Here are 3 common mistakes made in paid advertising:

• Advertisements don’t explicitly express your own goals. Many advertisements talk about something interesting your business or organization can provide even though your goal is to get them to do something specific. Be transparent about what you’re trying to accomplish and tailor your ads to this. If you want someone to fill out a quote, say this. If you’re looking for someone to subscribe to a blog or newsletter, make this evident. Don’t entice someone to click on ad by misrepresenting where they’ll land with an advertisement more attractive than what they’ll actually get.

• Loose use of keywords or geographic targeting. Just because a keyword is relevant to your business doesn’t mean you should include it. It’s best to focus on keywords that relate to a user taking action such as “buy” or “subscribe” and so on. Likewise, if your business is local and you believe consumers would possibly travel to your location or use your services doesn’t mean they should all be included. The farther away someone is from your business the less likely they’ll take action and search for a business that’s closer to them and more convenient.  It’s best to start of small, evaluate your results and then expand your reach.

• Landing pages are not clear and require effort. People have expectations when they click on an ad and if your landing page doesn’t meet (or exceed) these expectations people will quickly leave. Make sure your ad correlates directly with the page you send them to. Furthermore, create a landing page that clearly displays the way for the visitor to take the desired action and don’t make them dig through numerous pages to do so. Use the space you have wisely to further promote your intentions. If possible, put the form or purchasing point directly on the page. For many, taking the time visit a site like Facebook or perform a search is a task in itself – don’t make it more difficult.

Achieving a positive ROI through paid advertising takes hard work and patience. Results may not be apparent at first, but if you closely monitor and refine your efforts almost any business can benefit from this form of marketing.

You may also be interested in how to be successful with Google AdWords on a limited budget. Even if you don’t have a lot of money to invest you can still get a great return on dollars you’re willing or able to risk.

What are some other tips you have to be successful in paid advertising? What have your experiences been in paid advertising?

-  Billy

Still, many people get stuck on their site averages such as length of visit, bounce rate or traffic within a certain time period. However, this information rarely tells the whole story on how well your site is performing.

Despite search engines power to bring people to a relevant website based on their search, undoubtedly people will come to your site and not find what they’re looking for. Although this traffic doesn’t hurt, it may affect site averages thus devaluing certain data and giving you a misrepresentation of  visitor information. The focus should be on those who stay and navigate through your site – your potential customers.

Here are a few important pieces of information you can gather from Google Analytics that actually matters when considering edits to your website.

• Top Exit Pages: see what pages website visitors are leaving your site from and determine why. People will inevitably leave your site, but this will allow you to figure out the reasons for it and what changes are necessary to get them to your goal pages.
• Top Content: find out what pages of your site are most popular and make changes with calls-to-action to get these visitors to the pages you want them to go to. Take advantage of space available to advertise for conversions.
• Depth of Visit: determine the amount of visitors who stay and navigate your site and help figure out where they are going. Correlate this data with the pages they are visiting to increase conversions. Depending on the size of your site, you may want to focus on visitors who navigate through 3 or more pages.

These are just a few areas you should take the time to investigate using Google Analytics. No matter what you are trying to accomplish, you should setup goal tracking which will give you exact numbers on conversion points and easily lets you determine whether or not you are reaching your websites objectives.

If you have anymore questions on Google Analytics and how to best take advantage of this free tool please contact us.

- Billy

5 dollars.

With just $5 USD you can begin advertising  directly to people actively looking for you. Your advertisements will begin running and search engines users will be exposed to a message created specifically for their search term. Of course, when a user clicks on your ad you must pay Google or other search engines with paid search advertising for that user to enter your site based on a bid price. Fortunately, the bid price (and thus the amount you pay for that visitor) can only go as high as you allow it.

Many people believe it costs hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, to start a paid search campaign – but this is not the case. You can advertise with whatever budget you can afford to. This can be as low as $50 a month, however business who have efficiently and effectively setup and managed a campaign typically see a great return on investment and increase their budget to capture more qualified leads. Google AdWords allows you to fully track you’re ROI and enables you to make calculated decisions which improve your campaign while saving you money.

Here a few keys to running a successful AdWords campaign on a small budget.

• Focus on phrase or exact match keywords that include actions such as “buy” or “subscribe”.
• If your a locally based business, target users in the specific geographic area you serve.
• Create messaging that is clear about your intentions so that only users who are ready to take action click-through.
• Design and send visitors to landing pages with strong calls-to-action and with little friction.

These are just a sampling of tips to help get you started at a level you feel comfortable. There is much more you should learn  about how AdWords works to be confident in your investment and it may be best to contact a professional before engaging in search engine marketing.

Siphon is offering to setup and manage your AdWords campaign for one month completely free and with no obligation. Your only investment is to Google and at what you decide you’re willing to put in. Contact us to get started today and discover the effectiveness of search engine marketing!

- Billy

The Isis Group provides scientific document editing for the international community as well as consulting services for start-up biotechnology companies in the U.S. Because the business offers two unique services we created a website with two different sides, but with the same look and feel to maintain branding.You’ll notice the the homepage of the website is actually just a front door to the two other sites.

We also have had the challenge of getting found by the international community through their own native search engines. Although many countries use the top U.S. used search engines such as Google or Yahoo, or other search engines powered by these major search engines, there were still quite a few locally based ones with major traffic. Those that were in the English language we are able to submit the site to.

If you know any start-up biotechnology companies in need of consulting assistance or members of the international scientific community who want to ensure their documents are written in proper English feel free to contact The Isis Group.

- Billy

Although I love Google and all of their products, setting up new paid search campaigns and linking them to my account has been difficult, if not impossible. I noticed many of my peers had the same problems which they looked to Google’s forums for answers – with no resolution.

Some of the problem included not recognizing existing AdWords account, switching to different languages when submitting information, and trouble linking accounts to my own client center so that I can properly manage all of my paid search campaigns from one place.

I ran into this problem this morning in setting up a new campaign and noticed something I haven’t seen before. A phone number to call! And, a human being actually picked up. Not only were they able to help me with my problem, but offered to help me manage the campaigns completely free of charge. I now have a single designated contact at Google to help answer any questions as well as review each campaign on a monthly basis to determine ways to improve each campaign beyond what I find.

You can’t get much better than this. Support from the people who know Google best, their employees.

Previously, only companies who we’re managing over $30,000 of advertising budgets had this type of access. Now everyone does. Google is acting on their understanding of the power small and medium sized business and their proportionate advertising budgets. Furthermore, they realize the marketing agencies these SMB’s use for search engine marketing are not managing large volumes.

My one question at this point is why? Why a complete change from offering no direct service to complete service in such a short time period. I asked around and came up with a possible answer.

Bing offers and has been offering the same customer service that Google now does. Is Google feeling the pressure of Bing and other search engines?

Through April 4th, 2010 Google had 63% percent of the market share, down from 71% in in February, 2010. This is large percentage drop in such a short period of time and could be a reflection of the additional services of competing search engines. (Statistics courtesy of seoconsultants.com)

I’m ecstatic with these new changes with Google. What are your thoughts on Google increasing level of customer service? What issues have you run into and how were they resolved?

-Billy

One thing you can do in the meantime is create effective page descriptions, which are only visible on search engines. They can and should act as advertisements to entice a search engine user to click through to your site.

In the majority of searches I perform I see page descriptions that either:

·    Don’t exist at all.

·    Speak only about the company.

·    Only say what the business does.

·    Give a general description of the business and not the specific pages content.

·    Run too long and get cut off.

You can view the page description of your website in most browsers by simply clicking “View” at the top of the browser and then “Page Source”. In the new window, it will take little digging to locate the code “<meta name=”description” where you’ll see the page’s description that follows.

You may be surprised by what is there. Still, you now have the opportunity to write new page descriptions. Make sure to include your best keyword from the 1-2 keywords you are using on that page. If you can, use both. To avoid having your page description get cut off, keep it under 70 characters.

The page description should be written to describe that specific pages content and not your entire business. Write the description as an advertisement that speaks to the benefit of the consumer. Think about what is most important to them in this specific area of your business and how you can make your website stand out from others in SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).

This will be a fairly inexpensive edit for your web developer to insert the changes and not very time consuming if you have an in-house team. If your website is large, don’t try to write new page descriptions for all of the pages all at once. In fact, this may be an area you consider testing different messaging strategies and using Google Analytics to see spikes in traffic to specific pages through search engines once the edits have been made.

What other areas of search engine optimization are you interested in hearing about? What do you think about using page descriptions more like advertisements as opposed to just descriptions?

– Billy

In all of the clutter found throughout Twitter you can get away with posting these type of tweets and deal with seeing them. This doesn’t hold as true with sites like Facebook and LinkedIn where updates are less frequent and thus more pronounced. Still, if you are sending these type of tweets you really should use a hashtag that describes what you’re talking about.

This serves a few functions:

- People also using the hashtag can find me and what I am saying which connects me with other users with similar interest and lets us immediately engage in conversation.

- It allows someone to give their take without explaining the context. For example “I hope the Pats go with a wide receiver tonight.” would mean nothing to someone who didn’t know I was talking about the Patriots and more specifically the NFL Draft. Instead of having to say “I hope the Pats go with a wide receiver in tonight’s NFL Draft”, I can just say “I hope the Pats go with a wide receiver tonight. #nfldraft”

- A hashtag helps reduce the size of some tweets which increases the likelihood they’ll be fully re-tweeted when dealing with longer tweets.

The NFL and ESPN are doing a great job in getting their fans involved. Besides getting people to talk about the draft it connects people who are talking about it and strengthens it’s brand. Brand is extremely important to the NFL and is especially true in light of the recent sexual assault accusations made against Ben Roethlisberg which has resulted in a 6 game suspension. Other companies and brads can use hashtags to help gain support and get their supporters talking.

We’d love to hear from you the type of content you’re interested in reading. If you’re on Twitter, use the hashtag #fishbetter to give your feedback. You can also follow me to talk about marketing and anything else we have in common as well as learn more about Siphon.

What do you think?  What are your thoughts on hashtags?

- Billy

Today, graduating college and trying to find a job immediately in your area of study is like being thrown out in the ocean as a small fish and being expected to survive alone. College graduates today are realizing fast that they are a little fish entering a big sea. There is a much larger ecosystem of jobs, opportunities, and areas to learn than their college career initially taught them.

I learned this fact first hand when I finished my college career a semester early in December. I was like the little fish let out of the tiny college ecosystem early to beta-test the waters. I found that once out of college, grads must either swim fast towards the jobs that they are qualified for, or pick up the necessary skills needed to fit the job they desire.

I chose the latter option. Yes, we spend our whole lives in school learning, but are we really learning what we need for our particular career choice? It seems today that specialized jobs are becoming more and more prevalent, meaning that you must become an expert at that job in order to be hired and thrive in that position.

In order to succeed among the school of fish in the ocean, you must choose to swim a little faster, travel a little longer, and endure a little more. Graduates must learn to enhance their skills that they learned in college by honing in on what they are best at doing and become an expert. This can be done by reading books, attending conferences and seminars, networking, and learning from others.

Although the idea of spending more time and effort learning after finishing college may not seem ideal, it is what is needed to survive among the school of fish entering the job market today; it is an eat or be eaten environment. With the economy just slowly bouncing back, grads need to learn how they can be the best asset to a potential employer, and even become an expert in a particular area of interest for a better chance of survival.

Find ways to swim stronger against the current in order to stand out and succeed. Every other fish is swimming the same way and towards the same thing as you right now, so find your own style and strategy that will allow you to get that perfect job.

This is also a great opportunity for those in Generation Y who are either still in school or already in the work force. Those still in school can begin to hone in on what they want to do and start learning more about it now to advance themselves and speed ahead of the school of other students. Those in a career can continue to learn while on the job and outside of work to become an even stronger asset to their company for added job security and better industry recognition as an expert.

There is never a better time than now to continue learning about what you love to do. If you have found your passion in life, then learning about it should be easy, and even fun! Having spent the past few months learning each and every day about the job skills I needed for the career I desired and now being employed, I can endorse that it is more than worth it to go the extra mile.

But, besides engaging with these people through platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and your blog, what have you done to grow this community? It’s time we all start offering even more – for free.

One well-known company that has taken these steps is HubSpot with Inbound Marketing University. It’s a great resource filled with different classes from top minds in the marketing industry. In it you’ll learn much of what you’ll need to know to get your business started in inbound marketing. Best of all, it’s completely free and easy.

Why is this is so great for HubSpot? They now have over 1,500 people who have become certified through the program that will vouch for their knowledge, skills, and expertise. They haven’t just heard of the company and what their software can do, but can attest to their understanding of how it works for all types of businesses.

I became certified in inbound marketing through this program and learned a lot from it, which I can now apply to my own business and for our clients. It is a great starting point for anyone looking to enter the field and for those trying to gain a stronger grasp of what inbound marketing is and why it’s the future of the marketing world.

Look in the coming months for Siphon’s version of Inbound Marketing University with “The Lifesaver” which will offer relevant tips and strategies your business can take and use to start gaining more leads.

- Billy

If you’re looking to create effective business relationships using social media then it is best to actually meet in person. Understandably, you won’t be able to physically meet every person you connect with on Twitter or LinkedIn (we’re not talking about people you meet via Facebook or MySpace) but those within range, you should make an attempt at some point.

It can be at a networking event or getting together somewhere of similar interest, and it can be during the weekend. Business relationships are best started by discussing something outside of your professions. Most people use the weekends to take their minds off work. You can still accomplish this without giving up a great opportunity to start something new and valuable.

-Billy