10 Must Have Tips For Great PPC Campaigns

Below you will find 10 simple tips and tricks of the PPC industry. It’s nothing too advanced, but you do need to be aware of them in planning and managing your pay per click campaigns! They’ll save you both time AND money!

First step – use all the keywords that are justifiable for your product or target market. Keep your bids low to see what terms are searched the most.
Take mispellings and domain names into account. Also include your product names.
MAKE SURE YOU INCLUDE A CALL TO ACTION IN YOUR ADS.
Once you’re familiar with ad placement and keywords, split the lists up into individual campaigns.
Do some research on dynamic keyword insertion. This will put the keyword that the user searched for in your ad automatically.
Don’t waste your money trying to be in the top position! Positions 2 thru 4 work just fine.
Make sure you apply the right metrics to account for the end result. In essence, if you are trying to sell something, make sure the PPC program is tracking it.
Start with a low budget and increase as you refine.
If you only offer a product to a local area, don’t market to the whole world.
Make sure to check out the tutorials the PPC company provides. They will help with conversion.

For complete Pay Per Click tutorials, check out our interactive online training for more information on our Internet marketing courses!

Branding 101

Branding isn’t something we teach here at Traffick’d, but it is very important to realize that in order to market well online – you have to integrate your brand into the mix! If you forget your brand, it will be a much more difficult journey to the top because no one will be able to link your offline existence with your online existence!

Companies like Apple, Reebok, Nike, Mc Donalds and Dominos all stand at a point in their product life cycle where just their logo can do the talking. It’s the magic of branding. The next time you come across your favorite shoe company’s ad on the streets, remember to study it. The reason is because it will help you gain an insight into the world of branding. It remains to be one of the biggest and most important aspects of any business.

So how does one define a brand at all? Defining a brand can be a time consuming activity. It requires you to successfully answer the following questions:

What is the mission of your company? Define where and what your company is looking at?
What benefits and qualities of the product/service is being offered?
What image or perception do the prospective consumers already hold of your company?
With what do you want them to be associated with your company?

The answers to these questions will put you in a better position as far as defining a brand is concerned. Don’t trust outside information, do your research and take your time. It is extremely important that you know what the consumers think of you.

It should be clear how important the branding can be for a business. This includes knowing who, what, when and where you want to communicate or deliver your brand messages. So a brand must circle around the consumers right? Right!

Branding includes two elements – external and internal to the consumer.

Internal brand elements include the following:

Personality: This relates to the consumer’s description of the brand.

Culture: The social context within which

the brand is perceived.

Self-Image: What you feel as a company, what

the brand says?

External elements include the following:

Physical Characteristics: What

the brand has to say physically?

Reflection: Relates to the targeted audience or consumers

Relationship: The consumer’s ability to connect with

the product and identifying the relationship with the brands.

A great example of a successful brand could be Intel. The company has used all the elements that are required build a strong brand and has effectively achieved it as well. The micro-chip manufacturing giant has been able to sustain their image and is now counted amongst the top ten brands of

the world. The following content will explain what all YOU can do to become the next hot brand:

Creating a logo: One of the most important aspects of branding is to have a great logo. Once you have one, place it everywhere! Don’t restrict your ideas, feel free to post them wherever you can.
Pen down the “brand messages”: It is extremely important that your employees share the same image as you. Make sure that everyone knows what messages are to be conveyed through
the brand image.
Create a brand reflecting voice: Is your brand friendly? Be conversational. The voice should reflect all the elements of your brand including visual imagery.
Come up with a tagline: Have a tagline which encapsulates the whole experience your brand creates. Something that has a meaning, is clear and remains in the memory. Tagline can help consumers relate easily.
Be consistent: Without consistency, all of the above points and tips are useless. Drive for consistency, don’t be too fancy!

These were some tips on how you can start creating an image in consumers minds about your brand. Your brand is you promise to your customer, hence, it becomes extremely vital that you stick to it and be truthful. Once you connect with your targeted audience, you have one piece of the pie in your hand. For the rest of it, just be truthful, deliver your promises on time. Nowadays, co-branding has become extremely popular. You might have come across 2 brand names on the same product. This technique can also be very helpful when it comes to creating a brand name.

Once you have a brand, there are a million other things you can do for further promotion. Get into retail and merchandising. Print shirts with your logos, mugs/coasters, caps, etc. These may cost very little but then it becomes a foolproof method of free advertising. So don’t hurry, take your time and hire a professional if required because the road after that becomes only a little easier. Feel free to comment and suggest any thoughts you might have.

To learn more about branding, and how it all works with Internet marketing – sign-up for our membership only courses, available here through Traffick’d! You’ll have access to everything from PPC marketing to Facebook promotion at the drop of a hat!

How To Use Beta Invites To Create Incredible Traffic

There is pretty big section in our courses called, “Internet Marketing Expanded.” IME is where the gray-area marekting methods are explained in full – this one being one of them. We call it the Beta phenomenon.

The Beta Phenomenon

Being beta is a bit like being a very expensive wine bar – everyone wants in but no one wants to pay. The people that get in are enough to generate a huge buzz, and then the business is golden…

Websites aren’t any different.

You’ve probably seen them on TechCrunch, Mashable or a host of other startup-reviewing
blogs. “We have 500 invites for the private beta (get ‘em while they last)!”

Most who have been around these blogs see this and have become aware that usually, even if you are too late to get an invite, you can request one and get it within a day from the site itself. In theory, with so many of these out there, they shouldn’t work.

Yet, they do. Here’s why:

“It’s private. It’s beta. Your friends will envy you.”

Those who are active on Twitter have seen the desperate cry for help…

“I need an invite to (nextgreatstartup.com) and they’re out. Does anyone have one?”

We want to help our friends. Sometimes we want our friends to be jealous of us, too. A little invitation-envy never killed a relationship.

Early Adopter Status

There are those who have an eye for what will be big and what won’t be. They can see “The Next Big Thing” from a gigabyte down the road. For the other 99.9% of us who either:

A) Thought MySpace was a fad that would flop by 2006
B) Thought Cuil was really a Google Killer
C) Trusted AOL when they bought, well, anybody
D) All of the Above

…well, let’s just say that we have our instincts. With some websites exploding on the scene, it is important to users that they achieve “early adopter” status. It’s a bragging right of immense recognition into what is hot. It’s a feeling of power to be an expert on a site before the floodgates open. Most would like to start on the ground floor while the upper floors are being built.

“OMG if I miss this I’ll die!”

Most people know that it isn’t hard to get an invite if you miss the initial blast.

Most.

Some people still think that if they miss
the private beta, they won’t be able to get in anytime soon. Even worse, sometimes
the private betas with limited invites are truly private betas with limited invites. Once they’re gone, wannabe users really do have to wait.

That sucks. Trust me.

Potential, potential, potential!

The number one reason, after everything else, is that some startups just look like they will be really cool. Some fill a gap that we’ve wanted filled. Some fill a gap that we didn’t know existed until someone came up with a startup that filled that hole.

Regardless of what drives people to click on
the private invite button and type in the magic code, they simply work. They are an effective way to get a base of users to truly beta test a product. They are also effective in giving a boost of real users even if real beta testing has been completed.

Just as we hear “the next 17 callers will receive…” on the radio or “place your order in the next 10 minutes and we’ll send you…” on the television, we will always see “Hurry, only 500 Beta Invites available!” from now until the end of the Internet.

For more traffic driving tutorials and interactive courses – register for Traffickd – the complete Internet Marketing Courses System, delivered online through our secure website. Don’t miss the opportunity before the doors close!

The Top 10 Tips For Effective Pay Per Click Campaigns

Pay per click can be an amazing form of advertising, provided you manage your campaigns wisely!

Primarily working on the conventional techniques of search engine optimization, a campaign can do wonders for your business if you design it cleverly. A set of some specific keywords is sufficient to get your ad loaded on the search pages of any search engine – but that’s only the start of it!

Here are ten effective tips which will get you off to a good start:

Define PPC – Your first priority is to define your goal, plan and strategy in order to form a basic layout for a PPC campaign. This will help you to get a better idea as to what your campaign lacks and what your campaign is overburdened with. So define and design a set of metrics which will guide you throughout the campaign with the help of proper analysis.
Information and Data – Once you are done defining plans and strategies, you can opt for the second step of gathering information and data relevant to your business needs. This will help you design better pay per click campaigns in order to achieve your goal. Collection of information or data will assist you in determining the keywords required to make your venture profitable, target your audience and the right usage of those keywords with time and audience management requirements.
Keyword Usage and Tracking – This operation involves an advanced level of management. Management in the sense that you need to use keywords in such a minimal amount that your business gets its audience with very low expense. Right usage with right tracking will prove to be really fruitful for your pay per click campaign. You can also get a custom design for your keywords and a third party keyword tracking system, if you desire. This can act as an accessory for your basic campaigning needs and business necessities and growth.
Count on Bids – The idea behind any campaign is solely dependent on its bidding system. This bidding is based on a web interface which helps you generate traffic to your website or business. So get the right keywords and get better traffic with a keyword level tracking bid system.
Page Selection – If you are satisfied with your keyword usage and keyword tracking, then go for a page selection from where you would like your business to be propelled. This page will be your landing page. It is not necessary that your home page could be the landing page. The best tracked page which can make your PPC campaign effective must be your landing page.
PPC Management tools – You can use various inexpensive PPC management tools like bidvertiser, chitika or Google Adwords. They will understand your requirements and help you in making your pay per click campaign profitable in all respects.
Target Audience – Although it’s the first priority for any business need, it often gets bogged down in planning and executing business campaigns. A PPC campaign is no different. But at the right time you can make the decision of selecting your target audience helping your business to grow. You can do it by trial and error method by either selecting a local or an international zone.
Focused Factor – Make sure you have got easy landing pages for your campaign with easy navigation. It should have enough information that a user needs in order to fulfill their necessities. Avoid multiple folds and buttons since this will hamper the quality of the page.
Focused Factor 2 – Avoid too many flashy pages or bright colors. This can make your campaign the worst possible medium for you, since the user will have no other option but to leave the site. This is an important point of consideration since many people go for it assuming that it would bring traffic to their sites.
Daily Management – Make sure to manage your campaigns on a daily basis. Don’t think that they will be fine one their own because they won’t! Take an interest in how they are performing and optimize the campaign to fit your needs even better.

Pay Per Click is one of the cornerstones of Traffick’d – Step-by-step online internet marketing tutorials. For more information, check out the signup page! We offer completely interactive, easy to use tutorials which guide you through the steps of Internet marketing.

Amazing Ways Twitter Can Help You Promote Your Business

Words really can’t describe what Twitter can do for your business. Our web design firm, Tech Solution, embraced Twitter about a year ago and I can honestly tell you 80% of our leads come from the service… No joke!

Twitter is a mini-blogging application. It allows you to post small snippets of text, 140 characters or less, to your followers. You can include links and using a few thirdparty applications, photos.

At first, you might think, “What is Twitter going to do for my business?” And honestly, I thought the same thing at first too. But hold on! Check out these ways of promoting your sites through the infamous mini-blogging application!!

Here are some incredible ways you can use Twitter to market your business:

Use Twitter To Drive Traffic To Your Site

Questions are great mediums on Twitter. Post a question and include a link to your blog. For example. If you’re a graphic designer, you can ask the question, “Do you know how you can use vector art to make stickers?” Follow the question with a link to your blog and then track the traffic to your blog post!

Using Comments As Blog Fuel

Another creative way to drive traffic to your blog is to write a twitter post using some of the more interesting or unique comments to blog posts you’ve written. You might also share some experiences from meetings or telephone conversations. These can start very interesting conversations and drive traffic to your company website.

Announce Contests and Events

Announcing contests and events using Twitter is easy… Make sure you post a link to your website where the contest details are offered or post a question and challenge someone to be the first response. Give them something related to your business for answering the question correctly first.

Share Personal Adventures

This is difficult for a lot of people to grasp – personality wins in social media. If you don’t show personality, you will lose a very sad battle. If you’re having a company picnic, share a picture or post a funny or thought provoking quote the CEO just made during a speech. Anything that helps build your brand, company philosophy, and marketing strategy is worthy of posting.

Tweet Anything Thought Provoking

Post interesting or thought provoking statistics, quotes, or headlines and start a conversation. During the conversation, when appropriate, it may be possible to link to your company website.

Make An Announcement Or Do A Press Release

Do you have a new wonderful product or service to share with the world? Use twitter to make an announcement – amplify the power of the announcement and post a code to give the first 5,10, or 50 customers. Make it an event.

In Summary – Twitter is about being social

Twitter is one of those applications that are contagious… Think instant messaging of the future. Twitter gives you the power to send a message to just one person, or thousands. It’s your choice. The sooner you harness it and begin building up follower lists – the sooner you will start to see your business grow!

To dig deeper into Twitter, including how to build a following, how to combine Twitter, Facebook and Stumbleupon, check out Traffick’d – Complete Internet Marketing Training! Registration is quick and easy and features a 100%, 30-day money back guarantee!

5 Incredibly Easy Ways You Can Promote Your Business Through Facebook

Facebook promotion seems to be the buzz lately in seminar and workshops. The truth is, it isn’t really that hard to promote your business through Facebook! It takes a bit of time and effort, but what form of marketing doesn’t?!

Below are 5 incredibly easy ways to promote your site through Facebook:

Events

This was developed by Facebook so that anyone can promote events, sponsored parties, or even product launches, transactions, or company milestones. You can choose which people to send your event to and a request is sent to that person asking them to either confirm or deny participation in your event. This allows you to manage the number of people you involve in your event and create a guest list concerning your upcoming event.

Share / Posted Items

Facebook Share is a Facebook application that lets you promote any Group, Event, Photo, Link, or Application you come across by giving it real estate in your “Posted Items” list on your profile page or by sending it directly to your friends’ Inbox. This can be used as a great tool to get more interest in your product.

Networks

Facebook Networks are like group pages for everyone who’s a member of an Educational, Work, or Geographical network. While no Facebook members “own” any pieces of network pages, network pages offer both another way for users to discover events, posted items, and marketplace listings, and also any discussion forums or walls which any members can post to.

Mini Feed and News Feed

Facebook’s Mini Feed and News Feed detail a user’s interaction with your brand and express this to their friends, networks, and beyond. It’s possible that one Mini Feed item generated by a Facebook user could be seen in hundreds of their friends’ News Feeds. This tool provides added advertising for a company or a product and can draw attention to a product that receives a large number of hits.

The below options are available to the user for a small fee.

Social Ads

Social Ads offer very powerful targeting capabilities: when you create your ad, you have the option to limit who sees your ad by age, sex, location, keywords, education level, workplaces, political views, and relationship status. This can allow a user to target who views their product to a group more likely to purchase it. Facebook has a number of payment options available for Social Ads.

Summary

The reason Ebay is so powerful is it connects buyers to sellers. Facebook is similar, but in a different light. If your target market frequents Facebook, why not promote there? And with Facebook’s ever growing presence on the web, more and more target markets are quickly opening up!

For the complete tutorial, including step by step tutorials on implementing these features in Facebook – sign up for our interactive training through Traffick’d! We discuss Facebook and 20 or so other social networks out there that a perfect places for you to promote your site.

The Eternal Question – SEO or PPC

The online community is definitely a large market place that you can’t ignore, especially if you have an Internet business. There are thousands if not millions of consumers that you can tap in the Internet.

At the same time, the Internet also poses a quite different challenge. The easy access that Internet provides also gives you as much competition as you can imagine. It is too crowded and congested.

Having a website is simply not enough to make your business run. You need to take other steps to promote your work in areas that your clients are likely to be. It has to be visible. It has to be frequently targeted by consumers and surfers.

Invest in marketing your Internet site. There are two major options available to you, search engine optimization and pay per click. They are probably the most desirable alternatives you can get for your Internet business in terms of getting the word out there.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Some researches indicate that 60% – 70% of Internet surfers and users actually resort to using the Google search engine to find and locate web sites and pages, for any topic they desire. SEO is the process taken to make sure that the Internet uses will find your website when ranked among the top results of a search. This way you can make sure that you will be visible and can clearly stand out from the rest.

To get a well SEO’d site, you will have to research your target market, optimize your website to fit the research, and find some good back links.

In SEO, there is no need for you to pay for the clicks (because your site will be listed organically) although it will require you to spend time doing research to get a favorable combination of ads and target audience. The SEO process is a long term one. It requires months, 6 months at the least, before the proper outcome is fully achieved, but once the goal is accomplished, you will definitely get a steady source of profit.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC gives way in advertising on a search engine. These are sponsored listings that you see whenever you make a search. There will be a charge whenever a visitor or web surfer clicks on any of your ads. There will first be a bidding process. The highest bidder for the price per click will definitely get the chance to be first listed in the search engine.

With this kind of advertising, you can still basically control your campaign as you get to create your own ad. You will also manage the target audience and still stay within the bounds of your budget. Most of the providers of PPC advertising will allow you to specify the target market, either by topic, industry or geographical location. You can also check if your ad gets to be shown at all and if it is competitive with the rest.

There are some guaranteed benefits when you get to maximize the PPC strategy.

PPC lets you advertise to the whole of the online community. It is also relatively easy to set up.
At first glance, PPC advertising may seem very expensive. Could it possibly happen that someone out there will go on clicking on your ad? This will definitely give you a large bill without the expected profit on your part. If this provides a lot of worries, be rest assured that there is a protection for you. Networks are able to recognize fraudulent clicks.
You can also set a budget for a certain period. The moment your budget has been used up by the target number of clicks, your ads will no longer be displayed until the next period you want it again displayed.
You will also be able to adjust well to changes in market demands and trends.

In deciding which of the two strategies will work right for you, think of your goals and of your resources. Each of them offer distinct advantages that will work for your good. The better way to approach these two is to evaluate according to your short term and long term plans. Take the PPC course for your short-term goals and choose SEO if you have long term ones.

To get complete SEO and PPC training, delivered in a easy-to-digest online format – sign up for Traffick’d – Online Internet Marketing Training!

8 Key Elements Of Great Landing Pages

Landing pages are the key to Internet Marketing success. Below, we have 8 characteristics of great landing pages that you should include in your marketing efforts!

Make sure to have an eyecatching headline that grabs your visitor’s attention instantly and compels them to read on. Many refer to this as the hook. Does your headline have a hook? If not, work on it. You may find you have to test a few headlines to find out which one pulls in the most people (also known as A-B testing).
Brief introduction. Tell your customer who you are and what you are offering them. Don’t forget to list the benefits of what you have to offer. You can do this using a simple bulleted list.
An offer, whether you are offering a free product, newsletter or guide in exchange for an email address.
You shouldn’t have any links on your opt-in page (except for links to your privacy policy and other disclaimers) so your visitor is not distracted and freely offers their information.
A reminder that your visitor is receiving something free, that there is no charge, no risk and nothing to lose (provided you offer something free as one of your tactics to build your list).
A privacy statement to assure your visitors you will keep their information personal and private. Many visitors will not enter their information unless they know their information will be kept private and confidential.
Include your handwritten signature, which again builds trust and a personal experience for your visitor. Make sure when you include your signature it is legible. Signatures that are not legible usually suggest the author has something to hide.
Make your free product offer look as professional as possible. Consider getting an eCover for it even if it is free, so your customers assume the free gift or product is worthwhile.

When you design a simple web page in this fashion, you have a very high possibility of transforming customers into subscribers. You may find up to 80% of visitors subscribe when you create a great landing page.

And, if you are not good at web design or even writing, contract others to do the work for you. Just go to Elance.com and you’ll find hundreds of people capable of setting up your page at a reasonable price.

For more step-by-step interactive training, sign up for Traffick’d – A complete series of online courses for Internet Marketing!