Orange County Internet Marketing Advice by Darby Works, Inc.

Social Marketing For Your Cell Phone?

Wow. Who has time for that? I guess lots and lots and lots of people do, according to Bluepulse, the Australian social network for mobile devices. These guys are nearing 100 million page views per month. Could I have just a nickel per page view please?

Bluepulse Expands Mobile Social Marketing Sites...

Google Beats Yahoo! To The Punch For CNN.

CNN awarded their pay-per-click text ad service to Google over Yahoo! Read Google beats Yahoo! here.

How to Reduce PPC Advertising Costs...

Dr. Ralph Wilson interviews Catherine Seda who offers some great ideas for holding down costs with PPC advertising such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

Mark Cuban Bashes Internet

  Great post by web guru, Mark Cuban, who says the Internet is just plain boring. Here is a really funny snippet from another one of his posts over at his blog. He makes some great points....

"I've been inundated with spam on Myspace. Used flicker. Used Digg for sourcing news and laughed at the unending ridiculousness of its posters. Used and posted to Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Veoh, Flickr, Slideshare, used every bittorrent client, got bored with twitter after 7 minutes, signed up for other findme, find you, this is where I am, this is where you are, type app I could find, and the lists go on and on. I read techmeme, techcrunch, extremetech, and tons of other tech sites and I make a point to try every and any new site that seems the least bit plausible or interesting. I spend far far too much time on the net just to make sure I keep up and know whats going on."

Read the original post Mark Cuban post here.

No Office, Headquarters in Cyberspace?

Not sure I agree with this. I guess for some businesses - sure they can operate virtually. But people still need the human connection. Read the full article from ABC News virtual offices here.

15 Pay Per Click Marketing Tips

I have been doing pay per click marketing for too many years. Sometimes I forget what I know. Not that I am bragging. It's just that you can't help but learn stuff after staring at thousands of keyword bids, keyword variations, competitors, and ad copy for hundreds and hundreds of hours, month after month, year after year. So I thought I'd make this a quick post with some good pay per click marketing tips. No, this is NOT a treatise on PPC. That will come later. Anyway, here we go...

1. Before you get started, I think the most important thing for you to realize is that you are not trying to reach everyone on the planet! You aren't using a shot gun here. You want a laser beam focused exactly on your target audience - your bullseye. That's why you start NARROW and slow. Then expand outward farther away from your bullseye only as you see success! Your initial goal with pay-per-click is to locate your "bullseye keywords" first. These are the words that get you what you want with as little expense as possible - your highest ROI words.
2. Define what you feel is a “successful event” or “desired action.” We’ll call this a conversion. Your conversion might be someone completing a form, purchasing an item, or visiting a certain webpage. Only you can run the money numbers and determine how much you are willing to spend for a desired action.
3. Install a robust web analytics package on your site. You want to be sure you can track things down to the keyword. DO THIS NOW. Thankfully, Google Analytics is still free, and you can use it for all your various pay per click adventures. (At least I think it works for all of 'em. If not, please let me know.) Whatever you use, you'll want to use tracking codes so you can see which keywords are performing best. You can install Google Adwords tracking code on your site and the data will automatically port over to your Google Analytics account.
4. Start with Google Adwords for your first pay per click test. Reason? They get a ton of traffic so you’ll know relatively quickly what your results are.
5. Brainstorm each target market for your product or service.  If you are a professional photographer, you might have several different types of people – people getting married, families who need a portrait, pregnant woman who want to capture the memory, couples who just had a baby, on and on.
6. Develop separate “seed” keyword lists for each target market. In our example, the initial keywords you research might be: wedding photography, portrait photographer, pregnancy photographer, baby photos. The main point here is avoid lumping all your keywords into one big bucket. Divide them up into as many buckets as you think are relevant to your product or service. Does this take a lot of work? Yes. Will it pay off? Yes. In spades. (I have no idea what that phrase means, but it makes me sound smart and witty so I’ll use it.)
7. Within your Adwords campaign, create a different Ad Group for each of your target markets. Don't get lazy here. Go the extra mile and focus on each demographic. It will pay off, and you will learn tons just from the analytics alone.
8. When setting up your Adwords campaign, test your ads on the Google Search Network first. Then test them on their Content Network (also known as site-targeted.) The reason is that Google search tends to generate more targeted and motivated visitors. People how click on your ads from the Content Network tend to be less inclined to buy. But not always! That is why you test!
9. Use the built-in Google keyword tool to develop your keyword list. Only choose keywords that have green bars. Use negative keywords to prohibit your ads from showing (Ex> -thiswontshow). When starting out, I would avoid single keywords. That's a quick way to burn through your budget fast. Use keyword phrases that have a minimum of 2 words. Try out phrase match first. Phrase matches have quotation marks around them like this: "pay per click advice".
10. Write compelling ad copy. Think benefits and action! The reader could care less about you. They want to know: What's in it for me? Write 2 different ads so you can test the performance of each ad against the other. Then after 100 clicks or so, ditch the bad Google ad and write a new one. Also, don’t write one long sentence for your ad. Make it like a little 3-sentence poem with a title, benefit, and feature. Try to use your keywords in the ad. Make your ad obvious. This isn’t the place to get clever. Tell the reader exactly what they will get if they click.
11. Choose a specific landing page that matches your ad. All keywords SHOULD NOT lead to your home page.
12. Set a low budget to start to try things out. Don’t bid for the top position. Sometimes the 3rd position or even the 9th position may convert well for you. But don’t get cocky. Move your bids around and track your conversions.
13. Compare your spend with your conversions. Are you profitable? Note which keywords got the most clicks. Note which words got clicks but did not convert. Brainstorm more keywords. Add. Delete. Tweak. Note which ads performed best.
14. Expand only after you make your conversions profitable. Increase your spend. Try new variations of keywords. Try Google’s content network.
15. Try other PPC engines like Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter, or other smaller engines like Industry Brains or Quigo.

This really is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to effective pay per click marketing, but I hope this helps!

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You might also like this post about the The Importance of AB Testing.

Is Social Networking For Business Really Viable?

I am just beginning to dig deep into the latest web trend called "social networking" or "social marketing." It's basically word of mouth via the web. You see a website, image, video, or other resource you like and you "bookmark" and add it to your account from using one of the many social networking sites like StumbleUpon, Orkut, Digg, Squidoo, and many others.

Yes, know I am a little late to the "social networking" party, but I am busy making money for clients via search engine optimization, website optimization, pay per click marketing, business consulting, and other "traditional" marketing methods.

Anyway, I have a StumbleUpon account, and an Orkut, Digg, and others too. But man, to keep this up adding bookmarks day after day to each one can be very time consuming. Especially when you aren't even sure of the outcome.

I guess my concern is that this rampant bookmarking by businesses is just another fly-by-night way to get some cheap traffic. Basically it’s link farms re-incarnated. But I could be wrong. I don’t know enough yet to make a final judgment.

Here is one gal who thinks social bookmarking is a bunch of hogwash. She is Molly Wood, section editor at CNET.com, and she makes some really good points. Here they are in a nutshell:

1. There's nothing to do there
2. It takes too much time
3. Traffic alone isn't enough
4. Strangers kind of suck (or, put nicely, the social hierarchy is really not that attractive)
5. We already have the Internet

Read the full article here. I welcome your comments…

Search Engine Friendly Shopping Carts

What exactly does "search engine friendly" mean?

Search engine friendly means that the search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask are easily able to find, read, spider and categorize your web pages. In addition, a search engine friendly website should improve your chances of getting higher rankings for the keyword phrases you select or "optimize" your pages for. A search engine friendly shopping cart allows you the maximum flexibility to optimize all your web pages for the search engines.

What are the key elements for a search engine friendly shopping cart?

There are a number of important criteria to consider when looking for a good search engine friendly cart. A good cart should offer the following as a minimum:

• Short, keyword-rich, customizable URLs

Many shopping carts create a long URL and assign a number to a new product rather than calling the product what it is. This can have a negative effect on search engine rankings since one aspect the search engines use are keywords in the URL of the page. Granted if you are Amazon, you can afford not to care about your URLs. But if you're like the rest of us, be sure that the shopping cart you choose offers search engine friendly URLs. Some carts will even allow you to name the URL whatever you want which gives you the most control to insert your own keywords you choose.

Good URL Examples
www.darbyworks.com/woodenpictureframes.asp?=pine
www.darbyworks.com/pine-wooden-picture-frames.html

Bad URL Example
http://www.darbyworks.com/gp/product/0375503595/ref=amb_link_809852_2/104-7230298-7056764?n=283155

• HTML Navigation

You definitely want HTML text links instead of images for your site navigation. Yes, Dorothy, there are ways around this, but for the sake of this discussion, let's keep it simple. I know there is always a trade off between search engine ranking and look and feel, but for now work with me. The search engines recognize and rank HTML text, so use it!

• Hierarchical Structure to navigation and overall site

The search engines like thematic order. They like to see pages linked together like this:  FOOD - FRUIT - APPLES - RED DELICIOUS.  You want the cart you select to allow you to organize your categories, subcategories and products in the most relevant way possible. Remember back in high school and college when you had to write those perfectly organized thesis papers They had to have that super focused thesis paragraph, supporting paragraphs and then the conclusion which summarized the thesis? Same concept here. Help the search engines find their way deep into your site by organizing your pages by theme. A better way of putting it is: "Help the search engines not to get lost in your site."

• Ability to create custom metatags for every page of your store.

The main metatags you want to be concerned about are the title tag and description tags.

• H1 Header tag around your page title at top of every page.

The H1 tag looks like this: <H1>Product Headline Here</H>. The H1 tag tells the search engines what the page is about and is very important for ranking. You want an H1 tag at the top of every single page.

• Keyword-Rich Site Map

A good cart will automatically generate a basic sitemap for you. A sitemap is a simple list of links to all the pages on your site on its own web page. Search engines like sitemaps since its...well...a road map to your web site. The saerch engine spiders can easily navigate and find all the pages within your site. Some shopping carts may also generate XML sitemaps automatically, but I don't know of any out there yet that do this. Google now accepts XML sitemaps.

• Ability for keyword descriptions on the page

You want to be sure you can provide adequate keyword-rich descriptions for each of your products.

• Ability to use H2, h3, h4 tags and other HTML within your pages.

Some shopping carts are very restrictive about adding custom html to your product pages.  Avoid these carts. You want be able to use header tags, bold tags, italic tags, and hyperlinks to other pages within your site at will. Finding a cart with built-in flexibility is key.

• Alt image tags

An alt tag is a simple bit of text that is used to identify images. This is another opportunity to integrate your keywords into your pages.

• Bread Crumb Navigation

Bread crumb navigation shows you where exactly you on within a website on any given page.  Bread crumbs usually appear at the top or bottom of pages and might look like this:

Search Engine Friendly Shopping Carts Overview > FAQs > Shopping Cart Recommendations

A shopping cart which has this feature offers you another chance to use your keywords.

Why is finding a search engine friendly cart so important?

Go build a store in the middle of the desert. Are you going to make much money? Not likely. You want your site to be found.  A beautiful site that can't be found is one big waste of time. Maximize your chances of getting free, targeted traffic to your site by finding a robust, search engine friendly shopping cart.

Why aren't all carts search engine friendly?

Because they were designed by programmers - not marketers.  I am not blaming them. Programmers are brilliant, and they do things with code I could never do. However, success in business is all about exposure and good marketing. Why not tip the scales in your favor and use software that enhances your marketing efforts?

Which search engine friendly shopping carts do you recommend?

I personally use GoEcart.com for my shopping cart. However, I took a close look at Volusion which is also an outstanding choice. Take a look at them both and see which one better fits your style

GoECart Shopping Cart Software
GoECart is one of the most comprehensive, yet cost-effective eCommerce solutions available today. Features include inventory management, point-and-click layout authoring, full integration with all leading payment processors and shipping carriers and much more! Take a Free Trail for 30 days.

Volusion
Volusion shopping cart software is packed with tons of useful features to automate your entire business. From building & managing your website, to processing orders, to marketing, you'll find Volusion to be your INTEGRATED solution.

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions
Yahoo Stores has come a long way toward being more SEO friendly than they used to be. Although, you'll need to make some coding modifications to really max out the SEO potential. You also get some perks by being part of the Yahoo! network.

I know a great search engine friendly cart that is not listed. What should I do?

Contact me, and tell me about it. I will gladly add it if it looks good!