Your Blog as an advertising medium?

Advertising for me is an art form to express freedom in making business. The approach is forever varying that there are so many strategies founded to ease the way in achieving ones goal to be noticed. Blog, I can say, is one of the best answers to this kind of marketing freedom that I’m talking about.

Unlike online articles or contents on a website, Blogs are more concise. Yes, they are short or would only talk briefly about a certain topic but they are crisp with information. They also create a hippy impression to the viewers that even with just the mention of the name - ‘Blog’ - already creates an impact. You get my drift?

As an SEO researcher and consultant and a family business manager, thru the years, I’ve learned that to deal with competition sometimes you have to take it easy in your marketing approach. Yes, you have to be extra careful with your every decision but you also have to consider the fact that you’re dealing with your viewer’s interest. You have to always think both ways – the one arrow pointing to you and the arrow pointing to your customer. I’m not saying that

you have to take the back seat and just watch your business grow or suffer before your eyes and just do minor fixes. What I’m saying is you’ve got to have or find ways to be able to deliver in ease and feel the freedom to just be what your business can be. Alright, so that line I just said right there nearly gave my grandmother a heart-attack on a gathering about our family business. He-he. But seriously, get some hassle-free ideas to market your business like getting yourself a Blog for example.

Tips on this thought:
- If you’re a business owner who also happens to have a website up and running, consider creating a Blog for you and your business.
- Identify yourself as the legitimate owner of the business.
- Create write-ups using your own views about your products or services.
- Write and write some more!
- Be as candid as you can be. Anyways, Blog is hippie so no need to be serious and all that.
- Make connections to your colleagues’ own Blog sites.
- Use your Blog as a back link of your website.
- Freely share your opinion on why your customers should make an effort to check you out.
- But don’t expect too much from your Blog sit. The best you can get from it is your viewer’s feedback, nothing more nothing less.

I’ve experimented on this idea by simply updating regularly my personal Blog even with just simple entries about what I’m currently going thru right now as an individual (this Blog of course has connections to my friends’ Blog sites and other network community sites - i.e. Friendster.com, Multiply.com, Devianart.com and MySpace.com, etc.). Now, every time I post an entry to this Blog they’d be able to read my status, insights and all, be it good and bad remarks, you know.

One time I posted the same *entry I have on Deviantart.com to my personal Blog. The next day, I got a comment from a viewer in Bahrain saying that I was running out of ideas and all. I’m just saying, Bahrain? I mean --- I have viewers from Bahrain? That’s like wow, right? So, can you imagine just how much useful it is?


*Sorry, I already deleted the post just ver recently so I’m sure the comment went with it to the drain.

You and Your Marketing Campaign

Business is struggling, no customers coming in and out of your store, you were thinking, what now? You thought of online marketing. Sure. Why not? You hired an expert to create and design a professional website to represent your business online. Now it’s done. You now start selling your products/services online. Great! Everything’s all set. But the question again, how will your customers find you? Do they have to know my website address for them to see me?

Here comes advertising. You see different local directories, open portals, search engines, sponsored links, Multiply.com, MySpace.com, and Blogs just to name a few online advertising attractions. You thought such an advantage for the business. So you got yourself the most promising of all – Sponsored Link or Pay-Per-Click.

Like what I’ve posted on my previously about Mr. Limousine Florida who’s only servicing the entire Florida but wants the use of such a competitive keyword term – Limousine service. What you have to know about most marketing campaign is they specialize on specific areas only. For example, you’re Mr. Limousine Florida, and indeed you surely don’t want clients calling you all the way from the Pacific, right? So in order for you to achieve this you need to have a local directory advertising to make sure that you’re listed in your areas’ search results so the people around your area would find you as easily as that.

Let’s say you are a small company who wants to make it big in your industry. So you have a new website, ready for optimization. Well, that’s good then. It’s just quite right that you get your website optimized first since and allow it to go through the indexing or propagation process which normally takes 12-16 weeks or 3-4 months because your website will need some getting used to with the search engine robots.

The trick is for you, the site owner, to be familiar with the type of marketing campaign that would fit your target market. You have to remember the fact that both sides (you and your advertising) should not comprise along the way. If you have a consultant who is working closely with you on all your marketing projects for the business, better be open with them regarding what image you’d like to project towards your viewers online.

www.KeywordSpy.com

As an SEO consultant I’ve always been confronted with the question like - Where can I get the most comprehensive and budget friendly keywords for online advertising campaign? The question would usually freak me out because there are so many keyword research tools online that choosing which ones are reliable would be so hard to tell. By way of distinguishing from the popular race to the most effective of all, it’s really a tough call. Today, the answer is no brainier.

KeywordSpy was born in the midst of 2007. Its vision is to serve as the most useful keyword research tool there is in the market. Competing with almost a hundred advanced keyword tools for both SEO and PPC, KeywordSpy emerged as the newest and if not the only “All-In-One Keyword Research Tool” in the market.

Eventually, it was proclaimed to be the most advanced research tool to use for any Organic SEO or PPC campaign because it not only passed the expectations of analysts who tested its free trial feature but also surpassed their competitors efforts who had been in the industry for years.

What’s the story behind the success of this tool that most people are so into? Let me list you some of its features and see if you can use this tool (even just its free trial feature) on your next optimization project.

- KeywordSpy has the most comprehensive keyword database. They have over a billion keyword resources and counting.

- Their keyword databank is updated on a regular basis.

- They provide keywords for different countries (US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and South Africa). And since they are most of the time updating their database, we can expect some additions in this part really soon.

- They are the only keyword research tool that displays Ad Rank, Competitor Count and PPC Cost of keywords upon your request! Whoa!

- They provide excellent support service whenever you need assistance on their other features.

- They have really user friendly search log that are accessible with the use of either Keywords or your competitors domain name itself! Isn’t that so easy or what?

- Lastly, the search results you get have nothing but 99% accurate ratings.

There are now lots of talks about how revolutionize online marketing has been since its introduction in the late 1990’s. Many advertisers had a hard time keeping up with the changes. This is the reason for the creation of diversified tools to help advertisers and site owners gain back the confidence that web world is still a nicer place to live in – for their business marketing ventures of course.

SEO Keywords

When I was still working as a project manager for a website design company particularly handling an average of seven (7) optimization projects a week, the most misunderstood part of all the stages is the Keyword Research and Analysis.

Keywords are like the bread and butter of any search engine campaign there is in the online community. The universal rule in choosing keywords for your online marketing campaign is just simple – get the right ones and do not abuse them. So why is this part the hardest then, you may ask? Well then let me set the platform, allow me to site you some of my good and bad encounters in this area so for you to get the picture.

Client #1 – Mr. Boiler

Mr. Boiler owns a boiler repair and maintenance company in New York. He’s one beefy man who has only one thing in mind – get his competitor out of the way, in online marketing of course. While working on the optimization project for his website he related me stories about how long he’d been in this business yet his competitors are the ones making it big on the search engines. Clearly, he was in dire need to get something done on his site to be noticed. As I had explained the process, did the website analysis and keyword research, Mr. Boiler one day said he has his own list of keywords to use for the optimization. I was stunned. I though this man is really making a great deal out of this and so I took the list of keywords and re-checked them. With his “versus the competitor” in mind I checked the keywords using KeywordSpy (a keyword research tool most effective for finding competitors keywords) and reported the results back to Mr. Boiler. I explained to him that using a really substantial keyword generator – KeywordSpy – his keywords are no good. He was taken aback foremost. I realized that Mr. Boiler only took wild guesses as to what his prospective customers are typing in on the search engines without really doing any proper research and analysis on the keywords. So we went on with the optimization using the recommended SEO keywords from KeywordSpy and now he’s making waves in the rankings.

Client #2 – Mr. Limousine Florida

Limousine service is such a huge industry, and this is what I’ve been explaining to my client Mr. Limousine Florida. In my three years doing optimization projects, I could say I’ve handled almost a hundred limousine businesses already that dealing with them, as from experience, for the most part, is the hardest of all. Mr. Limousine Florida is a very meticulous client. Normally, I’d handle SEO development for the maximum of ten (10) business days only, but with him, time is out of topic. I spent like two weeks making him realize why we’re also using “limosine” – the misspelled “limousine” as part of the keywords (because it also has a fair share of results on the rankings. The word "limousine" is most commonly mispelled by searchers online), and why we need to add his target location if he’s only a local company, like if he’s only servicing the entire Florida, we’ll need to add Florida on the keyword “limousine service” and make it “limousine service in Florida”. In the end, we finished the optimization project for one month and with major post-project development assistance of course.

Keyword research doesn’t really have to be thought as a complex part of any optimization campaign, though it is considered tricky, still, if an SEO consultant, and the site owners themselves, would only understand the proper way to get effective keywords or would know which keyword research tool to be used in finding the best keywords then optimization would as easy as said and done.

What really is Search Engine Optimization?

For many advertisers, e-marketers, website consultants and analysts, Search Engine Optimization is a kind of process used to improve the quality of traffic to a certain website on the Search Engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN etc.) by way of choosing keywords to get their respective websites on the natural listings (i.e. organic or algorithmic). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) allows your website to be seen by millions of people on the Internet each and every time they’d be looking for the type of products or services online.

There are three (3) important stages in SEO process. Each step we would discuss so for you to understand the weight of each stage as we go along. First stage (1) is Website Analysis and Keyword Research. Second (2) is Copywriting or the content creation. Third (3) is Search Engine Submission.

In SEO, your goal is to get as much traffics to your website. You get this with the help of proper website analysis and highly targeted keywords to get started with.

Website Analysis

Identifying parts of your website that needs to be improved is decisive for most business owners who tried as much to get all their company information on their website (i.e. company profile, product descriptions and images, etc). But then this greatly affects the size of your website, making it not fit for optimization, because with SEO, size matters.

If you are planning to market your website on the World Wide Web make sure it really is that presentable. When we say ‘presentable’ that means your website isn’t that hard to be viewed by anyone from any part of the world. Check your website’s size capacity and limit; see if you’d been exceeding it. One way to check this is to ask help from your webmaster or a webpage analyzer who could probably even suggest a better way to minimize any affected area of your website. Yes, you will need to modify or change some parts of your website before it be optimized. As they say, change is inevitable, and online marketing is no escape.

Keyword research

What are keyword tools and keyword finder? How does a keyword research tool work? Will I really get effective keywords by using them? And, what are keywords by the way?

Keywords are words combined to find related and helpful sites in browsing thru the search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN). In your optimization you can either get yourself your own keyword research tool or a keyword finder in generating the best SEO keywords to use. Finding the best keywords suited for the products and services you offer is probably the most significant part of the entire SEO process.

That is probably the reason why there are hundreds of keyword research tools available online for anyone to use. The most important aspect in choosing as to which tool to go with is not only to serve as a keyword tracker for your website but also to have the ability to provide you the most effective keywords for your choice of campaign.

Copywriting

After getting the right keywords, next is getting them integrated on your contents. Contents are essential elements of a website. It is thru this you can be able to convey facts to your viewers about what you have in store. In any case, everything here has to be relative to all parties, for you (the owner of the website) for the viewers and the search engines as well.

The objective is to present your information in an easy yet sensible manner for your desired audience. Yes, in the web world, viewers vary so for you to keep up with this you would need to diversify your projection towards the information on your website.

There are many ways to explain the process of optimization. I, on the other hand explains this out of experience from my previous search engine optimization projects.

Note: if you’re venturing on online marketing for the very first time, do not rush! As some SEO projects can be kinda pricey, that rushing things might turn into not so good results that would only cause you high blood pressures and all (take it from my client in New York).

Tip: Consider subscribing to a serious keyword research tool like this one I’ve discovered lately – www.keywordspy.com, the latest and the most substantial of all keyword research generator on the face of online marketing. I’ll talk about them more in my next posts. Bye for now!

The SEO Preface

It is in the year 1996 when people began to explore the wonders and efficacy of online marketing. Businesses from all over the world started to realize the effect of advertising thru the Internet helping them maximize their potentials in making it big in their respective industries. These phenomenons evolved with the introduction of Search Engine Optimization, now considered the most widely used technique in online marketing.

But many questions were raised and speculations pulled advertisers and business owners to take it slow in trying this new trend in online marketing. Questions such as the following: What really is Search Engine Optimization? What will it really do for a website or for a certain business or for an advertiser trying to make a name on the World Wide Web? How is it important that an analysis has to be done primarily to really get things right? What are keyword tools and keyword finder? How does a keyword research tool work? Will I really get effective keywords by using them? And, what are keywords by the way? How important are they that it is considered the most critical part of the optimization process?

In the following articles we’ll talk about the answers to those questions for the meantime give yourself something to ponder. How do you use the Search Engines to get, say for example the lyrics of the new Chris Brown song – With You? Try and observe the way you do it and see what you will get. Enjoy!