6 AdWords Tips for Small Business Owners

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 12:45 PM PDT

In this article, we're going to take a look at some of the most important factors that make up a great Google AdWords strategy for an e-commerce business, both in terms of how to design your ad campaigns as well as how to optimize the site itself for maximum conversions.

1. What Gets Measured Gets Managed

Sorry for the clichéd wisdom. But if there's one basic metric that every advertiser should keep top-of-mind, it's return on investment.

In Google AdWords, the best way you can measure your ROI is to track conversions along with your costs. Don't think that click-through rate alone is the king of all PPC metrics: if you aren't making sales with all that traffic, you're losing money.

Set up conversions tracking—preferably for all ecommerce transactions—in your Google AdWords account.
Enable cost attribution in your linked Google Analytics account, if necessary.
Monitor how much profit your ads and keywords are driving, and whip your fast horses.

2. Transactional Keywords

The most lucrative keywords for an ecommerce business are those based around transactions. If a prospect comes to your site to research a product, see what it looks like and understand what it does, that prospect is not worth nearly as much as a different prospect who visits with the intent to purchase. Your bidding strategy should reflect this fact.

Who is more likely to buy: someone who searches for "best bicycles" or someone who searches for "bicycle stores in San Francisco"?

Set up different ad groups for different keyword sets, and adjust your bids and ad language accordingly.

3. Ads That Sell

Well-designed ads can work wonders for your AdWords campaigns. Proper word or image choice can lead to increased sales as well as higher CTR—which, by increasing your ads' quality scores, will often lead to lower CPC, better placement, or both. Over time, this can lead to a snowball effect where you see your entire campaign start to perform much better based on a few simple changes you decided to try out.

And "try out" is an important idea to keep in mind. You won't know what wording or design will perform best, so you should test many versions of the same ads and then thin the herd. I'm not going to mention mistreating horses again, but you know what to do.

Different niches and keywords call for different types of ad copy and images, but it usually pays to use active language, focusing on the benefits and unique selling proposition (if there is one). Google and Facebook give us two examples of this:

Notice how, in only one line of text each, Google and Facebook lay out the entire unique selling propositions of their respective advertising platforms—with the benefits implied therein. On Google, customers search and find you. On Facebook, you can reach the exact audience you want. These examples aren't particularly exciting, but you can bet they work.

When using text ads, another great ace up your sleeve is dynamic keyword insertion. Be careful not to overuse it, but if you can deliver on the implied promise of the keywords you're bidding on, it can be a powerful tool to increase your CTR.

4. Ad Extensions

For most e-commerce sites, the most important type of ad extension to try is product extensions, which display images, titles, and prices of relevant products based on your Google Merchant Center account. But depending on your particular business, it's worth trying seller ratings, ad sitelinks, and call extensions as well. (If ad extensions are new to you, check out Google's Adwords help center page about them for a quick overview.)

5. Custom Landing Pages

For each ad group, it's a good idea to have a landing page specifically picked out for a) that group of keywords, and b) the text of your ads.

In other words, if you're running an AdWords campaign for an ecommerce website and pointing all your ads to the homepage, you're doing it wrong.

You don't have to design a new landing page for every ad group, but you do need to make sure every URL you choose is the most relevant page on your site for that ad and keyword combination.

If the ad is targeted at keywords related to "running shoes," don't send your prospect to the homepage or even a general "shoes" category page. Show them your top-selling running shoes and cross-trainers. It helps to make the display URL something simple and topical, too: "yoursite.com/running" is better than "yoursite.com," even if the actual URL the ad points to is much longer and uglier.

6. Reduce Friction

Whether you're selling just one product or you carry thousands, one of the most surefire ways to increase sales is to decrease friction. That goes for free permission-marketing assets, too.

It seems obvious: the harder it is for your prospects to buy (or convert in general), the fewer of them will do so. But it's amazing how many e-commerce sites out there clog up their sales funnel by requiring a ton of information from their customers up front.

When it comes to information requirements and forms, remember these guidelines:

Ask for as little information as possible.
Make it possible to order from you without creating a username and password.
If you need to ask for a lot of information, do it in steps instead of all at once. A shorter or two-step registration can drastically increase registration rates.
When in doubt, take it out. (Or use an analytics tool like ClickTale to help you see what's making people leave.)

Zach Thompson is a partner at RYP Marketing, a firm that specializes in white label SEO and SEM.

Original Post: 6 AdWords Tips for Small Business Owners

“Protect Your Content from Being Copied in 3 Steps” plus 1 more

Protect Your Content from Being Copied in 3 Steps

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 01:06 PM PDT

This guest post is by Abhishek of Budding Geek.

Content scraping still haunts the entire blogosphere. No matter how hard you try to defend your creation, content thieves will always find a way to steal it!

It really feels terrible to find exact copies of your original work distributed all over the internet, often without any credit or link back to your blog as the source. The most frustrating part is when you find the copied content outranking your own blog in the search engines.

How can someone copy content from your blog?

Copycats can steal your content in a number of ways, but there are two key techniques:

by directly copying text and images from your published post and re-publishing the content on the spammer's blog (or splog!)
by scraping your RSS feed. The truth is, this form of plagiarism is the most difficult to tackle.

Since plagiarism is impossible to obliterate, we need to safeguard our blogs from these vulnerabilities in such a way that it becomes at least extremely difficult for the content thief to plagiarize our content.

Protect your blog content

There are a few different ways you can protect your blog content.

1. Disable text selection on your blog

This is the first and most essential step to discourage direct copying of your content.

Users of the Blogger platform can disable text selection from their blogs by manually installing some JavaScript code before the closing <head> tag in the HTML of their blog.

WordPress users can add this feature by installing the wpcopyprotect plugin.

2. Watermark your images

It's important to watermark all the original images you've created for use on your blog. A watermark proves that you are the owner of the copyright to all those images. Moreover, watermarks discourage others from using your photos and illustrations on their blog, since they'd have your blog's name all over theirs!

Although there are many watermarking utilities available on the internet, I generally prefer to use Windows Live Writer's inbuilt watermark plugin. Note that if you're using photos from any other outside source on the web (like Flickr or Picasa), it's up to you to take a notice of their licenses before reusing them—otherwise you might find yourself guilty of ripping someone else's content!

3. Manage your RSS feeds

A few months ago, I encountered a terrible content scraper who, I think, was using content scraping software and publishing my posts under several different permalinks. Sounds scary, right? This software basically scans your main content and republishes your posts with the main keywords replaced by synonyms. Isn't that irritating?

These auto-publishing sploggers target the RSS feed of your blog, where they scrape your creation in just a matter of seconds! In order to stop such exploitation you should either allow partial/short RSS feeds (so that the scraping software doesn't take all of your content) or add a custom feed signature with a copyright notice in the feed footer section of your blog, like this:

Note that, like a waternark on an image, this note won't prevent your content from being taken—but when it's reproduced on another site, readers will see that the content is being used illegally.

Users of the Blogger platform can add a custom feed signature by navigating to Other settings for your blog, then in the Site Feed section, add the following feed signature in the post feed footer:

<p> © copyright 2012 – All rights reserved </p>
<a href=”http://www.yourblogaddress.com“>Your Blog</a>

For the WordPress platform, I stumbled upon this excellent free plugin that adds a custom signature in the feed footer.

These tips can definitely help you to reduce plagiarism of your content. But what other techniques have you tried? Share them with us in the comments.

Abhishek is a part time blogger from Delhi who loves to write unique and interesting tech tips on a variety of topics like blogging, making money online, SEO, internet marketing and gadgets. Apart from that he is a die heart android fan and so don't be surprised if you find loads of android tips on his budding blog!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Protect Your Content from Being Copied in 3 Steps

Streamline Your SEO Efforts With Expired Domains

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 07:04 AM PDT

This guest post is by Matt Green of Evergreen Internet Marketers.

Have you ever thought or heard about buying aged domains to boost your SEO efforts? Well the results can be staggering. A lot of the top marketers in the industry have been doing this for years and have been dominating their markets! In fact, a recent post here on Problogger.net explained how this technique was used to reposition a business.

Not sure what an aged domain name is? Well it's an expired domain name that typically has authority, age, page rank, back links, and various other components that make expired domain names very powerful. You should be purchasing expired domain names because most of the work is already done for you.

Instead of working hard building backlinks and doing a ton of off-page SEO, you can find great expired domain names for which these tedious tasks are already done. The advantage of buying expired domains is that these domains can help you boost your rankings in the markets you are already in to drive more leads and subscribers to your blog.

The benefits of expired domains

Buying expired domains has numerous benefits, but these are the main advantages.

Benefit #1. Drive traffic through sub-niches

You can find exact-match domain names so you can target sub-niches that are relevant to the market you’re currently targeting, to help you drive more targeted traffic to your websites. The huge opportunity in finding these domain names is that they’re usually not very competitive and you can take over the sub-niches in as little as a couple weeks. The potential traffic you could be reaching can vary, but this can be a very profitable way to grow your business.

Benefit #2. Cut your workload in half with established backlinks

The second benefit to buying aged domain names is that they already have authority and backlinks. This can really help you out tremendously. It’s very time-consuming to create high quality, relevant back links—exactly what Google and the rest of the search engines require.

Backlinks are a necessity to online success. With expired domain names, someone else has put in all the hard work—and you can pick up right where that person left off. Once you get the domain, you can build more backlinks to rank in the search engines much faster than if you were to buy a brand-new domain where you have to start from scratch.

Benefit #3. Get instant page rank

Another huge benefit to buying expired domain names is that you can find domains that have page rank. This is a huge added benefit because, again, it takes time to establish a domain name and build up its page rank. When you’re buying an aged domain name you can literally buy domains with page rank overnight. This really streamlines the process, so you can build authority and traffic extremely fast!

Benefit #4. Expired domains for the masses

With 100,000 domain names expiring every single day, there is a huge opportunity for you. It’s physically impossible to look at all these domains every day, so the competition isn’t particularly fierce. Typically, you can find a great domain name and buy it for as little as $12. Who else besides me would love to buy an established domain name with lots of backlinks and page rank for just $12? This brings a huge opportunity to website owners.

Benefit #5. Directory listings done for you

Have you ever wanted to get into DMOZ, Yahoo, but thought it’d take ages? Well another huge benefit to buying expired domain names is that you can find domains that are already listed in these directories. This way, you don’t have to spend days and weeks trying to get your website submitted into powerful directories that have a lot of influence for your domain name.

The DMOZ directory can be very hard to get into. You submit your website and wait weeks to have someone review it to see if it is of high enough quality to be included in their index. But you can forget about this task if the expired domain name you buy is already listed in the DMOZ directory.

The Yahoo directory needs to approve your website and on top of that you have to pay Yahoo $299 to join. Why spend the money when you can buy an expired domain name that’s already in the directory for $12?

Expired domain pitfalls

Of course, there are some pitfalls you’ll want to avoid if you’re looking to buy expired domains. Let’s look at them now.

Pitfall #1. Buying domains that lack value

Beginners tend to buy domain names that have no value. You need to do your due diligence and make sure you’re picking the right expired domain names that will enable you to drive consistent, reliable traffic to your website over time.

Pitfall #2. Bidding too soon

When they find a great domain name, sometimes people will bid on it when there’s still more than a day left until the domain auction ends. This can really hurt you, because you’re sure to draw attention to the auction, which can inflate the domain’s price. The best time to bid on a domain auction is within the auction’s last ten minutes.

So many people make this mistake. If they’d just waited for the last ten minutes to place their bid, they’d have won the auction at cost! Bidding too early can drive competitors to the auction listing, which can cause you to pay more than you need to for your target domains.

Pitfall #3. Keep away from the competition

Another pitfall to watch out for is to assess the competition the domain name has. If you pick a domain name that has a keyword that’s very competitive you may want to move on and find a different domain. You want to be picking domains up to rank fast, so you don't want to find out later that you can't rank for the keyword because it’s too competitive.

You need to make sure you do some research on the domain name to make sure that the keyword that the domain will be ranking for doesn’t have too much competition. If the domain name has too much competition, it could take you a long time to reach a decent rank with that domain.

Seeking expired domains

Keen to dip your toes in the expired domain waters? The main sources of expired domains are places like GoDaddy, NameJet, Sedo, Snapnames, and Flippa. There are over 100,000 domain names expiring every day so I would recommend using an expired domain name service to help you sift through them all.

There is a ton of potential and opportunity for you to grow your business right away with these expired domains. Have you ever bought an expired domain? Let me know how it went in the comments.

This guest post is by Matt Green of Evergreen Internet Marketers.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Streamline Your SEO Efforts With Expired Domains

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