I’m back with another round of Q and A. I’d like to thank all none of you that took the time to submit the quality insightful questions below. If it weren’t for people like you, I’d be on the SEO Blogger’s A-List.
Has anyone been able to find any internet marketing or sales techniques/strategies that have worked for them?
Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/reno-i-love-you.mp3]
A couple of Saturdays back I had to spend the day at the office to get caught up. You know how that is, come Friday you realize that you haven’t gotten to all the tasks on your plate so you have two options: 1) Get to the office over the weekend and work a few extra hours, sans distractions, or 2) wait until Monday to get caught up. Of course we all know the latter doesn’t ever really work because come Monday you start the process of getting behind all over again. Stupid Mondays.
So the other Saturday while putting in a few extra hours I had left to grab a burger with the King. All was going quite well until I headed back to the office and saw this:
Maybe not quite a Top 10 Top 10 Reasons your PPC ads suck … but maybe.
Last week I was organizing my binder of helpful blog posts (read: old fashioned method of having something on hand to re-read later. ie hard copy paper trail version of del.icio.us) and I found at least 8 separate documents that in one way or another are lists of “Top ten mistakes made in PPC” “Top mistakes to avoid” “The reason your PPC ads suck” …. or some sort of variation on this theme.
And then on Friday I was catching up on reading Sphinn’s Hot topics and came across Top 10 Reasons Why ‘Top 10′ Lists are so Popular. This of course addresses exactly what I had noticed a long time ago, and yet was put obviously clear — in front of my face — as I organized my binder.
This post marks my first of many on the E-Marketing Performance blog. Although I have many years experience as a writer, I have little to no experience in marketing writing let alone SEO writing.
In order to get me more acclimated to writing for SEO and to marketing writing in general, my wonderful new boss provided me with the following recommended reading list (in order of priority):
Customers who, by all means, appear to be ready to make a purchase are often found abandoning their shopping carts before they complete their online transaction. In many cases this is part of the normal online shopping experience as the shopping cart is just used as a place to collect items of interest but which the user has no real intent to purchase. But all too often it is a failure of the shopping cart page itself that leads visitors to abandon their items which they do, in fact, wish to have.
While shopping car abandonment cannot be completely eliminated, it can be dramatically reduced. There are a number of key indicators that need to be present on your web site’s shopping cart page. These indicators continue the process of instilling trust, reliability and provide shoppers the cues they need to continue forward in the purchase process.
I’ve been researching the landing pages of PPC Management providers. I wanted to see how well their landing pages were likely to convert. We pay for the click, getting the visitor to our site, but then do we suck the wind right out of the sale with a crappy landing page? The goal of the landing page is going to be to get the visitor to contact you for additional information. I’ve been surprised to find that many of the landing pages I visited, don’t follow Best Practices of PPC landing pages. I would think that companies who sell themselves as PPC management would have the BEST landing pages, because they want to make it EASY for the person looking for PPC management to contact them.
Let’s take a look at some landing pages for the keyword “pay per click management.” Ignoring ad text all together, I’m just going to look at the landing pages for positions #1, 6, and 10. At the time I ran my query, the #1 goes to JumpFly, Quigo checks in at #6, and submission-pro takes 10th.
So the gang got back from the conference I didn’t get to go to Search Engine Strategies in San Jose and immediately Stoney tasked me with a scientific analysis of the Schwag they returned with.
Holding out two enormous bags of samples he meticulously collected from the conference floor, Stoney said my goals were twofold: to categorize the promotional items and log any ideas we could use for Pole Position.
My results, after much deliberation, are collected in the following super-technical report:
Day 2 began in a non-exciting way as Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone answered questions during the keynote conversation. I originally had been looking forward to this interview – I’d never heard a major company CEO give a presentation. Much to my surprise, the interview seemed to be a bit more of an advertising commercial for Ask than anything else. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ask.com. From a usability and creative standpoint, it is by far the greatest search engine available (though I rarely use it.) In any event, the keynote conversation lacked much in the way of usefulness.
I have survived Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference … albeit on information overload. It isn’t really that there was so much information that it was overwhelming. Taken in small pieces everything is perfectly digestible. It’s when I over fill myself that I waddle away overloaded. All that aside, I have to say that my first day was pretty good. I attended 4 sessions and learned something new from each of them.
Stoney introduced Rob and me to some pretty fun people. Rob asked me how it felt to be going to dinner with 12 guys, and I said: “Popular.” I also felt quite popular with all the rubber necking our Pole Position Marketing team shirts caused. We were quite the collective object of many a heads turning and fingers pointing. You could read people’s lips Check out the cool shirts. I bet next year there will be impersonators.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
