Internet Marketing

Weddings can be a rather stressful time for brides with all the planning involved for their perfect day.  If you provide information that’s targeted to brides and grooms that are planning their wedding, and want to know what keywords pay the best for Google advertising, we’re going to drop a few here that you might be interested in:

New Jersey Wedding Planning – $12.36

Boston Wedding Bands – $9.26

Chicago Wedding Videographers – $7.46

Chicago Wedding Bands – $6.37

New York City Wedding Photographers – $6.26

Hopefully you’ll find a few of these useful in targeting your audience and maximizing your advertising revenue!

There are a variety of niches out there that websites are geared towards.  The insurance industry is one of those very competitive niches that there are thousands of websites fighting for traffic for.  Here are some of the best paying keywords through Google Adsense that you can target your websites for if you’re a webmaster with automotive insurance information…

ladies car insurance – $52.27

chicago auto insurance quotes – $47.59

florida car insurance rate – $54.34

huntsville auto insurance – $53.83

get cheapest car insurance – $52.09

So yesterday I covered the topic of what SEO is.  However, it has a counterpart that you may or may not be familiar with: SEM – Search Engine Marketing.  Now, to someone who doesn’t work with this stuff every day, you’re probably thinking there’s really no difference between the two.  Not so quick.  Search Engine Optimization is the method by which you help search engines index your site.  Search Engine Marketing is the paid inclusion of your site in their results pages.  You see those links that are set off from your normal results either in a colored or outlined box, or in another smaller column off to the side of the search engine?  See that little heading that says “Sponsored Links” or something of the sort?  Those are paid advertisements that are shown when people search for whatever it was you just searched for.  The people who market their websites by bidding on these keywords are called Search Engine Marketers.  They help businesses attract traffic to their websites by buying the traffic through keyword auctions.

Let’s take an example keyword phrase – “highest paying keywords”.  Now, go to Google and type in that phrase.  (You might even see this blog as one of the top entries.  We go back and forth between being in the top couple of listings and being pushed back to the second or third page.)  You probably see a couple of links on the right hand side under Sponsored Links right?  Now, change your search to “top paying keywords”.  Notice any difference in the number of links shown?  If so, that means that there’s more advertisers bidding on that space.  They want their ad shown instead of their competitors.  I’ll go more in depth as to how this bidding works another day.  For  now, you’ve at least gotten a taste of what the phrase SEM means.

When people ask what it is I do, my typical answer is that I work on the Internet.  (Or Internets for those of you who speak GW.)  That’s because most people don’t understand the difference between a web developer and a web designer.  Nor do they understand what SEO, SEM, PPC or any number of other TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) mean.  So this blog is my attempt at explaining a little bit about what it is I do on this vast world wide web while I’m working on a book that goes into a bit more detail.  Hopefully I’ll have the book nearing completion around Christmas, but we’ll just have to see how everything pans out.

So when I say that one of the things I do is SEO I’m not talking about Synthetic Engine Oil (though I do run Rotella T in my biodiesel fueled trucks) and I’m not a Special Equipment Operator.  When I talk about SEO I’m typically talking about Search Engine Optimization.  Usually when I tell someone that I do Search Engine Optimization they give me this blank look like what I’m talking about is as understandable to them as explaining the pythagorean theorem to them in Greek or Latin.  But it’s really not that difficult of a concept to grasp.

You see, in order to be able to provide results to people performing a search on Google, Google has to know what’s out there on the Internet.  It has these programs that it’s constantly running called crawlers or spiders that go out to every corner of the web and make a note of what those pages contain.  But how does that program decide what to store in it’s log about the web pages that it’s looking at?  Well, there’s a variety of things that program is looking at.  Some web pages are built to easily tell that spider what the page is about, while others are rather vague.

Let’s say for instance Google has a bunch of results for blogs about crocheting baby blankets.  One blog it finds has a title of “My Blog”.  They name the titles of the posts such things as “Post One”, “Post Two”, “Post Three”, etc.  There’s meta tags in the web page’s code that normally contain keywords or a description of what the page is about but the keywords are blank and the description is simply “My First Blog”.  Google also has a blog in it’s database with a title of “Crochet Blog: How To Crochet For Fun”.  That author names their posts “How to Crochet a Baby Blanket”, “How to Crochet a Knit Cap” and “How to Crochet a Pair of Socks”.  The keywords are descriptive with things such as “blog crochet instructions baby blanket knit cap socks” and the description meta tag on each blog post is the first couple of sentences of the blog post.

Now, in the scenario above, when a user such as your sister or mom or aunt goes to search for “crochet baby blankets”, which blog do you think Google is going to list first?  The one titled “My First Blog” or the Crochet Blog?  The Crochet Blog, according to Google, is a lot more relevant to the user’s search results, so it has a much better chance of being on the first page of results than does the “My First Blog”.

So what I do is help people wanting to publish information or create websites better tell the search engines what their websites are about.  After all, you can spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign, but still never reap the benefits of the free and very targeted advertising – simply telling the search engines what your website is about.  I teach people about the meta tags in their website’s code and how to choose the right keywords and descriptions.  I teach people how to design their online marketing plan.  I teach people about social networking and the benefit to their products.  For quite some time I’ve done consulting and running my own websites.  I figured now it’s time that I branch out a little further and start to share all this knowledge.  So what you see here is my Information Overload blog.  Stay tuned to continue learning about the world of Internet Marketing.  It’s quite a vast topic, but I’ll continue writing about it for quite some time if I can just keep on top of it.  Enjoy!

So many times within the Internet Marketing world I see niche this, niche that. But so many newbs (new people) to the world of Internet Marketing constantly ask “What’s a Niche?” Think of the world as having many categories of people. You have horse lovers, people that love to kayak, hikers, dog lovers, cat lovers, glbt (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender), etc. Well, each of those categories is considered a niche. You can then even go even deeper into that niche. Say for instance you wanted to start a website about Dachshunds – that’s a niche within the dog niche. You could even go to a third level and create a blog about piebald dachshunds. Now, would you get a lot of traffic? I don’t know. But you could do it.

Speaking of Dachshunds I’m happy to report that this past weekend’s Howl-O-Weenie, put on by DREAM, was a blast!  Our little Dachshund, Pepper, had a great time with all the food, fun and festivities.

So now that we’ve covered the terms CPC and PPC, let’s talk about what that means money wise.  There are a number of keywords that draw fierce competition in the internet marketing world.  That means that lots of advertisers want their ads to show instead of their competitors’ when the appropriate page shows up.  Since the advertising game is a bit like an auction (with the ad spot going to the highest bidder or the highest bidder with the best chance of the ad being clicked on), if an advertiser wants their ad to be more prominent than the others, one thing they can do is set a high price that they’re willing to pay per click.  We’re going to share with you some of the secret (or not so secret) keywords here…

mesothelioma litigation – there are only around 280 monthly searches on Google for this phrase but advertisers are willing to bid an average of $66.74 per instance that someone clicks on their ad.

mesothelioma settlement – at 440 monthly searches on Google, it certainly draws a high price at $62.87 per click.

arizona dui lawyer – there are over 660 monthly searches for this term, but you can be sure the lawyers are making it back after paying $65.57 per click.

san diego dui attorney – 820 monthly searches on Google requires an average bid of $72.34 for this precious keyword phrase

private jet charter – quite a few more people search for private jet charters apparently at 2,800 searches per month.  However, at $12.33 per click, the cost isn’t quite as dear.

There are tons more keywords out there that pay just as much as the ones I’ve shown you here.  It only takes searching for them.  So go take a look and find your niche… maybe you’ll be able to help enough people find the resources they’re looking for through a well paying advertising program that you can retire early!

Since we’ve covered PPC, let’s talk about another common Internet Marketing acronym.  CPC.  What is it and what does it mean?

CPC = Cost Per Click

We’ve already established that one form of online advertising is for the advertiser to pay a certain amount per click.  The amount that they pay is called Cost Per Click.  That amount can vary quite widely from fractions of a cent to some number of dollars.  A good example of this comes through advertising programs such as Google AdSense or AdBrite or any number of other programs.  When advertisers go to place their ads, they tell the system how much they’re willing to pay per click – or each time someone clicks on one of their ads.  Some systems set minimums such as a minimum of 5 cents per click.  But the amounts only go up from there.

You see, in the online advertising game, there are some very competitive fields that drive the price per click that advertisers are willing to pay through the roof.  You’ve probably seen some of those ads on TV about Mesothelioma, right?  Well, those same guys advertise online.  And you know how much they’re willing to pay for someone to click on one of their ads?  I’ve seen over $10 per click.  Now, that’s a common niche that many online marketers know about and I’m not going to spill my secrets as to some of the other very well paying ones, but I will say that I’ve seen keyword bidding go for over $100 per click for certain phrases.  That’s right, there’s some advertisers out there who will pay over $100 for one person to click on their ad in the hopes that it will lead to a high dollar sale or a client who will make them many times that $100 investment.

Anyhow, I’ve got my own online work to do.  Time for me to get back to it.  Catch ya’ soon when I’ll be discussing probably more Internet Marketing ideas or topics!

In the world of online marketing, as with many fields, there are quite a few terms that you have to understand.  PPC is one of these terms that anyone who has even dipped their toes in the water of internet marketing should understand.

PPC = Pay Per Click

So you’re reading through this blog and you see an ad block.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a banner or a text ad or video ad or whatever.  The point is it’s there.  Staring you in the face with something that’s enticing you to click on it.  Click me!  Click me!  So you click.

The question becomes this: does the owner of the website that displays the ad get paid when you click on that advertisement?  Maybe.  If the publisher (blog owner, website owner, whoever) and the advertiser (Target, Tide, Wal-Mart, etc.) have an arrangement that the advertiser will pay per click…. then yes.

Now, pay per click isn’t the only type of advertising.  There’s CPM, affiliate marketing and various other setups as well.  So for more information on those, you’ll probably want to continue reading this blog.  Yep, this one right here.  We’ll tell you all about them!