“Keyword creation and organization are the foundations of a successful campaign.” – Chuck Norris (just kidding)

There are great posts that discuss keyword research, but what comes next? How do we organize these keywords for our Adwords campaign? Can we expand on these keywords to include permutations?

Hi, I'm Troy McClure, and in the next 5 minutes, I'm going to teach you how to organize your keywords and expand on them by segmenting them into root keywords.

Root Keywords

So you are done your research and now you have a myriad of unorganized keywords either scribbled down on a piece of paper or on an unformatted excel sheet.

So what does this look like?

Let's use the example of sun protective swimwear! Here is your messy list of keywords

We see a reoccurring theme of hats (uv protective hat, spf caps, kids uva headpiece, etc) so lets start there. First we need to recognize from the keyword list that we are selling both kids and adults sun protective hats. This would justify creating 2 separate adgroups since we wouldn’t want someone searching “sun protective hats for men” and landing on page showing sun protective hats for boys. So lets create an adgroup for “Adult Sun Protective Hats” and see what root keywords we can come up with!

We could go further and expand on other root keywords such as

+womens +spf (+hats, +caps, +headpieces, etc)
+mens +spf (+hats, +caps, +headpieces, etc)
+adults +sun (+hats, +caps, +headpieces, etc)

Organizing Keywords

Yeah… I’m going to have to ask you…to organize these keywords…yeah…that’d be great. – Bill Lumbergh

You can see that the keywords start to organize themselves once we start to expand on our root keywords. Everything is still unformatted with keywords clumped into a few cells so here is an Excel sheet that helps you organize your Adwords campaign:

Download SEM Excel Adwords Template for Small Businesses

You can use this template to keep track of keywords, keyword modifiers, adgroups, ads, and more! It will also help you organize root keywords on a per adgroup level.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Free Excel Template For Optimal PPC Keyword Organization

Recently, during timeouts at Portland Trailblazer basketball games, the team has been entertaining the crowd with something called the “Regurgi-cam”, consisting of having Trailblazer employees film members of the crowd eating and then playing the tape backwards, making the people look like they are pulling “digested” food out of their mouth. This entertainment never ceases to draw a bunch of laughs and hopefully, it will to be part of their entertainment rotation for a while.

Yet, somehow watching this silly stunt multiple times somehow triggered a powerful insight into search marketing from which I can draw out the following concept:

“Online conversions need to be regurgitated in order to properly learn from them.”

When I talk to SEO or PPC prospects, they almost always ask questions about analytical metrics that exist at the top of the sales funnel whether they are keyword rankings (SEO) or bid prices (PPC). In my humble opinion, that´s a bass-ackwards way to begin a conversation about search marketing. Search marketing clients need to focus on the conversion metrics (Cost Per Lead / Cost Per Sale) at the bottom of the sales funnel and work backwards to get to how the top funnel metrics might fit into fulfilling their revenue goals.

The core of any search marketing effort is web analytics. I don´t run into too many prospects that don´t have any analytics installed on their website…but I run into plenty that haven´t configured it to quickly and easily show conversion metrics. Even worse, I´ve seen plenty of analytics setups where the checkout system breaks the visitor path funnel, rendering any conversion analysis impossible.

If conversion tracking is properly setup, the search marketer can isolate the commonalities of website conversions and come up with plans to exploit them. On the paid search side, it might involve creating unique campaigns for certain keyword subsets, really fleshing out the relevant long-tail keywords in the campaign, and bidding aggressively on converting terms / ad groups. For SEO, it might involve pushing link-juice towards highly performing pages and adding some long-tail focused copywriting. Another relevant tactic might involve optimizing the sales path on the website itself to make the conversion process more seamless. If the company is doing email marketing or database marketing, the same principles apply…one can track the sales / leads back to the relevant lists / groupings of people and determine common tendencies that can be accentuated on future campaigns.

I think some prospects I´ve talked to might be put-off when I guide the search marketing conversation towards ROI metrics and I´m OK with that. After all, their Google Rankings aren´t going to pay their bills…their corporate revenues will :.)

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Sales / Lead Regurgitation

What Are PPC Ad Sitelinks

Ad Sitelinks are the paid search equivalent of the much sought-after organic sitelinks, and they’re one heck of a lot easier to get – especially for quality ads.

Benefits Of PPC Ad Sitelinks

· Each Ad Sitelink can link to a different, deeper page in your site far increasing your immediate marketability

· Different Ad Sitelinks in the same ad can point to pages on different subdomains, exponentially facilitating cross-selling promotions and strategies

· Ad Sitelinks are very easy to manage, and change, in the Campaign Setting tab in Google AdWords (they are a campaign level setting)

· You can change both the visible text and the destination URL of each Sitelink via easy inline editing

…Just click ‘Edit’ and enter the information you want to have displayed

How PPC Ad Sitelinks Work

You can enter up to 10 Ad Sitelinks, they will be displayed according to search relevance in rotation from what we understand by experience at this point – Google may like to elaborate and agree or disagree.

A maximum of 4 are shown in the SERPs at this time, though three or fewer or not uncommon in a slightly different form of presentation. Two or three have been seen in this format at position 2 as well.

The ability to easily change what you are including in the Ad SItelinks enables you to add seasonal promotions, new offers, new products, breaking news, most popular products or whatever you want to try and test very quickly and easily.

How to get Ad Sitelinks

Well, the sad fact is that not everyone can. While it is far easier to attempt to get these Ad Sitelinks, there are a few requirements to bear in mind:

1. The ad must have top position in the sponsored ads to enable Ad Sitelink display (for the traditional links)
2. Ads must be of a high quality as must that ad and campaign
3. High quality (especially brand) campaigns fare best

Is it worth the hassle?

For a brand that derives a lot of traffic via its brand phrases, absolutely. For a brand that owns a high volume generic term, possibly. While I cannot share data, I can tell any professional PPC manager that creative and effective use of Ad Sitelinks in Google AdWords has had a positive effect on every campaign I have studied to date

Reporting concerns

· Google Adwords lumps all Ad Sitelinks into an easy view snapshot showing the gross data attributable to all. Granular data is unavailable at this time.

· DoubleClick Search (by Google) allows you to see the revenue attributable to each Ad Sitelink, but the cost is attributed to whichever keyword was used in the initial search.

I hope this feature becomes more robust, and I’m sure it will, but those reporting concerns are something to bear in mind.

By attributing all cost to the primary brand term and checking to see if there was a significant difference in return, more than one team I personally know of has managed to determine how their Ad Sitelinks were performing. Experience to date is on the whole strongly skewed towards Ad Sitelinks being an excellent tool-kit addition.

Should You Try Sitelinks?

If you have a brand, yes. Try most popular product, any seasonal or short term offers, and even offline offers that you can convert via dedicated phone-line or other button-click capture.

Other Promising Up and Coming AdWords Features

Watch for Product listing Ads.

Currently in beta and only available to limited retail advertisers, we are – for the first time – seeing image ads in the Search Network (as opposed to the Display Network).

What they are:

· Product listing ads are aimed at simplifying the advertising process for large advertisers/merchants with large product inventories.

· You pay only for results (CPA – cost per acquisition)

· You can list your entire inventory with ease via integration with your Google Merchant Center Account

· No keywords or additional ad text are needed as Google will match the most relevant product listings in your Merchant Center Account (image, price and name) to a normal search query.

Final Thoughts:

PPC is a joy when you love it, a challenge when you hate it, but an experience in marketing strategy and execution anyway you look at it. Check out phone extensions as well, and bear in mind a highly reliable source has informed me that Android phones have the best return rates from an advertising point of view – for now anyway.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

PPC Ad Sitelinks: What They Are & How To Get Them

Solid Connections

Creating a great, well rounded SEO / SMO campaign can be a huge undertaking, especially when dealing with all the facets, tools and time involved. Now, the majority of the work, as you probably know by now, will be in your SEO content. No surprise there, since it’s a vital part of any online SEO and marketing campaign. You’re probably also aware that, in order to maximize your online efforts and presence, you need fresh content with your primary keywords to increase your product, brand and authority.

The biggest demand for most SEO campaigns is content, content and more content. Readers want new content, linking sites want new content and, yes, search engines want new content. You need copy for guest posts (link building), article submissions if you use them (link building), web pages (on site content), blogs (on site content), etc. Some SEO techniques become obvious after awhile: on page optimization, description tags, articles, guest posting… Even after doing all of that, however, there’s still something missing.

An important part of any online marketing campaign is Connections, with a capital “C”. Connections are important. Now, I’m not talking about the occasional hello on a social media site. I’m talking about the kind of connections that take you over to the personal level with your audience. One of the easiest ways to make those connections is with your blog posts.

As a budding, successful business, you’re adding content and sharing the latest news with your readers on an ongoing basis. While press releases are a great way to let potential clients know you’re a viable solution and keep them updated on your latest company news, they won’t drive daily traffic like a well-written and often updated blog.

In terms of both SEO and traffic, publishing a quarterly or bi-monthly press release on your site is only somewhat effective. For instance, it’s a great way to keep your clients updated. However, having a blog that you can freely update with fresh posts to engage your readers is paramount to your goals. This is a great opportunity for you to further your SEO primary keywords as well.

Now, when it comes to blogging and SEO techniques, a good time line is a priority in order to maintain the balance between great content for your readers and fresh content for search engines. If you’re blogging on a regular basis using optimized content, you’ll see a marked difference between high traffic and no traffic. The one issue here I’ve seen, however, is that often companies will become preoccupied with their blog schedule, posting crap if they don’t have the time to really write a post, as long as there IS a post.

Find the Balance

People, this is a no-go. Your readers will start questioning your sanity, or worse, wonder why they ever started reading your blog in the first place. Rather than rush around, wondering what you can do to get more traffic to your blog, VALUE your readers. They’re Connections, relationships (however small or large) – out of the millions of sites on the Net, these wonderful people have chosen YOUR blog to read.

That says something big, and shouldn’t be devalued or wasted on empty content. As well, this is one of the reasons why we say don’t ruin great content with keyword stuffing. If the keywords don’t fall naturally into the content – if you have to force your SEO – you’re doing the readers a disservice.

So – build your SEO campaign. Write to your heart’s content. Use those precious keywords… but always remember the reader and Connections you can make with them.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

SEO and the Big Blog Undertaking

What our solution does is goes to Google and returns the top results for a search query. Why is this important?

• This is useful if you want to know who your competitors are, and how much better than you they are doing in the search results.
• It's also good for monitoring your SEO success over time, and the success of other players in your playfield.
• Lastly, this can be useful to identify newcomers, so you are never caught by surprise when a new player enters your playfield.

How to use it

1. Download the file competitor-research.xls and open it.
2. Enter your website's URL in cell A2
3. Enter the various search terms you compete in, in column B
4. Press Ctrl-Shift-U

The script will scan all the Google result pages for the terms you specified, and will collect all the results that aren't your site.

It will also count the total times each competitor site appears above your site, and below your site.

The result list is ordered by competitor strength, the stronger first.

How it works

The main routine, CompetitorResearch, starts by retrieving our website URL and the search terms, and goes on to process the terms one by one using the utility subroutine ProcessTerm.

'' Retrieve my url
Dim myurl As String
myurl = sheet.Cells(2, 1).Text

'' Work through the list of search terms and process each one
row = 2
While (sheet.Cells(row, 2).Text  "")
    Dim term As String
    term = sheet.Cells(row, 2).Text
    ProcessTerm term, myurl
    row = row + 1
Wend

After all the data is computed, it is also sorted by the "Above me" column and then by "Below me". This way, the site that appears above me in most search term results, is considered the strongest competitor.

The other important subroutine, ProcessTerm, scans search result pages for a specific term:

For page = 1 To PagesToScan
    url = BuildSERPURL(term, start)
    contents = FetchPage(url)

The result pages are searched for organic result links, identified by the string <h3 class="r"><a href="…">

If a result link is a link to my URL, then a flag is raised to indicate that any further links are below me, not above.

If InStr(url, myurl) > 0 Then
    '' This my URL. Everything from here on is below me
    foundMyUrl = True

For all other links, the host name is extracted from the URL. For the sake of this tool, the host name is what differentiates between sites. If this is not the case in your niche (for example if there are plenty of competitors using various subdomains), then you may want to change this code.

hostname = GetHostname(url)

Then the existing list of competitors is scanned to see if (and in which row) this host name already exists. This is done with the Match formula function, which might fail with an error if the host name does not already exist.

row = -1
'' Locate this competitor URL in the existing list
On Error Resume Next
row = Application.WorksheetFunction.Match(hostname, sheet.Columns(3), 0)
On Error GoTo 0

Then, if this competitor site does not already exist in the list, it is added into a new row.

In any case this appearance in the results is counted as either "Before me" or "After me" and the code moves on to the next result

'' Count this appearance either below or above me
If foundMyUrl Then
    sheet.Cells(row, 5).Value = sheet.Cells(row, 5).Value + 1
Else
    sheet.Cells(row, 4).Value = sheet.Cells(row, 4).Value + 1
End If

Configuring the Macro

There are two easily configurable parameters at the top of the script:

1. GOOGLE_WEBSERVER is the host name for the web server you wish to query. As with our previous tool, this allows you to research your competitors in a region-specific Google data center and server, like www.google.co.uk for the UK.
2. PagesToScan is the amount of default-sized result pages to scan. This may be useful if you don't currently rank on the first result page, or if you want to research your weaker competition.

Summary

Knowing who to beat and analyzing how they got there can be a great way to improve your own SEO performance. This spreadsheet is a free and simple way to keep a track of your competitors over time. Is this something you might use for your own SEO efforts?

P.S.

I've updated the file so it now works on Office versions 2000 and up.

More SEO Spreadsheets

• How to Automatically Track Your Google Positions in Microsoft Excel
• A Search Engine Keyword Variation Generator in Excel
• How to Create a Link Checker with Microsoft Excel
• How to Check HTTP Redirects with Microsoft Excel

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

How to Perform SEO Competitor Research with Excel

This is not meant to be a definitive guide to online marketing – more of a checklist of things to do for businesses that are just starting their internet marketing.

Please note – we are based in the UK so a couple of these may not apply in your particular country!

Search Engine Optimization

You need to be found if you are going to be a success

1. Fix your Title Tags – make them keyword rich, with the keywords at the start
2. Fix your Meta Descriptions – Include a Call to Action and some of your keywords, this is for sales not ranking purposes
3. Fix your headings (h1, h2 and h3)
4. Create relevant useful content for your site
5. Keyword research is essential – find out what language your customers will use to find you and target it on your site
6. Remove duplicate content on your site
7. Learn about how search engines work (crawling and indexing) in order to help you understand the basics of SEO
8. Don’t worry too much about Page Rank – it’s a (fairly) useful guide but that is all
9. Don’t buy links – check out this recent SEOMoz post on buying links
10. Get access to your webmaster tools
11. Get a sitemap – you want a HTML and a XML sitemap to cover the search engines and the human users
12. Get a free website grade from Hubspot Grader – it will give you an idea an what needs work on your site
13. Fix your Alt Tags – recent study has suggested that these may be more influential than we previously thought, make them keyword rich and descriptive
14. Draw up a detailed inbound linking campaign and follow it (pay particular attention to the anchor text being used to link to your site)
15. Optimise for universal search (video, photos and local search can all be optimised)
16. Improve the internal linking structure of your own site
17. Subscribe to a couple of SEO blogs to ensure you stay in touch with any new developments

Social Media Success

18. Join LinkedIn
19. Join Facebook – once you have your Facebook page interact with your customers and fans
20. Join Twitter – it is a great tool for staying in touch with your customers and can be used as a promotional tool also. Develop a strategy rather than jumping in blind
21. Attach blog to your site – this will aid your SEO with the fresh regular content, it can give your company a human touch, it can help build inbound links and increases traffic to your site. Get your blog in some big blog directories
22. Get happy customers to review you on the relevant review sites and then thank them via the site
23. Use YouTube and other video sharing sites
24. Use other relevant photo sharing site or site related to your niches
25. Be consistent across all social media – claim your brand online
26. Use social bookmarking services – pick two and start with those
27. Join the forums that are most relevant to your niche and be helpful

Promote your business online

28. Get an add on Gumtree
29. Give a story to the BBC or other relevant news sites
30. Sponsor local events (for exposure and backlinks)
31. Write a Squidoo lens
32. Publish articles and press releases for exposure and backlinks
33. Get your products on Google Shopping
34. Use trust signals and calls to action on your website
35. Get and utilise reviews and testimonials

Drive traffic to your site

36. Give stuff away (content, advice, run competitions)
37. Feed the press
38. Use email marketing
39. Use add this buttons and share buttons
40. Guest blog on other sites in your niche (this can also give you a couple of new inbound links)

Measure your success

41. Get Google Analytics, understand it – and use it to its full potential
Hopefully this will help any businesses that are new to the world of Internet marketing understand what is required to be successful on the Internet – it is time consuming but rewarding. If you need further information here are some links to relevant tools and articles to get you started:

• SEO – Beginners guide to SEO
• Keyword Research Tool – Adwords Keyword Tool
• Website Grader – Hubspot

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

41 Tips For Promoting Your Business On The Internet

OMG not again!

Too Many Tweets?
According to RJMetrics, Twitter has about 75 million accounts all together. About 20% of those accounts are active. Now, while 20% doesn’t sound like much, it equals out to around 15 million active Tweeters (Read the Twitter report). If each Tweeter actually owns 3 of the active accounts (as some do), that still leaves 5 million individuals on Twitter. Quite a bit of social reach for any business or individual… #justsayin

This brings us to the whole topic of this blog, social media marketing.

There are tons of social media networks and methods, which ones should you use?

The three most prominent methods are Twitter, Facebook and blogging – both personal and professional versions. Each reaches out to millions of people, engaging, inviting and all-around connecting with individuals around the world.

Social Media Marketing provides a low impact factor on the target market, which means low annoyance. For example, if they don’t like a particular blog you’ve written or aren’t interested in the topic, they don’t have to read it. If your Tweets aren’t attractive, they can be ignored or you can be unfollowed. If your Facebook page doesn’t provide the information they want, they can unfriend you. In short, these forms of Social Media Marketing give the reader a choice: read or not. Ignore or not. Follow or not. Respond… or not.

As well, Social Media Marketing isn’t just low cost; it’s cost effective when used wisely. Plenty of web hosts offer free small websites to host a blog. You could also use a myriad of free blogging sites, such as WordPress.com or Blogspot. Twitter is free to use, as is Facebook unless you want to post ads. While marketing is traditionally an expensive undertaking, this isn’t true with Social Media Marketing. All you have to have is time. Therefore, it can truly be described as “cost effective”.

Pls follow me

Lastly, you have global reach. As mentioned in the very beginning, consider Twitter’s 15 million active users. They aren’t all in the U.S. or all in the U.K – or all in any one country; Twitter, Facebook and the Internet in general is worldwide. If your business only deals in one country or another, fine fine; however, just because you reach out to a person in the U.K. doesn’t mean that person has friends only in the U.K. They may very well pass on your company information to a friend in the U.S. – who just happens to need your product or service.

Social Media Marketing gives a small business fantastic opportunities that it may otherwise not have. So stop treating it like the unwanted redheaded stepchild embrace it and learn from it. Seldom has a marketing technique had so many benefits for so little cost. When you break it down, this form of marketing gives you the “old time” methods of personal connection, with the relatively new technology of social media that reaches out to hundreds of thousands of people with the mere click of a button.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Social Networks: The Redheaded Step Child

On today's panel we have:

Tami Dalley, Director, User Experience Optimization, ROI Labs
Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, EightFold Logic
June Li, Founder & Managing Director, ClickInsight
Noran El-Shinnawy, Internet Marketing Manager, Acquisio

Tami Dalley, Director, User Experience Optimization, ROI Labs

Tami gives us a quote: "Life's too short to learn all the lessons the hard way". With that in mind, she'll be giving us three life lessons that we can hopefully learn the easy way.

1) Don't let someone else decide what's best for you

Look at Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and tie creative IDs to ROAS. Don't just look at click through rate (CTR).

Steps:

1. Use dynamic URL parameters
2. Look at the entry page report
3. Add in AdWords Data, and match the creative ID data to the copy

2) Don't forget to focus on what helps you get to your goals

We're talking about attribution here. The industry standard is to use last-click attribution, but it doesn't tell you the whole story.

Steps:

1. Pull a campaign report for last-touch attribution
2. Pull a campaign report for first-touch attribution
3. Average the sales from #1 and #2
4. Calculate CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

3) Don't judge a book by its cover

No metric on its own tells the whole story, so do a multi-metric mash-up (deep dive analytics). Move away from counting things, to solving business problems.

Tami also mentions that they're always looking for web analytics talent (they're hiring).

Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, EightFold Logic

It's good to collect data, but if you're not using the data, then you're not listening. There is a lot of data available, so use it. Although offline is not easily measurable, online is completely measurable. "You can't manage what you don't measure," says Richard.

Not every metric is a KPI, and vice versa. KPIs are things that you measure and react to.

Key metrics for online marketers:

• Basic Counts (Visits, Uniques, Time on Site, Bounce Rate, …)
• Share of Voice (percentage of available traffic)
• Return on Investment
• Cross-channel mix

To look into the cross-channel mix, look at your log files for the referrer, session cookie, and persistent cookie information. Consider the attribution over time, and take into account everything so that you can invest properly into what works.

Businesses need to understand how all the channels fit together.

Use predictive analysis to project market opportunity, and don't just look at historical metrics. Look at data beyond tables of data; look at it in relation to the offline world. Segmentation is key to understanding your metrics.

Businesses care about:

• Channel investment
• Expenses per click/referral/etc
• Revenue generated
• Average order value
• ROI
• Share of voice

Businesses don't care about the terms used day-to-day by search marketers.

June Li, Founder & Managing Director, ClickInsight

Now it's time to talk about process! Look beyond the metrics, as they're not the problem. Ask questions and find out what's meaningful so that you can maximize value.

There are many tools, but the driver (analyst) is more important.

Go from:
Data and reports -> Analysis -> Opportunities -> Action -> Value

However, we begin our journey with value. What is expected to be delivered? Understand the desired business outcomes and goals. Identify the KPIs. Note that the KPI combinations will be unique.

Look beyond just the clicks, and drill down to the website to see where in the funnel there are issues. After that you can flip the funnel upside down to maximize long-term revenue. Turn loyalty into increased usage, then upsell or cross-sell.

In summary:

• The analyst is the key, not the tools
• Goals > Questions > Metrics > Analysis > Action
• Go beyond the initial conversion, and maximize long-term revenue

Noran El-Shinnawy, Internet Marketing Manager, Acquisio

Noran starts off by introducing an acronym from Avinash Kaushik, HiPPO. HiPPO is the highest paid person's opinion (your boss). It's important to tell a good story to the HiPPO and bring value.

Average metrics yield average results!

1) Targeting

• Show the right ad to the right people. Connect the search query to the ad copy and landing page.
• Divide the campaign by the CTR and focus on improving campaigns that are under performing.
• Don't know why a visitor's on your site? Ask them.

2) Valuing

• Increase the number of qualified viewers while keeping costs down. Use negative keywords and adjust bids.
• Quality Score has a huge impact on CPC.
• Run an impression share report.

3) Satisfying

• You're not a robot, so automate or semi-automate. [She's semi-pitching Acquisio here. ]
• Focus on increasing value.
• Create buyer momentum, from click, to consider, to convert.
• Give them an easy call-to-action.

On Twitter: @noranshinnawy

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

SES Toronto 2010: Meaningful SEM Metrics

Well, good news everyone, we have a solution in the form of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet!

Our Excel sheet produces your generated keywords both separately and combined together in one string (where keywords are separated by commas). It works on as many prefixes and keywords as you require. Starting from a small core set of words you can generate many full phrases that could be used in your SEO efforts or to generate a long list for your Adwords campaigns.

You can download the file from here.

How it Works

First we loop through all the prefixes, and through the keywords. Next we fill the separate results column while building a combined results string.

For Each rngPrefix In rngPrefixesList
    For Each rngKeyword In rngKeywordList
        ActiveCell = rngPrefix.Value & " " & rngKeyword
        If strVariationList = "" Then
            strVariationList = ActiveCell
        Else
            strVariationList = strVariationList & ", " & ActiveCell
        End If
        ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select
    Next
Next

As you can see, the meat of the code is some very simple string concatenations. You could modify it to add all the Adwords variations you need very easily, such as Exact Match brackets and so on.

At the end we put the combined result in the proper cell. For convenience we made a short-cut to activate the macro (CTRL+SHIFT+V).

Summary

Obviously this is just the start of what we could do. What else would you like to see incorporated into this tool? Perhaps we could do a follow up with more features?

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

A Search Engine Keyword Variation Generator in Excel

Have you considered email marketing? Do you have a list of people you can send a campaign to? This is the first step. An email campaign does no good if you have no one to send it to.

There are several ways to start and maintain an email list, but it comes down to two basic methods: buying or building.

Buying Email Lists
Buying email lists is not the most recommended method, but it is the quickest. The problem with paid lists is that many of the individuals on it don’t actually wish to participate. Thus, much of the email sent to them from companies fall under “spam”. Enough reports of spam and your business email address may be blocked by the email providers. As well, email marketing lists are not exclusive, which means you’re not the only one with the addresses.

Building Email Lists
Building email lists greatly reduces the chance of being reported as a spam account. It’s slower going, but those on the list are already familiar with you and your business. Have a call to action on your site and give them quick access to a way to sign up for your newsletter.

Success very rarely happens overnight, and the same is true for an email marketing campaign. However, the right strategy can, not only help you generate new business, but can also increase your customer relations for repeat business.

Business Concerns for Email Marketing Campaigns

When you think about your email marketing campaign, there are tons of things to keep in mind:
• What product or service should I use to convert readers?
• What words are considered “spam” words?
• How long should a good email be?
• Is there a good time to send out an email?
• What if I’m selling a male or female product in the email but have a general mailing list?
• What if I don’t have any conversions?

There are more things to worry about, but these are some of the most important.

Business Answers for Email Marketing Campaigns

A large part of what you need to know, you need to know before the campaign even starts. For instance:
• What do you want to accomplish with your campaign?
• Do you want them to buy something?
• Do you have a special deal you want to share with potential clients or customers?
• Do you merely want to have more visitors to your website?

Anytime you send out an email during your campaign, keep the purpose of the campaign in mind. Each email should be geared toward that purpose, whatever it is. As well, statistics show that readers respond better if you don’t hide your message in the email. If your title mentions a sale, make sure there’s a sale mentioned in the email.

Also, the links in your email should lead directly to the product or service landing page, rather than to a general or home page. The landing page should be similar to the email with the link. A home page, general page or landing page without the email information will quickly lose possible conversions because they didn’t see what they were promised in the email.

In short, a successful email marketing campaign has three main components:

1. An email marketing service with a customer database. Why is a customer database important? Because it allows you to do split testing, to figure out the best type of email for your targeted market, as well as for segmentation. With segmentation, you can also set apart groups of lists for specific emails.

2. Automated email follow up. Once you have more than a few contacts in your list, responding to everyone can take a long time and a lot of work. With an automated email follow up, you can set up different messages for different links. It also gives your readers a sense of constant communication and stops you from making mistakes – like sending the wrong response.

3. Multi-media campaigns with multiple steps. Most email campaigns include a sequence, such as “read email, click link, read landing page, complete conversion”. Each step is a chance to insert something spectacular that compliments the campaign, such a letter or gift for someone who converted. Follow this up with a voice message informing them that they should receive a gift soon.

In conclusion, keep the above questions and components in mind. Putting all these aspects into your email marketing efforts will give you a major jump on the competition.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Email Marketing: Buying, Building, Doing