Tips for Successful Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
By Eddie Machaalani (c) 2005, Interspire,
ROI and Conversion Tracking Application, TrackPoint

Introduction
Pay-per-click (PPC) is by far one of the easiest and quickest methods of driving targeted, consistent traffïc to your website. While this may seem like a daunting method of advertising for some, it’s actually quite easy and can end up becoming that one marketing method that you can’t live without.

What I’d like to do today is provide some tips and techniques that I personally use when creating and monitoring PPC ads. Hopefully these tips will help you in your future marketing endeavors.

Experimenting With Different Search Engines

There are many PPC search engines, with some being better than others. The top two are Google and Yahoo, which was previously known as Overture. It’s a good idea to start your PPC campaigns with a small budget, spreading it out over a few different search engines to experiment and see where your target market may be lurking.

Generally speaking, I’ve found Google Adwords is better for more technically orientated products or services, including software, hardware, web design etc. Yahoo, on the other hand, is better for general consumer products, including insurancë, toys, music etc.

What I wrote in the previous paragraph is very general, and you should analyze your campaigns carefully to see where they are performing their best. We’ll discuss this in detail a little later in the article.

Selecting the Right Keywords

The keyword selection process is probably the most important of all when it comes to creating your PPC ads. You’ll need to select keywords that are specific to your product or service offering, but you need to be careful not to select keywords that are extremely popular, as this may deplete your PPC funds sooner than expected.

The keyword selection process begins by asking yourself just one question:

“If I was searching for a product just like mine, which words or phrases would I search for?”

Using your answer(s) to this question as your base, you can then use a thesaurus and common sense to start building your keyword list with plurals, synonyms, similar words, etc.

To see which keywords your competitors are using, simply try searching for them. If you see a PPC ad along the side for your competitor, then note that keyword down and add it to your list.

Another way of coming up with great keywords is to use the overture search suggestion tool.

Type in a set of keywords and it will list similar keywords, including the number of times that keyword has been searched for on Overture (Yahoo) in the last month!

There’s often a fine line between selecting keywords that are either too specific or keywords that are too general. Try to keep away from these, as they can often result in wasted PPC funds.

A typical example of this would be an ad that I created recently for our latest product, TrackPoint, which — not coincidently — is an internet marketing return on investmënt (ROI) tracking tool. Although the product is heavily geared towards internet marketing, using such a broad term would have made it virtually impossible to compete with the other advertisers.

The term “internet marketing” is searched for 825,674 times per month on Overture alone. Combined with the huge number of different advertisers that target this keyword, the top bid for “internet marketing” on Google AdWords is $13.84 per clïck! With an average of 240 clicks per day, a single day of advertising alone would cost $505!

Nöw, unless you have an extremely high conversion rate of visitors to salës, or you’re selling a high priced item that usually has a high customer acquisition cost, I suggest targeting more specific keywords. Not only will this decrease your overall competition with other advertisers, but it will also increase the chances of turning your newly found web site visitors into customers.

Back to my earlier example, I chose to be specific with my keywords. One keyword was “ROI tracking”, which is searched for 1,828 times per month on Overture and has a much cheaper top bid. This keyword is also more targeted to the product I was marketing, meaning that a large percentage of people clicking on my ad should turn into customers.

It’s also helpful to note that taking the top bid is not always necessary, and anywhere in the top 5-10 can generate great leads. This really does come down to budget and analysis.

Attracting People to Your Ad

Nöw that we’ve selected our keywords, we need to get those searching to clïck on our ad, which in turn will result in them clicking through to our web site and potentially purchasing our product.

One of the simplest ways to get peoples attention is to use their search keywords in the title of your PPC ad. This has been proven to increase click-thru rates on ads by over 50%.

Why? Simple. If the potential customer is searching for “ROI Tracking” and the title of a PPC ad begins with “ROI Tracking”, then their attention will be grabbed instantly. He or she doesn’t need to know much else, other than that the PPC ad is catered specifically for him or her.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can sometimes create a more relevant title by combining your different keywords into one PPC ad. For example, I could have easily used something like “ROI Tracking PHP Scrïpt” as the title of my ad, which effectively would have decreased my click-thru rate, but definitely caters my ad more to a specific audience. Once again, this comes down to analysis and adjustment.

Another important technique to attract attention to your ad is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In our particular case, the majority of our competition offer hosted solutions, whereby they manage the software on their servers in return for monthly or per traffïc fees.

Our product caters to a different audience, those that want more control over their software, as well as those not wanting to pay monthly fees. So, in this example, I would make the title of my ad “Pay no monthly or per traffïc fees”.

Next — and this is where experimentation is extremely important — we need to create a description for our PPC ad that will attract the potential customer and let them know that our product is exactly what they are searching for. To do this, I start my ad’s description with “Track PPC, campaigns & search”.

Finally, it’s good practice to add a “Call to action” at the bottom of your ad. If you’re not familiar with this term, its usually an instruction to tell the person to do something, such as “Clïck hëre to view a demo”, “Download Nöw”, etc.

Marketing experts seem to agree that the average human needs to be prompted to clïck on an ad or take action, so we’ll add this line to the end of our PPC ad’s description:

“Track PPC, campaigns & search. Try demo!”

Reducing Click-Thru’s

Sometimes it’s important to reduce the number of clicks your PPC ad is receiving. This could be because you are attracting people who are only after frëe products/services, or even the wrong target market.

The two quickest ways to reduce click-thru’s are to make the description of your ad more targeted and to add the price of the product to the ad.

Making the description more targeted (as I’ve discussed above) can reduce your overall click-thru rate, but potentially increase the likelihood of a clïck resulting in a purchase.

In my earlier example, by adding the words “PHP scrïpt” to the description, we are effectively filtering out those looking for a hosted solution, downloadable software or even those with a server that isn’t capable of running PHP scripts.

We also increase the targeting of our ad because we now know that the majority of those clicking on the ad are looking for a PHP scrïpt, which is exactly what our product is.

Secondly, by adding the price of the product you are selling to the end of the ad, you instantly eliminate those looking for frëe products, and target those willing to purchase your product or service.

Tracking Your Clicks and Conversions

The fundamental core of a successful advertising campaign — whether it be a PPC ad, banner ad or even newspaper ad — is knowing whether or not your ads are actually converting into salës or not.

If your ads aren’t making you monëy then you’re more that likely better off saving your advertising dollars and adjusting your ads or using your marketing budget elsewhere in your company.

Both Google and Overture have built in tracking and conversion tools that you can use to get a holistic view of your current PPC ad campaigns. You can even use external tools which let you add conversion code to your website to tell you exactly which of your ads are converting into salës and which aren’t. This is often referred to as knowing your ROI or Return on Investmënt.

We need to know exactly how much monëy we are making per dollar spent on every PPC ad. If the ROI is positive and we are making more monëy than we are spending, then the ad is working and we can use this knowledge to further improve our other ads or increase ad spending for that particular ad/set of keywords.

If, however, our ads are costing us more than they are returning, then we can reduce our spend, change our approach, or remove these ads altogether. It’s a rather simple formula, but frustratingly ignored by many advertisers.

You must track your ads if you want to succeed with any förm of Internet advertising. You should also constantly monitor and adjust your ads according to how they are performing, your return on investmënt, etc.

Conclusion

Hopefully I’ve provided you with a clear insight into PPC advertising and techniques that you can use to improve your advertising campaigns. It pays — pun intended — to do your research and understand your target market, because the rewards can sometimes be much more than you expected.

About The Author
Eddie Machaalani is the Interspire marketing and project manager. He’s most recently been kept busy helping out with the interface design for Interspire’s ROI and Conversion Tracking Application, TrackPoint. To see how TrackPoint can help boost your revenue, go to: Interspire.com.

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By Joel Walsh

With so much talk about search engines putting a damper on direct reciprocal links, the hunt for the elusive one-way inbound link is on.
As someone who works with small business website owners, I’ve heard just about every inbound-linking scheme there is. In the end, I’ve only seen five strategies that really work consistently for getting hundreds of links.

Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies

Yet there’s perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as much potential as the five major ways of getting links.

Link farms nevër seem to die. The latest variations try to pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on down the line. Link farms can get you delisted from search engine indexes, so don’t even try them.

Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if you use affïliate software that links directly to your site rather than through a redirect. But many, many affiliates are now placing all their affïliate links in redirects of their own invention, to help protect their commissions from pirates who will simply apply to the program themselves to get a discount.

Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you one-way inbound links, but they’ll only have search-engine value a small percentage of the time. Many blogs and bulletin boards use search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file formats, automatically encase links in scrïpt, or use robot instructions to prevent spiders from following links.

Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into the great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website just for being so great.

Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as offering to provide testïmonials to all your vendors in exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply chain.)

Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all have more potential than some of the more madcapped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in order to really gain a distinct advantage in the one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two reasons:

Unfortunately, “eventually” can be a very long time.

Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can’t get search engine traffïc, or other non-paid traffïc, without inbound links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffïc, how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website you offer in exchange a link from another website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of defeating the link-dampening ambitions of Google and the rest. If you have more than one website, you probably are already employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

You need to have more than one website in the same general category of interest or the links won’t be relevant.

The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and verify compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be automated to the same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal linking.

As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is that the links are mostly on “Resources” pages that are just lists of links. There’s only a small chance of getting significant traffïc from these links. Plus, any “Resource” page may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if that hasn’t happened already.

3. Submitting to Directories

They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing, no-fee-charging, and actually well-run directories of relevant links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO acquaintance tells me he knows 200 good ones just off the top of his head. Plus, there are other kinds of directories: directories of affïliate programs, of websites using a certain content management system, of websites whose owners are members of this or that group, of websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.

Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it’s a good deal if you can get it. But let’s say you do get links from all 200 such directories and a hundred more from the little niche directories–now what?

4. Paying for Inbound Links

Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages has become big business. Buying good traffic-generating “clean” links is a great alternative to pay-per-click advertising, which confers no SEO benefit. But, there are a number of pitfalls of relying primarily on paid links for SEO:

The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial search engine traffïc can become prohibitive.

As soon as you stop paying, you losë your link–you are essentially renting rather than owning, with no “link equity” building up.

Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid links on rankings, as revealed in various patent filings. A website can try to mask the fact that the links are paid, but how well it does that is out of your control.

Given Google’s mission to dampen paid links’ effectiveness, paid link buyers have an interest in verifying that a potential paid link partner is “passing PageRank.” But identifying appropriate PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task in itself.

Google also has a stated mission of dampening the value of any “artificial” links. Having most of your links on PageRank 3 or higher web pages would seem to be a dead give-away that your links are “artificial,” since the vast majority of web pages (note: not necessarily websites, but their pages) are PageRank 1 or lower. Meanwhile, buying PageRank 0 or 1 links would have so little impact on a site’s PageRank that it would not be worth the expense.
5. Distributing Content

All of the above four inbound-link-generating methods really do work. But it is the fifth method of getting one-way inbound links that is the most promising: distributing content

The idea is simple: you give other websites content to put on their sites in exchange for a link to your site, usually in an “author’s resource box,” an “about the author” paragraph at the end of the article.

The beauty of distributing content for links is that the links generally generate more traffïc than links on a “resources” page. Plus, your article will pre-sell readers on the value of your site.

The downside, of course, is that it’s no small amount of work to create original content and then distribute it to hundreds of website owners. But nothing good ever came easy. And on the internet, one-way inbound links are a very good thing.

About The Author
Joel Walsh is the head content writer for UpMarket Content. Get more information on website content promotion

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In today’s highly competitive business environment it is critical to find ways to separate yourself from the other companies who sell the same - or similar - product and/or service. Here are several strategies that can help you accomplish this:

Help your clients achieve their goals. Virtually every business person has specific goals they are striving to achieve. These can include everything from increasing their market share and sales, to reducing operating expenses, to streamlining the business, to incorporating new business practices. Invest time learning the key objectives of each of your customers. Then determine how your products and services can help them achieve their targets. In some cases, you may not be able to help them but recommending someone who can assist them will be recognized and remembered. The more you can help them achieve their goals the more valued you will become.

Under-promise, over-deliver. As old as this expression is, it is still one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd. Far too many people make commitments to their customers and fail to follow through as promised. It’s easy to fall into this trap, particularly for service-oriented individuals. We have every intention of delivering on a promise but often, unexpected circumstances crop up that prevent of from doing so. While this is acceptable by most people - once in a while - frequent occurrences will drive your customers to your competition.

Be innovative. Most companies do business the same way until a crisis, emergency, or significant change in the marketplace forces them to adapt. The most successful organizations are creative and innovative. They constantly look for new ways to do business, gain more their market share, please their customers, and offer new products and services. The inherent challenge with this is that you will encounter resistance from many people both inside and outside of the company; I have experienced this first-hand in several companies I have worked for.

However, if you try to be innovative ONLY when it’s absolutely necessary, you will never get the head-start on your competition. Watch for trends in other industries as well as yours and think of how you can incorporate these into your business. Be a leader instead of a follower.

Surprise them. Look for ways to surprise your customers and do something completely unexpected for them. Make a charitable donation in their name. Invite them to a special event. Give them a bonus gift or service. Find out what networking events your clients might like to attend and send them a complimentary invitation. If they enjoy reading send an occasional book in their area of interest. Gift certificates to a show or play may be appreciated by some of your customers.

Two words of caution: i) Be careful that your “surprise” is not misinterpreted as a bribe to do business with you. There cannot be any strings or hidden conditions attached to this offering. ii) Make sure your client is allowed to accept a gift. Some organizations have a strict “no gift” policy and you must respect it.

Keep in touch. Very few people keep in touch on a regular basis with their customers. Yet, this is the best way to keep your name in their mind. An effective strategy - without appearing like a pest - is to send them useful information on a regular basis. You can send a newspaper clipping or a magazine article. You can also send them helpful and practical tips to improve their business; this can be set up quite easily electronically.

Send cards on special occasions but instead of the standard Christmas cards send some on lesser promoted days such as St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween, etc. You can also send postcards from exotic locations - just be careful not to write a tacky message. This past winter I traveled to St. Maarten in the Caribbean and found a beautiful postcard of a beach along the Caribbean Ocean. I sent this card to about four dozen clients and prospects with the message, “When the winter starts getting you down, take a three minute vacation by picturing yourself on this beach.”

Have a VIP day. You can organize a golf tournament - assuming of course your customers play the game. If you’re a retailer, you can invite your best customer to an invitation-only special sale..

Every year, a friend of mine organizes an evening filled with networking opportunities, guest speakers, great food and beverages and invites his clients, prospects, and friends to attend. Another friend of mine takes several of his clients on excursions to a local winery. He ensures they get a tour, a private tasting of premium wines, and a five-star dinner.

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About the author: Kelley Robertson, President of the Robertson Training Group, works with businesses to help them increase their sales and motivate their employees. He is also the author of “Stop, Ask & Listen - Proven Sales Techniques to Turn Browsers into Buyers.” Receive a FREE copy of “100 Ways to Increase Your Sales” by subscribing to his free sales and motivational newsletter available at www.kelleyrobertson.com. Contact him at 905-633-7750 or Kelley@RobertsonTrainingGroup.com.

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By Rok Hrastnik (c) 2005

The RSS promise for end-users is simple:
–> a unified one-stop-shop to consume online content, without having to visit dozens of sites every day to see what’s new and without having their online subscriptions interfere with their personal and business e-mail communications;

–> complete control over their content consumption, including a quick, easy and reliable mechanism to unsubscribe from content they do not wish to receive;

–> the ability to receive breaking news as it becomes available, without having to wait for a monthly, weekly or daily recap sent to their e-mail addresses;

–> the certainty of actually receiving the content they want, without the fear of it being stopped by sp@m filters on the way;

–> the ability to receive rich-media content directly to their desktops, including audio and video content;

–> the promise of providing the tools to make their lives easier, including receiving critical content updates as soon as they become available.

These points are not simple enhancements, but important advancements that can fundamentally change how internet content is consumed. Furthermore, these points themselves prove why marketers need to start implementing RSS today!

To bring the point home, let us inspect some of the content services already powered by RSS.

Library Elf : Making The Library Experience Easier

Library Elf helps you keep track of your library accountsin one place and received reminders, such as what library material is due, overdue and ready for pickup. Library Elf uses the power of RSS to help you forget about your library accounts and instead be directly notified of the changes you’re waiting for, directly to your desktop.

Indeed : Helping You Find The Right Job

Indeed.com provides its visitors with job seeking results from hundreds of sites and then makes the search results accessible via RSS feeds. Users can subscribe to individual search results, pertaining directly to their search keywords to be notified immediately new jobs are available.

Flickr : Sharing Your Life In Picture

Flickr is the most popular photography management and sharing service on the web, enabling end-users to upload their photos and then make them available to their friends, associates and family through a wide assortment of content delivery channels, including RSS. By subscribing to individual Flickr feeds from their users, everyone can have direct access to the latest life experiences from their friends.

RSSCalendar : Sharing Your Events

rssCalendar.com allows individuals and companies to share their personal or group calendars with the rest of the world, letting everyone that matters know of where and what they are doing next, delivering this information via individual RSS feeds.

Coupons.com : Savings To Your Desktop

Coupons.com brings the best deals and coupons to internet end-users, helping them save monëy by discounted shopping. As of late, they also started delivering coupons through RSS feeds, giving their subscribers direct access to their latest offerings.

PubSub.com : Tracking The World

PubSub.com is an amazing service that allows you to track practically everything going on around the world by matching your keywords with tens of thousands of online content sources, and enabling you to subscribe to your customized search results through customized RSS feeds.

RSSAuction.com : Tracking Your Purchase Interests

If you’re a regular eBay user, you certainly want to keep track of new products available, which precisely match your interests. rssAuction.com helps users keep better track of eBay by giving them a tool to first create a comprehensive list of product requirements and then delivering the search result through an RSS feed. As soon as new products matching individual interests appear, the user is notified of that through his RSS aggregator, giving him the ability to start bidding immediately and without having to visit eBay every day to find the right products.

Upcoming.org : Keeping Track Of Local And Social Events

>From the Upcoming.org website: “Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you’re attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog. As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will suggest new events you never would have heard about.”

FeedBeep : The Ultimate “Time-To-Information” Tool

Depending on who you are and your current life situation, many content alerts are critical for you. If you’re looking for a job, you want to know immediately when a new one matching your precise interests is available, and so on. While RSS brings this information to your desktop, that might not be fast enough. Feedbeep.com takes internet content delivery one step further, by empowering users to have their critical content updates delivered from an RSS feed directly to their mobile phones via SMS.

RSS Empowers Consumers

The one thing all of these RSS-based or RSS-empowered services have in common is that they empower consumers.

They empower them by getting the content that matters to them delivered directly to their desktops or online content aggregators, but still giving them the power to unsubscribe within moments of not being satisfied with the content they are receiving.

Even more so, these services empower consumers to create social networks and easily share their information with their friends, family and associates on a large scale.

About The Author
Rok Hrastnik is the author of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, acclaimed as the best and most comprehensive guide to RSS for marketers by leading RSS experts. The complete guide on RSS for marketers: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/index.html?src=sa11

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By Trevor Bauknight

Late last week at Seattle’s Gnomedex technology conference, a cutting-edge exploration of emerging Internet technologies like RSS, Blogging and Podcasting, Microsoft demonstrated IE7 publicly for the first and announced that the company was in love with RSS. Not in so many words, of course, but Microsoft is embracing and extending the open syndication technology in a way not seen previously.

For starters, IE7 will have nice RSS integration built right in to the browser. RSS feed autodiscovery will light up a button on the toolbar inviting users to subscribe to a site’s content. This is a nice touch, following the lead of Opera and Apple’s Safari in making it less of a chore to track down and subscribe to RSS feeds.

Next, the forthcoming and long-awaited followup to Windows XP, code-named Longhorn, will feature RSS-related “platform services”, integrating RSS functionality right at the OS level. What this means, concretely, is that those who create applications that make use of RSS can count on a certain level of OS-level functionality including automatic downloading and parsing of feeds. The jury is still out on what this could mean; and although there is the predictable speculation on how Microsoft will use this to put its competitors at a disadvantage, the company seems to have provided a means for application writers to make use of non-Microsoft-approved RSS elements while still gaining some of the benefits of OS-level parsing and idle-time feed downloading.

Finally, Microsoft has created what it calls Simple List Extensions to the RSS model, allowing content to be provided in the form of an ordered list, such as a constantly-updating top-ten lists, calendar entries and so on. In a refreshing move, the company will be making these extensions freely available using a Creative Commons license, a way of making content freely available while retaining certain rights to that content.

What Is RSS?

In the event that you live in a cave and still don’t know about RSS, it is a sub-standard of XML that allows content providers to easily syndicate their content in a predictable way, enabling programmers to create programs (commonly called “aggregators”) that pull in wide-ranging content one item at a time and present it in a logical manner. Think of it as a subscription model for capsule summaries of all the web content you don’t have time to read, similar to AP headlines rolling in on a teletype. It allows you to collect web content from a variety of sources into one place where you can pick and choose what you’d like to actually visit.

Building on the concept, the Podcasting phenomenon feeds audio broadcasts in a similar manner using the same underlying technology. It is this kind of versatility that makes RSS such a prime candidate for being the most significant disruptive technology since the arrival of HTML, meaning that it will acquire new uses not intended or foreseen in its original implementation. Blogs make heavy use of RSS feeds to present bits of news from other sites automatically, and so on.

In fact, Microsoft seems to be betting that RSS will once again shift the primary model by which people make use of the Web. Originally, linking was key, and people moved from site to site through a comparatively simple web of interconnections until there were simply too many pages to keep track of. Then came the search engines to help you find what you were looking for on the Web, and now Google has become a common verb. Searching is the primary way people find Web content today; but Microsoft sees this changing again as RSS makes it possible for people to subscribe to content they know they like or find useful.

I’ll nevër forget my first experience with the World Wide Web, and I don’t recall being all that excited about the text-based subject tree with some interesting entries but no content. That was fifteen years ago, however, and the Web has changed pretty dramatically since then. There is still a good deal of magic in the basic hyperlink, though the sheer amount of garbage on the Web has made the kind of discovery we used to enjoy nearly impossible. In fact, in spite of technological advances in the search engines, results are still hit-and-miss at best, and downright useless at worst.

Two Ways Forward From Here

RSS has been touted as a sort of “back-door” into the coveted highly-placed search results of Yahoo and perhaps into Google, thanks to the automated technology of “pinging” systems which spread the word about your RSS feed’s new content, the return-links they generate and the fact that most sites with RSS feeds are content-driven to begin with. We can say that since we established our RSS feed at CafeID, our traffïc from searches has picked up dramatically, and we’re nothing but pleased with the result of a couple of hours’ effort.

Google, however, is exploring a different technology it invented called SiteMaps, which are similar to RSS feeds except that they feed your content to Google, rather than to the world of RSS aggregators, thereby (it is hoped) improving the accuracy of its search results. We’ll explore SiteMaps a little further next week, after we get our own SiteMap up and running.

Microsoft’s embrace of the RSS model is hard to dismiss, especially given the enthusiasm and openness that the company seems to be bringing to the project. A public beta release of IE7 is due out sometime this summer, showcasing this technology, and when Longhorn arrives next year sometime, the idea that our content will be flowed automatically through the OS and a wide range of associated applications is very appealing.

Okay! I’m Convinced Already! What Do I Do?

Creating an RSS feed couldn’t be much easier. You simply create a simple XML file describing the content you wish to syndicate and place it somewhere on your site. The file, a simple text file, uses straightforward self-explanatory tags like title and link to describe each you want to syndicate (this article would be a new item, for example) and then set about keeping your sites up to date.

You don’t need to run a blog or anything like that to have an RSS feed. Just find a good tutorial like this one at SearchEngineWatch and make your file, then validate it and expose it to the monitoring (or “ping” sites) that keep track of and pass the word about your content feed.

It’s ridiculously easy to add an RSS feed to your website, whether yours is a content-driven site or not; and with the syndication format about to take off, it makes perfect sense to investigate embracing it yourself for your company’s website if you haven’t already.

A vote of confidence from Redmond goes a long way toward establishing technology like this. Subscription models seem to be very popular at Microsoft these days, and it will be interesting to watch how Gates & Co. handle the integration of RSS technology into its product line. Watch this space, or better yet, subscribe to it for continued coverage of emerging Internet technologies and how to put them to work for you.

About The Author
Trevor Bauknight is a web designer and writer with over 15 years of experience on the Internet. He specializes in the creation and maintenance of business and personal identity online and can be reached at trevor@tryid.com. Stop by CafeID.com for a frëe tryout of the revolutionary SiteBuildingSystem and look over our Flash-based website and IMAP e-mail hostïng solutions, complete with live support.

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By Brendon Turner

Designing your site to maximize traffïc from the search engines is not a difficult task but it does require you to think ahead and plan your SEO strategy carefully. If you have not yet built your web site and are still in the initial planning stages then you may have an easier time of it. If you already have an existing web site, then you may need to take the time to read up on these SEO strategies and make some changes to incorporate them into your web site.
I will discuss 13 ways in which you can improve on your existing web site or boost a brand new web site into the stratosphere of high rankings. These are NOT SEO tricks but rather tried, tested, ethical and true methods that we know to work effectively. We all know that in reality there are no real SEO tricks. True success is achieved through hard work, research and implementation of a thorough and complete SEO strategy.

Without further ado hëre is a checklist of important items to consider and implement into your SEO strategy.

Using Javascrïpt or Other Unspiderable Code

If you intend to use Javascrïpt on your web page it is best to use it sparingly or not at all. Search engine spiders cannot read Javascrïpt and it is possible that along with ignoring it when they come across it on your page, they may also get hung up on it if you are using a lot of it. If you really need to use Javascrïpt you can safely use it by putting the code into a separate JS file and calling it with a single line of code which you place between your and tags within your web page. The code used to include your JS file looks like this:

Using Style Guidelines Effectively

If you are using CSS style commands, do not include them within your actual web page source code. You don’t want search engine spiders to have to wade through 100 lines of unreadable code before they reach your actual content. Instead, place your style guidelines into a separate CSS file and call them with a single line of code from within your and tags by using the following code:

Primary Keyword Layout

Examine your web site from a source code point of view and ensure that your primary keywords or phrases will be spidered first. When search engine spiders read your page they read the source code just like we would read a book from left to right - top to bottom. We know that search engines place higher relevancy on keywords and phrases which appear closer to the top of a page so it stands to reason that if you’ve got a large table full of graphics appearing at the top of your source code before your primary keywords, then you can achieve higher rankings by adjusting your layout and placing a well written search engine optimized paragraph above that table full of graphics.

Spiderable Text Present on Each Page

Many times I have seen some very pretty web sites, but their chances of ranking high for any relevant keywords have been dashed by the use of only graphics and very little or no text on the pages. It is very important to your SEO strategy that you make sure that you’ve taken the time to write some quality textual content for your pages. Don’t write nonsensical text filled with blatant sp@m. Instead, take a few extra minutes and write 4-5 quality paragraphs which clearly explain the theme of your site and the particular page you’re writing for.

Proper Use of Robots.txt File

On several occasions I have performed an analysis of a client’s web site only to discover that they had inadvertently blocked spider access to their web site by incorrectly formatting their robots.txt file. It is critical that you know what you’re doing when you use a robots.txt file. If you are unsure of the correct syntax when modifying or creating a robots.txt file, I recommend you not use a robots.txt file at all. This may sound counterproductive, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Accidentally blocking the spiders can result in a loss of all your rankings. It would almost be like starting over again to repair the damage. For help on correctly formatting your robots.txt file, visit robotstxt.org.

Dead Links and 404 Errors

If you are not checking for broken links on your web site, then you should start immediately and make this a part of your SEO strategy. You can nevër be 100% sure of your link integrity, especially when your site has 100, or more, pages. Aside from losing potential customers into a vortex of 404 errors, you risk more than that from a search engine perspective. When a search engine spider visits your web site and finds broken links, the impression left is that your site is not regularly maintained and updated. Not much is known about how the engines view this, but your crawl status may be assigned a low priority by visiting search engine spiders. In other words, the spiders may not visit your site as frequently as they visit sites with 100% link integrity. So make sure you download some link checking software and begin a regular schedule of verifying your link structure.

Using Images For Primary Navigation Links

Many webmasters like to use fancy looking navigation links but, in doing so, they fail to establish a theme for their sites. For instance, using a graphical link back to your home page does not tell the search engine spiders what that link is about unless the spider actually visits that page. If you use optimized ALT text on that graphical home page link, then that would be a step in the right direction. But to maximize the effect and clearly define the theme of your web site, you need to use a text link that has your primary keyword or phrase within the link text. This is called Link Reputation.

When a web page has outlived its usefulness, webmasters will, on occasion, redirect visitors hitting that page to another page. Search engine spiders, however, take a dim view of page redirects. If you change the content of your site and find that you have no further use for a page, do not place a redirect on that page. Instead, remove the outdated content and replace it with something relevant. Include a text link to your home page or to a new replacement page. When you remove a page or place a redirect on an outdated page, you’re cheating yourself out of better rankings and search engine traffïc. Moreover, using page redirects can result in the removal of your site listing in search engine databases with a consequent loss of revenue.

Excessively Small Type Font Sizes

Text in a font smaller than font size 2 is normally reserved for copyright information and the lëgal jargon often seen at the bottom of web pages. Use font size 2, or greater, for the majority of text on your page. Font size is a major factor in SEO strategy because the font size used defines the relevancy a search engine spider assigns to the content it finds on your page. An example of this would be the text within heading tags (H1 through to H6). Text surrounded with H1 tags has a higher relevancy placed on it than text surrounded with H6 tags. Visit the W3.org website for a better understanding of how on-page text is viewed by search engine spiders with regard to importance and relevancy. Search engine spiders tend to follow the W3 HTML standard.

Hidden Text, Door Way Pages and Other Tricks

Nowadays search engines are pretty smart and trying to trick them is not a wise course of action. Take some time to stop and examine your approach before proceeding with your SEO strategy. The rule of thumb is that if it looks like sp@m or could be perceived as sp@m by the search engines, then it probably is sp@m. The last thing you need is for a competitor to report unethical SEO tactics to the search engines. Such tactics could result in a loss of existing site listings as well as a ban on future submissions. So, to ensure the longevity of your online business, stay away from any technique that looks unethical.

Using HTML Frames

In short, don’t. Frames are not very search engine friendly because search engines cannot read a framed source document that tells your browser to load more than one page in your browser window at the same time. Thus, achieving a high PageRank on your home page is difficult. Frames also make it hard for search engine spiders to find all of your sub pages.

Non-Spider-Friendly URL’s

If the URLs for your web site contain characters such as &, $, =, %, etc., that is they are dynamic in nature, then search engine spiders may not be able to read them. And, if they can’t be read, then the search engine spiders won’t be able to follow them to index your pages. However, there are solutions available to fix this problem. For example, webmasters who have sites hosted on servers with Unix operating systems can use Apache mod_rewrite to rewrite URLs that contain a session ID, or other nästy characters, into search engine spider friendly URL’s.

SEO, of course, is not just limited to the 13 areas covered in this article, but if you apply the SEO strategies outlined in these 13 areas to your web site, you will find that your site rankings and traffïc improve dramatically.

About The Author
Brendon Turner is a certified search engine optimization specialist with 8 years experience as a Senior SEO Consultant. Brendon also maintains ProfitGazette.com, a progressive weekly edition of real-world online marketing business tactics that work!

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By Donald Nelson (c) 2005

When it comes to search engine optimization, the single most important sentence that you will write for your website is the title tag of your main page. If you write it properly then you will have taken a big step towards getting your site well placed in search engine queries for your important keywords.
Before I give you a step-by-step guide to writing title tags, let’s define what they actually are and see why they are important. When you look at a web page in your browser, the writing in the blue strip above browser’s commands (file, edit, view, etc.) is the title tag. On your actual html document the title tag is in the head portion between the notation title and /title .

The title tag is important because it “tells” the search engine what the page is about, and in the case of your main page, what your website is all about. I remember back in my school days that we used to take standardized examinations in which we had to read a story and then answer the question: “What would be the best title for this essay?” Choosing a title tag is something like answering this kind of question. You’ve got to pick out the gist of your enterprise and highlight it in a sentence. So, take a look at your web page and get ready to begin, following these steps:

1. Make sure your three or four most important keywords or keyword phrases appear in the title tag. The most important words should appear near the beginning of the sentence, and they can be repeated within the sentence for added emphasis. For example if I am offering low-cost web design, then my title tag might look like this: title Web Design: Affordable, Low Cost Web Design from the Acme Web Design Company /title

2. Leave your branding and salës pitch for another part of the web page. Although it is a natural tendency to want to put your company name at the beginning of the title tag, you should remember that unless you are very famous like Coca Cola, people are not searching for you. So, put your most important keywords at the front of the title tag, and establish your brand name with your logo and other elements of the web page. If your company name includes your keywords, like our hypothetical Acme Web Design Company, then put it in the title tag, but not necessarily at the beginning.

Similarly, the title tag is no place for your salës pitch, so keep out flowery or extraneous adjectives, unless they are actual terms used in searches for your product or service.

3. Place your geographical or niche-defining term in your title tag.

If you are trying for a top ten or top twenty position for a term such as “web design,” then you are really in for a difficult struggle. However, suppose the Acme Web Design Company is located in Columbus, Ohio. Then instead of attempting the almost impossible task of getting the top rankings for the term “web design,” it would be far better to get a high ranking in the geographical niche using a title tag such “Web Design, Columbus, Ohio: Low Cost Web Design in Columbus, Ohio by The Acme Web Design Company”.

4. The title tag can be longer than you think.

Some guidelines say that the title tag should be no longer than 70 characters. It is true that only the first 70 characters will show in the top bar of the browser, but search engine robots will read the rest of the tag and the search engines will not penalize you for going over the 70 character mark. Take a look at highly ranked sites in heavily competitive categories and you will see examples of long title tags. Write the tag according to your need to get your important words and phrases included in a sentence that best describes what your product or service is about.

5. Vary the title tags on the inner pages of your website.

Even with a long title tag, it is not possible to highlight all the possible terms which someone might use to find your website. This is not a problem if you make use of the other pages of your website. Instead of simply having a title tag that says “services” our web design firm could highlight “low cost, web design services…” on that page. The “contact” page could be used to emphasize the geographical location once again, and so on. Many websites make the mistake of repeating the same title tag on each of the inner pages of the site. Avoid this and use each of your page’s titles to target important keywords and keyword phrases.

So, take a look at your website’s title tags, and see if you can improve them. The effort that you make will be well rewarded.

About The Author
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He is the director of A1-Optimization, a firm providing affordable search engine optimization, website copywriting, reciprocal linking and other web promotion services.

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Bambi Francisco [MarketWatch]

A Google “Wallet” sounds sexier than a Google classifieds or listings business.

So, it’s no wonder that there’s been so much chatter in the press about the possibility that Google will launch a payment system that would trump eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal service.

Even Wall Street analysts took to dissecting the possibility Monday, resulting in more near-term negative headlines favoring eBay short sellers than anything concrete about a Google payment service. Not surprisingly, Google stayed mum (and likely amused) throughout all of this speculative reporting.

But it’s not so much a payment system that presents an imminent threat to eBay. In my opinion, it’s a Google listing business, and/or classified business that poses a real danger to eBay.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if Google really wanted to get at the heart of eBay’s business, it would simply turn on a classifieds or listings business.

After all, it wouldn’t be a big leap for Google to let users list an item for sale much as they post an advertisement. (That’s one reason why this column posited the Google vs. eBay battle back in 2003: See prior Net Sense.)

By a listings or classifieds service, I mean listings by individuals of their one-off items, or listings of items from small or medium sized merchants. I don’t believe it matters if Google chooses not to get into auctions. EBay would still feel the pain from a Google listings business in a fixed-price format. That’s because 30% of eBay’s gross merchandise sales are done in fixed-price formats.

Here are a few reasons why I think a Google classifieds business poses a greater imminent threat to eBay than a payment business: A listings business is easier to implement; it’s more in line with Google’s core business, and helps fill up Google’s local service listings. Listings on a local level have a tailwind to boot.

Let’s start the easy implementation. Google already has an automated system that lets users post their advertisements on Google’s network. I’d imagine integrating and getting traction for a payment service is more difficult than extending an automated, self-service feature to individuals or merchants who want to sell one-off items, or highlight certain items for sale.

For instance, I conducted a search for “Parlee bikes San Francisco” on Google. If there was a listing for one of the high-end bikes at a steep discount, I’d be inclined to click on that listing to buy the bike, rather than click on the ad and have to peruse through the entire shop to find it.

A classified/listings business would also be a smart and easy way to fill up Google’s Local search-results pages with advertisements from local merchants, and listings of goods from residents. For now, Google’s Local page says, “Find local businesses and services on the Web.” It would be easy to add a line saying: “place your items for sale here.”

I’m certain that if Google had a local listings business my friends would consider listing their antiques, cars or sundry items they may have laying on Google’s service, especially if Google didn’t charge for listings, but only for a completed transaction.

By adding this option for individuals and merchants, Google could also expand the number of keyword terms that it can sell.

Today, if I search for “Parlee bike San Francisco,” I only get algorithmic results on Google’s main search page, but no sponsored links. I get no listings whatsoever on Google’s Local page. (Note: this listing is different from above because “bike” is not plural.)

But if Google had a listings service, a merchant could highlight that one product, or an individual could sell that one product, and it could be found with that keyword string. In other words, Google expands its inventory. And, that’s exactly what Google needs to do as the classified business quickly shifts online.

About $1.7 billion in classified advertising went online in 2004, according to the NAA, the Newspaper Association of America. But about $16.6 billion in classified advertisements went into traditional newspapers last year.

Finally, an online payment system isn’t exactly an easy sell to consumers. Consumers “like cash transactions,” said Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. There have been “no requests” from Craigslist users for an electronic payment system.

Clearly, an online payment business isn’t needed or essential in the local marketplace, if Craigslist is a guide. And an online payment system hasn’t gotten much traction beyond eBay’s platform. Back in 2004, about 33% of PayPal transaction payment volume was done off eBay. As of the first quarter, it had dropped down to 29%. The company said that change was in part due to an increase in its auction business overseas during that period.

Think of it this way: Are you really in need of an alternative payment system when you’re on Amazon.com, which has its own Amazon.com (AMZN) Visa card? I certainly don’t feel drawn to using eBay’s PayPal when I download songs from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes or if I buy on Overstock.com (OSTK). My credit cards will do. Even when I buy on eBay, I don’t think of using PayPal as my first payment mechanism unless the merchant demands it.

I am not saying that an online payment service won’t one day be large, and that eBay isn’t successful rolling this out off its platform. At eBay’s analyst day recently, the company said the PayPal market opportunity is $301 billion, on a global basis, according to a Smith Barney note. The PayPal fees also represent about 25% of eBay’s sales. And, eBay generated nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue from this business from $6.2 billion in gross merchandise value traded using the PayPal feature back in the first quarter.

Clearly, if Google were to get into this business, it’s not good news for eBay, especially if Google waives the fees sellers pay to facilitate transactions using a Google “Wallet” or whatever name they come up with.

But if I were to bet, I’d put odds on Google gearing up for a classified/listings business first. Only once that is set up would it eventually launch a payment system.

Final thoughts

When eBay bought PayPal back in 2001, Wall Street saw it as a sign that the online marketplace operator was essentially saying that its auction business was slowing down. If Google were to launch a payment service business, it would suggest to me that Google, in like vein, would be admitting that its advertising business is slowing down.

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By Merle

Many people think that in order to do business online you need to have an expensive merchant account to have the ability to take payments by credït card from your customers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Merchant accounts can be hard to get and the monthly fees can really add up.
So what’s an honest Internet Entrepreneur to do?

The answer for most is Paypal.com. It’s easy to set up an account, and fees are low and depend on your monthly salës (for most it will be 2.9% and .30 per transaction). You’ll find most Net users trust and use PayPal for their everyday purchases, so they won’t have a problem using it on your website to purchase from you.

However, relying solely on PayPal.com for your business can be risky. Should you ever losë your PayPal account or you have it “frozen,” your online income will come to a screeching halt. You need a backup plan; another way to accept payments — or you’ll have to close up shop. This is the same thing as relying on one stream of income. If you losë your job your only source of revenue dries up as well. That’s why multiple streams are best to keep you in the green.

So who are some of the others? I thought you’d nevër ask:

1) Bidpay:

This service is available only for those who buy and sell at online auctions. Buyers use their credït or debit card to make their purchases from you and BidPay sends you a Western Union Monëy Order or the payment is directly deposited into your checking account if you live in the U.S.

2) CCNow:

A shopping cart solution that also allows you to take all major credït cards without a merchant account. They pay you your earnings twice a month and while your monëy is sitting on account it earns 1.5% APR.

3) DigiBuy:

For those who sell software. Puts you in control of pricing, order forms, and delivery options. Pricing varies with two service levels to choose from. Your earnings are paid to you monthly minus their 13.9% per transaction fee ($3.00 minimum). Digibuy allows you to accept payments by Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover or Diners Club.

4) Ikobo:

With merchant fees at $2.99 plus .29 per transaction, and no extra fees for international transactions. You can sell to buyers in 170 countries. Payments are deposited to your bank account or to your Ikobo Visa debit card.

5) 2CheckOut:

It will run you $49.00 to open an account, then it’s .45 per sale and 5.5% of the salës amount. Includes frëe shopping cart and codes to add to your website. Will also work with your existing shopping cart if you just need a way to take credït card payments. Can be used for tangible or digital download products. With 2CheckOut, you can take payment from all credït cards and even chëck and debit card payments.

6) ClickBank:

A great service which I’ve used for years. Good for selling digital products and comes with a built-in affïliate program. You’ll have to pay a one time fee of $50.00, then it’s only $1.00 plus 7.5% of each transaction. Allows you to take payments from all credït card types.

7) ShareIt:

For selling software and shareware online. Your customers can pay by credït card or debit cards, even checks. Receive your monëy by chëck or electronic transfer to your bank account. Fees are based per transaction with no monthly charges.

8) ProPay:

Accept payments by credït card via the web or even by telephone. Funds are deposited into your ProPay account. You can get a ProPay MasterCard to access your funds or transfer your earnings to your bank account. They have four types of accounts to choose from: Basic, Premium, Premium Plus, Platinum, with annual pricing from $34.95 all the way up to $299.95, depending on the features and type of account you need.

9) Ibill:

For businesses selling services and subscriptions. Gives you the ability to accept payments by Visa, MasterCard, Discover, JCB, Online Checks, even by telephone via a special 900 toll-free number. Fees vary, but if you reside in the U.S. and your salës are from $0 to $9,999, the charge is 15.19% in a billing period.

10) Money-Bookers:

Money-Bookers offers a merchant feature that allows you to create order buttons for your website and be paid by credït card. Fees range from 2% all the way up to 8%, depending on how payments are made. No setup or monthly fees. You can accept payments from over 30 countries. Monëy can be transferred instantly to your bank account.

Don’t wait for disaster to strike before opening another web based payment account. Like a “good scout,” you want to be prepared in the event you need a backup. You don’t know what tomorrow will bring so get your house in order today.

About The Author
“Must Have Marketing Resources” by Merle is loaded with valuable online resources you need to know about, when it comes to running your web business. Get your copy today at … http://mcebook.mcpromotions.com.

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About Gmail

Here is a great free service from Google that allows you to have a 2 gig email account. Must have an invite though. To get one simply search Google for free invites and you will find a bunch of them.

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By Chet Childers

You may not realize it, but in the next few minutes you are going to learn one of the three most important steps to a successful pay-per-click campaign. That is, how do we find powerful keyword phrases in five easy steps? And the best of all, these steps are absolutely frëe!
As a start, you should focus on finding keyword phrases versus individual keywords. An individual keyword is usually too general in target and carries a higher bid price. For example, just think if you chose the keyword “toys” and how many types of toys might come up in the search results. We could have girl toys, boy toys, adult toys, child toys, youth toys, adolescent toys, pool toys, etc. If you were marketing toys for boys six to nine years old and bid on the keyword “toys” you would probably spend an excessive amount and get a number of click-throughs from individuals that are not in your target market.

So, how many keyword phrases do you need? Your goal should be a minimum of twenty keyword phrases with a target of seventy-five to one hundred. By the time you apply the matching options offered by the pay-per-click search engine, you should have more than enough keyword phrases.

Where do you find the phrases? Keyword phrases can come from a number of sources. As a first step, take a look at your website and start listing possible keyword phrases. Think about your Unique Selling Proposition for your product or service and add to your list of keyword phrases.

Who are your competitors? Go to your search engine of choice and do a quick search with your initial list of possible keyword phrases. Scan the search results and select several web sites. Read the text on the selected web sites and add keyword phrases to your list. If you would like to get detailed in your search, review the Meta tags for the title, description and keywords. The simple way to do this is place your cursor in the web site page, clïck the right mouse button and select “View Source.”

Now, add more keyword phrases to your list.

Some of the best sources for keyword search phrases are the suggestion tools provided by the pay-per-click search engines. Two of the most popular are the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Go to the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and enter your keyword or keyword phrase in the search box. The tool will display for the past month: your keyword phrase, the number of searches, other keyword phrases containing your keyword phrase and the number of searches for the other keyword phrases. You should be able to add a number of keyword phrases to your list that perhaps you haven’t thought of plus you get one other key piece of information.

You will learn the popularity of the keyword search phrases. If the number of searches is in the thousands then you have a large market opportunïty for your product or service offering. Unfortunately, if it is a low number of searches you may want to reconsider your market potential. However, a pay-per-click campaign could be a quick market research project. There is no reason why low search volume phrases cannot produce a high click-through and conversion rate opportunïty in a small, targeted market. Isn’t that what people refer to as a niche market?

Now again, add more keyword phrases to your list.

Check out the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool works differently from the Overture tool. Enter your keyword search phrase in the search box, select your language and country and review the two results. The first result is every keyword search phrase containing your keyword search phrase. The second result is similar keywords to your keyword search phrase. Once again, you will probably see some keyword phrases that you haven’t thought about. Unfortunately, search volumes are not provided but, look at the number of possible additions to your keyword phrase list.

Again, add more keyword phrases to your list.

There is one additional keyword tool you might want to consider. This frëe tool is Good Keywords which can be downloaded at www.goodkeywords.com. This tool retrieves its results from the Overture search engine so you will get the same information as the Overture Keyword Selector Tool. However, it does provide features and functions which make it easier to cut and paste results to other documents such as Microsoft Word or Excel. Once the keyword phrases and search volumes are loaded in an Excel spreadsheet, it is very easy to sort, group and manipulate your keyword phrase possibilities.

By now you should easily have one hundred plus keyword phrases to select from. In fact, you may have several hundred or even more than one thousand. Also, there are several other things you may want to consider such as synonyms to your keywords, typical misspellings and seasonal variations of your keyword phrases.

The task of finding, selecting and targeting keyword phrases is a significant key to success in pay-per-click marketing. Apply these ideas and tasks and you will be on your way to pay-per-click campaign success.

About The Author
Chet Childers is a successful Internet marketer utilizing the power and quick response of pay-per-click marketing to increase website visibility and profitability. Visit ThePayPerClickMarketer.com and enroll in our e-course, “Discover Tips and Secrets for Pay-Per-Click Marketing Success,” or visit www.ChetChilders.com.

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Has Google finally embraced RSS with their new XML powered Sitemaps program? Well, sort of, but it seems more like a hug than a strong impassioned embrace!
It does use XML technology which allows for the crawling and updating of your site’s web pages. You can even include your entire web site (all urls) with this indexing program. For anyone targeting the search engines, especially Google, this program (still in beta) is a Must Have.

If you require timely updating of your most popular pages Google’s new Sitemaps may prove indispensable. It’s a little premature to assess the importance or impact of Google’s new program but anyone wanting to give their site a competitive edge should be gearing up.

How it works:

There are several ways to set-up a XML Sitemap, perhaps the easiest way is to use the open-source Generator which you can download from Google. This is a Python file that you can upload to your webserver and this generator will create a sitemap from your ‘URL lists, webserver directories, or your access logs’.

It would probably be wise to chëck with your hostïng provider to see if they can accommodate this Generator on your webserver. It you have a small site there should be no problem but if your site runs into the 1,000’s of URLs or pages - chëck to see how much bandwidth such a system will take up. It’s better to be safe than sorry!

Once done, you have to then submit your newly generated XML sitemap to Google - the search engine will use this XML sitemap to update and index your site whenever you make changes on your site. You will need to have a Google account.

You may also submit text files containing URLs from your web site to be included in Google Sitemaps but these text files will have or will be given low priority for the time being.

To get started on your own Google Sitemaps Account you can go to: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

What’s great about it:

Besides seeing Google finally grab the RSS wildcard, it gives you better control of how and when the search engines update your web site pages. Perhaps, the most important aspect for Internet Marketers, you can now assign the importance that’s given to any of your particular pages. As most marketers know, certain pages on your web site are more important than others; these pages earn monëy, build your contact list, or direct your site’s visitors in the right direction. In other words, you can place more emphasis on your web site’s ‘bread and butter’ pages. A Big Plus!

With Google Sitemaps you can decide the importance placed on these pages by using the priority XML tag. This rating system is relative - it only relates to the pages on your own site.

Likewise, you can also indicate how frequently your pages change by using the changefreq XML tag. More or less instructing Google when your page will be updated or changed. This is a win-win situation for everyone - Google gets the freshest content for its users and you gain more control of the frequency of the updates done with your site or web pages. This may have a direct influence on the profitability of your web site.

For those who are actively marketing thru the search engines and keywords - Santa may have come a little early this year. Of course, the jury will be out for awhile but Google Sitemaps will probably have a positive impact on your bottom line.

What it means for Google:

For those of us who have been following and watching the RSS wildcard for the past couple of years - it takes away some of the frustration and a little of the puzzlement from Google’s seemingly total disregard of RSS.

RSS is not a fad, it is not a trend and it’s not going away. Instead, its importance is growing. It is fast becoming ‘the’ way data is moved on the web. One could even speculate that in the very near future all web pages will have an RSS component - perhaps a hybrid of ‘XML/HMTL’ or an embedded XML code that will work with all browsers, search engines and servers.

For Google to ignore the growing importance of RSS, blogging, podcasting, broadcatching, the RSS featured Firefox browser, MyYahoo, not to mention all those orange XML logos popping up on most of the major sites on the web - is beyond comprehension. Why Google does not have an RSS search on its main search engine page still seems baffling. Bringing out a homepage and not including an RSS feature is just foolhardy (They may introduce this feature later).

For those firmly in the RSS corner, Google’s continued disregard for RSS became more than a little frustrating to observe. It was downright rude! Perhaps Google was waiting to incorporate RSS in a program like this new XML sitemaps? Can this mean that Google has finally accepted the importance of RSS and they’re starting to make amends? More importantly, could there still be a few more RSS goodies in the Google Jar left to be announced?

One can only speculate but when it comes to RSS and Google, let’s just hope this is the start of a beautiful friendship.

About The Author
To add RSS to your Site within minutes -download this simple RSS Report and Guide. Copyright 2005 Titus Hoskins of BWMagic’s Frëe Marketing Tools & Guides.

Let Creative Mouse create a RSS feed or Blog for your site. Contact us today to hear how.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

By Cory Threlfall (c) 2005
The IWE, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is widely becoming a very powerful marketing tool on the NET and for Internet marketers around the world, the question is…
… “Are you using RSS to syndicate your content?”

When I first stumbled across RSS syndication while surfing the net, it peeked my curiosity to the point where I couldn’t help myself, but, to look into this new kind of site promotion further.

What I found out about this new technology will absolutely change the way you keep in touch with your subscribers and/or readers, in many ways, for years to come.

Just to keep up with the times I recently built a webpage for my website specifically to promote my RSS feed in order to take on new subscribers, and… most important of all, to put this new technology to the test.

Here’s what my webpage looks like if you decide to build your own dedicated webpage for your RSS feed. I highly recommend you do, but, that’s just me.

If you do decide to build one, make sure you give your subscribers and/or readers options.

http://www.internetwondersezine.com/rss_feed.html

For those of you who aren’t quite up to speed on what RSS is, here’s a quick definition for you:

RSS is an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”, and the XML extension is the format used for distributing your news headlines via the Web, which is known as Syndication.

Syndication is where the true power of RSS is unleashed, getting your message across the web in an Instänt to your subscribers and/or readers.

That’s the basics of RSS (Real Simple Syndication).

For the rest of this article I want to focus on the “10 MOST Powerful Reasons WHY You Should Be Using It”.

So, with that said, let’s go to reason #1.

Reason #1. RSS Streamlines communication.

RSS streamlines communication between the publishers and readers making it easier for the subscriber to receive your content.

Reason #2. Readers can opt-in to Feeds.

RSS gives the subscriber the ability to Opt-In to the feeds they are interested in and the ability to opt-out, if they wish, through their RSS reader just like an auto-responder.

Reason #3. You don’t have to maintain an RSS feed.

This is a great time saver for the busy marketer because RSS is a great communication supplement that doesn’t burden the publisher with having to maintain a “List” or having to follow strict privacy rules.

Reason #4. You have the ability to Syndicate your content.

This is where the true power of RSS comes into play because RSS gives you the ability to Syndicate your content to your subscribers and website owners in an instänt giving your content the exposure it deserves.

Reason #5. Broadcasts your Sales and Specials.

RSS gives you the ability to broadcast your Salës message and Specials to a wider audience in less time it would take to set-up an email broadcast.

Reason #6. No filters to worry about.

This is the next best feature to RSS feeds because you don’t have to worry about your message being passed through some email filter.

By using RSS, your message gets delivered to 100% of your subscribers.

This is a very powerful feature.

Reason #7. No more Sp@m complaints.

This is yet another great benefit to RSS because you don’t have to worry about “Sp@m” complaints or “Privacy Policies” - again because they have to add your feed to their reader, not the other way around with email.

Reason #8. You get Instant credibility.

By publishing your own RSS feed, you’re establishing yourself as an expert in the eyes of your readers and as someone who knows his/her industry which will build “Trust”.

Reason #9. Multiple ways to read your feed.

RSS is very versatile because it allows you to view the feed in many different media platforms.

Some examples are, Browser Based readers, Software Based readers, and the ability to view feeds on different operating systems like windows and mac.

Reason #10. Frëe and Easy site promotion.

I like to save the best for last because RSS is a great way to get frëe traffïc to your website without the need of spending monëy on advertising.

This benefit alone will save you hundreds, if not thousands, in yearly expenses to advertise your online business.

Well… are those enough reasons for you to get started with RSS?

I certainly hope so because they sure get me excited everytime I read through them.

Just imagine for a minute your same message you worked so hard on that you were going to send via email getting to 100% of your subscribers instantly — On-Demand — via your own RSS feed without ever having to worry about email filters.

Your response rates would Double, if not, Triple, meaning more $$Profits$$ in your pocket with less work.

Internet technology at its Best.

As I mentioned early in my article, the best way to take advantage of RSS… Starting Today! … is to set-up your own dedicated RSS webpage on your website.

If you don’t have time to set-up your own webpage I recommend you set-up an account with Blogger.com — and then head over to FeedBurner.com — and set-up an account there.

FeedBurner.com will auto-generate you a RSS subscription page with whatever RSS feed URL you choose.

Well… there you have it, “RSS… And The 10 MOST Powerful Reasons Why You Should Be Using It” and more.

In conclusion, publishers using RSS as a communication vehicle for there business are able to create keyword-rich, themed content, establishing Trust, Credibility, and ongoing communication with current and prospective subscribers and/or customers.

About The Author
Want to find out more about BLOGS and RSS? Search CBmall — Or if you want to get More ‘Insider’ marketing Secrets, subscribe to Cory Threlfall’s ezine called… The Internet Wonders eZine — or you can visit his BLOG at BlogSpot.com.

Let Creative Mouse create a RSS feed or Blog for your site. Contact us today to hear how.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

You’ve paid for your ticket and your ads are up on Google AdWords and Yahoo’s Overture, but have you set up a safe landing for your clients?

Run a test landing. Do a search and find your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad in Yahoo or Google. Click on it. Where does it bring you? Your home page? I hope not. You should create a specific landing page for your PPC ads. A landing page is the page you create to convert your PPC traffic into sales. This page should get your potential customers (that you have already paid for!) to go exactly where you think they want to go.

Here are some tips to create a good landing page:

1) Focus! Focus! Focus!
The landing page should be about your product or service. No links to other sites, no advertisements, no “how do you do”. When people arrive at your landing page, they should already be predisposed to buy (since you wrote such an excellent ad to get them here in the first place) and are trying to either: a) Get more information about your product or service b) Find the “Buy now” button Use the search term on the page, because searchers will key into the section of the page with their search term. If the search term is “buy skidoo” then have a button that says “Buy Skidoos Here”. Don’t distract them - give them what they want.

2) Customize your landing page
Use a different landing page for each group of keyphrases. If you sell seadoos and skidoos, don’t use the same landing page for each. Create a new landing page for each product (or each group of products) and send the clients directly to the page they are interested in.

3) Give them information
If they are not yet sold on your product or service, then they are going to be looking for more detailed information when they arrive at your landing page. Give it to them. You have to convince them that you have the perfect product or service to solve their problem. If they run out of information before they make a commitment to buy, then you have lost them. Nobody will spend money until they are convinced that your product or service is the right choice for them. So prove it.

4) Tell the reader what you want them to do
Use calls-to-action. If you want them to buy your product, than tell them often how to do it (”Click here to buy”). If you want them to call you, post the number up with instructions (”Call us now at 1-877-717-3667″). Repeat it throughout the text, then again in big and bold at the end.

5) Use graphics
Use pictures to sell your product or service. Pictures of the product or pictures of satisfied customers sell. Use them - and use them often.

6) Run tests
Set up two landing pages to see which one converts better. Set up two identical ads and send one to each landing page, then compare conversion rates for each page. Figure out why one converts better and try to improve the other one. Then, run more tests until you are completely satisfied with the results.

Set up your landing pages so that your potential customers arrive for a safe landing. If all goes well, they will step out of the plane with their credit cards already in hand - and their money almost in your pocket.

——————————————————————————–
About the Authour: Shawn Campbell is an enthusiastic player in the ecommerce marketplace, and co-founded Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. He has been researching and developing marketing strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998. Shawn is one of the earliest pioneers in the search engine optimization field.
——————————————————————————–

Let Creative Mouse help you drive more customers to your products or services. Contact Creative Mouse today to find out more about our search engine optimization program.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

Creative Mouse had a creative idea. Reward their customers and intice prospective customers. So Creative Mouse started sending out Creative Mouse Mugs and filling them with Starbucks Gift Cards. Just a way to say thank you to current clients and great way to start off a relationship with a prospective customer. Creative Mouse clients love the mugs and love the option to fill it with creativity and free Starbucks coffee. See below how to get started with a fun creative idea for your company.

Making Starbucks Cards work

The Starbucks Card is a flexible marketing tool that many businesses have successfully used as a thank you, an incentive and a reward for customers and employees. Please review their customer feedback below and start brainstorming about roles the Starbucks Card can play in your next campaigns.

A couple of the most winning strategies have been persuading customers to use credit cards for auto-payments and garnering customer referrals with Starbucks Cards. They will customize the accompanying Card carriers with messages and business logos, ship Cards to multiple addresses and offer bulk order discounts. Starbucks is a leading and well-recognized brand associated with high quality products and outstanding service. The Card is the perfect reward to inspire high performance or persuade clients to upgrade services.*

To place an order, please call 1-800-611-1669.

Customer Incentive

Client: The San Francisco Chronicle is the largest Northern California newspaper with over 400,000 in circulation.

Objective: Use a $10 Starbucks Card to motivate their cash-paying customers to convert to credit card payment.

Campaign: The promotion ran for three months and was inserted into customer’s bills. The Chronicle’s goal was to receive 500 conversions during the three months.

Results: The Starbucks Card yielded 1,300 conversions. Chronicle customers who pay by credit card are retained seven times longer than cash paying customers.

Next Step: The Chronicle plans on using the Starbucks Card in its next campaign to convert cash-paying customers to credit card payment.

Client: Leading national bank with over $275 billion in assets.

Objective: Motivate existing customers to add a check card to their account.

Campaign: Mailed $10 Starbucks Card in carrier with bank’s logo and custom message.

Results: Over 68,000 customers responded, exceeding expectations by over 1,260%.

Next Step: Analysis has proven a positive return and customers are continuing to use the check cards at higher usage levels than customers who did not respond.

Employee Incentive

Client: Recruiting company for Registered Nurses on travel assignments.

Objectives: Administer questionnaire and reward nurses for their hard work.

Campaign: Nurses received a $5 Starbucks Card for answering a poll and as an employee gift during Nurses Week.

Results: Received over 19% percent poll response (far exceeding expectations); and the Card has received high praise from recipients.

Next Step: Mailed out the Starbucks Card again as a gift for Nurses Week in 2003.

Comments: “The Starbucks Card has a high perceived value and is very convenient for our nurses. The Cards are small, so they are easy to store and cost-effective to mail out.”
– Brand Manager

Customer Reward

Client: A national home inspection franchise.

Objectives: Show customer appreciation and generate referrals from current customers.

Campaign: A $5.00 Starbucks Card with a personalized message and company logo on the carrier was used to thank customers and encourage referrals.

Results: Approximately 10% of customers are referring new business, exceeding campaign results tenfold.

Next Step: Expanding this effective strategy to the entire home inspection network.

Comments: “Starbucks Business Gifts and Rewards provided us with a strategic marketing tactic to encourage past clients to refer our services to their acquaintances. The relationship between our company and Starbucks had a dynamic impact on our clients and incremental sales.”
– Director of Marketing Services

Employee Reward

Client: A leading mortgage/financial company.

Objectives: Improve employee satisfaction by recognizing employee contributions.

Campaign: On-the-spot rewards of $5, $10 and $25 Starbucks Cards.

Results: Employees have commented that a $5 Starbucks Card is a meaningful gift. Managers have been able to keep their budgets under control, while offering a nice incentive.

Next Step: The Starbucks Card will be offered as the reward-of-choice for employees.

Comments: “I think Starbucks is a successful reward option for my company because we are nationwide with corporate offices and branches throughout the United States. I do no have to worry when I send out a Starbucks Card to reward an employee that he or she lives in an area where there isn’t a store to redeem the Card.”

Business Gift

Client: One of the largest accounting firms in the world.

Objectives: Memorable gift for an annual national accounting conference.

Campaign: Presented attendees a box of chocolates and a $10 Starbucks Card in a carrier with the company logo and custom gift message.

Results: Feedback from the conference was tremendous from both clients and firm partners, including thank-you calls.

Next Step: Will use the Starbucks Card at other functions including client meetings, in-house meetings, welcome gifts and as an incentive.

Comments: “Everyone loved the gifts. We have been pleased with the entire decision to go with Starbucks.”

Let Creative Mouse fill your Creative Mouse Mug up with a free Starbucks Gift Card. Contact Creative Mouse today to find out more.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

A recent study in Cambridge, England, demonstrated high levels of customer frustration, leading to their cutting short visits to popular websites.

Poor website performance can cost companies millions annually in wasted marketing money, according to a study conducted by Red Gate Software, a supplier of testing software for web applications.

Red Gate used its ANTS (Advanced .NET Testing System) software to simulate the experience of 500 visitors to popular corporate, travel, shopping and search engine sites. ANTS Load uses patented “frustration coefficient” and “abandonment prediction” measurements that reflect ongoing research documenting people’s emotional response to website delays.

The frustration coefficient is ranked 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest level of frustration; the abandonment index is a prediction of the percentage of people who will leave the site in frustration.

Turning Away Customers
“The business impact of poor web application performance goes straight to a company’s bottom line,” says Simon Galbraith, Red Gate’s Director of Marketing and Sales. “If your website has an abandonment prediction of 25 percent, it means you are likely to be turning away 25 percent of your potential web customers - it’s that simple.”

Galbraith uses AT&T as an example. AT&T spent an estimated $447 million in the first half of 2001, according to figures in AdAge.com from research firm CMR. These ads generate website traffic. Yet Red Gate’s research predicts that 33 percent of those visiting AT&T’s site will abandon it because of poor performance. The frustration coefficient is 41, as a result of long download times for accessing web pages. Galbraith says that a frustration coefficient under 5 is very good, but anything over 20 can have a negative business impact.

In comparison to AT&T, people are unlikely to abandon Microsoft’s site, even though it has a fairly high frustration coefficient of 28. Two sites can have identical frustration coefficients, but dramatically different abandonment predictions. That’s because sites that occasionally inflict extremely long wait times are abandoned more frequently than those that are fairly slow all the time.

In Microsoft’s case, an abandonment prediction of 0 means more bang for the buck: For advertising that drives potential customers to the website, Red Gate predicts that AT&T achieved about the same impact as Microsoft, while spending an estimated 50 percent more.

Booking Travel
More than 80,000 people in the United States do searches for flight information each day. Companies such as Orbitz, Hotwire, American Airlines and Delta Airlines are spending as much as 60 cents a person on search engine advertising to lure visitors to their flight booking sites. Factoring in other advertising that drives traffic to their sites, these and other travel companies could be spending as much as $1 for each visitor. Yet, these sites have relatively high frustration coefficients, ranging from 25 (Orbitz) to 33 (Expedia). One quarter of visitors to Orbitz and Expedia are predicted to abandon the sites.

Online Shopping
Just about everybody who shops online has a story of frustration and abandonment. But, none are likely to equal those of visitors to ShopperUK.com, a website that sells large appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines. According to Red Gate’s measure, everyone who uses the site is frustrated by the way it operates, and half of all visitors are predicted to abandon it.

Search Engines
Search engines are guides or portals to the Internet, making them among the most frequently visited websites. All the search sites tested by Red Gate had abandonment prediction percentages of 0, but Yahoo had a rather high frustration level of 30. According to Red Gate, Google has earned its reputation for no-fuss searching, with a low frustration coefficient of 11. But, Google is not exclusive in its simplicity and fast response: Altavista, Lycos and LookSmart all have frustration coefficients equal to, or lower than, Google’s.

Full Results and Methodology
For full results of the study and a more complete description of the methodologies, please visit here.

About Red Gate Software
Red Gate Software make simple software that solves complex problems for developers and testers. The company is a Microsoft Gold Visual Studio .NET launch partner and a VSIP partner. In addition to ANTS, other software tools by Red Gate include SQL Compare for comparing and synchronizing SQL databases, and the Aardvark bug tracking system.

Let Creative Mouse help you retain your online visitors and convert them to buying and returning customers. With years of experience in web design and site navigation, Creative Mouse can increase your ROI and customer retention. Contact Creative Mouse today to find out more.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

Blogarama

Should You Blog in Your Business?
Published by Blogarama on February 5th 2005

Although blogging did not begin as a business pursuit, it did not take the business sector very long to begin using blogs in a commercial manner. Some businesses first became aware of blogging because they discovered an employee’s personal blog had commented on their company or other employees, or they discovered an employee using company time to write to their personal blog. In these cases, the company learned about blogs, but the employees usually lost their jobs. Because of these experiences and the resulting publicity surrounding some especially high-profile cases, more and more businesses have learned about the potential power of blogging as a marketing tool.

As a business owner, you may wonder if you should jump into the blogosphere and begin a company blog or not? There are, as with all business decisions, many things to consider. Here are 10 facts or ideas about business blogging that may help you make up your mind whether a business blog should be something that you should try.

Business blogging is rapidly spreading throughout companies with an online presence. This applies not just to IT-related companies such as search engines like Google (which has innumerable employees all blogging merrily away about the latest and the greatest at Google), but also to other companies that sell everyday products. Every company, even the smallest, with any Internet presence should at least consider the idea of starting a company blog while the genre is still so popular.

A great example is the Tinbasher Blog, which is a blog written by the owner of a small sheet metal company in England. This blog has become very popular, however, because the blog usually showcases the part of its business that will appeal to the average Internet reader, not necessarily its large customers who buy huge amounts of sheet metal products (other advertising sources may work better there). Their target audience, as any business blog’s should be, is the end-user and usually an individual.

By chance or design, The Tinbasher Blog is widely referred to by other blogs who comment on their cool consumer items (like metal soccer balls/footballs, plant holders, etc.), and since these other blogs are read by people in many different parts of the world, this small British company is selling its products to markets it could never afford to penetrate by traditional advertising means They may not be making a billion dollars, but sales are up and visits to their website are up. If you are a small business, you can’t afford to buy this type of worldwide publicity, yet they get it via a blog that costs them very little to produce. The key is that it is a successful blog - that’s the difficult part about company blogging - it has to be done right or it really is a waste of time.

Blogging software and even webspace for your company’s blog may be free, but even if you choose not to have your blog on your website to save money, you still need an employee to write the blog. It is vital that you chose someone who knows your company’s purpose for the blog and what tone you wish you set. Business blogs that are successful have a feel of casualness to them that is not forced - they don’t read as if they are an advertisement for your company, but more like the day-to-day life of your company.

Finding the right person to write your blog is often the most difficult part of business blogging. They must have the knowledge (or access to it) of almost everything about your company, be able to write coherently, and be able to add that almost indefinable something that makes a blog different from an advertisement. In a small organization, in particular, often the CEO or founder becomes the blogger, if only because they know everything that has happened to their company and assuming they have been successful so far, they know something about how to be persuasive in selling products/services without necessarily being very obvious about it.

If your company is large and has many different departments or divisions, consider multiple bloggers. Each one will present a different view of the company from their angle and provide more variety for the readers of your company’s blog. You may have one blog and still have many different people contribute to it. Just be very careful about who you choose to blog for your company - they must be able to write, but they must also WANT to do this job of blogging because the basic nature of a blog’s success is the degree of passion that is put into it. Without dedication and passion for your business blog, your bloggers will not succeed in bringing more exposure of your company to the online community.

Don’t start a company blog unless you are willing to be completely honest when writing it. You must be prepared to own up to any mistake your company may have made and try your best to do damage control via your blog. Actually, blogs are great places for damage control, precisely because they have more of a personal feel to them.

If a business apologizes for a mistake they made in their company’s blog, and demonstrates their commitment to customer service in that blog entry, this can go a long way towards repairing the damage that mistake may have caused in your clients’ eyes. It’s about appearances - you seem more like a person than some impersonal corporation in a company blog, and most clients appreciate the personal touch and will forgive a lot if they feel they have been dealt with fairly and, most importantly, honestly.

Company blogs are a great way to answer questions you may receive from potential or actual customers through your regular email process. By putting the question and answer in your blog, you are now generating the information out to potentially huge numbers of potential or actual clients, instead of just that one person who wrote in.

It looks even better if someone writes you an email with a suggestion to improve your service, you decide to follow his or her suggestion, and then talk about it in your blog. Otherwise, it may be more difficult for your clients to know that you have instituted what might be too small a change to advertise, but that might make a difference to them as well in terms of how they feel about your company.

Think carefully before you decide to allow comments to your blog entries. When you have a company blog, by allowing comments, you will encourage people to ask you questions and make comments that may be helpful, but you will also find that people post derogatory comments or ask questions that are difficult for you to answer, because of internal company policies. However, if you don’t respond to comments, you will be criticized for not doing so.

Keep in mind that a blog entry doesn’t have a specified length. Even company blogs can have individual entries as short as a sentence or as long as an article. You can include links to other blogs, articles, pages in your website, or any other place on the Internet to illustrate a point rather than write at length about it. In fact, the most interesting blogs seem to be the ones that vary in length - sometimes they have longer entries and other times just short entries - plus this gives your company blog the appearance of a personal touch. Blogs originated as a sort of online personal journal, and personal journals rarely have entries that are approximately equal in length each and every time.

However, if you do decide to start a company blog, be sure to make entries frequently. There is no requirement that you make an entry every day, but don’t let too long go between entries. In fact, with company blogs especially, some readers expect some kind of “schedule” because the originators are a business. Readers may expect to see an entry every second day or every third day or whatever.

If you do set up an informal schedule, and find that on a day you are supposed to make a blog entry that you either can’t or have nothing to say, make an entry that is a generic comment on the local weather or some other inane remark and leave it at that. The important thing is to keep to your informal schedule if you set one up so as to not disappoint regular readers.

Varying the length of your entries can make a blog with a time schedule for entries appear not to have one, especially if some of the short entries consist merely of personal remarks by the blogger on an uncontroversial topic or a short anecdote about something that happened today that doesn’t reflect badly on the company or its competitors (or anyone at all).

If you are a small company, you might want to consider making a company blog the highlight and center of your website. This really only works well if you are a company that serves a local customer market, rather than appealing to a regional or national/international market.

Prime examples are restaurants that are not chain restaurants. Sometimes adding a blog and making it your website is what will bring more customers to your establishment. The personal nature of blogs allows you to persuade the viewer that your restaurant is THE place to go, and so sometimes you feel freer to express yourselves and the personality of your business via the blog. Of course on your website you would also include information about where you are, what you are, your hours, your services/products, etc., but this information typically does not take up a lot of room for a smaller establishment, leaving space for the blog to be the centerpiece that draws it all together.

Finally, if you are thinking about adding a blog to your company, never forget that it is just another business tool. As much fun as blogging can be, once it is tied to your company, it reflects your company’s image and your company will be judged by the quality of your blog as well as the quality of your services/products. Plan a blog carefully, put the right person in charge of blogging, ensure that it sends out the message you want it to send, and with any luck, word will spread and you will see more traffic to your website.

The search engines do index blogs as well as websites, so it will show up in search results and people will find it on their own or on the recommendation of others. Give it a little time to get its roots planted in the Internet and it should bring more traffic and more sales. If it doesn’t or if you can’t get the equation quite right, don’t be afraid to stop blogging. A bad blog can hurt a business just as easily as a good blog can help a business.

There are many other aspects of company blogging that could be brought up, but the above points are among the most important to keep in mind if you are even thinking of starting a company blog. A company blog is a large undertaking, because it is a commitment that you must consistently keep up with if you wish it to work as a marketing tool for your company. Company blogs fit some corporations better than others, but small businesses are especially good candidates for blogging if they already have someone on the payroll who they are willing to allow the time to do a good job on a company blog and who wants to do it and is capable of producing good material. If those three conditions exist, consider giving a company blog a try and see if it brings more interest in your company from others online.

You could also save yourself a lot of time and money and have Creative Mouse design or re-design your site and or blog.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

Creative Mouse Adds Senior Project Manager and Database Director to Continue Integration Into Wireless Application Gateways

June 06, 2005

Portland, Oregon. (June 06, 2005)- Creative Mouse, a Portland-based Web design firm, has hired John Randy as senior project manager and Peat Bakke as Database Director.

John Randy will be responsible for the daily operation of all Web site projects including scope, budget, schedule, risk management and quality assurance. Prior to joining Creative Mouse, John Randy held the position of vice president of sales for a major telecommunication company. There he managed projects for a diverse client base. Before that, John Randy held the position of director of business development at another telecommunication company where he focused primarily on the telecommunication market.

Peat will also play an instrumental role at Creative Mouse by developing and managing the creative direction of client database projects. Peat brings his expertise in database development to Creative Mouse. His experience is working on corporate and franchise database projects for numerous clients. He will be an asset to Creative Mouse and help take clients to a new level of interface design and corporate branding.

“The addition of both John Randy and Peat to Creative Mouse’s senior development team will allow us to provide an unsurpassed level of service to our clients while continuing our growth pattern,” said J. Mottinger, president of Creative Mouse. “We feel that with John Randy extensive project management experience and Peat’s contributions as databse director we are building a cohesive team and are better able to offer a more comprehensive range of expertise to clients looking to maximize their Internet and PDA presence.”
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About Creative Mouse
Creative Mouse is an advanced web design firm specializing in database integration, e-commerce, application development, web site hosting and graphic and multimedia design. The Portland-based company also designs sites for personal digital assistants — a rapidly increasing facet of its business. Creative Mouse provides pro-bono consultation and development for many non-profit groups in the area. Creative Mouse can be reached at 866.664.4343 or by email at sales@creative-mouse.com.

Don’t know the difference between HTML and a URL? Here are some things to think about when seeking a Web site designer.
Entrepreneur magazine -
By Paul and Sarah Edwards

Q: I’d like to build a Web site for my business, but I’m barely computer-literate. How do I find a competent Web designer?

Name withheld

A: To find a talented Web designer, get recommendations from people whose judgment you respect. Review examples of the designers’ work, particularly active Web sites they’ve designed. Always check their references.

If your contacts lead nowhere, try talent Web sites like Elance (www.elance.com) and Guru (www.guru.com), which let you get bids from designers. However, since you’re not getting a personal referral here, you’re taking a greater chance of having an unsatisfactory experience.

No matter how you find your designer, make sure to have a written contract that specifies:

The work to be done: Include a description of the graphics and text content.

Timing: When is work to begin? Specify the progress points, such as when you’ll approve the template for the site, the first version and so on. Also include a completion date.

Payments: Specify due dates for the deposit, and the final payment.

Other terms: Specify terms, such as who owns the site design, confidentiality, handling of disagreements and so on.

Also, consider if you’ll be able to update and make changes to your site once it’s done.
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Authors and career coaches Paul and Sarah Edwards have written 15 books, including Working From Home and Finding Your Perfect Work. Send them your start-up business questions at www.workingfromhome.com or in care of Creative Mouse.

You could also save yourself a lot of time and money and have Creative Mouse design or re-design your site.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

By: Rob McGann

The majority of Internet searchers use multiple search engines, according to a study by Nielsen//NetRatings. The finding shows the volatility of the search market as the major players intensify their competition for user loyalty.

The study found that 58 percent of Google searchers also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, Yahoo! and MSN Search. The use of multiple search engines also applies to Yahoo! and MSN searchers. Approximately 71 percent of Yahoo! searchers also visited one of the other top two engines, and 70 percent of MSN searchers also used one or both of the other two.

While it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Google is the search engine to beat, it is critical that all of the major search players, including Google, recognize that they exclusively own only a minority of their users,” said Ken Cassar, director of strategic analysis at Nielsen//NetRatings. “This highlights an opportunity and a threat to all of the established players in the market, and underscores the importance of continued innovation in a highly competitive market that is anything but mature.”

However, NetRatings did find some differences in consumer loyalty to the different search engines. Google users were found to show a higher degree of loyalty than users of other engines. Google shared approximately 58 percent of its visitors: 26 percent with Yahoo!, 19 percent with MSN, and 14 percent with both Yahoo! and MSN.

For its part, Yahoo! shared 71 percent of its traffic: 39 percent with Google, 11 percent with MSN, and 21 percent with both Google and MSN. MSN, meanwhile, shared 70 percent of its traffic: 33 percent with Google, 13 percent with Yahoo!, and 24 percent with both Google and Yahoo!

NetRatings also released the latest rankings of the leading search engines, measured in terms of search query volume for February 2005. Google took first place with a 47 percent of total searches, with 1.92 billion queries. Yahoo! came in second with 21 percent market share, based on roughly 870 million queries. MSN, meanwhile, came in third place with 13 percent market share, based on approximately 520 million search queries.

Source of Article: ClickZ

Date of Article: February 28, 2005

Make sure that people can find your site on multiple search engines. Let Creative Mouse help you in your optimization needs.

Ready to get started? Click here for pay per click service options.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
7327 SW Barnes Rd., Suite 523
Portland, OR 97225
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

Whether you are new to pay per click or struggling with an existing campaign…pay per click management can take your budget and your goals to a whole new level of effective advertising.

WHAT IS PAY PER CLICK, ANYWAY?

bid on the exact search words and key phrases that people use in search engines to find your products/services.
when your terms are searched for in a major search engine, the result is an eye-catching ad to promote your products/services.
your ad may be seen in the major search engines hundreds or even thousands of times each day but you ONLY pay when your ad is clicked on (bids start at 3 cents per click and go up)

PAY PER CLICK ADVANTAGES?

- Fast results. Traffic to your website in days, not weeks or months like other Internet marketing.
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- Regional marketing options (by country, state, city or radius).
- Reach over 80% of all Internet traffic with first page exposure for your website on every major search engine (*when your terms are searched for and you are bidding in the top three positions).
- Automated Bidding. This is the biggest competitive advantage in pay per click because you can have your Google, Overture and Enhance bids adjusted a minimum of once every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you want to maintain top positioning, automated bidding will work hard to keep you ranked high. If you want to stay in the best position for the best price, automated bidding will make sure you are not over-paying or getting caught in PPC bidding wars. If you want to turn off your account on certain days (holidays? weekends?) or on and off for certain hours…automated bidding can do that (some on/off limitations in Google).
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**There have been many recent changes that have considerably increased the amount of time it now takes to set up and/or manage a successful pay per click account. As you are learning about PPC advertising, how it works, all the tricks, etc….please take into account that currently, there is NOT one method for setting up a successful PPC account. There are too many variables involved including: display URL, landing pages, product(s) or service(s) being offered, click through budgets, target audiences (age, race, sex, etc), regional advertising used/not used, types of keywords selected, keyword popularity, keyword positioning goals, etc. that can affect HOW your PPC campaign is set up and/or managed.

STARTING NEW PAY PER CLICK ACCOUNTS?

Jumpstart your advertising campaign and save money from the beginning…having an expert set up your pay per click accounts will get your accounts up and running quickly and efficiently. With Creative Mouse, you won’t have to worry about the time consuming learning curve. You also won’t have to worry about costly mistakes - with your advertising account set up correctly, you can avoid unwanted clicks and keep your ads in the positions that provide the most clicks for the least amount of money. By having your accounts professionally managed, monitored and improved every month, you can get more for your pay per click marketing budget! Click here for details on Google, Overture and Enhance pay per click advertising services

OPTIMIZING & IMPROVING AN EXISTING PAY PER CLICK ACCOUNT

By having your pay per click accounts professionally managed and monitored, you can save money and greatly improve the overall performance of your advertising campaign! Some clients have cut their click through budgets 50% and still increased the number of clicks. You can take advantage of all the insider’s tricks and knowledge for optimizing pay per click campaigns to squeeze the most out of your advertising investment. Click here for details on Google, Overture and Enhance pay per click advertising services

Considering setting up and/or managing pay per click yourself? Click here for free step-by-step instructions for setting up a new pay per click account.

Ready to get started? Click here for pay per click service options.

Creative Mouse
sales@creative-mouse.com
7327 SW Barnes Rd., Suite 523
Portland, OR 97225
tel: 866.664.4343
fax: 866.664.4343

Welcome to Creative Mouse web blog.

This site exists largely as a resource center for Creative Mouse staff and clients and as an experiment in Search Engine Optimization.

Along the way it will become a repository for interesting articles, resources, and other helpful items.

Perhaps by some accident, something on here will be useful to you.

Feel free to visit our site for more information, Creative Mouse. We are only too willing to help assist in your web design, web hosting, and web search engine optimization needs.