1. Facebook marketing requires communicating, not hard sell advertising.  Make yourself an authority to your followers, and they will stay with you and recommend you to others.
2. Your office staff can help market your business from their desks.  Your office staff members can use your Facebook business page to stay in touch and to promote your business to others. Train the office staff to provide great original content, or to republish useful content that is relevant to your target audience.
3. Ask your personal Facebook friends to fan/like your business page.  The warmer the connection to your business, the better the chance for success.
4. Advertise on Facebook.  Advertising on Facebook can be a great boost to your marketing effort.  You can select your ad to show up for particular locations, age groups, education levels, and even hobbies or interests.  You can link the ad to go out to your website, or to go right to your Facebook business page.  Also, you can set your daily budget and control how much you want to spend in a day for advertising.
5. Create an event.  Conduct a webinar, host a business network meeting in your office, create a contest, survey, quiz or other event for your target audience.  These strategies can put you in the middle of activities with people who need your product or service.
6. Create a custom business page which encourages people to take action.  Action to call you, to get a quote, to download your company brochure, or other specific actions.

Just as in relationship building and in-person marketing, Facebook marketing is not a once and done effort.  A Facebook business page is a lasting online asset, and the ongoing engagement you create is what will bring success to your business.

1. Low Startup Costs.  Compared with other forms of advertising, PPC adverting can be done for a fraction of the costs.
2. Fast results.  Ad campaigns on Google are pre-approved and can start appearing almost from the moment they are launched.
3. Targeting.  Ability to advertise to a specific geography, local or global.  Also, the ability to appear for specific search keywords, choose as many or as few as you like.
4. Minimal risks.  Set your daily budget as large or small as you want to set.  Ads stop appearing once the budget limit has been reached.
5. Trackable.  Able to track results and determine which keywords are getting clicks, and which are getting the actions you wish (sign ups, purchases, leads, etc).  Based on the results that are seen, adjustments can be made to fine tune a campaign’s performance.

These are just a few reasons why Pay Per Click advertising is so popular. Whether you are trying to generate sales, leads, traffic or branding; pay per click advertising is definitely a form of advertising that you may want to consider.  For expert help setting up and managing your Houston, National or International Adwords Pay Pay Per Click campaigns, we have the expertise to help you build your business at Global Business Builders.

Global Business Builders

1. Give the adgroup a name relevant to the keywords in that adgroup.
2. Create targeted adgroups that have tightly themed keywords. Around 5 to 40 keywords that are tightly themed.
3. Use keyword or keyword phrase in the Headline,  either by specifically coding it there or by using Dynamic Keyword Insertion.  This will cause the Headline to be Bolded for the keyword used in the search.  Do the same in the ad copy where possible.
4. Split Test ads.  Use at least 2 ad creatives for each adgroup, and after some time, use Splittester.com to see which ad has a statistically significant lead over the other.  Then, pause the ad which is not performing, and write a new one to test against the better ad.
5. Test with different matching options.  Broad, Phrase and Exact.  After a good test period, choose the keyword with the best click through rate (CTR) and lower CPC.
6. Send ads to a landing page “optimized” for the ad keywords.  For highest quality score, it is critical that the keywords of the ads and the keywords of the landing page have agreement.  Be sure and add the Quality Score column in the Adwords interface, it is not part of the keyword columns by default.  Quality score starts at 7/10 and goes up or down with the ad’s history.
7. Mulit variant landing page testing.  This is a pretty advanced effort, but changing different elements on a landing page can have a significant impact on conversions. Learn more here:  Google discusses Quality Score
8. After some testing,  update the meta tags on each landing page with the best performing keywords.  Also, use the best performing and highest converting keywords in the Title tags of the landing pages.  And last, use the exact ad text from the best performing creative in the meta description tag.
9. Google strongly favors sites that seem legitimate and credible.  To add credibility to your site, these types of pages will help: About Us page, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Contact Us.  Google ads are pre-approved and then manually reviewed later.  If your site looks like a doorway site, an affiliate site, or a spam site, Google will “slap” the quality score of the site and bid prices can go up 5 to 10 times or more.  For example, from $1.00 to $5.00 keyword bid price.
10. Negative match.  The more impressions your ad gets without a click means the lower the CTR, eventually creating a lower Quality Score and then a higher CPC.  Use negative keywords, typically at the campaign level, to get a razor focus for when your ads appear.
11. Install Conversion Tracking code to see which keywords are getting results.

I hope this has helped those running PPC campaigns or anyone looking to improve their ROI by increasing their Quality Score. If you would like more information or would like our Houston-based Google Adwords Management service, please get in touch.

When Facebook was opened to the general public, over 100 Million users joined within the first 9 months.  Today, there are over 300 Million users worldwide.

So, aside from the history lesson, what makes Facebook such an amazing platform?  It provides customization and network capability that is outstanding to use in business marketing.  The most used term nowadays is “Social Media Marketing.”

How?  Not everyone in an office likes to go out in the streets and network, or hit the phones and cold call.  But, most everyone likes to chat and interact in the comfort of their business or personal lives.

What are the steps?  At a high level, you start with these activities:

1. Create a Facebook Business page
2. Create a Custom Facebook Sales page
3. Request your contacts to “Like” or “Fan” your business site
4. Set a specific URL on Facebook, such as:  www.facebook.com/GBizBuilders
5. Begin growing your following, and start getting connected…and staying connected

Remember, that in getting people to connected, it’s important to be seen as someone that can be liked, trusted, and knowledgeable.  Information that shows you as an authority builds you as the “go to” person for your services.

Learn more by visiting Facebook Social Media Marketing and see how you can start using Social Media Marketing to generate leads for your business.

How do you test that your website and internet marketing plan are being successful?  The simplest test would be to ask:  Is your website bringing you leads, getting you phone calls, making you sales?

If you aren’t passing this test, then it’s your website or your internet marketing plan.  A good internet marketing management agency knows what your website and internet marketing plans need, and also knows that they go hand in hand.
Your website is very important to internet marketing success.  Your website should be:

• Informational
• Interesting
• Persuasive
• And it should funnel a visitor to a final call to action where you ask the visitor to do something

Your internet marketing management plan should be:

• Utilizing several channels such as: Facebook, Blogs, Sponsored advertising, Forums, etc.
• Should be consistently developed over time
• Should help others learn and gain value

These are some basic points to help you succeed on the internet.

Need help?  We bring it all together.  Get Seen.  Get Traffic.  Get Sales.

The interesting thing about negative keyword match type, is that it can be used to prevent your ad from showing up in a pay per click advertisement. As examples:

-job
-employment

The above keywords become “negative” when prefixed with the “-” sign.  And anytime either of those keywords is used in a search query, then an advertisement would not show up.  So, even if you had bid on a keyword phrase of “great home care” and someone entered this google search:  great home care job, the advertisement would not be shown.

But what is real interesting, and also an advanced technique, is the use of a Phrase Negative Match or an Exact Negative Match.  In Google Adwords, these capabilities are often lumped under a really strange term: Embedded negative match.

Here is an example:

You an advertiser selling new corvette merchandise puts a negative exact match on: -[new corvette].  In this example, if someone types in: new corvette parts or new corvette accessories, the merchandise could show up but not for someone just looking for a new corvette.

Contact us to discuss your Pay Per Click advertising needs.

Carl
Global Business Builders

You see, RSS stands for Really Simple Sindication (sometimes it’s referred to as Rich Site Summary) and it is a tool for syndicating content (sending content out) to sites that give news feeds or bulk feeds of information.

How to do it for Blogs?

1. You need to have your blog in “Feed” form

2. You need a feed reader to send your feed out to feed syndication sites

To put it in easy terms:  in most cases, just add /feed to your blog.  Then choose a feed reader (such as Yahoo) that will send it out.

As an example, my blog feed is at:  http://www.GBizBuilders.com/blog/feed

I would take that and enter it at www.feedburner.com , then choose one of the RSS readers that come up after I’ve entered it.

That’s a quick look…

Carl

Global Business Builders and Houston Internet Marketing

1. Website
2. List Building
3. Video Marketing
4. Article Marketing
5. Exchange Links
6. Blog Marketing
7. Google Groups
8. Press Release
9. E-Zine Advertising
10. PPC Advertising
11. Webinars
12. Twitter
13. Facebook
14. LinkedIn
15. Offline Advertising
16. Squidoo
17. HubPages
18. Instant Sales Force: Affiliate Marketing
19. Forum Marketing
20. Contests
21. Link Directories, Directory Submissions
22. Social Bookmarking
23. One article is all that you need and you can build blogs on Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Webs.com, Weebly.com
24. RSS Directories: directories where you can submit your RSS feed URLs.
25. Pay someone to Blog about you

Website Promotion activites

This issue is, when multiple URLs exist for the same home page, search engines count these links separately, spreading the linking benefit (PageRank) among the different home page URLs. This means that the number of links to the home page are minimized, thus worsening your position in search results and weakening the SEO effort for the home page, and indirectly for all subpages from the homepage (since internal links won’t transfer as much link power to the subpages).

The issue is generally knows as “The Canonical Home Page issue.”

It is best to have a 301 redirect to the page you want to get all of the “link love.”  It is best only to refer to your domain as one or the other when using the domain name in an anchor text link off site.

Below is an article which gives great information on this topic.

http://www.seowhitehats.com/2009/03/10/canonical-home-page-issues.html

So, if you can put both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com in the URL and see your site, and you’ve done some off site link buildig, you may have an issue and could benefit from the solution above.

Carl

Global Business Builders

Keyword tools are important, but they are just a tool and don’t do the thinking.  We must do the thinking to get the right keyword research approach.  Then, keyword tools can be used to support the research directions our thoughts and understandings have led us to.

Not that keyword tools aren’t worth using, they are.  But what’s more important is to use your own thoughts to getting into the “keyword conversation” in your target visitor’s mind.  What is the problem they are trying to solve?  What forums discuss their issues and what is important to them.

I talk more about the benefits of this different keyword approach to finding great keywords on the Global Business Builders website.  Here is the link to the Best Adwords PPC keywords.  Ultimately, the best Pay Per Click campaigns are created from the best keyword research approach.