Tips & Tools

Learning & reference material
If you are considering internet marketing for the first time and you want to get an overview of the industry, then consider downloading my free Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing, it’s right here and it’s free!

Arguably the most well respected Google AdWords expert is Perry Marshall. Perry wrote one of the most popular eBooks on the topic of Google AdWords called The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords™. It was one of my first purchases.

Tools
One of the first things people want to know is “how much do the clicks cost?” and the answer is always “it depends”. It depends in large part on how competitive the keywords are for the terms people will be using to find you on search engines. Here is a tool that you can use to get a pretty good idea what your competitors are paying and who they are. It is called the SpyFu.

One critical aspect of a successful PPC advertising campaign is that people must be searching for your product or service otherwise the whole thing just doesn’t work. if you are looking for a tool to help you identify possible keywords, you could do a Google search for "free keyword tools" and you will have several to choose from. However, if you are serious about building a campaign then you need a serious tool. There are basically two types of tools for researching keywords, PC-based tools and host-based tools, which you use on a subscription basis.

I have tried several PC based tools and the one I like best is Keywords Analyzer. If you are a real pro and you want the latest and greatest host-based tool, I suggest Keyword Discovery.

Once I begin working with a client and I am doing competitive research, I usually show them some of the information I've collected so we can make some decisions about how we go forward. More often than not, the client says "Wow, how did you find that out?". Well, I used another tool by the same folks who created Keyword Analyzer, but this one is called Competition Dominator. I can't begin to tell you how much time and effort this saves.

Programs
If we begin at a high level, when it comes to promoting your web site on the internet, there are basically two ways to get found when someone uses a search site like Google, Yahoo, MSN and a myriad of smaller player like Dogpile, Knoodle, etc.

These two techniques are called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click). For a detailed comparison, visit our page on SEO Limitations and for an even more in-depth comparison see my Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing.

When your web site pages are “ranked” by the search engines through what is called “natural search” or “organic search” that is because your web designer has used SEO techniques to “optimize” pages on your web site. However, if you have not or do not wish to invest in SEO techniques, yet you still want to get found by the search engines, then you can use PPC or “Sponsored Link” advertising. This is what I do, I don’t do SEO.

To keep the discussion manageable, I will limit my discussion to Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you wanted to try it yourself or you simply wanted to get an idea of what I do, you can go to the following sites and look around or open an account. The sites are Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter.

All three of these search providers; Google, Yahoo and MSN, have the ability to target your ads locally, nationally and even internationally. However, if your business serves a local market you will probably want to have both a local campaign as well as a national campaign, where the national campaign has all of your best keyword phrases along with appropriate “geographic qualifiers”. Geographic qualifiers are city names, so in addition to having the keyword phrase “accident attorney” in your local campaign, you would have the phrase “dallas accident attorney” in your national campaign.

In all of the cases I’ve described, your ad position is based primarily on the amount you are willing to pay for the particular phrase. However, there are other programs for promoting your local business where you can actually place an ad for free, but the position of your ad relative to your competitor is based on other criteria such as; the distance to the center of town, when your ad was placed, how many people have “rated” you and in the case of Google, how “relevant” your ad is to the search term used by the searcher. Google calls their program Local Business Listings. Yahoo has a similar program called Yahoo Local Listings.

My ListLocal service automatically submits your local business information to these and many other on-line directories, search engines and Internet Yellow Pages.