Google Adwords - Target Your Audience

When you place your ads, do you target your audience? You can actually choose the language and location for better targeting in adwords.

English is the most common language but if your ad is in chinese, you could choose the language of chinese instead of english so that to target more precise readers.
* If user doesn’t specify a language preference, Google determines the default language preference by considering the Google domain (like google.fr)

You can also target the location and by choosing the right location targeting for your products, you save costs and selling the right products to right customers. For example, you should sell the winter wear during winter and to the countries that have season of winter. If you don’t aware of this and target to worldwide in your ads, you are wasting money and not target to the right audience.
* For regionally targeted ads, Adwords identifies your chosen region or city in the last line of ad text to distinguish them from country and territory targeted ads.

Adwords will determine to show your ad based on the following:

• Google domain
• Query entered (called query parsing)
• Internet Protocal (IP) address
• Language preference

Tags: Google, Google Adwords, google network

We have discussed about the importance of building reputation online at social media and today let’s see what are the important elements that needed to build a popular social media profile. To develop a stronger online reputation, we need to put in some effort and there are some helpful characteristics that might help us.

1. Participation levels - Actively participate at social sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg is a good way to increase your visibility and develop your brand recognition. You can maintain high submission volume so that your profile to become more familiar to other users and broad visibility will give you lots of opportunities for networking, which helps you along the way. But please remember, only submit good stuffs and don’t spam.

2. Continuous presence - Not only you need to actively participate, you also need to continuosly presence at social media sites. It is not a good strategy to actively involve with certain site and then disappear for few weeks and then back again. You might find the other users have unfriend you. It is good if you can make it a habit to get yourself involve with the social media sites everyday.

3. Joint ventures - Normally at social sites, people often vote because of the submitter and not the story. Do you have the experience that when your friends ask you for favour and you will help? This is exactly the same at social media and you need to take the initiative doing someone a favour and ask nothing in return. It’ll come back to you because this is the unspoken rule of reciprocation. Always think further and think about how you and the other user can collaborate in mutually-beneficial ventures.

4. Conversation - Keep in mind that conversation is a big part of social media. Communicate with others and you’ll learn new things. Conversation also an integral part of building relationship and make new friends. It will help to enrich your social media experience and always make it easy for others to contact you.

5. Value leads to trust - You should provide value in order to build a successful brand through social media. By providing value, you earn trust and your attention and brand grows. It then leads to greater benefits in the future in terms of traffic, reputation or connections.

Hope the above helps in building your social media profile and your online reputation.

Tags: SMM, Social Networking, Traffic

What is your ads rank number? Rank number for your ad is the position that your ad would be shown at the search result.

For example, the search result for “seo”, the ad with the very high position are “Professional SEO Solution”, “SEO Workshops Singapore” and “SEO Experts since 1997″. These three ads stand a very high chance for the potential buyers to click on their ad because they have gained the position advantages.

*click to enlarge

This is the normal user behaviour just like you and me. When we google something, we always click on the first few search results and lazy to stroll down. This is very common and therefore the higher the ad position, the higher the CPC Bid we should place at adwords.

In adwords, there is another important element that can help to lower the CPC bid but still gain us the higher rank number. This is the Quality Score.

Rank Number = CPC Bid x Quality Score

From the schedule, it shows that Advertiser B has higher CPC bid but his position is at No.2. Why? Because the quality score of Advertiser B is the lowest, only 1. Therefore we can clearly see that Quality Score plays an very important role in determine your ads position and in term of the cost savings.

Still remember What are the components of Quality Score? There are 3 important components:

1. CTR
2. Keyword and ad text relevance
3. Landing page quality

If your CTR is very good but you still need to bid higher price for your ad to show on top, perhaps you need to adjust your keywords and your landing page quality accordingly.

Tags: Google, Google Adwords, Internet, learning, Traffic

Social networking is a good way to build your reputation online. Your biggest responsibility at social networks is to build your reputation. Social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are good sites that allow you to do so.

Tips to build your reputation
1. Always be yourself - You must be yourself and always proud of being yourself. If you are acting and being fake, people may find out after a while and as soon as they realise you are not who you say you are, your reputation is destroyed. Everyone has it’s own strong points and knowledge in particular field. So don’t worry of being yourself. When you start to share some knowledge, those want to learn from you are going to gravitate towards you.

2. Keep everything real with your audience - Let your audience learn how to trust you by sharing your things with them transparently. Always let people know what you are doing and why you are doing it. For example, I have learnt about social media and I know it’s going to help you all in internet marketing, so I blog about it and hope that you get some tips and know how to benefit from it. Recently my articles at Hubpages also doing quite well and one of it being published at the 200,000th articles. I’m sharing with you all and hope that you all have good result at article marketing too. Those are the strategies that can actually help us in internet marketing.

3. Be positive always - Always share your positive perspective and be positive and optimistic. Even though you can login you Twitter or Facebook to talk about some negative topics like how bad your day or how bad the products but by doing this, you will get negative return. And it won’t help either you or your products.

4. Be patient - Building your reputation at social networks is not going to happen over night or even over a few weeks. You must be patient and when time goes, you get more followers and a larger network of friends and peers. It might take couple of months or year for your network to grow and once it hits a tipping point, your reputation and business accelerates at a very quick pace.

5. Sharing is the most important - participate in the conversation, try to help people and let people how to do without charging them money at first. You think people will follow you if your answer to them is “You can get my answer from the eBook and go buy it”? You need to share with them and give them solutions so that the trust is developed.

How does social networking help to make money?
It doesn’t help you to make money directly and you got to have fun and build relationship. Connect with people and really help them out. Dollars will come when they become your loyal followers. So, start to have fun at social networks.

Tags: SMM, Social Networking, Traffic

We have discussed about Contextual Targeting in my previous blog posts and we know there is difference between Search Targeting and Contextual Targeting. Today I would like to share with you the creating of contextual targeted campaigns.

From my handwritten note you can see that I have actually put it in summary form for easier glance and just in case you can’t see clearly, I write it again for sharing.

First, we should know that the buying cycle is:
1. Attention - draw the attention of the consumers
2. Interest - let them have interest about your product
3. Desire - increase their desire to get the product
4. Action - buy your product!

So, it is important to remember the buying cycle and apply this concept into our campaigns.

When creating the Contextually Targeted Campaigns, There are 4 main points to take note at:
1. Define Campaign Goals - create wider brand awareness, have more people consider purchasing your products and enable customer purchase your products.
2. Create Campaign in Adwords
3. Measure Performance
4. Optimize - stay on message, understand customer, track conversion on each ad group over weeks or months, test and test again.

Try the above and keep track on your performance of Contextual Targeting.

Tags: Google Adwords, learning

Today just my lucky day! When I login to my Hubpages, I was informed that my Hub: Baby Safety - Traveling Safely with Your Child is the 200,000th Hub published.

I’m happy to share with you all the good news and you can view the announcement at Hubpages Blog.

For me, this is a kind of encouragement and I will continue to put in effort and submit good content articles to Hubpages.  =)

Tags: Article Marketing, Content Sharing, learning, SMM, Traffic

When the first time I heard about social media marketing, my reaction was “huh? what’s that?”. And later, I’ve realised that social media marketing is a poweful method that will easily give us large numbers of visitors and some of them may come back to our website again and again. This strategy will give us links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.

Since this is a powerful strategy, why still have people who ignore the efficacy of social media? Basically there are few reasons:

1. they don’t know much about social media
2. they are interested but don’t know how to use it
3. they don’t believe social media strategy can bring values to their business

Let’s see the main benefits of social media for your website
Borrowed trust - Search engine will trust your website if your website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains. A new website normally find it difficult to gain links from authority sites but a trusted domains make it easier for links to come in. Those trusted domains have some “certified” value and if the visitors come to your website through them, you gain the trust of search engine.

Referral traffic - Many people will claim that the social sites normally send them useless traffic because the bounce rate is high and visitors normally come to the website and click away. This is what happen normally but we shouldn’t ignore the referral traffic that social sites bring us. Referral traffic is the traffic that come to your website after they come across your content through the social sites. Since they have interested in your content at social sites, they tend to visit your website and come back to you again and again.

Why should practice Social Media Marketing?
1. It is low cost or zero cost - Compare to PPC, it is totally free if you done by yourself. If you consider to hire writers to designers to do for you, the returns still often exceed the cost.
2. Easily controlled - Social media traffic can be very easily controlled compare to search engine traffic. And the advantage is, once you have social communities, they can be a great source of web traffic.
3. Natural - The most important is you get natural links and your website is exposed to large groups of people.
4. Community specific - It’s an easy marketing method and usually community specific.

Community specific?
Social media marketing is characterized by communities and it allows users to do many or all of the following:

• Create profile
• Grow a network of friends or colleagues
• Collaborate with other community members
• Submit content
• Vote on content
• Tag content
• Comment on content

I hope by now you see the benefits of social media for your website and I’ll share with you more about social media. Subscribe to my RSS if you like my post and I invite you to join my community and grow your community as well.

Tags: Article Marketing, Content Sharing, SMM, social bookmarking, Social Networking, Traffic

Would you limit your web site traffic? Your first reaction about this question might be, “No way! I don’t limit the amount of traffic coming to my web site, I want traffic and more traffic to my web site the better!” So, more traffic means right traffic? Sometimes it does not seems all the traffic are the right traffic you get.

I give you one of my example. I have one article “Will the AIG Crisis affect Singapore” and this particular article drive me lots of traffic. However, this article does not have anything to do with internet marketing and most of the readers just read the article and leave. So, I realise that these traffic is of little or no use to my business.

Get the right traffic
I welcome traffic to my web site and the more traffic the better. However, I prefer to get more right traffic instead of high bounce rate traffic. I ever described our web site is a “location” for us to advertise and market our product, just like a traditional business man needs a shophouse for selling (my post - Is webpage and website related to feng shui?!). And since our web site is our shop, we need to get the customers to come and eventually “buy” something. Therefore, getting the right traffic is important in the sense that when we get the right customers through the door of our shop, we’ll sell significantly more.

How to get right traffic
Recently I’ve spent lots of time learning about Internet Marketing and focus in Google Adwords, SEO and Social Media. I have a notebook for my Adwords which I share some handwriting notes with all of you and I have another notebook for SEO and Social Media. See, this is my another notebook and it’s totally full now.

Ok, about getting the right traffic, I’ve also spent time focusing and creating content for my sites on a very specific target market. As a result of making changes, I get some good feedback and the number and quality traffic has gone up significantly. Although it wasn’t happened overnight but I think the time was well worth the investment because some friends are contacting me and we share more in particular areas.

We have probably heard a lot on how to focus on the niches market and get the traffic from the niches. So, I think all of us can approach traffic in the same manner. We just need to think on how to get the relevant traffic and implement something to prevent unrelated traffic. One of the best way is the create relevant content which to your niches and make sure those contents are useful for the person who read the information. Also, the most important is the information relevant to your business, product or service?

I heard from my friends that their websites have many traffic / visitors but they can’t generate good sales. And I also heard from them that they don’t have products but only websites. So, my thinking is, as an internet marketer, we are in business and we shouldn’t only focus on our web site but ignore about our products. Just imagine you have many right customers get through the door of your store but you just let them go with empty hands. Will you do that if you are the boss in real world? Doing business in internet is exactly the same like doing traditional bussiness, the same concept apply here and some people don’t see the whole picture.

Try to focus on the main theme of our website and always creating relevant content is a good way to get right traffic. I’ve learnt a lot about social media and it’s really a powerful tool in internet marketing. I will share more about my findings and recommendations on this area. Of course I will continue to share about the Adwords too. If you would like to know how social media helps to increase quality traffic and how it helps about your products, follow my blog and subscribe to my RSS.

Tags: Google Adwords, Internet, SMM, Traffic

Facebook is not a new term to you all and in case you have heard about Facebook but have not joined in as a member, now come join us. If you are already a member but inactive and seldom log in to your facebook, I invite you to come back and actively participate in this social networking site.

Why I want you to join Facebook but not other social networking site? Yes, you should join other social networking sites but you should not ignore Facebook and underestimate the power of Facebook. Here let’s see some data about Facebook.

*click to enlarge

From here, we can see that in June 2008, web search volume for Facebook has exceeded google.

*click to enlarge

Rising searches are searches that have experienced significant growth in given time period, with respect to the preceding time period. Data shows that Facebook has a rising searches of +220%.

Why people are on Social Networks?
Looking for friendship
Improved communications
Exchange ideas with like-minded people
Meeting new people

So, I think you have no reason not to join Facebook. Come join me there and add me as your friend! See you there!

Tags: Facebook, Social Networking

My mind always have questions about how to do social bookmarking. I don’t know how social bookmarking helps in internet marketing and don’t know how social bookmarking brings traffic to my website.

Questions in my mind

• The purpose of social bookmarking sites are for people to bookmark their favourites, what and how should I do to promote my own site?
• Can I bookmark all of my posts?
• What is the correct ways if I want to bookmark my posts?
• How many social bookmarking sites should I have? Can I register as many accounts as I like?
• How to allocate my time at social bookmarking sites?
• Will I become a social bookmarking spammer if I bookmark too much?
• etc

I then tried to find from Youtube how people do social bookmarking and I really watched it for several times because I hope I can get any ideas how to do social bookmarking.

After I watched the video, I know how to social bookmark my favourites but those questions in my mind still have not been solved.

Until recently, I finally know what is the best practices of social bookmarking.

Best Practice of Social Bookmarking
Always bookmark good stuff - Good stuff like useful information or good websites that other people are interested in.
Bookmark frequently - Don’t just open the accounts and post few things and then nothing else. Try to bookmark several times a day.
Bookmark new stuff - When discover new stuff, try to be the first to bookmark and share with others.
Don’t focus on one topic only - Bookmark on several topics because normal people are multi interested.
Comments on other people’s bookmark - Don’t just bookmark your own stuff, do comments on other people’s bookmark. However, it takes time.

And there are something we must remember

• Too active in social bookmarking is dangerous! Don’t be a social bookmarking spammer.
• Dangerous if you have multiple accounts from same IP address.
• Always use pen name for social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool but we must be very becareful and not to become a social bookmarking spammer. Social bookmarking spammer will get penalise by Social Bookmarking sites and also by Search Engine.

Tags: social bookmarking