Successful Internet Marketing Without Search Engines

by Bill Platt

Believe me or not, a business can survive and thrive on the Internet without good search engine placement. That does not mean that a Webmaster should not strive to get good rankings in the search engines, but it does mean that a Webmaster should not throw his or her entire advertising budget towards search engine optimization (SEO).

The SEO guys are rolling in their Ferrari's as you read this. I would have said that the SEO guys are rolling their graves, but they are not dead, yet.

There Can Be Only Ten

How many web pages will be listed on page one of the search results at Google? How about on Yahoo or MSN? That is right; there can be only ten web pages listed on page one of the search results.

According to the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org), there are currently 85 billion web pages on the Internet. But, if you have ever used the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, then you know as I know that they have not archived everything that is out there, so that 85-billion number is actually smaller than the real number of existing web pages.

With only ten listings on page one of the search results, there are going to be a lot of disappointed people in the world. They cannot all be on page one of the search results.

First Things First

Search engine optimization is an expensive undertaking, so it should never be taken lightly. I talk to people everyday who are building their first website for the very first time. These folks, bless their hearts, know just enough about Internet marketing to blow their savings on a website that may or may not deliver a profit to them.

There are steps that people should take when they start their website, and SEO is not one of those first steps.

Here is a checklist of steps that the new Webmaster should use in the development of his or her website:

Step One: Select the products or services that the website will sell.

Step Two: Determine if there is a market for what will be sold.

Step Three: Analyze the competition and determine the competition's weaknesses. Competition is about building a better mousetrap or reaching customers that another might be under serving.

Step Four: Build the website to sell the chosen products or services. Sales conversion is the most important element in any successful business model.

Step Five: Run test advertising to figure out what will generate traffic to your website, and more importantly, to figure out what one needs to do in order to sell goods and services.

Testing And Tracking Advertising Results Is Essential

I sold advertising in my newsletter to a guy one time. He paid a nice fee to have his advertisement run in my newsletter, but he did not invest any money in writing or testing his ad first. The advertisement itself was written very badly.

I asked him if he would like to tweak his advertisement before I ran it in my newsletter. He said he did not care what the ad looked like. He just needed me to run his ad.

I offered to rewrite his ad for him to enhance his chances of getting traffic from my newsletter. He agreed and I did.

As the newsletters I subscribed to began rolling in the following week, I noticed his bad advertisement ran in dozens of those newsletters.

I asked him later his results, and he said he had spent $10,000 running that advertisement and closed four sales at $25 each. He spent $10,000 to make $100. Needless to say, his website closed down just a couple months later.

The problem was clearly his ad, but his website may have contributed to his lack of sales conversion.

Starting Small Serves A Very Real Purpose

As we saw with the guy who spent ten grand to make $100, starting small would have been beneficial. It is all a matter of figuring out how to get traffic to one's website and more importantly, how to convert traffic to sales.

One should start small with his or her advertising to find the ad formula that will actually deliver traffic to the website. Once the traffic is coming to the website, the webmaster needs to tweak his or her sales copy to make sure that the copy will close enough sales to justify the expense of a large advertising run.

SEO should be treated in the same way. By using Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC), a webmaster can get an idea as to which keyword phrases will actually generate traffic to a website, and with the right analytical software, the Webmaster can determine which keyword phrases generate clicks that will lead to a sale.

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/urlnalytics/) is a good program to help webmasters figure this out and it is free, but it has its shortcomings.

Popular paid programs include:

> http://www.opentracker.net

> http://www.keytrail.com

Another two-dozen web analytics applications are reviewed here: http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/internetmarketing_webanalytics.asp

SEO campaigns should never be undertaken until one knows exactly which keywords will actually generate sales for a website. To do otherwise, one runs the risk of optimizing a website for keywords that will not help the website convert traffic to sales.

Advertising Lessons Learned

While testing your advertising and your PPC advertising, a few very important lessons were learned.

First, you learned how to tap into the Law Of Attraction to bring people to your website.

You have learned what keywords you should target, if you decide to optimize your website.

You have learned how to track your successes and your failures with your website analytical software.

And finally, you have learned to tweak your website for the purpose of increasing your sales conversion.

All are very important lessons, because each will contribute to how much money can be earned from a website.

Building Links Is Not About PageRank

If you remember, the title of this article is, "Internet Marketing Without Search Engines." That should imply that this article is not about getting good rankings in Google. By extension, the title should also imply that what I am telling you has "nothing" to do with PageRank.

The fact is that every person using the Internet is clicking on links to take them from one website to another. Some links are in emails; others are in paid adverts on websites, or in informational web pages. Even social bookmarking websites have links to other web pages.

Building links to your website is about getting your sales message, with its accompanying link, in front of the people most likely to buy what you are selling, in a way that encourages your potential customer to click your link and visit your website.

Once you understand who your customers are and where you might be able to reach them, then you will know what steps you need to take to get your link within reach of their mouse.

You may need to buy advertising at that location. You might be able to write an article to give to them, in exchange for a link to your website. You might be able to participate in the website's forums and leave a breadcrumb trail of links for your potential clients to find. You can even create social bookmarks that will point to your website or to a page that points to your website.

The goal of linking is to give your potential customers more ways for them to find your website.

An Ironic Twist To This Tale

Although this article is about thriving on the Internet without relying on search engines, any person who undertakes linking for the sake of attracting customers will find their websites climbing in the search engine results, due to all of those links on targeted and relevant websites pointing to their own website.

Imagine that --- a link that will attract and deliver potential customers to a website AND influence how well a website might rank in the search engines


About this author
Bill Platt has been writing reprint articles for the promotion of his websites since 1999, and now he has written an ebook to share what he has learned. His book is called, “Article Marketing For Traffic, Sales and Profit”. Included in the book are many examples and the Five Essential Elements Of Creating A Successful Article. To learn more about Bill's business, visit: http://www.thephantomwriters.com

Why is Search Engine Marketing So Popular?

by Mikhail Tuknov

The key to marketing has always been getting one's product recognized by as large a group of people as possible. Advertising has always been the key to any marketing effort. Companies spend millions on ad placements in trimedia campaigns that encompass print, radio and television.

Print, radio and television have traditionally been the main medium for marketing. However, in the past decades, another form of paid advertising has found itself on the rise, and this utilizes the internet.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing. It uses the web as a medium to spread awareness of its target product. Internet marketing has emerged as a cheap yet dynamic way to distribute information in the global market.

SEM seeks to promote websites - and the products being sold on those websites - by increasing their visibility through search engine results pages.

The development of SEM is an off-shoot of the success of the Internet in the global arena. As more and more people started using the web, more and more sites on a variety of topics started being created. In the mid-to-late 90s, search engines were developed to help people find the information they wanted quickly.

Soon search engines developed business models to finance their services such as pay per click programs.

A pay per click program is a small text ad that appears next to results from an on-line search. A marketer buys the rights for their ads to appear on a web page or a search engine. The ads are tied up to key words. When a searcher types in a particular query to a search engine, the engine not only offers up a listing of relevant websites but also the marketers "ad".

The first pay per click programs were offered by Open Text in 1996 and Goto.com in 1998. Goto.com changed its name to Overture and was purchased by Yahoo in 2003 and is now Yahoo! Search Marketing.

SEM methods include: Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion.

Search Engine Optimization is a strategy by which you attempt to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a website by "marketing" it to a web site. Using key words and content to ensure your site shows up many times during searches.

Paid placement is the pay per click program. Advertisers pay when a user clicks on to the links to visit their web site. These are also known as sponsored links or sponsored ads. Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter are the largest network operators of the pay per click program as of 2007. Minimum prices per click start at US$.01 to .50.

Paid inclusion is when a search engine company charges fees for the inclusion of a website in their search index. This fee structure is ment to ask as a filter against superfluous submissions - websites that try to "trick" the engine by using popular key words that are unrelated to actual content of site - and a revenue generator for the search engine company. The fee is typically an annual subscription rate.

SEM is a relatively cheap and inexpensive way to create traffic on you web site and cultivate brand recognition. A pay-per-click program is cheaper then a trimedia campaign and yet can reach a large number of people globally day and night. As a result, many companies are now taking advantage of the internet to let consumers know what they have.

According to a recent report by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, advertisers in North America alone spend $9.4 billion in SEM in 2006. In 2006, the majority of search marketers (62%) said branding was the primary objective of search marketing campaigns. Nearly as many, however (60%) said that selling products was a key objective. This year, direct sales were the top choice, at 58%, followed by brand awareness at 57%. For more companies, SEM spending is increasing and actually earning a bigger budget then other marketing techniques. It is estimated that by 2011, companies will be spending $ 18.6 billion on SEM.

This growth will be driven by strong advertiser demand, rising keyword pricing and more small and midsized business discovering the effectiveness of SEM.

Currently, SEM is an alternative marketing tool with many possibilities. It's increase in popularity will eventually result in more businesses utilizing SEM techniques and a possible rise in rates for web space. The faith major businesses are placing in SEM - as denoted by the money they are willing to spend on it - makes this fast growing advertising technique that should be utilized by any business seeking to make a name for it's globally.

About the Author:

Mikhail Tuknov, a Search Engine Optimization Specialist, can improve search engine ranking of your online business.SEO specialist providing search engine optimization(SEO),pay per click(PPC) management,web site design or development and web analytics services.

11 Tips for Pay-Per-Click Success

This list details some very important points to keep in mind when creating or managing any pay-per-click campaign. Is this all there is to know about pay-per-click advertising? Absolutely not, but for those new to PPC it should serve as good place to start. Additionally, pay-per-click veterans or at least the moderately-seasoned will want to touch upon these points now and then to brush up on their fundamentals.

1) Do your keyword homework.

Use Google's free Keyword Tool or sign up for a WordTracker account to find out which keywords are the most competitive. The more competitive the keyword, the more expensive your clicks will be. While you're finding out which keywords are too expensive you'll come across some that aren't being targeted heavily by advertisers. Take a good look at these - they may be your keys to a successful niche campaign.

2) Don't bunch your ad groups.

You should be striving to separate your ad groups by keyword. Whatever your target, separate your keyword lists into closely related groups containing the same target words and write ads geared specifically to those words. Your ads will show up higher in results based on their quality, and search terms show up bold in results - a click-through rate booster.

3) Drive home your selling point.

What's your offer? Why are you better than the others? Remember that your ads are going to display with your competitors. The difference between a user clicking your ad and clicking a competitor ad is about 100 pixels on the screen - or a millisecond of time. You need to convince them that you are the one they want. You are better. Grab them.

4) Don't send users to your home page.

This is perhaps one of the worst things you can do to your Pay-Per-Click campaign. Internet users are notoriously impatient. Send them to your home page when they were searching for a specific product or service and see how fast they leave. Don't waste your advertising budget - send them to optimized landing pages.

5) Optimize your landing pages.

Your landing pages need to drive something home immediately for your users: "you have landed in the right place." They need to know that, yes, this is what they were looking for, here it is, here is why it is better than the rest and here's the easy thing they need to do to get it. In most cases you'll need to create multiple landing pages based on your different ad groups and keywords, but look at it this way - if your users aren't landing at pages geared exactly to their search phrases they'll leave and take your advertising budget with them.

6) Don't lie in your ads.

People aren't dumb. If you promise something in your ads you had better well deliver. Otherwise you'll not only waste advertising dollars but damage your brand. Be honest, and focus on points that make you stand out from the competition. Grandiose ad text might bring in clicks, but if it isn't the truth it won't bring in conversions.

7) Your domain name counts.

In most cases you can display a domain name that you own as the "display domain" but point the ads to a page on a different domain. Why does this matter? If you own a domain name that contains the keyword text it will show up bold and increase conversions. Enter the optimized domain as the displayed domain, point the ads to your landing pages and you can expect higher CTRs in most cases.

8) Utilize negative keywords

Google has a new Negative Keyword Tool that will allow you to find negative keywords that you should specify for your ads. Negative keywords are those that you don't want your ads to display for. For example, if you're selling "blue widgets" you don't want to display your ads to those users searching for "free blue widgets." If you don't use negative keywords you are missing out on a chance to get more targeted traffic to your landing pages, and this can really hurt your conversion rates.

9) Test, test, and test some more.

The greatest thing about internet advertising is the ability it grants you to measure your success. It's easy to create A/B split tests with Pay-Per-Click advertising. Change one word, add a comma, include a value proposition. . .just make sure you only change one thing for each split or you won't know which variable it was that made the difference! You'll find out right away that this is a great way to optimize your click-through rates - just don't forget that clicks aren't everything!

10) Don't focus too heavily on CTRs.

Getting tons of clicks isn't always the name of the game. In fact, if you aren't using proper techniques to ensure that you're getting targeted traffic and sending it to well-optimized landing pages you can blow through your advertising budget in no time flat. Remember that the success of any advertisement is getting back more than you put in. It's an investment, not a cost - so do all that you can to better your rate of return!

11) Don't pigeonhole yourself.

We all know that Google AdWords is the most popular Pay-Per-Click service out there. Your competitors know it, your users know it - even your grandma might know it. It would be foolish to ignore Google as a venue for advertising, but don't forget that there are other search engines out there who offer similar services. Yahoo!'s new Panama search system is catching on, and Microsoft's adCenter is nothing to sneeze at either. Both companies are currently offering sweet promotional deals to new Pay-Per-Click advertisers to stay competitive so take advantage and diversify!

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About the Author: Mike Tekula handles SEO, SEM, usability and standards-compliance for NewSunGraphics, a Long Island, New York firm offering Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, W3C-Compliant web design using full CSS layouts and all things web design/development.