Pay Per Click Advertising has become an extremely popular method for generating website traffic, building lists of qualified prospects in specific niches, making sales and, in some cases, reaching prospects around the world where it wouldn’t have been either feasible or likely using traditional advertising methods.

Pay Per Click or PPC Advertising, if used correctly, can set you on a path to potential financial independence, but used incorrectly, you can lose your shirt, fast. It’s very important for newcomers to get the proper Pay Per Click education by reading one of the excellent books on Pay Per Click Advertising before actually getting in the trenches and spending money.

There are several different companies that you can choose for your advertising campaigns, Google Adwords, MSN, Yahoo Search Marketing, Kanoodle, Enhance and many more, but the undisputed king of Pay Per Click Marketing is Google Adwords. Google has changed their advertising rules several times now since opening their doors at the early part of this decade, but still has an enormous following. It’s estimated that Google gets apx. 47% of all searches being done on the Internet with Yahoo second at 23%, followed by MSN at 11%. Number two and three combined don’t get as much traffic on a regular basis as Google does. This means that placing your ad there can potentially bring you a lot of qualified traffic. It also means that the competition for that traffic will be fierce and potentially very expensive, if you don’t know what you’re doing. Read on.

One of the most recent changes that occurred at Google was the ability to separate “Search Ads” and “Content Ads” within your campaigns. When you advertise using Google Adwords your ads will not only be displayed within the Google search engine, but also may be placed on other people’s websites that have related subject matter and also on some of their “Partner Networks”. Some of these partners are other PPC Advertising companies just like themselves, but on a much smaller scale.

For you as an advertiser it’s very important that you keep these two entities separate when running your campaign. You now have the option to either pay less money for the traffic you receive through the Content ads or you can eliminate them from your campaign entirely. I recommend that, if you do choose to run them, even at a lower cost, you set up an entirely different campaign. I know that it sounds like a big hassle, but there’s a good reason for this. That reason is tracking your ads. If you don’t track your ads then you are losing money. It’s important that you know exactly where your clicks and sales are coming from in order to eliminate waste and only pay for what’s actually working. It’s virtually impossible to do this when you have both Search and Content running in the same campaign.

If you’re new this may seem like a lot of “chatter” to you. If that’s the case, I highly recommend that you invest in a good book on Pay Per Click Advertising, as mentioned above. If you’re not new, but this seems like a lot of extra work to you, think of it this way; you could be doing a labor job somewhere or continue in your day job for the rest of your life. Which seems worse now? Besides, once you get it set up correctly you’ll be able to get rid of the garbage, only pay for what works, increase your profits by redirecting the money that you were wasting into another area of your advertising portfolio and increase your bottom line by doing so. Does it still sound like too much work? Get those campaigns set up right the first time. Good luck!

SEO or SEM?

With all of the SEO companies popping up everywhere how do you know your SEO efforts are going to pay off? I spend a significant amount of time reviewing SEO offerings from other companies and find that the range in quality of SEO can vary greatly. While doing proper SEO is very important, will SEO alone dramatically improve your ranking in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)? If you don’t have an effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, the answer is probably not! SEM uses several techniques that could include but aren’t limited to, SEO, Link Building, Pay Per Click, Social Media and more. The focus of this article, and one of the more difficult and time consuming aspects of a good SEM campaign, is link building.

What is link building and why is it important?

Link building is the process of building your sites link popularity, or simply put, creating links back to your site from other sites. This is very important and arguably the most heavily weighed factor in determining your site ranking in the SERPs. Through building a large amount of outside links back to your site, the Search Engines will view you as more relevant, credible (possibly), and popular. Ideally you should try and build links from credible websites with content related to you site. The more popular and credible the linking website the more it should help you. There are all sort of potential ramifications for building links from unsavory websites and link exchange services which are beyond the scope of this article. But suffice it to say you can actually be doing more damage than good if you try and take shortcuts. Remember if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is… and it’s been my experience that this adage holds truer today, on the internet, than at any point in history! (Thanks Nigeria!)

Why link building today is harder than ever.

After many years of link building abuse from comment spammers and the like, Google came up with an answer, the nofollow tag. Because of rampant misuse of people posting spam comments on blogs, bulletin boards, and content sites, the nofollow tag was introduced. This is a method by which sites could still allow users to post links, without lending any of their sites credibility to the referring link. In other words, your site now gets NO credit for linking if the referring site uses the nofollow tag. It seems major sites, that were once a staple of link building (both credible and otherwise) are all going the way of the nofollow tag. Wikipedia, craigslist, yahoo answers, and the list goes on. While I am not sad to see spammers lives made more difficult, this has made credible link building more difficult for the rest of us. Below are 5 ideas for good and credible link building after the nofollow tag.

1. Article Syndication – Writing relevant articles with good content, that will interest readers is always a great idea for more than just link building. It helps establish your reputation as a professional and build credibility. It is also very time consuming but over the long run well worth it. As part of your link building campaign consider writing 2 to 3 articles a week and syndicating those to 10 – 20 different article syndication sites. Part 2 of this article will include syndication sites listed by popularity and that will be a great place to start! It may take you an extra 5 or 10 hours a week, but your efforts will pay off big time over time. If you don’t have the time, consider hiring someone who will work with you to develop link building plan and submit your articles for you. There are many good companies out there that can help you with this.

2. Press Releases – Have you recently launched your business or a new website, product or anything else worth telling the world about? Consider issuing a press release. While most of these services are not free they are a very effective means to get the word out about your company and create links from highly trusted websites. PR Newswire offers a large variety of services that can reach many different audiences. It’s not free but it is effective.

3. Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking sites are a great way to promote your content. Part 2 of this article will include a current list of social bookmarking sites that do not make use of the nofollow tag and more detailed strategy using social bookmarking.

4. Blogging – Blogging is a great way to add content to your site, gain a following of readership, gain relevancy and credibility with the search engines and your prospects and clients. Blogging can also be a great way to link build. Once you have established your blog and have a decent following, you can make use of guest bloggers from other popular blogs, or even link to another popular blog when you see a post that you think is excellent and your readers would appreciate. There is a reasonable chance the owner will notice your inbound link and link back, if you have good and relevant content. Warning: if you do plan to blog, make sure you stay on top of it and post content frequently. Weekly if not daily is preferred, but even more important than frequency of posting, post GOOD CONTENT.

5. Trade Links (if it’s relevant and beneficial) – Email the webmasters of sites that compliment your site but generally do not compete with it, the more popular the better. Outline the benefits for them to link to your site. Explain how their readers could benefit from the content on your site and how your readers benefit from the content on theirs! ALWAYS HAVE A LINK TO their site on your site already BEFORE you do this. Include the location of this link on your site in the email and explain why your visitors benefit from linking to them. This can be a very effective tool when done right because you are building links from highly popular and highly relevant sites to yours. Part 2 to this article will discuss strategy to trade links in much more detail.

For more tips or information on how T2T Marketing can help you market your business online successfully, call us at 858-952-0848 or visit our website at for help with your SEM or SEO Campaign.

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