Category Archives: Sales & Marketing

Sales, customer service, and negotiating strategies for startup business, entrepreneurs, and small business.

SEO and Other Forms of Advertising

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Search engines are by and far the largest supplier of traffic to your web site. Moreover, its targeted, meaning the visitors that arrive at your site were looking for information that you are delivering. At least this is the goal of the search engines to deliver high quality results to web surfers.

Recent major changes in Google, Yahoo and MSN have put the internet market however in a frenzy. As the search engines battle it out to be the one producing the highest quality results by frequently altering their index algorithm, search engine optimization has taken an almost obsessive importance.

The problem I see is that the battle is not going to end soon and repeatedly trying to stay ahead by optimizing after each re-indexing is truly a never ending battle. A balance must be struck between search engine advertising and other online venues.

Starting out with an online home business business is intimidating. There is pressure to build a quality site, offer valuable information, promote, build subscribers,and the list goes on and on. Having a few different forms of advertising that you slowly utilize can payoff big in the long run. With a market
that can change on an hourly basis, you must not focus too heavily on any single form of site promotion.

Think of it as your advertising bag of goodies. You reach in and pull out one method and give it a try. Do not dump all of your resources into it. Spread them out. Reach in and pick another, until you have a few in the works. Now pause and see which is working. Tweak a bit here and there and sit back again. Continuously re evaluating your advertising campaigns, you will begin to grow a deep feeling as to which works for your online business.

Here are a few types of advertising for your home business you should consider

  1. Classified Ads  cheap and short to write.
  2. Article submission  write an article and post for free.
  3. The rewards reaped can be enormous in the long term.
  4. Paid ads in E Zines  hit those seldom used small niche markets
  5. Link exchange  can you bring in traffic from another site. You betcha.
  6. Newsgroup and Discussion lists  join in on discussion and pass out a small blurb about your business at the end.
  7. Signature files after all your online activity. Make use of all of the emails you send out daily.
  8. Flyers. Yep, offline.

The bottom line here is not to stagnate. Search engines are important but not the only way to promote. Its better to balance your site optimization with other promotion strategies. If one method fails you at least have others to fall back on.

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Understand Exactly What Your Business Has to Offer

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Every business started for a reason and every business did so because they felt they could offer people something that no other company was able to. When a company first starts out they are more likely to keep that idea close to them.

Everything they do will likely be centered on this very idea. However, the longer a company exists the further they start to drift from that idea. I have talked to people from companies before where I quite literally asked them what it was that their company could do that no one else could, and they just gave me a blank stare.

This is and always should be your chief selling point. Now, this is not always going to remain the same as it did when you first started your company. For one thing, if you happen to originally offer something that no other company does, but once you are successful, you get a lot of other people following your lead, you have to change what makes you unique.

The very first company to get catalog printing done and send them right to a person’s home had the benefit of saying that they offered people a level of convenience that no one else could. The very idea of being able to shop right from your home was unique and immediately grabs a person’s attention, leading to a great selling point for those first few companies.

Catalog printing is hardly a rare thing now, and if that is all you have going for you than you are not likely to get a lot of interest. Those companies had to eventually alter their key selling point by improving on their catalogs rather than just keep focusing on the exact same thing.

This was no different when the internet became mainstream and stores began opening up cyber counterparts to their actual locations. This in and of itself was their selling point initially, while now it has become a given that stores will certainly have an online version.

All of this means that a selling point needs to evolve. Nevertheless, for it to evolve you first have to know what it is that you are evolving from, which is why it is so important to know what your stores strength is at all times.

The best way to keep track of this is to be sure that every marketing push is centered on your selling point, and that when you do alter this selling point, you are still taking into account what the first selling point was. Let us use that first example of catalog printing.

Because innovation and convenience was part of the first selling point for those first catalogs the natural way to improve this would be to find some new way to alter the catalog that made them easier for people, which was what quickly happened.

Figure out the best way to improve upon your selling point, and never forget what makes your company unique.

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Adsense Techniques Hints Strategy Making Money With Google

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It’s amazing how you can earn such easy money with the power of Google Adsense. By easy, I mean you don’t need to make sales to generate money but just clicks on targeted ads. It couldn’t be that simple. Of course you need to drive traffic to your site and as with everything in internet business, you can’t get any income if you have no web traffic. Even if you can generate an extra $300-$500 per month, wouldn’t that make a difference in your life? I bet it will. Google Adsense can easily cover your web hosting fees and you are already running on a profit just by using adsense. Of course there are some people who are earning thousands and tens of thousands of dollars with this program but this is not the norm for most participants. Income will vary depending on many factors like targeted traffic, number of websites, the more the better, the theme of your site whether the keywords being targeted are high paying ones on adsense. If you have a network of websites on high paying adsense keywords, you will get much more. Mind you that it’s against Google terms to create websites for the sole purpose of generating income from adsense. Build a useful website, then integrate adsense in your content.

You need to realise that there are certain tips and techniques to take into consideration if you want to really profit from adsense. It’s not just slapping an ad on your site and watch the money rolling in. You need to tweak your ad whether it’s in appearance, placement or in content. Did you know that what you write on your web pages can have an effect on what ads appear on your web site? This is one of the key factors that can decide between a high earning adsense site and a low earning adsense one. Some keywords that are bidden on Google Adwords are extremely lucrative because they yield a high return on the clicks due to the fact that the advertisers are paying a hefty sum to get a top placement in the adwords ranking. The more you pay, generally you appear higher and in some niches, it costs a lot to get top ranking in adwords.

Say your site is about search engine optimization, you should try to write content focussing on this subject well so that you have ads on this topic. If some advertisers bidding on adwords have paid quite a lot for them and these advertisers’ ads appear on your site, you will earn great income. Note that in an adsense ad unit, Google generally displays the highest paying advertisers. So in a block comprised of 4 ads generally, you can see only 3, 2 or 1 from time to time. This varies and is not static. Usually, the ad at the top pays higher.

Also you need to take into consideration the ad appearance because this can have a positive or negative effect on your click through rate of the ads. You can have an ad with border or a frameless one. You can have ads, background or links with specific colors, all these can be changed in your adsense settings on your web page. Usually an ad without border, blue links and which blends in your site content and background works pretty well. Ad formats like the leatherboard(728*90), the skycraper(160 * 600 or 120 * 600) or the square ones(336 * 280, 300 * 250 or 250 * 250) are most used.

Furthermore, adsense placement is crucial to your overall success. Ads above the fall generally viewable without scrolling down will get the most clicks and ads that are strategically integrated in your content will be more profitable. Ads at the bottom usually generate fewer clicks.

Google Adsense is a fantastic way to earn extra money and should be used by webmasters for an additional stream of revenue.

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Do High Paying Google Adsense Keywords Really Work?

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Do high paying google adsense keywords work? Yes without any doubt if you are targeting adsense ads that advertisers are willing to pay high to get targeted visitors because that would be an important business for them, you should really benefit. Instead of earning a few cents per click, you will earn several dollars per click. Now this is indeed a huge difference. This can quickly add up. Usually adsense ads that pay well are in competitive fields whereby it’s difficult to get a top search engine ranking and advertisers are paying top dollars to get a high ranking on adwords along with the organic search engine listings. Adsense keywords like mesothelioma, asbestos cancer, asbestos, debt consolidation, refinance, home equity loans, structured settlement, acne, make money and others are among the top paying ones. The high paying adsense keywords usually range between $1-$50 but this is not static and can change depending how much advertisers are willing to pay for. But don’t just think that it’s that easy to cash in on those keywords.

First of all you need to build a useful website about one these topics preferably and not just adding pages having these type of content while on the other hand your site is about a completely different topic. Google has a system called smart pricing whereby if you are getting lots of clicks to a specific ad and generating good money from it, sometimes Google will try to level the playing field in an attempt to provide a better return on investment for the advertiser. In my opinion, this means that not every click counts the same, some clicks are way better and will tend to convert into either an online sale, a query, a subscriber etc… Google smart pricing model can estimate the value of a click eg based on the site relevance and adjusting prices on an ongoing basis be it lowering it to be just above the competitor’s maximum cost per click and giving greater value to the advertiser.

By site relevance, it means – is the whole site dedicated to a specific topic or just a single web page? You can have a page on your site about photography techniques and your site is in fact about digital cameras. Someone who is displaying ads about digital cameras on his digital camera website will get better value for the clicks whereas someone displaying digital camera ads on a particular page on his photography website. The difference is how targeted the visitor is. If the advertiser is getting higher value so will the adsense publisher meaning more dollars per click.

For sure, you should try to get some high paying adsense keywords related to the theme of your website to increase profitability in your adsense business while at the same time driving targeted traffic to your pages.

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