Yahoo! and Google Ads - Do It Yourself or Hire An Expert?

May 6th, 2008 Tim White

Yahoo! and Google don’t care whether you set up an advertising account by yourself or hire a professional. Thousands of business owners have opted to do it on their own and paid the price (whether they knew it or not). Here are the top 5 reasons to hire a professional:

1. Although it’s pretty easy to actually sign-up with Google and Yahoo!, it’s also very easy to waste thousands of dollars once you get started. Although there is a cost associated with paying an expert to set up and possibly manage your accounts, they will save you a lot of money and headaches.

2. Your online advertising accounts are only part of your overall marketing campaign. A professional can help keep your cost per sale or lead as low as possible by providing expert advice in other important areas such as domain names, web hosting, lead generation pages and follow-up. (more) »

Posted in Conversion Tracking, Google, Lead Capture Pages, Marketing Mistakes, Pay-Per-Click Marketing, Yahoo! | No Comments »

Top 10 Internet Marketing Mistakes

May 4th, 2008 Tim White

There are dozens of mistakes you can make trying to promote your products or services online. Here are the top 10 that I have encountered with clients:

1. Doing it yourself to save money
2. Not having a clear vision about your goals
3. Having a website that’s confusing to the customer
4. Hiring the cheapest vendors
5. Being too conservative
6. Focusing only on Google
7. Not tracking your results
8. Not using email marketing
9. Not backing up your website or files
10. Choosing a long or confusing domain name

and one more bonus mistake…

11. Being unwilling to change (more) »

Posted in Blogging, Conversion Tracking, Google, Lead Capture Pages, Marketing Mistakes, Pay-Per-Click Marketing, Yahoo! | No Comments »

Cut Your Google Costs by 50% in 30 Seconds

May 2nd, 2008 Tim White

How much are you spending with Google per month? $500? $1000? $5000? For the most part, Google really does try to look out for their advertisers, but there’s one thing that they do that usually isn’t in your best interest.

When you sign up to advertise on Google, you think that that’s exactly what you’re doing, however, by default, your ads will also appear in two other places other than in Google’s search results. These are Google’s Search Network and Content Network. The Search Network consists of websites such as Earthlink.net and AOL.com. The Content Network represents those sites participating in Google’s Adsense program, such as Plentyoffish.com

Here’s the problem: While there is a lot of click fraud in Google’s search results, there’s a lot more in their Content Network. So what’s the best way to deal with this? A quick solution is to simply opt out of the Search and Content Networks. You do this simply by unchecking two boxes. (more) »

Posted in Google, Pay-Per-Click Marketing, Yahoo! | No Comments »

Are You Tracking Your Cost Per Lead?

May 2nd, 2008 Tim White

One of the most powerful yet overlooked tools that Google and Yahoo! offer is conversion tracking. This tool can very accurately tell you how much you are paying per lead or sale.

Most advertisers spend too much time worrying about what they are paying per click rather than per sale or lead. Of course you want to keep your cost per click as low as possible, however, conversion tracking helps you determine how aggressive you can be (per click) and still be profitable. For example, if you don’t know how much a lead or sale costs you, you might be bidding conservatively to keep your costs down. But what if you doubled your average cost per click and tripled your profits? Wouldn’t you want to do that as much as possible? (more) »

Posted in Conversion Tracking, Google, Lead Capture Pages, Pay-Per-Click Marketing, Yahoo! | No Comments »

Google Launches Mobile Banner Ads

April 24th, 2008 Tim White

Google has introduced brand-image ads for mobile phones, in a bid to extend beyond the computer-based Web market into the emerging market for advertising on phones.

In a statement on the company’s Web site, the company said it had designed mobile images to look like standard graphical display ads for desktop computer Web pages, but made them smaller to fit on mobile phone screens.

The company said all mobile image ads are targeted according to the keywords users type into phones to search for information. The ads are priced on a cost-per-click basis, and must link to Web pages optimized to work on mobile phones.

Only one image ad is displayed on each mobile page, a move to that appears designed to limit clutter on small screens.

“For advertisers, mobile image ads serve as a branding tool and have shown to have good click-through rates,” Alexandra Kenin, a product marketing manager, for Google Mobile Ads said in a blog post on the company’s site.

Mobile image ads are available in 13 national markets: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the United States, Google said.

Posted in Google | No Comments »

Google Still the Most Powerful Brand

April 21st, 2008 Tim White

For the second year in a row Google has been named the most powerful financial brand by BrandZ, a financial brand index from Millward Brown.

Read more

Posted in Google | No Comments »