Did you know that when Google initially became known, its founders had no way to make money from their new search engine? That’s right. It wasn’t until Google Adwords came along, that Google was able to finally turn a profit, and a profit they have certainly made. Adwords bring Google over $1 billion per month! So, that should be encouraging to you when considering how to advertise your business.

With that being said, it’s very easy to spend lots of money very quickly, gain a lot of visitors to your site, and make little or no money. When considering how to advertise your business with Adwords, there are some things to consider. First of all, Success with Adwords is a two-step process: 1) You need to make sure your Adwords account is set up properly, and 2) You need to make sure your site is set up in a way that people will respond to it.

First of all, you need to do some research online and compare yourself to your competitors. Are there many other companies that are essentially selling the same thing you are? Are you able to compete with other companies in your industry or are they too big to compete with? You need to assess your competition. The next thing you want to do is access Google’s free keyword tool. Plug in some key phrases you’d like to show up for and see what the going cost-per-click rate is for those key phrases. Are you willing to spend what it takes to get first page placement?

Now, once that’s all said and done, and you feel you still have a shot at making Adwords work, you need to organize your account well. Here are a few suggestions:

Organize your products/services into unique themes (Ad groups). Don’t bundle everything under one campaign. If you sell men’s shoes, for example, here are some potential ad groups:

Men’s dress shoes

Men’s running shoes

Men’s boots

You get the idea. Then build keyword lists, using the free keyword tool, under those ad groups. Then build unique ads for those ad groups. This will also save you money as Google will lower your cost-per-click if your ads prove to be relevant.

Send your visitors from your Adwords campaign to the proper landing page. Don’t make them navigate to your site any more than is absolutely necessary. I can’t tell you how many people I see that send everyone to their home page. If your ads talks about men’s dress shoes, send them to the page that talks about men’s dress shoes.

Next, implement negative keywords. These are words you wouldn’t want to have trigger your ads like free, cheap, etc. Make a list and add them. Go to the keyword tab, scroll to the bottom, and you’ll see where to add them.

Don’t bid on single words. They’re too general. If you sell shoes, don’t bid on the word “shoes.” You’ll go broke sooner than you’d like. Generally speaking, the more specific the search, the more clear the searcher is on what he or she wants.

Okay, let’s talk about what your website should be like for a second. Aesthetics is a tricky topic because we all perceive things differently. However, there are some general rules of thumb to heed to in order to ensure your guests don’t regret landing on your site.

Keep your site clean and professional. Leave off unnecessary flash and wacky free widgets and noise makers. Keep it simple, clean, and most importantly helpful. Ask yourself, “Would I want to spend time on my own site if I were my site visitor?” Always remember. It’s about them; not you.

Make sure your site offers as much helpful, valuable content as possible to help them make a buying decision. If all you have are buy now buttons everywhere, you won’t do well. Give them the information they want, and they are much more likely to do business with you.

Provide a clear call to action, and create a fear of loss. While not being pushy, express to your site visitors what you want them to do, and by creating things like limited time offers, you can create a fear of loss in their minds to help motivate them to act sooner as opposed to later.

Success with Adwords is a process. You’ll need to give yourself a few months to determine what’s working and what’s not. However, if you keep your visitors’ best interests in mind, you are much more likely to succeed above your competitors.

This is a guest post by
Brandon Jones
Senior Marketing Advisor
My Marketing Team

Tel: 818.693.1450 | Fax: 877.543.7560

Image via Wikipedia

Where’s the Return on Investment from Social Media Marketing. There isn’t any. Now it’s official, at least according to the folks at Copyblogger.

Are you surprised? I’m not. I’ve believed for some time now the only way of making money on the Internet is teaching people how to make money on the Internet, and that includes Social Media Marketing.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be including social media in your marketing strategy. Far from it. It does mean you shouldn’t expect to measure the return on the investment. Because there is none.

You might remember, back in the days before Adwords, the accepted wisdom about advertising was everybody knew 50% of money spent on it was wasted. Unfortunately nobody knew which 50%.

Advertising was about brand building, about recognition and about reputation. It was intended to support the product at point of sale. Not drive immediate revenue. Adwords kind of changed the conversation with cost per click and cost per conversion. But the reality is somewhat different. There’s no shortage of businesses with bad experience of adwords, including this one. And these days companies are as likely to pay for Internet advertising as part of the brand building.

Internet advertising turns out to be no different to traditional media advertising, and so does social media marketing. That’s the point made by Copyblogger.

But of course there is a point to social media activity. Businesses may not be able to measure returns in ways some would be consultants suggest. But they can understand the risks of not being where prospects and customers will look for them.

Social media is the ideal place for the new openness, honesty and availability we customers expect of our suppliers. Only businesses with something to cover up need avoid it. Every other business should embrace it, remembering social media isn’t about selling its about listening.

These days social media is a fundamental dimension of customer experience.

Has Google got it right with Buzz? What do you think? From what I see the evidence just isn’t there right now. All of the noise and most of the activity is on Twitter. Maybe for kids and family Facebook has some sort of leadership, but Twitter has the mindshare, driven by the traditional media. Every TV show, or celebrity, or journalist, seems to carry around a Follow Me on Twitter banner.

Meanwhile Linked In aggregates this stuff for business types. Status updates and RSS feeds get published on our profiles. Others are jumping into the aggregation space. The most useful, to me at least are Gist and Rapport. Both integrate with Gmail, even for Apps users, which is more than Buzz does.

Buzz, on the face of it is another Wave. A barmy idea to come out of some hidden Google cave in the back of beyond, just because they can. It isn’t working. There’s no traction. So who gives a crap about Buzz?

Well thinking about this for some time now I’ve concluded Google has actually got it right.

Twitter is really just another communication mechanism, like Email and SMS, but its swamped by garbage. There are plenty of services to help us sort the posts we’re interested in from the rubbish. That’s exactly what Gist does – help us see what people we’re interested in are saying, in updates and feeds. And it lets us do that in our time, when we’re ready. We don’t have to be watching the stream, or using search, or get clever with Lists.

Isn’t that what Buzz is going to do?

Buzz sits there as part of our Inbox, at least for people we know. It’s a combination of broadcast stuff, updates and feeds. It’s also a Short Message Service. And of course it hooks up with our Google Profiles.

That sounds to me a lot like Facebook, and Twitter, and most of the useful stuff in Linked In, for business at least.

I figure Google has got it right with Buzz. The only problem is nobody realises that yet.

For business people Buzz will become the new Gmail. That’s my prediction. And Wave will resurface as real time content collaboration within Gmail.

If only the Google monster would get off its rear end and give us Buzz in Google Apps we could begin to see the big picture emerge.

Our social media sales strategy deliberations moved on considerably today, and then hit another wall of confusion. We spent the morning talking about our experiences using networks to reach and influence people. That reinforced our conviction.

We’d been asked to talk to friends who manage a golf club. They’d heard some of the stories about Internet Marketing and wanted to know if, and if so, how the club should be promoted on the Internet – apart from the standard 5 page web site of course.

The conversation started with an offer to run video advertising in newspaper content. It pretty quickly extended to blogging and presence in the networks – Twitter, Facebook, plus a bunch more.

We explained how we’d addressed those very same questions, in relation to a number of our own businesses. The story is covered in this blog where we’ve described the questions in Does a Social Media Selling Strategy Make Sense.

And we’ve explained our conclusions in Why to Use Social Media Even When It’s a Complete Waste of Time.

To cut a long story short – it’s an issue of Be There or Be Square. All of the hype is indeed just that, and the new paradigm isn’t going to change marketing fundamentals. But today’s fashion does point the way to a new dimension, in which marketers attract and inform potential customers.

The conversation with the golf club reinforced our conclusions. Particularly when we started talking about a business strategy, which informs a marketing and sales strategy, and the way that informs our marketing activity.

So where did the confusion come from?

Later in the day we received an invitation to join in a Hubspot webinar. VP of Marketing Mike Volpe will host a discussion with title Why Social Media is BS!

The invitation reads:

Free Webinar: Why Social Media is BS!

Is social media really the future of marketing? In this webinar Mike discusses how much the marketing power of social media is exaggerated. Social media is not magic, and fundamental marketing strategies shouldn’t be thrown out the window and replaced by new social media techniques.
Social media is a powerful tool, but it is still just one of the many gears that you need to make up your marketing machine.Join Mike’s webinar to learn how to integrate social media tools with your current marketing strategy in order to fully capture its benefits. There are many ways to create value and get noticed, and although social media may help, it is by no means the reason to stop doing marketing.

We don’t know the folks at Hubspot, but do know they’re experts in web presence, and turning it into traffic. And they have some excellent technology.

And we agree with the conclusion the power of presence in networks is exaggerated BUT.

BUT having sat in on these seminars before I expect there’ll be a lot of “And this is how to make it make sense”.

That’s why I’ll be on-line for the Webinar. Will I meet you there?

A new online business model emerges almost every day, and today we’ve seen another, really smart idea. Zemanta is offering PROMOTED links and I’d personally like to congratulate those guys on a brilliant idea.

We’ve been using the Zemanta plugin in our blogs for a long time now. If you haven’t it’s well worth a try.

As you write a new post the Zemanta software monitors the content and suggests links and images. A single click hyperlinks the words. It makes link building ultra simple while we worry about the ideas.

Better still the plugin offers lists of other recently published articles. Another simple click inserts links to those at the foot of the content. Content is richer and more SEO friendly without the author struggling with Search and HTML.

Another benefit is Zemanta users have their articles offered to other publishers for linking. We get our ideas spread around the Internet, for free.

To be honest we’ve always been a little confused about where the money is in the Zemanta business model. Today it’s slid into view. The plugin still offers all the usual links, but top of the list is the promoted link.

Now the blogger community can be bought, because the tool is so easy to use and in its own right adds value.

The price is painless, and we have control over whether we pay it. There’s nothing underhand – which is the really smart dimension.

The Zemanta business model appears to be the ultimate in Win Win – everybody is better off as a result of the technology enabled collaboration.

Maybe Google will lose the advertising, because the links promote content rather than Adsense. But the monster still wins in the end. The Internet is a more connected, richer environment for users, and that serves its purpose very well.

When Google, bloggers, promoters and Zemanta all win, because service to users improves, we can share in a bigger cake.

Great job guys. I wish I’d thought of it.

We definitely need a strategy for social media based selling. Like it or loathe it, the new paradigm is here to stay. We’ll either take advantage of its opportunities, or suffer its threats.

But exploiting social media for selling isn’t simple. We’ve spent the last two years trying to understand where, and how, social can meet business in places we’ll be successful for ourselves.

Our conclusion is we need a strategy. Otherwise we’ll implode under the pressure. We have to get engaged, but we also have to stay effective. We have to be part of communities, but have to keep our business identity. We have to give freely, but we have to make money. As in everything else the issue is Return on Investment.

Overcoming these paradox is nowhere near as simple as it sounds.

The number of social channels, multiplied by the different ways contacts use them, and the number of tools available to monitor the firehoses threatens to swamp us. The return on investment is hard to tie down. Larger businesses will undoubtedly hold back, only committing to social media selling when benefits and costs can be calculated by the bean counters. Smaller businesses shouldn’t do the same. Because of both the possible wins and the potential losses.

In the strategy we’ll need to put some limits around the sites we’ll monitor, where we’ll contribute, the tools we’ll use and ways we’ll engage. We’ll definitely be represented at Linked In, Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. There are some sites with a local focus which might make the cut.

We know at least part of our tool set, with Front Office Box, WordPress, Hootsuite, Gmail, and Gist. (We wrote in Social CRM Makes Sense at Last about how the integration of Gmail and Gist is working for us). There’s a genuine business process in amongst all the confusion, reinforced by more recent experience.

And we’ll need some basic rules like these:

• If customers can do something on the Internet they will – research, selection, purchase – it’s so much easier than talking to sales guys, trying to sift the facts from the hype.
• Sales guys need to be where the customers are looking, because our competitors will be.
• Sales professionals need to provide what the customers are looking for – insight and ideas – and expect nothing in return- that’s the nature of the new Internet.
• Sales people need to be listening and responding. When customers speak they expect somebody to be on the other end of the line.
• We have to be engagers and translators – business as usual for us, but now we have to do it on-line.

So we already have the sites, the tool set and some basic principles. Now we need to work out how much time we’ll spend on which activities.

In our next article we’ll publish on progress, in which case I’d better get on with figuring out what to decide on next.

For the moment there are many more questions than answers.

Have you thought about your social media selling strategy? If so what have you decided, and how did you get there? Did you choose the same sites and tools? Is it working for you?

Can our businesses benefit from social media based sales? Can we afford the time spent on uncertain returns? Would we better off with the tried and trusted business models of the past?

There’s lots of hype about the new paradigm, but very few measurable results to learn from.

The problem is we won’t have a choice. The world isn’t simple any more. Good old fashioned sales tools of cold calls, pitches, proposals and closes no longer work. Territories, targets, compensation plans and commission riders aren’t effective ways of measuring sales performance. Social media is rapidly becoming the only game in town, and changing everything.

It seems sales professionals, managers and representatives need something different – a strategy based on the use of social media, because that’s rapidly becoming the only game in town.

The question is how we develop such a strategy to suit our own individual mix of style, personality, product offer and market. We’ve been struggling with this question for a couple of years. Our research into the role of social media in B2B sales has become ever more complex and the results more confusing as the phenomena of social media has spread.

We started with some seemingly simple questions.

• Is Social Media changing the art of selling?
• Do professionals like us need a strategy for exploiting social media opportunities?
• Why would we bother when most of our business contacts don’t?
• Should we forget the fools gold promise and stick to the tried and trusted methods?

The hype suggests the answer is a definite positive. There seems no limit to the noise promoting Twitter, and Facebook, and Linked In. But practical experience is a lot less positive. While numbers joining social networks soar, numbers of tweets (updates) read and retweeted (republished) are dropping like stones. And content creation has plateaued. Less than 10% of our business contacts have Linked In profiles. Less than 1% have Twitter or Facebook accounts. None of them post updates we can use to connect.

Despite the lack of positive feedback we can’t help but recognise the world has changed. If customers can do stuff on the Internet, they will. Sales professionals need to be where customers are looking, and providing what they’re looking for.

Ultimately we agree with Dave Brock on Social Media and the Disintermediation of Sales People

But how can we work out an effective strategy so as to stay productive whilst building the future?

What do you think? How will you make the most of opportunities? Why wouldn’t you keep doing the same old stuff?

Social CRM has become a very popular topic over the last couple of years. It started with what I like to call the rim dwellers, people who spend their time watching all the innovations brought to Internet and figuring out what they’ll mean for everybody once they become mainstream. For the record rim dwellers isn’t a derogatory term, more a description of what I do most of the time.

Recently it became very Key Word friendly. Adding Social CRM to any post almost guaranteed immediate interest. Even more recently the consultants and sales trainers picked up on it. Now we see something about Social CRM everywhere we look.

But the reality has disappointed when compared with the promise, for me at least, and until yesterday. The problem has always been the wide spread of Social – the number of sites needing to be monitored if we’re to catch that all important connection.

New software services have emerged to help aggregate feeds from all those sources and bring the important stuff to us. For me it started with Gist – because of the iPhone app – but the output never really made much sense. It was mostly RSS and Twitter feeds I could get a number of other places.

Recently Gmail included the Rapportive plugin quickly followed by the Gist plugin. I have both running on my Gmail courtesy of Google Apps. In the sidebar of any message Rapportive offers me what it knows about the email address messages come from. At the foot of the message Gist gives me everything it knows about the sender.

This is really cool. But it’s never made any real difference to what I do, until yesterday.

We had notice from our Front Office Box app about a new registration. When I copied the address into a welcoming message Gist exploded with the social footprint of the owner.

Now this was really useful. I immediately followed the Twitter account, researched the RSS feed and sent friend requests on Facebook and Linked In.

For me yesterday was when Social CRM ceased to be an idea talked about by consultants and became a genuine business resource. I’m now a fully fledged, died in the wool, believer.

Unfortunately, a big slice of our business works with the public sector, or close and those people aren’t in to Social yet. That’s a pain in the rear, because now I’ve seen the promised land I want everybody connected to it.