Interesting Articles
Advertising Game Plan: #1 Determine Your Budget
April 26, 2011 | 
Author Previously, we described how you as a business owner need to develop an Advertising Game Plan. We’re going to be taking you through a brief primer on the basic steps necessary to intelligently advertise your business.
Step one is to determine what advertising funds you have available for the coming year. If you are a small business owner, this can be a “what comes first: the chicken or the egg?” scenario. If you don’t have any income, how can you afford to advertise? On the other hand, if you don’t advertise, how can you build any income?
I don’t pretend that the answer is easy. Ideally you should start your new venture off with a war chest that includes a significant portion set aside for advertising. How much is enough you ask? In our opinion, if you are using traditional media in midsize markets (Milwaukee, Hartford, Birmingham, etc.), you need AT LEAST $1000 per month to gain any sort of noticeable impact within your first six months. And that means steady advertising, with a somewhat repetitive program every month. To give you just one example, you could likely negotiate 25 (mostly primetime) sixty-second radio commercials for $1000 in a midsize market. That would be appropriate for a solid 7-10 day sale each month. If you are in Boston or LA or Dallas, ratchet up that budget 3x to 10x as much.
And here’s a common error advertisers make: they run the aforementioned 7-10 day advertising campaign, spend their hard-earned $1000…and no new customers come into the store. The owners panic and shout “Radio (or newspaper, or cable TV or…) doesn’t work!!!” and they turn around and try something completely different the next month, and then something else the next. And none of them work.
One of the secrets of successful advertising is that you initially have to have a cast-iron will. You have to do your research, pick out a good media partner — the city paper, the local TV station, the area billboard company, or? — and HAVE FAITH in your research. Start a campaign, and ride it out for several months without giving up and canceling the program you started. It takes time to develop customers!
Think about it…you just opened Bridget’s Gift Shop. Only 50 friends and family knew about it when you started off. You decided to run 20 cable TV ads. Mary saw 4 of the 20 ads you ran, didn’t catch your name in the first two, missed the address the third time, and finally understood and liked the 4th commercial…but didn’t need what you were selling that week. Your campaign didn’t fail to sell Mary. It just hasn’t had enough time to sell Mary! Keep running ads every month, and if you have a good message, sooner or later Mary is going to need to buy Hallmark Christmas cards and will think “Hey, there’s that new Bridget’s Gift Shop on Maple St. Maybe I can go there and buy some cards.” And voila, the sales pitch she heard from you seven months ago finally lands you her credit card.
The bottom line is this: you need to advertise. It is arguably more important than having X number of good employees. You need to advertise to bring customers in to fuel your business. So sit down with your calculator and try to determine what extra cash you have to build your advertising kitty. We’ll take you through some further Advertising Game Plan steps from which you’ll see more clearly how to spend those dollars, and how much you may need to advertise effectively in your market.
Next step: determining what at least 5 or 6 of your local media cost.
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Advertising: Building A Game Plan
Today we begin a series of posts that are aimed at helping business owners learn more about the right and wrong ways to advertise.
Our iTitans staff has more than 25 years of experience in the media business: selling advertising for radio and TV stations, Outdoor (billboards) and web properties. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. The first tip we can give you is that nearly every advertising media can be effective for you, though obviously your expectations from running a TV ad in the Super Bowl differ from having a 1″ x 2″ ad on a placemat at a local diner. The key is to have a Game Plan:
- determine what advertising funds you have available for the coming year.
- determine what at least 5 or 6 of your local media cost.
- determine what Reach and Frequency you will achieve using each of the media, based on a certain budget amount.
- drive your best bargain with the 2 or 3 media outlets that fit your budget best.
- develop a good relationship with the sales rep and the sales manager at your preferred media outlet.
- run your campaign and don’t cancel it too soon.
- repeat the process.
So your first step is to gather your available funds together for an advertising budget. We’ll explain more about that in our next post in the series.
SEO Tips – Your Websites Title Tag
First let me explain what a title tag is for those who do not know. The title tag is the link that you see on the search engine results page (SERP), it is just like a newspaper headline so it should grab the users attention. You set the title of a page on your website with the
For example if you have a clothing site your homepage may warrant a title like -Jim’s Discount Clothing | Great Clothes at a Great Price –
A subpage for sweaters should let the user know that page is about just that – Jim’s Discount Sweaters | The Best Price for Sweaters Anywhere -
A deeper page from the sweaters page that is all about wool sweaters - Jim’s Discount Wool Sweaters | Sweaters made from 100% Angora Wool -
Remember that your home page may not always be the page that ranks highest for a particular keyword so by properly defining the title of each page you not only give more information to the search engines but to the visitor.
Effective Internet Marketing Tips – Part 1 – Defining your Audience.
Defining Your Target Audience
The very first step you should take prior to designing any content or even the layout of your website is to figure out what your target audience is. It sounds like a simple thing to do doesn’t it? Not always. There are mountains of information out there to sift through on demographics that visit certain types of websites and a site owner often jumps to conclusions about who will be interested in a particular subject without doing any research at all. If you take the time and do the work to define your target audience it will help you build the foundation of your website accurately and give your site a better chance at success.
Most websites are cookie cutter built for a broad audience of visitors instead of being developed in a way that best suits your taget audience. While it might be appealing to develop a catch all site that works for eveyone, most often you will fail to build loyalty in your users. Loyalty is a true key to success, these users not only return to your website but they also tend to recomend your site to others, link to you, and share things they find on your site via social media. So before you grab a standard template and add some cool graphics to it take some time to find out who you are targeting and what other successful sites that cater to that demographic do.
A great way to find out what sort of audience to target is to take a look at some competitors, successful and non-successful, and check their Alexa statistics. This will show you the core demographics of these sites, how often they bounce, and the keywords that bring most visitors to their site. Compare what each does and try to find common themes on successful sites that lesser sites are missing and improve upon it.
SEO Tips – Why you should alternate your anchor text.
If you are not sure what I am talking about, anchor text is the text that shows up on a web page that is a link to your/or someone else’s website. example – Super Web Development Website . That link points to the home page of our website but the text gives you an idea what the site is about. If the link just read www.ititans.com a user might not know what it is we do and pass over the link.
So why alternate it? There are a few reasons:
First anchor text helps pass information to search engines as to what the target page is all about. This is a nice way to get yourself up in rankings for keywords that you are targeting. By alternating the text you can pass information to the search engines about several relevant keywords.
Second if every inbound link to your site has the same anchor text the search engine, especially Google will give them less value as they look automated or like spam. You want your links to look as natural as possible to search engines so they give them more weight.
How to properly target a keyword
Let’s use an example keyword here, suppose you want to target Nike Shoes. By alternating things like Inexpensive Nike Shoes, Nike Crosstrainers, Best Deals on Nike, and Nike Basketball Shoes. You focus on your main keyword and add weight to several longtail key phrases. You should on occasion also just link in with something like your domain name or address and also on less specific phrases without the keyword – Inexpensive Crosstrainers. This will make your links look a bit more natural to the various search engines and should give you far better results.
‘Bum Marketing’ and Finding a Sales Niche
Your first question just might be “what is Bum Marketing?” Simply put the idea is internet marketing that is so easy any ‘bum’ can do it. I disagree with the premise a little bit, the basics are easy, but still involve some time to get right and make successful. With that out of the way let’s take a look at how this model can work. The general idea here is to develop a few web 2.0 pages, link them to one another and watch the revenue roll in from ads and affiliate marketing. Sounds a little too good to be true but let’s explore the idea some.
One of the main points most make when talking about bum marketing is that all it costs is time since you are using free web 2.0 services like WordPress, Squidoo, and Hub Pages. Sounds awesome right? The question is will it work, and if it does will it work as well as if you were using your own website in conjunction? I think the answer is No! it won’t. Let me tell you why. When you develop pages on the free Web 2.0 sites you get some benefits, they are free, usually indexed fairly quickly, and you have a chance of being spotted by another user. While these are all great you just don’t have the control that you will in optimizing your own site, some of them also have their own ads on your page that you can do little about and that can siphon off your potential revenue. In my opinion a mix of the two is the way to go, you can get hosting relatively cheaply and the benefits of driving traffic to your own site are far superior.
So since we have the main point down let’s move forward into just how this style of marketing works, at least in theory.
Step One: You pick a subject that you want to monetize.
Step Two: You develop a few keyword rich pages on various web 2.0 sites and link them together.
Step Three: You drop in some Google Adwords and affiliate links.
Step Four: You move on to doing the same thing for another subject while the money rolls in from the old one. Rinse and repeat till you strike it rich.
That certainly does sound like something any bum can do, but is it really as easy as all that? In truth, unless you get very lucky, no. The internet is loaded with other pages just like you pumped out in a few hours. There is likely little to any value to the content so it will not likely generate many organic links from other websites and you will be lucky to crack the top 100 in any search result for any keyword. I can not say with any certainty that this will never work, but this will never work, at least not consistently.
So what should you do if you want to market this way?
It can be done, just not as easily as many ‘courses’ you can buy on the web or through infomercials will have you believe. I am going to try to give you a good idea of what might work. I say might because no matter how grand your planning and preparation there is no telling with the net exactly what will happen.
Step One: Make a list of things you are genuinely interested and at least somewhat knowledgeable about. It is much easier to develop content ideas if you are actually passionate about what you are writing about.
Step Two: Look over your list and take a poke around the web for affiliate marketing potential for each of your subjects. Narrow the list down to three or four ideas.
Step Three: Take a look at the competition for each of the ideas on your list. A great tool to find keyword information and get great information on your competitors is Market Samurai. It is an invaluable tool and has a 14 day full trial. You can of course get your information the old fashioned way by combing through Google and manually researching each keyword.
Step Four: Pick the idea that has a good balance of low competition, a fair amount of ability to monetize, and that you have a good passion for.
Step Five: From step 3 you should have a few good keywords in mind, double check how often those terms are searched and look over some of the Google suggested alternate keywords and find 5 or 6 to focus on. Again Market Samurai is a big help here.
Step 6: Start writing, and writing, and writing. It is fine to do research for your subject on other sites, just try to keep your content as original as possible. Once you have a handful of articles/posts/ etc. ready start some pages. Develop a lens on Squidoo, A WordPress blog and a Weebly page at least. Put different content on each and link to the others from at least one of your pages. Don’t link every page to every other page. If you have started your own personal website as well, www.yoursite.com, then make sure to link each of your web 2.0 pages to it.
Continue to develop new content on your primary site (your own site or pick one of the 2.0 to be your primary). Don’t copy and paste any content from other sites, at least not enmass, you might be penalized for duplicate content by search engines. A brief quote or similar is fine.
Join some forums that have to do with the subject you are monetizing, if they allow you a signature for your posts make sure to link it to your site.
Comment on other blogs that are relevant, offer to guest blog if you can. Make sure anchor text for any links back to your site are varied and keyword driven. If you are trying to sell fishing lures then anchor text like “sure-fire fishing lures” is good, text like “www.awesomelures” is bad.
Don’t spam blogs and forums, there are plugins that can not only block you from posting but if a webmaster marks your comments as spam you can be blocked by anyone else running that plug in. Actually read what the post is about and add to the conversation.
DON’T buy x number of links from a service, not only are they usually poor quality, they usually just spam blogs that are totally irrelevant, and it is a great way to get yourself ignored or blocked.
DON’T publish articles on your site to article directories, If you want to use that as a marketing method develop a new article to do so. Posting content on your site to such a directory will most likely make it look like you have the duplicate content to the search engines.
Finally Continue to develop your content, give your users a reason to come back and a reason to want to click on your affiliate links. Make sure whatever you are linking to is something you would actually use or buy. If you recommend junk products you will lose the trust of your followers and diminish your potential earnings.
Once you have a niche up and running and you feel it is on the move then rinse and repeat with another idea from your list.
Good Luck
The Do’s and Don’ts of Optimizing your Website
I bet your first question is “Why tell me how to do something that iTitans charges for?” Simple. We are glad to share our experience in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with others. Some will see the monumental task that it is and hire us, others will be thankful for the information we provide and come back many times perhaps needing us for something in the future. Either way we are not helping our readers if we keep what we have learned over the years locked away in some top secret vault.
So the time has come to begin testing your website, remember that optimization is not only about how your site appears to search engines, but how it is useful to you potential clients. So where do you start? What is the first step? Following are some do’s and don’ts that will help you develop a successful testing strategy.
Do Test your site properly: Just because your sales shot up 60% after some minor changes to the Home page does not mean the tweak is responsible for your new success. There are many variables to consider in a case like this, Had you sent out a newsletter or email? Was a sale running? Before you can determine if your new page is truly out performing your old page you must test both pages by running them at the same time under identical conditions. A split test using something like the free website optimizer by Google will give you the data you need to determine if your success is indeed coming from your new page.
Don’t be afraid of failing: When optimizing your web site, failure is success. If you develop a new landing page and find that it is underperforming compared to an earlier version or did not bring any noticeable results that is a success. Remember to test properly and use what you have learned on your next design. As your site continues to evolve you will find more of what works and what does not.
Do Be Patient: Once you start a test (between 2 versions of a page) let it play out until you have a clear winner, fight the temptation to end the test if the version you prefer is edging out another. You are best not to check results until the end of the test, or at least a predetermined milestone (x number of sales) before making any such decision. If at the end of the test you still have no clear winner you may want to go back and retool your newest version again until you have one.
Don’t Waste Time on Disagreements: Let testing settle them, properly testing your pages is the ultimate argument settler. Why waste time arguing with team members, managers, or clients about what the best route is when you are basing that on opinion and not hard data. Get away from the “let’s do it” attitude and move over to a “let’s test it” method.
Do Test High Priority Pages First: Start with pages that get the most traffic and are higher in the conversion funnel. Look first to pages that have the highest bounce rate or exit rate. After you have tested all of those move on to pages that customers spend the shortest amount of time on. If they are spending so little time on the page is it even necessary? Finally test the key pages of your site, your spotlight product, site registration page, checkout, etc.
Don’t Deploy Too Many Versions At Once: While you can certainly develop many versions of a page and test them all at the same time it is very easy for the data to become to scattered to determine a clear winner. You should not really test more than 3 versions of a page at the same time, if none of them outshine the others significantly then you can add a new version into the mix.
What separates a poor site from a good site from a great site is site optimization. If you adhere to the steps above you will find that job much easier.
Keyword Density (KD): Revisiting an SEO Myth
By E Garcia
Back in March of 2005 I wrote The Keyword Density of Non Sense article for Mike Grehan’s newsletter. An expanded and improved version was also published at Mi Islita.com. After these articles, many SEOs saw the light.
However, in an attempt at perpetuating KD myths, few SEOs tried to reformulate the alleged importance or usefulness of keyword density by presenting KD as a spam detection filter used by search engines. Good try, but this still is non sense and another SEO myth.
Ask these folks about any proof of these claims to see if they can provide one. If you read between lines what they are trying to do is to keep their KD tools relevant and alive. They just want to insists in dumb ideas and theories they nurtured around keyword density. A “saving face” effort can be recognized by the many twists involved.
This simply reinforces my notion that these folks either don’t get it or don’t have a background on IR.
I’m working on a paper on local term weigths, called Understanding Local Weights. It is clear from the several models examined that some scales can be used as math red flags for detecting spam. Here is a sneak preview:
Let Lij be the local weight of term i in doc j. We can defined Lij in many different ways and as a function of fij, wherein fij is the ocurrence (frequency) of term i in doc j.
Two candidate scales to think about are FREQ and LOGA.
FREQ Scale
If term i is in doc j, then Lij = fij; else, Lij = 0.
This is the most common model SEOs know about, wherein local weights are given as raw frequencies. KD lovers simply divide an fij value by total # of words and call that KD.
This primitive way of defining local weights (as Lij = fij) is used in the old IR literature and in few simplistic models. For instance, early LSI papers used local weight-only scores. These are the same papers often misquoted by SEOs. The fact is that we normally use Lij=fij to teach students basic things. Then, they can move on and learn about other local weighting schemes and improved LSI models.
FREQ has several drawbacks and limitations. For example, it assumes that a term repeated x times weighs x times more, which we know is not necessarily true.
So, if doc1 repeats the term “crap” once and doc2 repeats this term ten times then
L(crap, doc1) = f = 1
L(crap, doc2) = f = 10
which assumes that crap is ten times more important in doc 2 than in doc 1 or that doc2 is ten times more pertinent to crap than doc1.
LOGA Scale
If term i is in doc j, then Lij = 1 + log fij; else, Lij = 0.
This model is a bit better than FREQ. It is a logarithm augmented scale at a given base. A base 2 or base 10 scale is often used. Other base values are possible.
If I use base 10 logarithms in the example, then
L(crap, doc1) = 1 + log(1) = 1 + 0 = 1
L(crap, doc2) = 1 + log(10) = 1 + 1 = 2
The term weight just doubles. Term repetitions don’t increment drastically local weights. Now if I want to make a third document, doc3, three times more heavier in “crap” than in doc1,
L(crap, doc3) = 1 + log(100) = 1 + 2 = 3
So, I would need to repeat the term 100 times. That’s a lot of crap!
More likely, valid keywords repeated 100, 1000, etc in a single web page for sure will raise a spam red flag. Thus LOGA can work as both a weighting scheme and an obvious spam detector.
No doubt that both FREQ and LOGA have some drawbacks and that there are better local scoring models (log normalized, squared, local entropy, etc). All these models are designed to address specific extreme cases. Still KD is not nearly around in any of these models.
How do I know if Google or Yahoo is using LOGA or other published local weight models? I don’t know so I am not going to speculate.
I am sure about one thing: How natural would be repeating a term 100 or 1000 times in a single web page? Exactly.
So, if I use LOGA at base 10 in my own experimental search engine I would be inclined to tag as spam any doc with Lij around 3. I would probably use a maximum upper bound around Lij = 2 or less.
There are better local term weight scales. Wait for my article and learn why.
On and on, next time you hear or read about the virtues of KD, get a gas mask or think about… toilet paper.
The severe impact of using Black Hat SEO techniques
An online entrepreneur would like his website to be the first name in the result that search engines throw up for relevant topics. At times, you must have come across a certain Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) that guarantees a place of your website in the top 10 results. This is exactly what you want, but exactly something you musn’t buy!
No company on earth can assure you a forefront place in the search engines. There exists no SEO tools that can make your site attain overnight popularity, but what exists are merely some tricks, which some SEO firms use to make some quick bucks. However, their ‘work’ will do your site anything but good. Assume that this works and your site is right on the top of the search results, and stays for quite a period of time. But eventually the search engines come across these tricks and will impose a penalty. That’s what a black hat SEO is – fooling the search engines. For the benefit of one’s own business, one should shy away from such SEO firms and avoid the following things:
Overstuffing pages with keywords:
Cramming the pages of your website with the main keywords and offering little more then a page of ‘tags’ will get search engines to drop you in a heartbeat.
Invisible/ Hidden Text:
This is almost the same as cramming the key words. Invisible text is considered a serious no-no by the search engines and can be extremely harmful for your website, so why use it in the first place?
Doorway pages:
These are the non-existent or the fake pages which are designed for specific words or phrases which are viewed mainly by the search engines rather than the visitors. The entire logic behind the building of a Search Engine Optimizer is to enhance the experience of the user, and getting web pages that no living person can ever view will surely not be viewed well. Many main search engines like Google, etc. have severe policies to combat doorway pages.
Link Farms:
Many popular search engines are against artificial linking like link stuffing and link farms, etc. So linking farms will do nothing but get your site banned from the database of the search engine.
It can be concluded that whatever the search engines view as being spam or junk, is banned by them. Most of the techniques are bound to get you result in the short-term, but in the long-run, a ban or a flag is all that you will get. Moreover, using a black hat SEO also raises serious doubts on the credibility of your website and business that you’re pursuing online.
So rather than opting for a SEO, its better to get your site fixed by page optimization. And while doing it, it’s better not to keep in mind the search engines. The main priority should be the benefit of your end-customers. If you’re being loyal to them, the net result will automatically follow and instead of gaining popularity by immoral means, you’ll gain it even without these SEO, and the search engines respect that!
Is Your Ezine Being Zapped?
by Michael Southon
About a year ago I wrote an article titled ‘Winning The War On Sp^m’. Unfortunately, the war on sp^m is not being won at all.
In fact, the problem is now so serious that sp^am is shaping up to be the greatest threat to online marketing.
The threat comes not from sp^mmers themselves, but from the filters that are being used to block them.
These filters are hitting hard at the very core of ecommerce - Ezine Publishing.
Anti-sp^m filters operate at two levels: (i) client-side programs that reside on individual computers and (ii) server-side programs that ISPs are using to block incoming sp^m.
The problem is that the filters are now so sensitive they are blocking even the most innocent of Newsletters.
For example, if your Newsletter contains the words ‘remove’, ’unsubscribe’ or ‘click here’ it will trigger anti-sp^m filters in many of the programs that are now being used by ISPs.
The result?
Your Ezine is zapped, deleted – and a large percentage of your subscribers will think you have stopped publishing your Newsletter.
What can you do about it?
Here are some tips to avoid sp^m filters:
(1) Post your Newsletter online and then email your subscribers to tell them that the latest issue is now available online.
(2) In your Newsletter carefully avoid (both in the subject line and the body text) all words that are likely to trigger anti-sp^m filters. Use the free service listed at the end of this article – it will flag any words in your Newsletter that trigger anti-sp^m filters.
(3) Instead of saying ‘to unsubscribe’ (which is a phrase commonly found in sp^m), say ‘If you no longer wish to receive…’ or ‘If you wish to leave this mailing list…’ or ’To take yourself off this list…’
(4) If there are trigger words that you simply cannot avoid, you can disguise them using carets (^) or other symbols. The ‘F’ word would become fr^e and the ‘U’ word would become
uns^bscribe.
(5) Include the word ‘Newsletter’ in the subject line of your email – this will help the filters identify your email as non-sp^m.
(6) Avoid whole words in upper case. In many Newsletters the headers are capitalized – this will trigger the filters.
(7) If your Newsletter contains ads, scrutinize them carefully - ezine ads, by definition, contain words frequently used by sp^mmers.
Here is a fr^e service that will help you avoid sp^m filters. Before you mail out your Newsletter, just send a copy of it to the email address below with TEST in the subject line:
mailto:spamcheck@sitesell.net
Within a few seconds you’ll receive a report that analyses your Newsletter and gives you a score (0 to 5=no problems 12-16=over the limit for most ISPs).
If you write articles, it’s worth submitting them to this test as well, together with your Resource Box (I just sent this article to Sp^mCheck and got a score of 4.6).
Sp^mCheck is operated by Sp^mAssassin, a filter that is widely used by ISPs – so this is a good test of whether your Newsletter will get through to your subscribers.
About the Author
Michael Southon has been writing for the Internet for over 3 years. He has shown hundreds of web masters how to use this simple technique to get massive free publicity and dramatically increase traffic and sales. To find out more, please visit: http://www.ezine-writer.com.