Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

This traditional media is experiencing quite a shakeup. From the research I have done, it appears that circulation numbers have stayed stable but no real growth. I think that the cost of printing coming down as meant that publishers can print more copies of their magazines at a cheaper cost and pump them out to the public to get the circulation numbers higher.

Are they really growing?
In reality, newspapers and magazines are not growing. I forgot the last time I bought a newspaper or magazine and think they are a waste of paper. When was the last time you bought a paper or magazine?

Advertising revenue from traditional media is falling. That is because the ads in these publications are not as effective as they used to be. I used to advertise in all the computer and Internet magazines in Australia with a full page ad. But as more competitors started advertising in the same magazines, our return on investment fell and we pulled out.

News are it happens
Newspapers and magazines cannot keep up with the news quick enough. A monthly magazine is often out of date by the time the reader gets a copy. Blogs and other websites have up-to-date content. Many websites display content as it’s happening.

I don’t think newspapers and magazines will ever die but I do not think they will ever be as big as they were.

What do you think? Are websites and social media replacing newspapers and magazines?

Of all the businesses I talk to, many of them are cutting out Yellow Pages advertising completely or at least cutting back on their spending. I’m not sure of the exact numbers are for their advertising revenue but it seems the old yellow book is an out of date concept.

Customers are turning to the Internet to do most of their product research. With search engines and other websites, customers are dealing with businesses all over Australia and the world – not just in the local area anymore.

Introduction of Metropolitan and Mobile Books
To earn more money, Yellow Pages introduced new lines – Regional books within metro areas and Yellow in the Car. This means that advertisers have to spend more money to make sure they cover their area.

Google Local Search
Google is becoming more targeted with their local searches. When this becomes mainstream, it will be necessary to be listed in here. I think there will be more local websites appearing helping people find local businesses.

Our Experience with Yellow Pages
We have cut back completely on all our Yellow Pages advertising and the online version got us zero results after spending 6 months advertising on their website.

What do you do?
When researching about your next holiday, booking airline tickets, booking show tickets … Do you turn to the Yellow Pages and start dialing? Do you go into town and go into the shops? Or do you do what most people are doing – getting on the Internet and doing all your research ang bookings online? So who is going to get the big yellow book out and use that as their research tool?

What has your experience been with Yellow Pages? Do you still use it? Will you be advertising in the Yellow Pages next year?

Maybe you should look at moving some of your advertising budget from Yellow Pages to Internet advertising?

Your website can rank higher by simply knowing what elements Google and other search engines look at when indexing your page. When you are aware of these elements, you can make minor modifications to your website to produce a better ranking.

This is information that your SEO expert does not want you to know. SEO experts charge thousands of dollars to apply this to your website.

1. URL – The URL is the web address. You can name the page with the targeted keywords.
   Action – Name your pages accordingly.
   Example – http://yourdomain.com.au/keyword.html
    
2. Links – The links in the page should be related to the targeted keywords. These are just like references and by reading the references, you should be able to work out what the original page is about.
   Action – Name your links so they are related to the targeted keywords.
   Example – <a href=”apr.com.au”>Australian Produce Report</a>
    
3. The title tag – Do not simply place your business name here. Search engines rank the first words as the most important keywords for your site.
   Action – Place the most important keywords first and then your business name.
   Example – <title>keywords | page name | Business name</title>
    
4. The description tag – This does not have as much weight as it used to have but it is still important. Many search engines still look at this for keywords and even Google may use it as the description for your page in it’s search results.
   Action – Imagine that your visitor has not seen the page and write a good description about what the page is about.
   Example – <meta name=”description” content=”a great description of the page”>
    
5. The keywords tag – Search engines may not put much weight on to the specified keywords but it is still good to include it because every bit helps.
   Action – Enter a list of the most important keyworkds into this tag.
   Example – <meta name=”keywords” content=”a list of great keywords”>
    
6. The heading tags – Search engines look at the heading tags throughout your document and define what the page is about. Many websites make the mistake of not using the heading tags at all so the text looks like a long blurb to a search engine.
   Action – Using heading tags to break up your text into headings and subheadings using the search engine recognised way.
   Example – <h1>Big heading</h1> … text … <h2>Sub heading here</h2> … more text.
    
7. Bold text – Does your site use bold text? Using bolding on your most important keywords in your text. This will make it easier for a human reader and search engine bot to understand it – but make sure that it still looks good. Afterall, you need to make pages that humans can read and not pages that are simply only optimized and readable by search engine robots.
   Action – Use bolding for your most important keywords in your content
    
8. Text – Your chosen keywords should be the main discussion points on this page. If you have chosen a keyword but have not mentioned it in the content, should you be really targeting that keyword or maybe you need to add more content so you include the keywords.
   Action – Check that your target keywords are aligned with the content.
    
9. Alt text – Do your images utilize the image description element? If you load a web page without images, you should be able to make out what the images are about using the image description information. Search engines only read text and not images. The alt image value appears when you rest a mouse on an image.
   Action – Describe every image on the page and add your targeted keywords where you can. Remember that Braille readers and speech synthesizers use the alt text value so do not confuse these readers.
    

How could we forget these basic rules?
When making a web page, we often think about the marketing and the selling perspective of the page. We often forget that search engine robots need to read these pages too. On the other hand, we need to create pages that humans can understand as well.

Search engines try and replicate how a human would read a page but sometimes, they need a helping hand. By implementing these elements correctly on all your web pages means that search engines will recognise the content and targeted keywords more easily.

Conclusion
You now know how to optimize your on-page elements for your website. Now go update your website with your new found knowledge!

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising means that you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement. You do not pay each time your ad is displayed. PPC advertising can be an effective form of advertising because you are paying based on the performance of the ad. If no one clicks on your ad, then you do not pay.

The idea was formed in 1998 by GoTo, a search engine portal. PPC has now become one of the main forms of advertising online. This has created some very competitive marketplaces and can be expensive. Some marketplaces are very inexpensive and can be very profitable.

The Benefits of Pay-Per-Click
There are many reasons and benefits for using PPC advertising. Here are some of the benefits -

• Get instant traffic to your website
• Create test campaigns
• No waiting to be listed in the organic search listing
• Allows (smart) small players to compete against the big guys
• Spending controlled on a daily, weekly or monthly basis
• Anyone can setup a PPC advertising campaign in Google, Yahoo or Bing.
• Continually test landing pages, ads, keywords before putting more resources into the campaign

The Cost of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The great thing about PPC is you control what you spend. For popular keywords, the budget can be limitless. Industries such as insurance and car rentals can be very expensive and push the smaller players out.

Some keywords can be very profitable resulting in high conversion rates. Having a great ad, the right keywords and sending the visitor to the correct page can make all the difference for a successful campaign.

I have personally seen websites that were previously getting very little traffic and poor sales results – to becoming an overnight success because the world did not know they existed. Once the right traffic was sent to the site, the website started producing great profits and operations expanded.

Always Testing
Pay-Per-Click campaigns allow you to continually do testing. You can run a PPC campaign for one day or even an hour and see how people respond to the ad that you have created, the landing page that you are sending the traffic to and track the keywords that you are targeting.

You can do split testing where you run two ads in rotation and see which one runs best. You cannot do that with normal print media.

Tracking Results = Return on Investment
Through the use of Google Analytics and similar programs, you can track all online transactions. You can see the following information -

• The exact keywords that the visitors enter to find your ad
• The pages they view when they visit your site
• The cost of the ad
• The conversion rates resulting in working out the ROI

Why Pay-Per-Click is Important
If you are not advertising your services to your potential customers, your competition will and they will get your new customers. Can you afford to lose customers?

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts will be wasted if you target the wrong keywords. PPC allows you to fast track your SEO by testing the keywords before you even attempt to optimize your site for those keywords.

Warning – You Can Lose Money
Google and Yahoo are targeting small businesses to start advertising online by offering free credit. Please be educated before you setup your own campaigns. If you do not know what you are doing, you will lose money. I have seen business with one keyword in their keyword list, poorly written ads and sending visitors to the wrong page. I have even seen ads sending visitors to broken pages!

Professional Pay-Per-Click Consultants
If you do not know what you are doing, I recommend using a professional service. They will charge for their service but in the long run, it can save you thousands of dollars and a lot of time.

A professional Pay-Per-Click consultant will -

• Research for the best keywords
• Enter negative keywords
• Create professional copy for your ad
• Pre-qualify visitors so you are only getting buyers to your website
• Point visitors to the correct pages on your website
• Setup multiple campaigns
• Optimize your ads to have a strong rating
• Continually test keywords, ads and the land pages
• Control the spending of your campaign
• Analysis the existing competition
• Generate reports based on the performance of your campaigns
• Answer any questions you may have

Conclusion
Pay-Per-Click advertising can be used in many ways to help your website get more sales and become more profitable.

I will be writing more articles to explain the different ways you can advertise your site online and setting up your own campaigns. If you have any questions, please email nigel@burke.com.au

Google has introduced a new feature to their online map service: Real estate listings. That’s right! You can now have your property listed on Google Maps for free. This service is shaking the online real estate portals.

You can use this feature here – Google Maps and click on Real Estate.

Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au are angry
News Corp who owns 60% of realestate.com.au and Fairfax Media owns domain.com.au are very upset. They are big spenders of advertising on Google and have now been shot down by Google by providing free real estate listings.

They are now re-evaluating the millions of dollars they spend with Google.

Simon Baker, the former boss at realestate.com.au said “Google was moving from a search engine to a portal what is now serving up the end data itself.

What’s Next?
It seems that Google is putting it’s finger into everything these days. Will these moves help Google become more popular or is it going to hurt Google in the longterm?

Have your say below ..

Google Wave is a highly anticipated tool by many people. It’s an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave is similar to an email which people can discuss and work together on multiple document types.

The file types include normal documents, videos, photos, maps and more.

How is it different to an email?
Imagine an email where it could be edited like a conversation by a number of invited people. Unlike emails that are bounced around to a number of people with different sets of replies, a Google Wave would allow one page that has everyone’s contributions and accessible by any computer.

It’s a live document where all participants can watch and interact together. We can all relate to miscommunication with emails with information all over the place.

But will a Google Wave resolve this problem?
I think having all the information at a central point where everyone can see the same information is definitely on the right track. Collaboration is a very important function because many of us are working with people that are in multiple locations across the world.

Group Projects
We all remember what it was like doing group assignments at school or university. The students do their part of a group assignment and submit it to the organizer of the group. People end up writing the wrong content, there is duplicate content, people write conflicting points, the list goes on.

I believe that if Google Wave works for students, it would work well for businesses.

Conclusion
I can see many uses for the new Google Wave application but only see the live document being useful. It does not sound revolutionary to me. Google is hyping this up a lot and there is a lot of talk about it on the Internet.

They are encouraging developers to build applications that use the Wave framework. Maybe some developers will be able to provide more applications that will help us work in an online world.

Click here to find out more about Google Wave.

Melbourne Cup is the race the stops the nation. It is expected that $230 million dollars will be gambled on this race from punters and an incredible $1.67 billion over the four day race carnival. Many people take a day off work and go to the races, go to Melbourne Cup functions and have office parties. It is even a public holiday in Victoria!

Would your business benefit from advertising for the Melbourne Cup? Could customers interested in the Melbourne Cup use your services? You may not be based in Melbourne but this is watched by half the population in Australia. Is that a big enough market?

Melbourne Cup search on Google
I did a Google web search for “melbourne cup” and there is 17,500,000 results but there are only 4 advertisers which are gambling websites. A search for “melbourne cup catering” has 48,900 results and many more advertisers.

Could your business be advertising for melbourne cup services? What about other events?

Event Specific SEM Campaigns
You can create specific SEM campaigns that target the event. You would need to choose related keywords, create related ads and maybe even create a special land page to send people to. The campaign may only run for a couple of weeks leading up to the event and then you could turn it off. Maybe re-use it for next year.

The benefit of setting up an SEM campaign and paying for the traffic means that you don’t need to optimize your website for the event keywords. You can apply a budget and only pay for the performance.

Conclusion
I hope I have you thinking about setting up event campaigns to targetted events utilisng search engine marketing.