Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

For many of us, Pay-Per-Click marketing is perceived and utilized as a fast and sometimes cost efficient way to drive qualified visitors and conversions to an advertiser’s website. Many PPC agencies and freelancers spend their time optimizing and strategizing around improving conversions and improving ROI. However, over the years PPC has evolved not only in traditional uses, but also has established itself as a multi-faceted platform that has been used to protect company/personal reputations, defend political agendas and drive awareness to issues outside of the online world. In this article, I will discuss the other benefits of PPC and why we should consider these initiatives more often.

Reputation Management

We have seen this most recently in political jabbering amongst candidates at all levels as well as national and global level for incidents such as the BP oil spill disaster where people are leveraging PPC as a fast and efficient way to protect themselves from negative news coverage.

If you remember, BP was using PPC for reputation management because of the bad PR they were getting all over the world.  BP used text ads as a sounding board to tell the public that BP is working hard everyday to make sure they were doing everything they could to “make it right”.

Web Design Testing

How many times have you heard from a potential prospect saying “I’m not ready for PPC yet because we want to redesign the website and when were done, we’ll give you a call?” Well, traditionally that makes sense from a CEO’s perspective, but what many people fail to realize is that PPC can open the door to testing design, layout, and usability before committing thousands of dollars to something that has not been tested or seen by the public.

I have encouraged many prospects to look at PPC as a testing vehicle before shelling out the money for a complete overhaul of a website.

New Audience Testing

Imagine a typical retailer or manufacturer who is eager to test a new target audience because they have a product or service that can be distributed to a wider market. If this testing was done offline using traditional channels like TV, radio or print advertising, it would be costly and would not generate detailed analytics to pinpoint its effectiveness. Moreover, PPC can not only enable companies to do all of this testing much more affordably it also allows for much more detailed analytics beyond online perception and adoption. It also provides much better “message testing” which can then be used in any other offline strategy.

New Product Retailer Advantage

Getting an advantage on the competition is sometimes a very difficult task to accomplish. That advantage could be improving customer service, lowering prices, offering free shipping, etc… On the other hand, many retailers cannot start promoting new products until the shipments come in to make it available to their customers. Here is where PPC can be a powerful tool to get a leg up on the competition.  For example, a creative merchandising team can leverage PPC to get those products to the public before any of their competitors by offering the product as a Pre-Order item. This tactic was a huge success in the past and quickly became a merchandising “must do”.

Offline Influence and Promotion

This strategy has been mostly triggered by what we have seen on TV, listened to on the radio or read in a newspaper or magazine. It’s the holistic behavior of migrating from offline to online in order to get that personal “branded” engagement for more information. In fact, increasingly frequently TV shows and even commercials are telling their audiences to go online to get more information. This is significant for marketers because they can use PPC to leverage offline awareness from news events, upcoming trends and other offline buzz.

In conclusion:

In a nutshell, PPC has evolved itself into having many more benefits for advertisers other than just driving traffic and increasing conversions. It’s now making a name for itself in the overall marketing strategy for both offline and online initiatives. The more we start looking to PPC to increase awareness, the better we can measure its effectiveness.

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Greg Meyers is the President/Founder of iGESSO Internet Marketing, LLC and author of the Search Marketing Blog SemGeek.com.

I run a growing search engine marketing agency, so you’d think that I’d spend heavily advertising my agency with PPC, right? In fact, I spend a total of $0/year on PPC for my own business. Partially this is because I don’t need to (I get business from existing clients and word-of-mouth), but it’s also because I don’t think PPC would work for my business. Simply put, I’m too expensive for the average PPC clicker.

As John Battelle aptly put it, search engines represent “the database of intentions.” When someone does a search, they are expressing their intent to do something. My agency charges a minimum of $2500/month for our services. With that in mind, how much do you think the typical searcher who types in “search engine marketing agency” or “AdWords help” or “PPC” into Google expects/can pay for SEM help? The vast majority of searchers are looking to pay at most a couple of hundred dollars a month for SEM consulting. And for most of these people, that’s what they should actually pay – they don’t need to advanced tactics that my agency offers, they simply need “blocking and tackling” – a properly set up campaign with a good list of keywords.

If I bought 1000 clicks a month on AdWords for my business, the odds are that 990 out of 1000 clicks would come from people looking for something other than what I am selling. That leaves me ten chances to convert a customer. If each click costs $2, I’m paying $200 per click for those ten qualified searchers.

There are, however, good reasons to advertise expensive products and services via PPC – if you do it right. First, if you have a product that makes you a huge amount of money for every sale, you might want to advertise it with PPC, even if most people aren’t looking for what you are selling. For example, let’s say you sell telephone service to large enterprises. A consumer might want to pay $30/month for home phone service, but if you sell your product to IBM, you might have a $10M annual contract. If 990 out of 1000 clicks are consumers, but the last ten are companies like IBM, even if you only convert one sale a year, the PPC campaign will pay for itself many times over!

Secondly, if you are slightly more expensive than competitors but have significant differentiation, you can also make PPC work. Let’s say that the average consumer phone service costs $30/month and comes with voicemail, call-waiting, and conference calling. Your service, however, costs $50/month but includes an after-hours call-answering service, a toll-free number, and superior sound quality. If you can convince consumers that it’s worth paying more for your product, you may still be able to make PPC work. Imagine an ad that said something like this: “The only home phone service with a toll-free number and sound quality approved by NASA!” With an ad like this, you are clearly telling consumers that not all phone service is the same, and that it may be worth paying more for quality.

In general then, PPC can work for selling expensive products and services, but make sure to follow these rules:

• If you aren’t the lowest priced product, differentiate yourself in your ad so that only people interested in quality will click your ads;
• Expect a lot of untargeted clicks and make sure to work hard to close the few targeted ones. This might mean having a very informative landing page, or for B2B, setting up a lead nurturing/lead qualification process to engage potential customers;
• Avoid generic keywords if possible. If you are selling Rolexes, avoid keywords like “telling time” or “watch” and instead focus on targeted words like “expensive watch” and “designer watches”;
• Add in lots of targeting. If you sell to businesses, exclude non-business hour day-parts. If you sell an expensive consumer product, add negative keywords like “cheap”, “free” and “ebay.” If you market to rich people, exclude lower-income geographies;
• Measure success over a long period of time. If your average sale is $50K, it’s OK to spend $1000 a month for six months and not get a sale, as long as you are seeing potential buyers move through your sales pipeline;

I still believe that PPC is best-suited for companies that position themselves as the “low-cost leader,” or the cheapest seller in a category. Follow the tips above, however, and you can still make your pricey offering work. Good luck!

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David Rodnitzky is Founder of PPC Associates, a leading SEM agency in San Francisco. To learn more about full service AdWords management from PPC Associates, contact David at david@ppcassociates.com.

When marketers create budgets for paid search campaigns, a question that sometimes comes up is “do we really need to spend money bidding on our own brand name?”. The short answer is, yes, it’s generally a good idea to bid on your own brand name. It might seem redundant if your brand already dominates the search results page organically, but there are some compelling reasons to support a branded paid strategy.

Here are just a few reasons to consider bidding on your own brand:

1. Get more total click-throughs from the search results page
2. Defend your turf, dominate the page
3. Manage your brand’s reputation
4. Create additional opportunities for messaging

More total clicks from the search results page

Studies we’ve conducted have shown that typically links and ads together on the page will attract more total clicks when the brand is dominant on both the organic and the top ad space. Yes, the paid clicks may come at the expense of some organic clicks, but overall click volume increases. With an optimized paid campaign, this strategy can be very cost effective.

Defend your space on the page

Bidding on your own brand can be a good defensive strategy to reduce competitors’ exposure on the same page, by taking up more space with your brand and pushing other results down the page, or even off the page altogether.

Managing your reputation

Had some bad news or bad publicity? Got an uncomplimentary organic result showing up on the search results? A paid ad is a chance to voice your response and meet the challenge head on, with specific and timely messaging.

Take advantage of another opportunity

If you are bidding on your own brand and placing an ad on a page where your brand is already represented organically, use that opportunity to provide a deeper engagement. A recent example on Google US for the search term “Samsung tv”, provided an example of this. Samsung shows up well in the organic results, but they used the top ad spot to promote a special “Black Friday” offer that was timely, and more direct for some shoppers than drilling down through the Samsung web site.

Relevancy of Google Ads Affects the Whole Page

The new option on some Google searches to see up to eleven ads at the top of the search results page could put even more emphasis on the need to make sure ads are relevant. Our studies have clearly shown that if the ads are not deemed relevant to the intent of the person searching, they tend to discount all the results on the page – yes, even the organic results. Your wonderful organic listing could also get pushed down below the fold, so placing a branded result in the ad section can mitigate that problem.

Recent Changes to Google Results

Recently, Google have made a number of changes to how they present their search results pages. In case you’ve lost track, here’s a quick list:

• Google Instant
• Google Instant Previews
• Google Places
• Google Places with Hotpot
• Google Product Search with Local Inventory Count
• Google Ads (formerly known as “Sponsored Links”)

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Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist with Mediative. Mediative is one of North America’s largest integrated digital marketing companies. Their results-oriented marketing network is supported by industry thought leaders and a data-driven platform.

An industry best practice for structuring a paid search campaign is the implementation of highly targeted and relevant ad groups. This is a part of the ‘before the click’ process that can easily be controlled and maintained. If this is not happening you have bigger issues than what the rest of this discussion is about. That being said, separated out into its own stop along the entire value stream, the paid search campaign is a relatively easy thing to manage and manage well. However, as we will see, the paid search campaign is in the middle of the value stream and can only sustain long lasting success if the upstream and downstream processes are completely aligned to serve the customer with the best user experience.

Upstream From the Paid Search Campaign

Before a paid search campaign can take form and become effective a search team needs to have certain basic information from the client who is further upstream in the process than the paid search team is. The following are key points about how to be most effective and what to avoid further upstream from paid search.

1. Goals and KeyPerformance Indicator’s (KPI’s) - To begin, clients should have a good idea as to why they are getting into the paid search game or how they’d like to grow their current paid search program. Clients should know the goals they want to achieve, their KPI’s, and their tolerance/risk for testing in order to learn. Paid search experts can help set expectations and guide clients in understanding what the potential may be for reaching certain goals, however, the initial goal setting should come from further upstream. Since both parties are working toward the same end results, ideally these are collaborative goals agreed upon by the expanded team before implementation or optimization happens.

2. Messaging Information- If the paid search program has already been implemented or is in the process of being developed, one of the most critical components of a paid search campaign is the text ad. And it’s just not the relevance of the text ad for Quality Score or how targeted it is, but more so in what the text ad messaging offers. Is there a generic call to action or is there some amazing discount or benefit that only your client can offer potential customers?

In some cases differentiated messaging can be found on a client website that can be worked into the ad creative copy. In many cases, on large e-commerce sites where there are hundreds of vendors and thousands of products, hunting and pecking for sales, discounts, and offers is not an efficient use of time. These offers, sales, and discounts should be made available to the paid search team in the form of a merchandising calendar so pro-active planning can occur.

3. Internal Communication- At times there are internal communication issues outside the paid search team that occur farther upstream that can have a significant negative impact on the success of paid search. Whether it’s an in-house paid search team or an agency there can be multiple layers of people and departments involved. If those parties farther upstream fail to communicate effectively, the lack of communication can trickle farther downstream and limit the effectiveness of the paid search team. This not only adds stress to the relationship between the paid search team and the departments farther upstream, but in effect, when the lack of communication and alignment reaches the paid search team and they are left to work with limited information this will have a negative impact on potential customers – the people you are trying to convert.

The impact of upstream goals, information or lack of information can vary but can mostly be managed to a certain level of success. If upstream processes are not fully aligned with everyone involved, the sustainability of long term growth may be at risk.

Downstream From the Paid Search Campaign

As part of the development, implementation, and continuous improvement of a paid search initiative, there are a couple of ‘post-click’ components that occur on the website that have an even greater significance on the success and growth of the account than those farther upstream in the process.

1. Does the Website Work/Are the Landing Pages Valid – This downstream process is the most critical in the mix because this one comes closest to customers you are trying to convert. First and foremost your website should work 100% of the time. Beyond that it should be user friendly providing the best experience possible for customers. Once customers have decided that your paid search ad matches closest with what they want to buy or it provides a solution to their questions, you are on the way to providing a high level of satisfaction for customers.

Not only should the website work and that its usability and navigation be at its prime, but the landing pages selected must be functioning and relevant. In reference to the large paid search program above, if you tag keywords and/or ad creatives with destination URLs it is critical to have open communication (from farther upstream) as to when those URLs change due to inventory levels or other website structure changes. If the landing page has been updated or the product no longer exists and there is not a redirect in place until the paid search URL can be updated, customers landing on error pages or some other random page is never a good thing. This not only impacts customers’ experiences, but also can have Quality Score implications.

2. Proper Implementation of Web Analytics Tracking & Tags – We all know paid search and all other online marketing channels are usually inaccurate within an acceptable range. That’s just the nature of this industry. For some reason website analytics tagging is the search industries bane of existence and inevitably problems occur when web analytics site tagging is not implemented correctly the first time. The other problem is when URL tagging parameters are not used correctly and used as a temporary work-around to fix a problem farther upstream instead of fixing the root cause of the problem. These types of downstream problems create additional challenges in reporting and decision making farther upstream in the process.

Regardless of upstream or downstream from paid search, the entire value stream should be considered as a total system.  When all of these processes are aligned there is a greater opportunity for success of the paid search account. The alignment of the entire value stream also builds trust between all those involved creating a more productive team for long term sustainability.

Let us know what you think — fee free to add your comments, ideas… below!

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Matt LeVeque is the Founder & President of SEM Science Consulting, LLC and Senior Member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ).

Google AdWords can have numerous benefits if planned, executed, and monitored properly. There are also pitfalls to be avoided. This article will cover important things to avoid as well as effective steps for implementing an effective AdWords campaign.

Step 1: Define attainable goals

A team seeking to maximize the use of AdWords will identify and articulate realistic goals, which might include:

1)    Increasing donation volume

2)    Recruiting more volunteers

3)    Raising brand awareness

Step 2: Appeal to the relevant geographic and/or demographic targets.

An effective campaign should speak to a defined market. For tracking purposes, duplicating or moving around keywords once “up and running” should be avoided. A feature called Ad Scheduler can be set up using either Accelerated or Standard Delivery (evenly delivered ads throughout the day).

Step 3: Develop tightly-themed Ad Groups

The more relevant the ad text, the higher the CTR (click through rate), the Quality Score and the Page Rank that will be achieved. As for Ad Text Optimization, place catchy calls to action and inter- capitalize your display URL.  For instance, instead of having www.marketingbydeepak.com show http://www.marketingbydeepak.com/.  In addition, rotate various ads and you can track individual performance.

Step 4: Research keywords

This requires serious consideration; an organization can benefit from using the Google Suggest Tool to find relevant keywords.  Trying to think like the target demographic may result in coming up with keywords from the User’s perspective.  Be sure to look at all match types – broad, phrase and exact.

Step 5: Landing Page Optimization.

Most people have shared the frustrating experience of clicking on an ad only to be led to page that has nothing to do with the product/service searched for.  There are numerous resources available on Landing Page Designs online.

The bottom line is that the marketer can have great goals, campaigns, ad groups and keywords; however, if these cannot be converted to close the sale, the effort has been fruitless.

AdWords Campaign Cautions and Pitfalls
Earlier, it was mentioned that there are pitfalls to be avoided. Chief among these is: Google AdWords cannot be done alone.  AdWords is only one aspect of Social Media, which is a marketing tactic.  Any business or organization seeking to leverage the social media tools, at a minimum, will establish a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and show up in organic search results in addition to running AdWords.

Statistics indicate that, when people do searches, 75% of the time they click on the organic content found within the search engine results page (SERP).  Only 25% click what they see on the sponsored links section.   Users tend to trust the organic content more because of the independent review.  An organization that shows up in both areas has a great deal in its favor!

Branding should not be underestimated.  An organization that is well-branded and enjoys good press is more likely to perform better than an up-and-comer.

Remember to use Keyword Research, the Google Suggestion Tool, and to brainstorm with your Team or others to generate novel ideas.  Even funny-sounding search terms can yield surprising results!

Campaigns that are up and running can benefit from the reporting features and Google Analytics to monitor and track campaign performance.  Every so often, adjust a campaign by eliminating low performers, refining keywords, and ads themselves.  Repeat this process often.

As with other aspects of your ad campaign, budget how much to spend on AdWords.  Calculate enough allowance for your industry.  Competitors may jump in and bid up the price for keywords.  Determine a realistic ROI. Team members should take the time to read your reports and work with AdWords as seriously as they would a direct mail campaign.

What are the challenges you face with your AdWords campaigns? Please add your comments below.

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Deepak Gupta is VP of Marketing for Help My Resume, a Florida-based non-profit and is the Principal of Marketing By Deepak Consulting Group. Prior to jumping into the inbound marketing world, Deepak worked in database marketing and analytics where he developed marketing initiatives for brands like the Auto Club, State Farm, UPS, Hooked On Phonics, Comcast, AT&T, World Wrestling Entertainment, ESPN, Nickelodeon and other related brands.

The countdown to Christmas is on and the holiday shopping season is now in full swing, with Cyber Monday just barely in the rear view mirror. The good news is that there is still a lot that can be done to take advantage of the increase in consumer spending this month, whether you started planning in July or are just now thinking about how to grow sales this holiday. Here are 5 tips and tricks that any Pay Per Click (PPC) advertiser should consider when maximizing AdWords for the holiday sales rush.

1.       Budget Wisely. For many online retailers, traffic and sales volume can go through the roof come holiday time. This is because more people are searching and more of those searchers have the intent to buy. Don’t let your ‘regular’ budgets limit your profits. If you are obtaining or exceeding your ROI goals, there is no reason to keep your campaign budgets capped! This is one of the easiest ways to increase your PPC profits this time of year.  Review your campaign budgets and ROI and where it makes financial sense increase those daily campaign budgets to levels that ensure your ads aren’t missing out on impressions.

 In AdWords, you can look to the metric called “Lost IS (budget)” (“IS” stands for “Impression Share”) to tell you how much traffic you might be missing out on. In the AdWords interface, edit the columns of data you are viewing and select this metric. If your “Lost IS (budget)” is 25%, then that means that you could be receiving 25% more impressions if your budgets were 25% higher.

2.       Plan Your Promotions, Have Ads at the Ready. Make the management of your holiday PPC efforts effortless – by having all of your promotions laid out for the holiday season, you can also ensure that you have PPC ads ready to support those promotions. By creating ads ahead of time and including the ads in your campaigns on “Paused” status before the promotion is live you allow time for the ads to be approved by editorial and limit the risk of any lack of visibility when your promotion goes live. I generally recommend adding new ads a week in advance just to be sure there aren’t any editorial issues. Then when it comes time to promote your sale or special offer all you have to do is switch your old ads off and flip your new ads on.

 3.       Know Your Competitor’s Deals. Holiday shoppers are a fickle bunch – always looking for the best deal. This is why it’s so critical to make sure your promotions are just as attractive as your competitors. Be sure to consider the total price of the transaction, including shipping. A comparable “30% off regular price” will not be as enticing if your standard shipping is $10 and your competitor is offering reduced or free shipping on top of the 30% off price tag. Monitor your competitor’s ads and websites and have the flexibility to adjust your promotions accordingly.

 4.       Leverage Sitelinks. Many retailers have a lot of different promotions, offers and sales taking place this time of year – and with only a very limited amount of space in the typical PPC ad, it can be difficult or impossible to make sure searchers are fully informed. The AdWords ad extension called “Sitelinks” can add up to 140 additional extra characters to your text ad space. Add up to ten Sitelinks per campaign that call out, for example, your Free Shipping offer, Clearance Sale, New Products, lowered prices on specific products in your inventory, or Gift Guides. AdWords will display up to four Sitelinks in an ad at a time. Sitelinks will not only help to make your promotions visible, but your ads themselves are often more visible and can generate high click-through-rates.

 In this example, Moonstruck Chocolates is using Sitelinks to merchandise a variety of holiday-related product offerings. A range of price-points are included in order to speak to a range of shopper’s budgets.

5.       Plan for Promotions After December 25^th. This is something that retailers often forget about – some of the biggest shopping days of the year are actually AFTER Christmas. This is driven by gifts that shoppers received such as gift cards, cash or products such as a Wii that will require the purchase of additional games and accessories. Post-Christmas shopping is also driven by deal-seekers heading out in droves to take advantage of all of the clearance sales that traditionally take place at this time. Be sure to promote your post-holiday sales in PPC; don’t just revert to your ‘regular’ ad messaging. Make your website’s Clearance or Sale section extra prominent, but be sure to keep tabs on inventory – if pickings are slim, then users can get frustrated and leave the site without making a purchase.

Even though the holiday shopping season is quickly counting down, PPC advertisers still have time to grow sales and profits. Make it a happy holiday for your PPC campaigns by implementing any or all of these five easy tips.

Let us know what is working or not for your holiday AdWords campaigns. Feel free to comment!

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Leisa Hall is an Account Director at Anvil Media, Inc. – a search engine marketing agency in Portland, Oregon. Leisa directs Search Engine Marketing strategy primarily for B2C clients ranging in size from start-up to Fortune 500.

When creating a pay per click campaign, marketers commonly focus on things like keywords, match types, cost per click bids, organizing the campaign into ad groups, target cost per acquisition, and other mechanics of PPC campaigns. But in concentrating on the setup and execution of their pay per click campaigns, too many marketers don’t spend enough time thinking about their PPC landing pages – some don’t even setup customized landing pages at all!

So here are the top landing page mistakes to avoid when creating pages for your pay per click campaigns:

1) Not having a landing page. I know I already mentioned this, but this is the single biggest mistake you can make. Many marketers who are first getting into PPC advertising think it’s adequate to drive traffic to their website. Get people to your home page, and they’ll know what to do, right?

Wrong. When people are typing a search into Google, Bing, or another search engine, they are looking for an immediate answer to a specific query. If they click on your ad, they’re expecting a question to the answer they asked – now. They’re not going to dig through your website to find what they’re looking for. Customized landing pages answer the question the searcher was asking quickly and directly.

2) Not having CUSTOMIZED landing pages. If you’re running a large pay per click campaign or multiple PPC campaigns, chances are you are covering a multitude of keywords and have numerous ads. If possible and appropriate, you should be setting up customized landing pages with different offers that are aligned with the ads and keywords used in individual ad groups and campaigns.

This can help improve your quality scores for Google AdWords, which, in turn, can help bring down your cost per click. By ensuring your landing page offer and wording are closely aligned with your ads, you should also improve your conversion rate.

3) Not having a conversion goal. Too many marketers do setup landing pages, but fail to setup a conversion goal. What is a conversion? Simply put, a conversion is when a visitor to your landing page takes the action you want them to take.

This could be downloading an ebook or white paper, signing up for a newsletter, registering for a webinar, and so on. If there isn’t an action you’re trying to get visitors to take, why are you paying to get them to your website? Tracking conversions lets you know how effective your PPC campaigns are. Make sure you define what your conversion is and setup conversion code on your landing pages to track when visitors complete your defined goal.

4) Not tracking return on investment. While establishing a dollar value for conversions can sometimes seem arbitrary, doing so can help you manage your PPC campaigns and determine whether or not they are cost effective. While the dollar value of some conversions might be easy to calculate (buying a product, registering for a paid webinar), others can be more difficult (signing up for a newsletter or downloading a free white paper).

Do your best to realistically calculate the value of your conversions and use this to compute ROI on pay per click campaigns.

5) Not testing, testing, testing. Another major mistake many online marketers make is failing to constantly test and improve the effectiveness of their PPC campaigns. There are many landing page optimization tools out there to help you do this.

If you’re not continually testing and optimizing your landing pages, you’re letting potential customers get away and leaving money on the table. Testing different offers, landing page designs, copy, and images can help you improve the conversion rate on your pay per click campaigns.

Everybody has been new to Internet marketing at some point, but that doesn’t mean you have to repeat the same mistakes as everyone else. Instead, learn from the common pay per click landing page mistakes explained here.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  Jason has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Online marketing today is not quite what it used to be. Just a couple of years ago, the combination of SEO with PPC seemed to be the final word in serious online marketing. With Social Media gaining ground in recent years, more and more channels and communities are accessible to users where they prefer to ‘hang out.’

Users are researching blogsphere & community websites for checking out reviews of products they want to buy, find solutions to their problems, or just share their views on subjects that would interest most marketers in reaching out to them. Most users feel that peer groups tend to offer a more unbiased and genuine reviews about products.

Facebook’s traffic alone is inching close to Google’s traffic and is growing at a much faster rate than Google’s traffic. Twitter’s traffic is in the vicinity of Yahoo’s & Bing’s traffic put together. Smart marketers need to put their content in front of these potential buyers, right where they hang out.

The increase of Social Media usage, as against traditional marketing channels like SEO & PPC, is also throwing up several uneasy questions –

• Is SEO losing its effectiveness, becoming obsolete or already dead?
• Will PPC become more expensive? Will it continue to serve its original purpose?
• Will companies divert part of their PPC budgets into SEO & Social Media Marketing?
• Is Social Media just a fad? Can Social Media really serve as a serious marketing vehicle? Should one have a defined and serious Social Media Marketing strategy?
• Will Social Media continue to grow at the same pace or is it reaching its saturation?
• What will happen if search engines like Google make more radical changes to their algorithms?
• Should one have a common or a complimentary marketing message across SEO, PPC & Social Media?
• How should SEO, PPC and SMM dovetail into your online marketing strategy? What role should each play? What kind of performance can one expect from each of these marketing vehicles?
• How does one decide how much budget one should allocate to each media?

Today’s marketers need to take a fresh look at their marketing strategies when they plan their media mix of SEO, PPC, Social Media and other vehicles to deliver their marketing message. Conventional promotion techniques and approaches need to be innovated to get powerful results and fight competition.

One can no longer think of SEO, PPC, and Social Media Marketing in isolation. You need to have a holistic approach in planning the media mix, keeping in mind the power as well as limitations of each media. The role of each media should be deployed in such a way that they fill gaps of the other. One needs to use each medium for what it is best suited to individually accomplish, given its distinct advantages. Ideally, SEO, PPC, and Social Media should together serve your common business goals.

Online Marketing Objectives

Before you can go about planning how each marketing medium should be used, it is important to first outline your specific short-term & long-term marketing objectives. Getting clarity on your marketing objectives is key to setting a roadmap for your resource deployment and budget allocation to SEO, PPC and Social Media. SEO usually works well to serve your long-term objectives, while PPC and Social Media Marketing can be used to achieve both short-term and long term marketing objectives.

For example, SEO can be deployed to steadily build website traffic for your main key phrases but may require considerable time and resources to get good results. However, SEO can achieve quicker results for your long-tail keywords with minimal efforts. It is also cost effective to promote ‘non-commercial’ product-relevant keywords, which may not boost instant sales on your website, but is good to get potential buyers interested in your product and may eventually convert into sales.

PPC is ideal for promoting special offers, seasonal sales, geo-targeting, new product launches, direct website sales, lead generation, website page content A|B split testing and getting traffic for your ‘head’ or competitive keyword phrases that result in conversions. Essentially, it is best to invest in PPC where time is of essence and the results can be commercially measurable.

Social media promotion can play an effective role in building customer relationships, interactivity, providing customer support services at reduced cost, get direct customer feedback on your products, your services and your website. It allows you to build communities, positively influence existing communities and steer a positive peer review of your products.  Social media also works well in affiliate development, engaging new marketing partners, hiring key people, channel development, brand image building, creating brand visibility, online reputation management, and lead the users to useful online resources, information and reference material on your website.

Of the three stages of the buying process –

a) research stage where the customer is researching on the possible products or solutions

b) when the buyer firms up his buying decision and

c) when he is ready to make the purchase

- SEO and Social media can work cheaper to serve the first two stages, while PPC can serve as a ‘go-getter’ to grab the buyer in the third stage.

In this multi-part article, I shall evaluate several of the aspects listed above. We will try to understand the unique advantages of SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing and how each of these marketing vehicles can work in coordination to deliver maximum mileage for your marketing dollar. A well planned marketing strategy based on clearly laid out objectives not only enables you to measure the success of your campaign but also secures your investment for a long term and helps you remain ahead of the competition.

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Atul Gupta is the Co-Founder & CEO of RedAlkemi.com, a company specializing in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. Atul is a thought-leader in Online Marketing industry and has been working in this field since 1996. His company has helped over a thousand clients succeed in their online businesses. Atul is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has published several articles about SEM industry.

Any single-metric-based approach is dangerous, but some are more deadly than others, especially in some contexts.

When you’re doing Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing as an Affiliate Marketer, you want to have a clear understanding of how the Earnings Per Click (EPC) is being calculated. EPC is a metric that is being widely used by affiliate programs and affiliate networks. In fact, while there is no across-the-industry uniformity on displaying other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of affiliate programs, EPC is one of very few metrics that is being disclosed to you — even before you join an affiliate program — by most affiliate networks out there.

Here’s an example of how this looks on Commission Junction:

While on the surface, EPC looks like a great “benchmark” metric, but it can be quite dangerous when taken at face value. There are two things PPC marketers shouldn’t do with the EPC data:

1) Do Not Understand EPC Literally

“While  this  abbreviation  was  originally  coined  to  stand  for an affiliate program’s average affiliate’s EPC, you want to be 100% clear on how exactly it’s being calculated. In fact, in the vast majority of cases EPC now means Earnings Per 100 Clicks, and not per single click. The formula used for calculating EPC in the majority of affiliate marketing contexts is: EPC = Profit ÷ Clicks × 100. Therefore, in the above screenshot AT&T affiliate program’s 3-month EPC, which is $88.65, should be read as: “$88.65 is what an average affiliate earns through the AT&T’s program on every 100 visitors sent to them”.

But wait! That’s not the only thing you want to understand about EPC! Point #2 is even more important:

2) Do Not Budget Your PPC Campaign(s) Based on EPC

When setting your PPC bids, you have to be especially careful with how you use the EPC data. One of the costliest mistakes is to merely divide the EPC figure by 100, and budget your marketing campaign setting the result of this basic arithmetic operation as the amount you’re willing to pay per click/visitor.

Let’s take this health insurance affiliate program as an example. Below is the information you will see on it (prior to joining it):

The program’s 3-months’ EPC is $16.56. Dividing this number by 100, we will arrive at an average affiliate earning of $0.16-$0.17 per click.

Here’s the part you do not see (top 10 affiliates’ EPC in the program):

Do you see how different the amounts are in every case? They range from $5.45 to $292.24 in earnings per 100 clicks, but you don’t know this when you’re looking at the average; and the individual affiliate’s EPC data is only available to the merchant.

There are also other important factors that you do not know (about the program, and affiliates in the program), but the above example illustrates the point well.

Averages are good to know, but always tricky, and should be treated as such. Never base your decision on any single metric, regardless of the context, and especially if this metric is an average.

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Geno Prussakov is the Founder of AMNavigator.com, a graduate of the University of Cambridge, author of “A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing” (2007), “Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes” (2008), contributor to “Internet Marketing from the Real Experts” (2010), international speaker, and regular contributor to a number of industry’s publications. He is an acclaimed expert in affiliate marketing and an award-winning affiliate manager. Feel free to contact him directly with any questions on affiliate management.

Think about the hot-button keywords for online businesses. Many will say “need traffic”. Others say “more leads”, “improve rankings” or “need new website.” I say conversions, i.e. the result that is recorded after the visitor performs an event and actions preceding that. This is what smart marketers work on.

Recently, I spoke to the owner of an online health-care business. He needed to ‘improve’ his website with a new look. After a brief discussion, he shifted his thinking. He didn’t need a prettier site, but rather – to focus on tracking, measuring and tuning the traffic, conversion and funnel experience that the visitor had with his website.

Your website – a performance machine.

To build a better performing website – you must build trust, authority – both in the users and search engines’ eyes. And, it helps if you create compelling, actionable pages that convert.

However, this article is not about detailed conversion strategies, per se. It’s about building website content with which users engage. And, it is about creating an experience for the visitor that compels action, referrals and admiration (fans) for your business.

I have used these strategies to more than triple traffic in a short period of time using content marketing and SEO friendly copy. The bounce rate moved from approx. 90% to about 22% in the same period, as well as doubling the lead count, and increasing time on site to an average of 9 minutes.

Quality content – how to create it.

What is the word that you hear most often at SEO conferences? Answer: Links. It makes sense, since that’s at the heart of search engine’s ranking algorithm, and in specific, Google. It is the power of “votes” for your website (pages, actually) from others across the Internet. You get the benefit (depending on the link attribution) of ‘link juice’, overall visibility and, if done right – more web traffic.

To develop quality content, several criterions exist. One important aspect is about matching your content to your audience.

You can do this by collecting information for topics from:

• Keyword research (Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker.com, Keyworddiscovery.com)
• Competitive research (Search engines, spyfu.com, semrush.com)
• Links research (OpensiteExplorer.org)
• Popularity research (Google trends, digg.com, amazon.com, shopping.com, search.twitter.com)

Once you have data from this research, you’ll be able to build the articles and a content calendar for your website. You’ll have a never ending stream of ideas from which to build. You can even outsource this research if you don’t have time. Check http://www.elance.com/ to start. (Footnote: I recommend using a blog – WordPress – to facilitate the organization and output of this new, steady content. Soon, I’m launching a new search-engine friendly WordPress system with built in content marketing solutions. Feel free to check http://www.simplewebsitepress.com/ for more information).

Visitors and links attraction.

Now that you have your content factory constructed, users should find you as you deploy and get a few links. However, you must expand your strategy to capture a broader net. These next steps will help your content get wings, and will provide much needed links for the authority building.

While some would say, start with a PPC campaign, find out what works first – and then apply wider strategies later, I say you can expand using social media with very little effort and cost too. Reaching out to other bloggers in your space will be important, don’t forget that. Here’s what to do:

Step 1: Convert your text into video format. Upload to Youtube. Use Tubemogul for wider syndication. Use keywords in Titles, URLs early in descriptions, add full text there also.

Step 2: Build an audio version. Audacity.com is free to record if you do it yourself. Or, use transcription services (also elance.com). I hear good things about castingwords.com. Distribute to podcasting / voice directories. Try itunes.com.

Step 3: Create a list of places to “tweet” and distribute the (links) multiple formats of content into the social media sphere – start with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. (Footnote: don’t spam, join the social communities, and become a listener first). Include rich media into press releases. Try a social media release with prweb.com.

These tactics work, and Google loves multi-media and video. It’s easier to get listed in organic (universal search) results with video.

Develop a process for yourself, and keep doing it consistently. I spend most of my time in research and RSS feeds, and content is built in 10-20 minutes on average.

Provide something of immediate value, offer downloads and give products (when you can) away for free. Don’t forget to build out a great relationship via your follow-up email marketing (did you get their name & email?). Learn their behaviors from that list over time. Send information they care about, and drive them back to your money site.

Let us know how you are creating an experience to compel visitor actions, referrals and admiration (fans) for your business. Feel free to comment!

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Jon Rognerud is the SEO columnist, blogger at Entrepreneur Magazine, author of the “Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization” (Entrepreneur Press/McGraw-Hill) and writes on his own blog at http://www.jonrognerud.com. Visit now to get more cool information on internet marketing, SEO, PPC, Social Media, content, traffic, lead strategies – and learning more about the human challenges of being an Entrepreneur. You are not alone.