by Alex Plana

Acquiring affiliate marketing leads can significantly help increase your customer’s overall life time value. Instead of getting one sale upfront, by having their email, you can simply present your customers with multiple offers and generate additional sales. The best way to accomplish this is through mailing lists. No, we’re not saying you need to purchase a list of names. We’re simply talking about utilizing opt-in email lists. In this situation, names are not purchased but are provided by the users themselves.

An example would be an information website offering ways to build confidence. The site promotes multiple affiliate related programs in the self-esteem niche. Through these affiliate programs, the visitors on the affiliate’s site can find themselves on the merchant’s landing page by clicking on a link or button. If the visitors complete a transaction in a form of a sale or lead, a commission is then made. In this situation, the visitor lands on the affiliates landing page and is then directed to the merchant’s landing page. By not capturing the visitors email information, the affiliate has no way to present additional offers and losing out on additional commissions.

As an affiliate and with PPC costs on the rise, it’s getting much harder to produce profits. This is why it’s imperative that online marketers utilize mailing lists to improve the life time value of their customers. This in return will help justify the higher CPC costs.

Here’s how to get started:

There are several email marketing applications to assist in managing your mailing lists. Prices will vary and the type of program you choose is dependent on your business requirements. Take your time to evaluate several programs and choose one that fits your needs. If you are are just getting started, it’s always safer to go with a lower end package and if needed, scale to the higher end products. You will want to make sure the package you choose allows for scalability before proceeding.

Once you’ve established the mailing list software, take the time to learn how to use the program. Once you complete this, you are ready to rock-n-roll and begin collecting leads. You will want to setup your site by requesting visitors to register, or sign up for your mailing list to receive occasional emails. You simply can’t add a register box and hope a flood of people will register. You’ll need to entice your visitors to register. Give them a reason to sign up. For example, “7 Must Know Tips on How to Improve Your Confidence”. Your visitors are at your site because they have a need. Know what they are looking for and provide them with a solution but that solution is provided after when they opt-in to your mailing list.

Popular Email Marketing Services:

GetResponse
iContact
AWeber
MailChimp

With internet marketing, it requires a number of smaller targeted disciplines to make it successful. One of these disciplines is article marketing. Both, internet marketing and article marketing complement one another. Without them together, any online marketing campaign would be less effective. Using articles to market your business, individual, or affiliate offers is essential to having a highly effective internet marketing strategy.

There are essentially numerous ways promote your business online. Just like in traditional advertising, most facets of internet marketing costs money and in many cases these costs can be steep. This is where article marketing can make the most sense in keeping costs low and showing a good return.

Article marketing offers a unique twist to online marketing and it has been used long before commerce online has been around. When it comes to promoting online, article marketing posses an excellent opportunity to creating those hard to get targeted keyword links back to your website or other web properties you might own.

Important Features to Consider in Article Marketing:

• Marketing in this fashion creates a wonderful opportunity to get links back to your website. The more links you have coming back to your site from other web properties, the more likely you will see improvement in organic search listings.
• Increase in referral traffic to your site. The more articles you have in circulation on the internet, the increase in visitors coming from these articles to your website.
• Establish yourself as an authority on the topics you are writing about. People will keep coming back for more if you prove yourself as an authority within the topics of your articles.
• Add some form of resource box or byline for a way your readers to get in contact with you or a link to visit your website.
• When optimized right, you can improve your overall search engine rank and traffic by having your articles on high authority web properties.

For the reasons listed above, this is why it’s vital that article marketing should be a part of any internet marketing campaign. There are a variety of ways to market online, the thing to remember is that content is still king and article marketing offers the a way to get your content on the internet through a variety of web properties.

The Big 3 - Google, Yahoo, and MSN announced a new tag they are currently using. This tag will solve the duplicate content issues that has been a problem for many websites throughout the past few years. Now, you can tell the search engines what is the preferred URL to use when faced with multiple pages that are identical to one another.

In aggregate, all duplicate pages will transfer any Page Rank and other SEO advantages to the preferred canonical URL. This could result in a bump in search engine rankings.

The link tag below should be implemented within the <head> tag of the duplicate pages.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com” />

Canonical URL Plugin for WordPress:

http://yoast.com/wordpress/canonical/

As I watch Super Bowl XLIII and in typical fashion, I was more interested in seeing the commercials than the actual game itself. It was quite evident the state our economy is in from the Super Bowl commercials and lack thereof.

Gone from the normal Super Bowl advertising scene was any U.S. automaker. Taking their place were foreign automakers like Audi, Toyota, and Hyundai.

New to the scene this year were 3-D commercials by Monsters vs. Aliens and SoBe Life Water. As I watched the commercials on my 42 inch Plasma TV, I first thought the fluorescent green outline I was seeing was a sign my TV was malfunctioning. Whew!, was I ever relieved to find out it was the commercial and not my TV that made my heart stop.

The one commercial that really caught my attention was Cash4Gold.com. It’s not your prototypical Super Bowl commercial. In fact, my first thought was, it’s the work of an affiliate marketer. Let me tell you this, if affiliate marketers were to make a commercial, this would be the perfect example. Everything about it had an affiliate feel, the domain name, type of commercial, and landing page completely felt like an affiliate marketer.

Let’s take the domain, Cash4Gold.com. This domain name alone sounds like an offer you would find on many CPA affiliate networks. The domain is bluntly to the point, which is very typical of many affiliate minded offers. Even though the domain may seem “cheesy” to most, it is a high converting domain name.

The web page for Cash4Gold.com even had the feel of an affiliate marketer. It wasn’t just any old web page, it was a highly converting landing page/microsite, commonly found with many successful PPC campaigns. A lead form with the common strong call-to-action on a red button was very prominent on every page. Also evident common with successful PPC driven landing pages was the “As Seen on TV” reference, 100% Money Back Guarantee (above the fold), strong headline with major bullet points, and a landing page design created by someone that is not a designer.

The commercial felt like something an affiliate marketer would create. If Googlebot were able to crawl this commercial, Google’s “red flag” for organic listings would probably be raised. The term “gold” was used 18 times in this commercial and was quite obvious what the message was about.

This could be a sign of the times and with our current economic status, advertisers will have to really focus on how they are going to drive sales. Just like an affiliate marketer, the mindset with improving conversions and the bottom line. What a concept, more emphasis on ROI and less on winning an award.

by Alex Plana

Choosing the right keywords is vital for any search marketing campaign. If you target the wrong keywords, it can prove to be costly and if you do not target the right keywords, you’re are just simply missing out on a huge opportunity.

With keyword research, there are two strategies when researching for PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). With PPC, you have the luxury of going after a larger and broader keyword list. It’s common to have a keyword list ranging from a few thousand in upwards to a hundred thousand.

For SEO keywords, your list will usually be much smaller and more targeted. To rank organically, keywords must appear on the web pages. The more keywords you want to rank, the more pages you’ll need to create to support those keywords.

In this article, I’ll be covering keyword research for PPC. First, you need to understand that many people fall short when researching for keywords. In many cases, they capture only 20% - 30% of possible keywords within their niche. This is where many PPC campaigns fail to make a positive return on investment. The keywords they go after are the most common and usually the most expensive. They don’t realize that the 70% - 80% keywords they didn’t target are the keywords that could bring them 50% - 300% ROI.

Understand Your Market

I know this may be a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how many people who do not understand their market. This especially holds true when it comes to online. Find out what your top online competitors are doing and what PPC keywords they are targeting. Understand your demographics. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they mostly U.S. visitors? If so, what states are providing the most visitors? The better you understand your industry, the better your understanding to what keywords to target.

Here are a few tools I’ve found to be quite helpful with market research:

1. Google Trends
2. Google Insight
3. Microsoft adCenter Labs
4. Quantcast

Build Your Keyword List

The initial keyword list you create is very important. Where many people fall short is that they usually target deep keywords before targeting broad terms. Deep keywords are keywords that usually have the main keywords in it. Let’s say we have a site about dogs. We want to target keywords all dog related.

A deep keyword list would look like this:

• dogs
• small dogs
• dog breeds
• dog
• breeding dogs
• guard dogs
• dog names
• dog breeders
• …

A broad keyword list would look like this:

• dogs
• puppies
• kennels
• canine
• house breaking
• german shepards
• border collie
• boston terrier
• bull terrier
• breed profiles
• humane society
• …

As you can see with the broad list, the term “dogs” doesn’t appear with the other terms but they do relate to “dogs”. If you noticed, I have the keyword phrase “humane society” under the broad list. Yes, this is a very broad term and I might be reaching, but this is a term that could convert very well. Here’s a secret, no one really knows unless you try it. This could be one of those “golden terms” that most people tend to miss.

So, create a broad list first. Once you’ve created this list, take these terms and go deep with them. As you can see, this will create a much larger keyword list. In addition to this, utilize misspellings and create a negative keyword list. You’re well on your way to a successful PPC campaign.

by Alex Plana

Any website owner who cares about ranking well in search engines should utilize what is sometimes referred to as link condoms, or more commonly known as “nofollows” .

Nofollows was originally created by Google to combat the large spam problems that faced many bloggers. Spammers would post irrelevant comments in blog posts with hyperlinks to their websites. This would pass SEO link advantage to their site and eventually provide an increase in search engine rankings.

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is assigned to a hyperlink, and provides no SEO link advantage to the destination page. With no apparent SEO advantage to spamming blogs, most spammers simply looked to other areas to game Google’s organic listings. Blog spamming is still being practiced today but since the introduction to nofollows, this type of spam method has dramatically decreased.

Nofollows was made to deter spammers and help reduce altering organic listings,  but with it’s existence proved to be quite useful with on-page optimization. This is especially true when applied to a high-level SEO technique called Site Theming. Here, nofollows play a vital role in increasing a theme’s overall  topical relevancy.

With Site Theming, the goal is to structure a site in a themed sectional structure. For example, if you have a site about automobiles, you may have a themed section for Ford, Toyota, and Chevy. Within each section, you can find it’s supporting pages. These pages will be topically related to the sections they are in thus supporting the sections overall theme. An example would be a Ford Mustang page would fall under the Ford section. Any supporting pages to the Ford Mustang page would also be under this section.

Now, the idea is to link to pages within the same theme section. All Ford hyperlinks only link to Ford pages. This will provide a high theme weight for each section and could provide a big boost within search engine rankings. Unfortunately, from a usability standpoint, you need to link to other themed sections. By doing this, you will dilute your section’s overall theme weight resulting in lower search rankings. This is where nofollows come in handy.

Using a nofollow on links to unrelated themes will help keep all the link weight within it’s own theme. Like I said earlier, nofollows don’t pass off any link value, it stays within it’s page. You’re simply telling Google, don’t pass off any link love (link value) to this page, just keep the link love to myself.

In this article, I only scratched the surface of Site Theming. It is one of the more complex on-page optimization strategies but when utilized correctly,  it can provide a huge boost in organic listings.

by Alex Plana

As I scour the Internet as if I’m superman flying over Metropolis looking for helpless victims in need. I come across an online advertisement by a so-called SEO specialist. To me, it’s apparent this person is inexperienced and looking to take advantage of some website owner.

The ad reads:

“Ventura - SEO Service Website optimization

Get your website in the top 10 of the major search engines!
Website optimization can be a difficult nut to crack and needs an experienced SEO expert to get it done!
I am an independent SEOS with over 12 years exp. If you want good organic listings hire me first, i will get you
where you need! References on demand.

Anthony T - SEOS

email: <user>@live.com”

Yes, this is how it was written; typos and all. I did change his email to <user> for obvious reasons. Most of you reading this would never hire someone from an ad like this; right? Unfortunately, somebody out there has or will hire him for his services.

Let me break down this ad and explain to you why this person does not know SEO.

First, no one can guarantee organic rankings. Any wise SEO specialist knows better and would never say they can guarantee rankings. Experienced SEOs know there are constant ranking fluctuations. Search engine ranking algorithms are continually being updated causing adjustments with search rankings.

Search results tend to be different from one geographic location to another. Somebody from New York will likely show slightly different search results from someone in California.

The major reason SEOs can’t guarantee search rankings is because of this little thing called Personalized Search. You might of heard of it, it’s one of the biggest topics in Search right now. Personalized search is evident when a user is served search results based on their history and past results. So, if you are searching for “dogs”, you may receive future results on “dog houses”. Basically, if personalized search is enabled, it’s unlikely no two people will have the same search results.

Oh, I should also mention Google’s Search Wiki. It was introduced back on November 2008. It’s a way for users to modify their search results. If for some reason you don’t like a certain search result because it doesn’t relate to your interests; you can move it’s position or delete all together. This gives users the ability to customize their search results.

The second reason why the advertisement above has no credibility, is that our boy Tony is saying he has over 12 years experience with SEO. So he’s saying he’s been doing this longer than some of our forefathers of SEO? The earliest sign of the term “Search Engine Optimization” being used was in July 1997 (11.5 years ago) on a Usenet group. I really find it unlikely he’s been doing SEO for over 12 years.

Last but not least, the e-mail address being used. He is using a free email account from Live.com. Don’t you think, someone who has been doing SEO for 12 years would have a professional email address on his own domain by now?

Bottom Line: Tony may be a nice guy but he lost credibility with his advertisement above. I would simply not trust him with my 80 year old grandmother’s crochet website.

Up Up and Away!

One of the best skill sets an online marketer can possess is the ability to be innovative. Successful Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns are the direct result of growth and revenue generated through tactical execution and out-of-box thinking.

At the onset, successful online marketers understand that in-depth keyword research, strategic bid optimization, effective campaign setup, continuous split-testing, and creating highly conversion driven landing pages are the keys to online success.

Handling the intricacies of PPC is like handling a slippery eel! Success can slip right through your hands if you miss the mark. And quite often, a simple change in PPC tactics can mean the difference between a campaign that takes off—and one that never leaves the runway.

Without the right strategy and execution, you could end up paying higher than average ad costs, experience non-existant visitors, and cross the finish line well below your margins. In our next visit, we’ll discuss how to design landing pages that are guaranteed to bring in the traffic.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of online advertising in aggregate with disciplines in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Contextual Advertising, and Paid Placement.

Contextual Advertising is when ads are displayed on a website where a contextual ad system determines what ads to display based on the page’s related keywords.

Paid Placement Advertising is when an advertiser pays for keyword placement within a sponsored ad section of a website. With Paid Placement, you can determine where you want to rank as long as you are willing to pay for it. Both Contextual and Paid Placement Advertising tend to fall within Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most sought after form of online advertising for businesses. The reason for this is it costs absolutely nothing to rank within the organic search results. When a website is properly optimized for search engines, they can expect to show up in organic listings for keywords that are relevant to their website. Sites that rank well for high traffic keywords can expect to receive a significant number of visitors. With SEO being the most rewarding form of online advertising, it’s also the hardest to execute. Many web designers, webmasters, and even search marketers struggle to take full advantage of getting sites to rank organically.

The top search engines utilize complex algorithms to determine what and where a web page will rank within their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). There are over 100 plus factors that help determine organic search engine rankings. Each search engine weighs certain factors more than others but typically hold the factors with the most influence equally high on their lists. Within SEO, their are 2 major areas of focus, On-Page and Off-Page factors.

On-Page factors, which is about 20% of SEO, includes everything a webmaster can control. These factors are changes that can be made on a website by modifying keywords in the Title Tag, H-Tags, Alt Tags, Body Content, and Site’s Theme.

Off-Page factors, which consists of the remaining 80% of SEO, includes factors a webmaster can’t control. These are factors that consist of acquiring quality relevant in-bound links (online votes) from other websites, blogs, articles, directories, social sites, and etc. Search engines, especially Google, place more emphasis on Off-Page factors because it is much more difficult to influence.

Why do many webmaster’s, web designers, and some search marketers struggle with SEO? Simply put, they focus most of their energy on the 20% of SEO. Just that alone is not enough to have a well optimized website. In the upcoming months, we’ll discuss some strategies to getting quality in-bound links to your website and some high-level On-Page optimization strategies.

Unlike SEO, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising comes with a cost. An advertister pays everytime someone clicks or an impression is executed on their ad. Even though it is more difficult to get a positive return with this type of online advertising model, it’s absolutely not impossible. Maybe you have heard that PPC advertising is a complete waste of money? And quite honestly it is…but that’s if you don’t know what you are doing.

Have you ever heard of Affiliate Marketers? Many of these marketers are some of the most savviest online marketers. Most affiliates generate 80% to 90% of their business through PPC advertising. They work with much lower margins and still find ways to generate positive ROI through PPC advertising. Some of the top affiliate marketers are generating well over 6-figures on a monthly basis at 50% to 300% ROI.

Why do most people fail with PPC advertising? Well, PPC advertising requires a high-level of understanding, right keyword research, proper campaign setup, bid optimization, high click-through ads, continual split-testing, highly converting landing pages, and much more. With PPC advertising, the slightest change in a campaign can be the difference from a negative to a very profitable campaign. Most people just don’t understand the intricacies of PPC advertising and in return are paying higher ad costs or converting less visitors keeping them well below their margins.

When done right, PPC advertising can prove to be a great online advertising tool to improving a website’s bottom line. In the upcoming months, we will cover some PPC strategies that will dramatically improve you return on investment. We’ll go into landing page design, avoiding the infamous “Google Slap”, high-level keyword research, and much much more.

Thank you for visiting Plan A SEM Blog and we hope you found this to be informative. Please continue to come back or simply subscribe to our RSS Feed as we reveal SEM tips to help you grow your online business.