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Win An Advance Copy of Tony Hsieh’s “Delivering Happiness”

May 27, 2010 By
Delivering Happiness

Delivering HappinessI had the opportunity to hear Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) speak when he keynoted at PubCon West last November. At the time I was very impressed by his passion for creating companies and creating a positive company culture. Therefore, I applied for their advanced copy giveaway program and by good fortune received not one, but TWO copies. Therefore, I am giving away a free copy of Delivering Happiness to one lucky reader.

How To Enter

I’ll make this dead simple. Just do one thing:

  • Leave a comment with 1 thing that made you happy today.

I’ll randomly select a winner on Memorial Day and notify you via the email address you leave with your comment. I’m currently about half way through my copy and I can testify that the material is inspirational and well written (in Tony Hsieh’s very conversational style). Good luck and please let your friends know!

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Misc. Tagged With: , ,

PPC Poll – How Often Do You Run AdWords Reports?

May 26, 2010 By




Filed Under: AdWords, PPC Tagged With: ,

PPC Poll – Which AdWords Report(s) Do You Use?

May 26, 2010 By


Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: ,

Book Review – Rework

May 25, 2010 By
Rework

ReworkRework is the newest book from Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, founders of 37signals. They share their thoughts on their experiences. They avoid business-speak, buzz words and platitudes in favor of a very conversational tone. What did I think?

Rework Makes Some Fantastic Points

The authors’ perspective is refreshing. There are no apologies and their opinions are presented on a “take it or leave it” basis. Each chapter contains several brief sections and each section very succinctly deals with an issue that virtually everyone can relate to somehow. Here are a few points that resonated with me:

  • Build on successes – Instead of analyzing failures to find what not to do, look at successes to know what TO DO more of in the future.
  • Work smarter, not harder – They believe that workaholics are not heroes, you need to sleep when you’re tired and that people should go home at 5. It’s not about the hours your butt is in the chair but what you get done. Find ways to work smarter (or maybe there are things you should stop doing all together).
  • Culture is action, not words – Company culture isn’t established by edict or during a company off-site, it’s developed by the consistent behaviors of employees. Make sure you emphasize/reward the right behaviors to establish the right culture.
  • Act today – Decision aren’t permanent. You can change down the road if necessary. Acting now allows you to start making progress and learn faster. Avoid analysis paralysis.
  • Learn to say no – Saying no is hard and unnatural, but vital to your success. You may even have to tell customers that, no, you won’t be adding that feature or, no, you aren’t going to lower the price.

What You Might Not Like

The book comes across as a bit of an ego trip. At some point in the book you will find yourself thinking “That may have worked for them, but that would never fly at my company.” Don’t brush off those topics. Write them down and really look at why you think that wouldn’t work. These are the areas where you might have a huge opportunity to grow. Or it really might not work for you. That’s okay too.

I recommend the book highly. It will get you thinking and give you a fresh perspective. If you’ve already read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With:

PPC Farming – Harvest Part I

May 20, 2010 By
Amish Harvest

Amish Harvest
Whew! This PPC stuff can be hard work. You spend hours prepping the soil (researching keywords and competitors), planting seeds (account creation and settings), watering & fertilizing (bids, match types and testing) and weeding (negative keywords and domain exclusion). Finally, it’s time to harvest and see the reward of your labors.

Landing Pages – Where the Harvest Happens

All your work should result in a qualified person arriving at one of your landing pages. However, their is still work to be done.

  • Relevance – Is your landing page relevant to the keyword searched and the ad copy they clicked? If you can’t answer yes to this question you’re losing a large portion of your harvest. The chain of relevancy is vital to conversion because your ad copy made a promise. Your landing page has to deliver on that promise.
  • Clarity – As Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments is fond of saying, upon arriving at a landing page customers want to know “Where am I?”, “Why am I here?”, and “What can I get here?” Your landing page needs to convey those answers quickly (within the first few seconds) and clearly.
  • Actionable – This may seem obvious, but your landing page should prominently feature the next step you want a customer to take. And don’t just “feature” it, tell them exactly what they should do. From the headline to the button copy, tell them what you want them to do and the benefit they’ll receive if they do it.

Don’t waste all your hard work with a half-hearted harvest. Get those landing pages done right.

Filed Under: Conversion Optimization, PPC Tagged With:

PPC Farming – Weeding

May 19, 2010 By
Pulling Weeds

Pulling WeedsYour garden is planted, the seeds have sprouted and the water and fertilizer have really sped up the growth of your garden. However, you quickly notice that your seeds aren’t the only ones that have sprouted. You now have a weed problem.

How Did Weeds Get In My Garden?

Just like your garden at home has weeds without any effort, your PPC efforts will have “weeds” in the form on poor-performing keywords and poor-performing domains.

Despite your best efforts to pick only relevant keywords that relate to your products, the sheer size of the internet and diversity of the people using it can create problems. Here are a few reasons those weeds always come up:

  • Multiple meanings for the same words – Toto is a brand of high-quality toilets manufactured in Japan. However, Toto is also the name of Dorothy’s dog from The Wizard of Oz as well as the band Toto (famous for the songs “Rosanna” and “Africa”) from the 80′s.
  • Spammers/Bots – Unfortunately there are people/programs out there that will run searches and click ads for “other” reasons. Whether it is SEO rank-checking programs, PPC competitive intelligence programs or AdSense scammers, these will hurt your performance by raising impression counts, depressing CTR & QS, or even causing fraudulent clicks.
  • Google’s automatic matching – The idea of showing your ads for related terms is good (ie you bid on “red basketball shoes” and Google shows you ad for “red Nike shoes”). However, that only works if you actually carry Nike (which you may not). Say Google gets a little more liberal and shows you ad for a search of “red slippers”? See how your ad can suddenly be showing for unrelated searches?

How To Weed You PPC Account

There are two main tools you should be using to weed your PPC account; Negative keywords and domain exclusion.

Negative Keywords – If you know common keywords that are unrelated, you can add them in your initial account set up. With our Toto toilets we could add words like “band”, “Dorothy”, “Oz”, etc. right from the beginning. However, as you campaigns run you’ll likely see some new terms you hadn’t thought of. Run a search query report (the new interface makes them easy – here are instructions for running a search query report) to see what terms are triggering your ads. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.

Domain Exclusion – If you’re using the content network you’ll want to see exactly which domains are showing your ads. Inevitably you’ll find sites that A) have tons of impressions buy no clicks or B) have a great CTR but high cost/conversion. Simply exclude those sites to improve your account improvement.

Weeds rob your garden of water and nutrients. In PPC they rob you of your budget, raise your CPC and thwart your efforts to deliver a positive ROI. Do your weeding earlier rather than later because nobody wants this to be their garden:
Weedy Garden

Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: , ,

PPC Farming – Fertilizing

May 14, 2010 By
PPC Fertilizer

PPC FertilizerPlants have 3 simple requirements:

  • Sunlight
  • Water
  • Nutrients

Google provides the sunlight (impressions), you provide the water (budget) and this will start getting you results. However, to maximize the growth potential of your PPC, you need some Miracle-Gro.

Fertilizer = Testing

Just as fertilizer helps plants grow larger, faster and produce more, testing helps your PPC efforts to get more clicks, better QS and more conversions. Here are some areas of your PPC accounts that you should be fertilizing:

  • Keyword Match Type – For short terms (ie organic shampoo) test both phrase and exact match to see what works best. For longer terms (ie Utah Grass Fed Beef) test broad, phrase and exact.
  • Keyword Bids/Position – These two concepts are linked, but test your ad in different positions to determine the “sweet spot”. You may be able to deliver more profit in positions 4-6, or if you want volume target the top 3 spots.
  • Ad Copy – ALWAYS have at least two ad versions in an ad group. And don’t just test little differences like “Buy Here” vs. “Shop Here”. Try radically different ideas. Even ones that seem a little crazy because this is where you can really learn what messaging resonates with your customers.

Constant testing and improvement is why PPC should be managed by a qualified in-house resource or outsourced to a qualified contractor or agency. Your competition is always changing, PPC platforms are changing themselves and you can’t afford to just “set it and forget it” with PPC.

Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: ,

Being the Lead Goose

May 12, 2010 By
Flying Geese

Flying Geese
Yesterday morning I had the pleasure of attending a half day summit featuring Mitch Joel (author of Six Pixels of Separation), Julien Smith and Chris Brogan (authors of Trust Agents). The event was put on by the Women Tech Council and I was a guest of Pounders Grill (an amazing Hawaiian food restaurant here in Utah, highly recommended). All three presentations were inspirational and all three men are very down-to-earth, genuine human beings. Though they are presenting, the vibe is much like that of an engaging conversation. However, one area jumped out at me:

Be The Lead Goose

Growing up as a kid in Idaho, I would often see Canadian geese fly overhead during their seasonal migrations. Similar to the picture above, the geese fly in a V formation. As many of us know the lead goose puts in the most effort and makes flying easier for all the other geese in the V.

Julien compared the V to your network and you should be the lead goose. That means you’ve got to make things easier for your network. But how?

  • Invite, Invite, Invite – You may have overcome the temptation to sit on the couch, but others in your network may need a little help. Invitations can help get people off the couch, because you have 0% chance of making connections at home, but at least some chance if you go out. This works for your business life and your social life.
  • Carpool – If an invite isn’t enough, carpool. Every little bit of motivation helps.
  • Make Introductions – If you’re talking with one acquaintance and another comes to say hi, introduce your other friend. Better still, include a compliment in the intro.
  • Follow-up – This includes not only connecting on LinkedIn or following someone on Twitter, but making sure you follow up on any promises you made. Did you say you’d introduce them to a friend? Do it. Did you say you wanted to have lunch sometime? Schedule it.

What are you doing to be the lead goose?

Filed Under: internet marketing, networking Tagged With: ,

3 High-Level Themes from Conversion Conference

May 11, 2010 By
Conversion Conference

Conversion ConferenceLast week I had the pleasure of attending Conversion Conference, a conference focusing entirely on conversion optimization. A big thanks to Tim Ash for putting the conference together (getting a conference going from scratch can’t be easy) and here are 3 high-level themes from the conference (also read Scott Brinker’s 3 big picture marketing themes post that inspired my post):

Conversion Conference Takeaways

  1. Conversion Optimization isn’t hard – Regardless of how complex your website may be, there are lots of tools out there to make testing easy. Google Website Optimizer is free, will auto-prune poor performing pages (in MVT tests) and generates PDF reports that you can deliver to execs or clients. And don’t think that because it’s free it can’t handle the load, GWO was used to test the homepage of YouTube, all 1024 possible page variations and the millions of visits.
  2. Conversion Optimization isn’t new – Brooks Bell talked about how she was helping AOL with split testing over 8 years ago. Direct mail has been doing it for years before that. Conversion optimization may be the hot topic in internet marketing, but it isn’t as new as some people think.
  3. If in doubt…test it – Each site is different, so most questions about what will work/won’t work on your site will start with “It depends…” and end with “…test it.” The key is to actually DO IT! Don’t get caught by decision paralysis. Don’t have meeting about it and talk about it and get stuck in the technical deployment of it. DO IT!

These were 3 themes that I pulled from the conference, but there was a lot more good stuff. Keep an eye on my blog this week for more, follow this Twitter list of Conversion Conference attendees, or read Daniel Sevitt’s first thoughts post.

Filed Under: Conversion Optimization Tagged With: ,

Targeted Traffic Building Tips For Your Website (Guest Post)

May 6, 2010 By

Getting targeted traffic is probably one of the biggest problems that webmasters often face. Finding the needed sources is hard enough as it is, so I have created a convenient list of sure and effective ways to build targeted traffic for your site. Yes, you’ve heard that correctly, our keyword is “build”.

Effective Ways To Build Targeted Traffic

• Engage well in healthy discussions. It can be as simple an e-mail sent to someone to something more complex like chatting with friends online. Any action that requires interaction is a good way to create loyal readers.
• Participate and join in forums that are relevant to the content you are promoting. Learn from  them and also share a thing or two to others. Show what you really have and people will soon follow you through your website.
• Post comments on blogs which are relevant to your site.
• Track back articles and content from other blogs.
• Find an affordable contextual advertising service for long tail keywords which you can use to screen out unwanted clients.
• Sign up for social networking groups relevant to your field of business. Interact with people within those communities accordingly.
• Exchange or share guest posts with other blog owners.
• Article marketing can also be a good suggestion. E-zine articles should one of the websites on your list for this strategy.
• Add new SEO-optimized content frequently on your website using high end or high potential keywords that have very little or if possible, no competition.
• Outsource certain projects that are targeted on a specific group. For example, link directories usually attract web owners.

The “Building” Part

• Go with your readers, as this defines building your targeted traffic.
• Suggest any syndication service that interested readers can subscribe to, regardless of whether it is in the form of e-mail or direct feed, just anything that can keep your readers updated. Twitter can be a great tool for this.
• Naturally, quality content will play a major role that makes it an important center of effort for web owners.
• Always give an aura that you are always available on the internet. Offer services that would convince them that you are always active. You can do this even better and easier with the help of a Twitter or Digg account.
• Think about what actually keeps the readers hooked and what could interest them the most. Giving incentives or events can be a great idea to liven up your community.
• Give information, and communicate just as you normally would in any group. One of the biggest priorities that you have to take is to engage and sustain readers, to give them a good reason to explore your site better and to continue coming back for more.

Proper maintenance and treatment of your readers would be the best way to obtain targeted traffic and to ensure long lasting effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Try to use all tips moderately and do not focus only on one or 2 tips extensively. I often compare this with constructing a house, if you would build your house on one column and this column would break then your house will collapse and you will have to start over, however if you construct your house on many columns, it would be strong and withstanding a failure of one or even more columns, while giving you the time to fix them again.

About the author: Andreas Horch is a professional search engine marketing consultant with over 10 years experience in the internet marketing industry and CEO of Linknami.com, which offers online marketing and advertising tools for webmasters, seo’s and small businesses.

Filed Under: internet marketing Tagged With:
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