Promote U Guru Blog

Archive for August, 2012

Basic Steps to Creating an Effective Google AdWords Campaign

August 30th, 2012

Hi All!

The following Guest Blog post is another good one courtesy of Craig Robinson, an online Marketing Expert and the Editor for Qwaya, a Facebook campaign tool that runs through a web interface.

In this article, Craig is going to take you through the basic steps and tips to create a winning AdWords campaign. It’s loaded with great info, so let’s jump in!

Basic Steps to Create an Effective Google AdWords Campaign by Craig Robinson

When you’re ready to take the big step into online marketing, you will undoubtedly be creating an AdWords campaign with Google. Of course, there are many other ad services out there to choose from, and you should always spread your eggs out instead of putting them all in one basket, but Google is the biggest service around and it demands your attention.

However, only the best campaigns on Google are going to succeed, or at least have a greater chance of succeeding. But there is an endless amount of competition using AdWords campaigns, so you have to create great material or else your competition is going to bury you.

So let’s discuss how you can get ahead of your competition, and improve your branding and sales through an AdWords campaign…

Steps & Tips:

Target Your Market

This is the first step in the process and perhaps one of the most important. You want to ensure that you have the proper market targeted if you’re hoping to use AdWords to generate sales.

When you’re creating your AdWords campaign, think about whom to target both from a keyword and geographic perspective.

Your keyword portfolio decides when and where your ads will show. You need to balance great reach with high relevance, so think about the market you’re targeting and play to their needs.

Best Ways to Write Copy

This is something that can seem rather difficult at first. The goal is to command the reader’s attentions with your copy, and there’s a careful mixture of art and science involved here. For instance, you may want to ask questions that appeal to the users. You can also hand out simple instructions, tell a short story, offer up a teaser, etc. You want to create an air of intrigue, but you also want to come across as trustworthy.

Although good copy depends a lot on what you’re advertising and to whom, the key is always relevance. How can you make the ad as relevant as possible looking at the keywords you’re buying clicks for?

Here are examples of quick-hit messaging you’d want to follow when writing your ad copy:

  • Current promotion: “Right now only $50”
  • Specific product: “iPhone 5 in stock”
  • Review: “Best in test”
  • Your unique selling point: “Largest phone retailer in the US”

A Strong Call to Action

With a call to action, you’re looking to entice someone to click through on your ad and act on your offer. You’re not trying to order them to do something, however. So save those multiple exclamation points, the huge promises (i.e. lies), and other gimmicks used.

If your copy is written well enough and if the ad is relevant for the chosen market, a simple “Purchase online today” or something similar is as “strong” as you need for a call to action.

Creating Relevant Search Phrases

For Google’s particular system, this is an incredibly important part about effective marketing. You need to make sure that your keyword portfolio matches search phrases that are actually searched by people. There’s no “best guess” feature with AdWords.

You’re going to be paying the freight here, so make sure that you do your research.

(Note: It helps to have a service delivering these ads that will help out in search term generation.)

Lowering your CPC

Yes, playing the game with Google AdWords is going to cost money. It’s worth it if you have an effective campaign. You’ll receive a nice ROI. But if you’re interested in lowering your cost-per-click number, you need to focus on three main areas: long tail keywords, uncompetitive themes, and relevancy.

Long tail keywords are far more descriptive and thus have less competition. The same goes for the uncompetitive category. You should be able to find some really popular phrases, relevant to your ad’s message, which aren’t “over” competitive.

Lastly, make sure that your ads are using keywords that are as relevant as possible. Nothing lowers costs like actually making money!

Doing things the right way with Google can make your campaign a huge success and can help your business to grow exponentially. The above guide isn’t as thorough as it could be, but it does give you a general run through in terms of creating effective ads. Expand on each tip as you need it. And if you’d like more tips on search engine marketing, visit keybroker.com.

Thanks, Craig, for contributing another helpful article. And I hope all of you learned something here to make YOUR AdWords campaigns more successful…done right, they are a great way for small business owners to not only increase sales but build awareness for their brand, too. So I don’t care if you’re selling books online or want to promote your services, try some AdWords campaigns in your marketing plan.

Cheers & Happy Marketing!

Lisa

 

 

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Ten Tips for Writing Articles to Build Your Brand, Book Sales and Web Traffic

August 01st, 2012

Hi All!

I wrote about this last year but felt it was worth doing again. Why? Because a great strategy for building your Topic Expert brand, and for increasing traffic to your website, is to write articles.

By doing this, you can immediately be positioned as an expert in your field. It also gives you the opportunity to showcase your knowledge and this can attract clients to you, as well as attract media interviews for you. But, if you’re not a great writer, relax! Hire a ghostwriter (inexpensively) to do them for you. All you have to do is provide them with the topics you think will appeal to your target audience and they’ll do the heavy lifting for you.

And, for any of you Authors, writing short articles with content from your book, even AS you’re writing it, is a way to also generate interest in your book and increase your book sales! It’s also a way to continue interest in your book topic even if it has been out for a few years.

That said, here are 10 quick tips for making them compelling and using them as a valuable marketing tool:

  1. Grab The Reader’s Attention Fast: Make sure to create an interesting title for your article, and you can even make it a thought-provoking question. Also, in your opening paragraph set-up the “pain point” you’re going to solve and why it’s important to them. Writing articles that will solve a problem for your target audience is a great strategy for the angles you develop.
  2. Keep the Articles Simple, Short and Easy to Understand Quickly: People want to read quick-hit information that they can grasp fast and benefit from. So make sure the articles you write provide good, helpful information and are written in a succinct style. A good way to achieve this is to use bullet points or numbered points so that your key messages and tips are easy to reference and follow. Having your key points “buried” in paragraphs will make it frustrating for your readers.
  3. Add Keywords for Online Search: Your articles will be posted in numerous ways online and will often be found by people doing keyword searches on your topic matter. So you want to make sure that you use the Google keyword tool that I mentioned back in the chapter about writing an effective Press Release, and add those popular search terms in the body of your articles. I know many experts who rapidly increase their search rankings because of writing articles, and oftentimes their articles start ranking higher in search results than their main websites do. Therefore, you want to implement this strategy!
  4. Don’t Pitch Your Services and Products: When you write articles it’s only about providing helpful info to your target audience. It is not about making your articles big infomercials to pitch yourself and/or your products. If you write good articles that people truly learn from, they will typically want to learn more about you and they will visit your website. The fastest way to kill your credibility and lose a potential “fan” is by trying to sell them on something in your article content.
  5. Be Yourself in Your Writing Style: Conveying yourself as likeable is important! If you’re a fun person, be sure to bring out your personality in your articles. This is the same advice I give to clients who hire me as a coach and consultant to launch their speaking careers! Don’t be one person on the stage and another person off stage. People can see through that because you’re not being authentic. And when you write articles, it may be the FIRST contact anyone has with you; even before seeing your website. So you want to make sure who you really are comes through in your writing.
  6. Don’t Quote Other Experts: The purpose of your articles is to showcase you; not someone who could be a competitor. You normally only want to quote other people in your articles if their information really adds to your message and content quality. Sure, you can quote stats and research results from studies you find, but try to avoid quoting or mentioning other experts who are similar to you.
  7. Offer Your Articles on Your Website & Submit Them to Online Distribution Services: When I submit articles online, I also add them to my website, in Word, so that people can download them to use as content on their blogs, ezines, websites and newsletters. And, on my article web page, I clearly state they can use my articles as long as they are shown in their entirety, and the short bio about me provided at the end of each article is included. I also ask that they send me a link to it when it’s used. Millions of people are constantly seeking for content and understand they have to source the author who wrote it. This is great for driving their traffic to you!
  8. Write Them Consistently: If possible, try to write and submit at least one article per month online. I know experts who do one-per-week because they receive so much benefit from doing so, but that may be tough for many of you. Start by writing a few, and after you get the hang of it and start developing a “formula” for cranking them out (or hire a ghostwriter to do them for you), you can start to increase how many you publish monthly.
  9. Share Your Links: Many article distribution services will create a web page for your article that will be found through online searches. You’ll have a unique url for your article’s page and can share that link to drive traffic to your article on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and in emails to your contact database.
  10. Embed Links in Your Articles: When you write an article, make sure to have certain words or phrases that have hyperlinks to pages on your website, your blog posts, Twitter page, Facebook page, and/or to other articles you have written and that are posted online. Just make sure the links take them to info that is relevant to what you’re writing about and to points you are making.

Okay! There are 10 quick tips to get you started on writing articles to build your brand, revenue, credibility and online traffic!

Cheers & Happy Marketing!

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