise, advertise, advertise. They have to do it to survive. If they have to do it, when they’re so highly visible, it makes sense that you need to promote yourself as well. Everyone’s busy today. We’ve all got short attention spans.

YOU must tell people who you are, and what you do. If you don’t do it, it won’t get done, and that would be a tragedy, because you’ll miss out on dozens of opportunities which would have flowed into your life as a natural outcome of your promotional efforts.

Creative self-promotion is an art, and it all starts with your attitude.

=> Enthusiasm: decide to have FUN with self-promotion

Your attitude must be based on enthusiasm. Nothing sells like enthusiasm. Are you enthusiastic? If not, tell yourself that you are. Keep telling yourself this at least 15 times a day for the next month — yes, this is an affirmation, and affirmations work. Put a little note on the corner of your computer monitor, or on the dashboard of your car: “ENTHUSIASM— I am enthusiastic!”

Your second affirmation for the next month is: “Self-promotion is fun!”

You may feel silly at first, repeating your affirmations, but if you find marketing difficult (promotion is an integral part of marketing) it’s because you’re letting your attitude get in your way. And because your attitude is in your mind, you can and must change your mind.

So for the next month, put the proper foundation under your future marketing endeavors by working on your attitude. At the end of the month, you’ll see a real shift, I promise.

Author of many books, including Making the Internet Work for Your Business,
copywriter and journalist Angela Booth also writes copy for businesses large and
small, and consults on search engine marketing. Angela has written copy for
companies in many industries, ranging from technology and real estate to the
jewellery trade. Her clients include major corporations like hp (Hewlett Packard),
WestPac Bank, and Acer Computer. For copywriting services and marketing
advice contact Angela at angelabooth.com

Tags: marketing, PR, promotion, publicity, self-promotion, selling

So which is the better option, pay per click listings or working towards strong natural listings? This answer depends on you and what you want to achieve in the long run. From my point of view, I would look at using both methods of optimisation with a technique that changes as time progresses. Let me explain

For those who are not quiet sure what pay per click listings are, they are the listings that appear before all the natural search results for a particular search. To appear in those positions, a set amount must be paid for each time a user clicks on your link. For the website owners who have just built a new website or have a very low search engine visibility, ppc is a great option to get your website indexed and to start receiving quality traffic, provided you have the necessary funds to cater for all the clicks. Daily budgets can be set so you do not overspend on your ppc account.

What about achieving a strong presence in the natural listings? This is a very important point not to overlook. The most obvious reason being is you do not have to pay for each time someone clicks on your link. Pay per click is the fast and easy option however, over a long period of time the amount of money spent can add up to a large sum. So it would be very wise to take on search engine optimisation for your website to achieve those strong natural listings.

As time progresses and your website starts to built a strong reputation within the search engines, pay per click optimisation spends can be cut for the keyword phrases where you are at the top of the competition. If you are satisfied with your incoming traffic from the natural listings, then pay per click optimisation can be stopped completely. In my opinion, I would recommend to continue running ppc listings for those keyword phrases where a strong presence has yet to be made in the natural listings.

To recap, until a strong search engine presence is made in the natural listings, pay per click optimisation is strongly recommended. As time progresses and your website gains more popularity within the search engines, ppc optimisation spends should be reduced or can be stopped. At this stage, your focus will be primarily on keeping your natural listings at the top of the competition and seeing that it has all paid off in the end.

About the Author: David Touri is a search engine optimisation specialist working for SEO Sydney. He has worked on many projects and offers pay per click bid management services to companies in Australia. For further information, please visit http://www.seosydney.com.au

Tags: Adwords Advertising, Pay Per Click Bid Management, Pay Per Click Optimisation, ppc, SEO Sydney

A few months ago, I attended a seminar on search engine marketing organized by Hitwise, the competitive intelligence provider. The event, held in our home base of Singapore where paid search marketing still has a long way to go, was an attempt at creating greater awareness of the potential of this channel in a lukewarm market. Apart from a speaker from Hitwise, the select panel also included representatives from Yahoo, MSN (representing the search engine side) and eBay & B2B media company, Global Sources (representing successful search engine marketers).

Towards the end of the seminar, the panelists were asked to name the one advice they would give to individuals or companies considering search engine marketing. Their responses summarized the key things that any search engine marketer–even someone who is considerably experienced–would do well to remember.

Experiment: Contrary to what some people might lead you to believe, one will be hard-pressed to find a single, permanent path to paid search marketing success. Like any other science, one needs to continue to experiment— be it with the keywords being targeted, or the bids and campaign budgets, the ad creative or the landing page where users are led to from the ad. One of the biggest advantages of most pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing campaigns is that it is conducive to lots of experimentation, so make the most of it.

Start small: PPC search marketing, while one of the most cost-effective marketing channels, can still drain the advertising dollars very quickly, if one doesn’t watch campaigns closely. Small to medium-sized businesses, in particular, will be best served by starting with smaller budgets, experimenting and progressively increasing their spend after they achieve a certain minimum threshold in cost-effectiveness that works for them.

Get the message in context: Your messages have to be absolutely in context to what the user is looking for. Context and relevance (see next point) and may sometimes be a bit confusing and interchangeable, but that is because these are essentially two of the most critical pillars of search engine marketing.

Relevance of the ad results can be viewed as a match with the fundamental motivation that drives a user to take the action that he/she eventually takes, while context is about the influential environment that can sway a user another way— it is like identifying the right bait, or the underlying or even dormant motivation of the user If you can get context and relevance to be congruent, such that the user gets exactly what he wants when he wants it, you have maximized your chance of getting the highest quality click, and possibly the best return on the dollar that you just paid the search engine. On to relevance….

Keep your ad and site content relevant: This almost goes without saying, but it is often overlooked. The success of a PPC campaign depends on the relevance of the keywords selected, the relevance of the advertising message (remember that an ad is competing against the perception of relevance of the organic search results as well as against other sponsored/ paid ads), and last but certainly not the least, the relevance of the content on the page that the user lands after clicking on the ad message. Constantly evaluate all of the above for relevance, and work on making those as relevant as you can to what the user is looking for.

Manoj Aravindakshan is Director of On Target Media & Marketing Services, a Singapore-based marketing services company, offering paid search engine marketing (PPC) and search engine optimization(SEO) services, in addition to a range of other online marketing and web content services.

Tags: online marketing, pay per click marketing, Search Engine Marketing, SEO