Directory of PPC Blogs

August 31, 2011 By 13 Comments

We know Trada’s readers are rabid for PPC knowledge. That’s why we gave everyone 10 PPC Experts to Know. Now we’re dropping a large blog directory so readers can gain additional PPC knowledge. The following blogs discuss pay-per-click (PPC) strategies of all levels from beginner to advanced, they offer breaking industry news, present case studies, track pay per click trends and more. Topics covered include ways to optimize Google AdWords, Bing, Microsoft Advertising, Facebook … and the list goes on.

 

 

 

 

[Read more...]

Filed Under: PPC Tips Tagged With: ,

What We’re Reading This Week

August 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Fantasty Football Draft at TradaThis week had one very intense meeting for Trada. Was it an intense corporate strategy meeting or was Tim Mayer leading our team in fantasy football recruitment? Look at the picture and be the judge.

So what great marketing articles caught our eye this week?

Filed Under: Uncategorized

How to Market Your Business – Twitter

August 26, 2011 By 31 Comments

Check out Trada’s other posts in our online marketing series: How to Market Your Business on Facebook, How to Market Your Business on Twitter , How to Market Your Business With a Blog , and  How to Market Your Business with Video.

Yesterday, SmallBizTrends wrote about how 47% of SMBs don’t use social media in their marketing arsenal. That might be you, and that’s ok. We’ve interviewed some of the smartest people we know using Twitter to help their businesses. This interview gives you the low down on how to start using Twitter, ways to be effective and how to measure your success.

Meet the Experts:

  • Kaitlin PikeKaitlin Pike is the community manager of Web 2.0, one of the top Internet conferences in the world. Plus, she’s a friend from SXSW. Follow her for personal tweets at @kcpike and business tweets at @w2e.

 

 

  • Ef RodriguezEf Rodriguez is an organizer with Ignite Boulder, one of the largest Ignites in the world. His full-time job is helping craft interactive strategies for one of the top advertising agencies in the world. Go and find him on Twitter at @pug and see his magic at work at @igniteboulder.

 

 

How do you find people to engage with on Twitter?

Lauren Preston: At Qdoba, we actively track our brand’s mentions, direct and indirect, on a daily basis. Through this continuous monitoring, we are able to [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, Social Media

What We’re Reading This Week

August 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

World's cutest puppyIf you’re looking for some good content this week, than go no further than our “Pets of Trada” Facebook album. But if you’re looking for more substantial content, Trada’s Tim Mayer presented at SES San Francisco this week, so be sure to check out his presentation on Tools to Make Paid Search Campaigns More Successful.

Onto the good stuff:

Filed Under: Paid Search

The Psychology of Landing Pages

August 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Don’t miss Trada’s webinar on Wednesday at 12:15 ET on the Psychology of Landing Pages.

With your PPC campaign, don’t drop the ball at the 10-yard line by having a poor landing page. When people arrive at your virtual front door, will they find you to be credible, trustworthy and full of value?

The secret to a good landing page is to understand the psychology behind them and what causes visitors to act. What will people’s gut reaction to your site be?

Make An Excellent Value Proposition.

To earn your leads trust, make your value proposition not only clear but worthwhile. As our account manager, Brandon Hess, says, “You want your leads to feel what your providing is worth handing over their personal information.” No one wants to feel like they’re at the losing end of a deal struck.

This landing page by ExactTarget provides a comprehensive guide about email marketing as part of their landing page.

This example of a good landing page by State Farm tells you’ll receive an auto insurance quote that can save you up to 40 percent off.

State Farm Trust

As an advertiser, you want to show your trustworthy. You wouldn’t give your phone number out to just anyone at a bar until you feel that person isn’t a creep. (Unless you would do that and then you have issues that are best not addressed on this blog post.) What you want to do is give visual cues that you’re totally worthy of earning a lead’s personal contact information. This is a time to preen your feathers by showing if you’ve won industry awards or a Better Business Bureau company.

This great landing page example from 1-800 Dentist shows that they are a BBB company and are certified by Verisign. They also show they’ve been seen on major national media outlets.

1-800 Design Landing Page

Credibility

Will a visitor to your landing page feel confident that you know what you’re talking about or that your product does what you say it can do?  How do you get your visitor to feel comfortable that what you’re offering?

Product reviews lend immense credibility to websites. Size six actually closer to a size eight? Let your other customers inform them. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff talked about how much letting other customers write reviews lent credibility (and increased sales) for eBags.

Testimonials are the perfect route to show how your service or product has solved a problem. The above example from 1-800 dentists talks about having “millions of happy patients” and shares testimonials from those patients.


 

 

 

Filed Under: Landing Pages, Paid Search

What is a Landing Page?

August 15, 2011 By 1 Comment

A landing page is exactly what you might think: it’s the first thing visitors to your website see when they click on a link from an email message, print or electronic ad or whitepaper. It’s not your home page, but a specially-designed internal page directly related to the content that caused your visitor to seek more information.

The immediate purpose of a landing page is to capture customer information. Ultimately, of course, the purpose is to convert those leads into sales.

Why is a landing page so important?

  • It serves as a “back door” to your company’s website, leading potential customers immediately to exactly the information they want. Your home page can’t accomplish this. Visitors have to look around to find what they need, and if they don’t find it quickly, they may just move on.
  • It strengthens your relationship with existing customers and prospects who have chosen to “opt-in” by visiting. You can realize higher conversion rates from these “hot” leads, or even generate immediate sales, depending on your business type and goals.  For this reason, landing pages are often able to deliver strong ROI.
  • Because it’s very specific, a landing page nicely supports niche and narrowly targeted marketing campaigns.
  • It is an essential component of any pay-per-click (paid search) or other direct-link marketing.

What makes a good landing page?

  • Clarity of purpose is critical. Your ad (or other source) has already captured customer attention, so this is the next step. Exactly what do you want searchers to do now?  The landing page must have a clear call to action: sign-up or registration, perhaps even purchase.
  • How you design your landing page depends on your audience. (If they’re responding to an ad, the page will be different than if they’re clicking through from a whitepaper.) The page needs to relate directly to your ad or keyword(s).
  • Offer an incentive to encourage the maximum number of searchers to take the next step and give you their information. If you provide tangible value with a compelling offer, you’ll keep them engaged and continue building a positive relationship.
  • Make sure your entire page displays above the “fold” (no scrolling down to uncover information). Keep it uncluttered, so visitors stay focused.
  • Include testimonials, reviews, certifications, etc. Third-party praise and professional recognition build trust and credibility.
  • Omit regular website navigation buttons, so searchers don’t get sidetracked and wander away from your landing page.
  • But do include a sharing button, to encourage viral expansion of your campaign.
  • Test, and test again. Try various versions of your page to see what works best.

A landing page may seem like a simple marketing tool, but good design is critical.  Keep it short, sweeten the pot, and give customers immediate value so they’ll want more. They’ll be motivated and receptive to maintain an ongoing relationship with your company. And, of course, highly engaged customers are your top-tier audience for future sales.

If you’re interested in learning more about landing pages, check out our webinar on the Psychology of Landing Pages this Wednesday at 12:15 ET.

 

Filed Under: Landing Pages, Paid Search

What We’re Reading This Week – Aug. 12

August 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Hi there blog readers! Hope you’re having a good week. The end of Trada’s abysmal softball team is coming to an end, so we’re in talks to start up an abysmal basketball or hockey league.

Poll: Are you using Google+?

  • 11 Google Plus Predictions from 11 Social Media Pros – We read this one with bated breath because as our Facebook poll (above) showed us, not too many people are actively involved with Google+. Tamar Weinberg has what I feel is the most accurate prediction: “I think it’s really dependent on Google+ getting those business pages ready. Once that’s made, the businesses that get started will have a leg up on their competition. If you snooze, you lose. Early adopters always see a lot of success.”

Put on these sneakers, drink this nice drink, and submit to the conversions.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

10 PPC Experts You Should Know

August 9, 2011 By 11 Comments

Here are ten paid search experts we follow that we think are the most active on social media, and provide the best learning materials and resources out there. These are some of Trada’s go-to sources for PPC, and we think they should be yours too.

Joanna Lord1. Joanna Lord is the Director of Customer Acquisition & Engagement at SEOmoz, and in addition to being a PPC whiz, she writes great content on the SEOmoz blog. She’s a frequent speaker at the search conferences and is speaking at PubCon Las Vegas 2011 on the best landing page optimization techniques. You can find her on Twitter at @JoannaLord.

Brad Geddes 2. Brad Geddes has been on the online marketing scene for some time. He’s a trainer, teacher and author. He’s one of only two Google-approved AdWords Seminar Leaders, and many at Trada have taken his PPC classes. He’s also the author of Advanced Google AdWords, which also frequently makes it way around Trada. You can read his online marketing blog and follow him on Twitter at @bgtheory.

Pat East3. Pat East is the founder of Hanapin Marketing and the epononymous PPC Hero blog. Like Joanna, Pat is an entrepreneur and understands the needs of small business owners because he is one. He’s currently also the founder of Tingian Ventures, which is launching a beta product to create landing pages without HTML. You can follow him on Twitter at @PatEast.

4. Mark Ballard is a Senior Research Analyst at Rimm Kaufman Group, and we happen to love data at Trada. He writes the most detailed and thorough blog posts on PPC and yep, you guessed it, they’re backed up by data. If you want to see what we mean, check out his post “Mobile Traffic Patterns in Paid Search.” We haven’t been able to find Mark on Twitter. So Mark, if you’re reading this, let us know where to stalk find you.

Jeremiah Andrick5. Jeremiah Andrick is in charge of SEO, social media, and paid search at Logitech. Before he was at Logitech, Jeremiah was a program manager at Bing. He believes in owning all of your sales funnel and understanding how they work together. He’s smart and we like him a lot despite his hipster tendencies. Maybe we’re just jealous he got to attend the Grammys. You can find him on Twitter at @jeremiah and his personal blog – The Cubicle Punk. {Bonus: Our interview with Jeremiah}

Danny Sullivan6. Danny Sullivan is the Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land is the foremost expert on all things related to search. We like him so much we even named an arbor after Danny. His team also puts on the must attend SMX conferences and you can hear him speak at SMX in New York on Causation vs. Correlation when it comes to SEO rankings. You can follow him on Twitter at @dannysullivan.

Craig Danuloff of ClixEquations7. Craig Danuloff is the president of ClickEquations, which is PPC software. He’s also the author of Quality Score in High Resolution, a book that everyone at Trada is always begging to be the next to read. Previously, he founded electronic commerce and desktop publishing companies, and he’s also spent time as a VC. You can follow him on Twitter at @cdanuloff and @clickequations.

Joe Kerschbaum8. Joe Kerschbaum is the VP of Client Services for Clix Marketing. He’s also the co-author of PPC: An Hour a Day, helping you understand the essentials of PPC. When he’s not writing for the Clix blog, you can find his columns in Search Engine Watch, Website Mag and adCenter Blog. You should follow him on Twitter at @JoeKerschbaum.

Matt Hessler9. Matt Hessler is Account Director at Trada. Clearly, we’re biased, but we think Matt is fantastic. Before coming to Trada, he co-owned a search agency and has multiple years of search experience. He’s no one-trick pony, and when he’s not at Trada, he’s running his own clothing company ELC men’s clothing. He’s a PPC mastermind that knows small businesses. You can find him on Twitter at @fasterstill.

Matt Umbro, host of #PPCchat10. Matt Umbro is a PPC Specialist at Exclusive Concepts, but is more well-known as the founder of the Twitter discussion group #PPCchat. You can find recaps of #PPCchat on the PPCblog.com. You can find him on Twitter at @matt_umbro.

 

What PPC experts do you follow and love? We’ll also be posting SEO experts we love, so let us know your must-go-to sources.

Filed Under: Paid Search, PPC Tips

How to Market Your Business – Facebook Page

August 5, 2011 By 18 Comments

Check out Trada’s other posts in our online marketing series: How to Market Your Business on Facebook, How to Market Your Business on Twitter , How to Market Your Business With a Blog , and  How to Market Your Business with Video.

Most small businesses have Facebook pages, but once they set it up, they don’t know where to go next. We wanted to create a look at how to market your business with a Facebook page. We also wanted to see what the best practices were, so we polled the experts. We interviewed experts from a Fortune 50 company (Pepsi), a social network (Daily Burn) and a top social media agency (Room 214).

Meet the Experts:

George G Smith Jr. of PepsiGeorge G. Smith Jr., a Senior Manager of Brand Engagement: Social Strategy and Execution (among other things) for a Fortune 50 Company. Check out his company’s Facebook page and follow him on Twitter at @georgegsmithjr.

Brandon Whalen of Room 214Brandon Whalen, a social web marketing strategist  at social media agency Room 214 working on clients such as Hello Kitty, Vail Resorts and the Linux Foundation. Check out his agency’s Facebook page and follow him at Twitter at @Brandonsings.

Kate Brown of Daily BurnKate Brown, Community Director  and Health Expert at the fitness tracking social network Daily Burn. Check out Daily Burn’s Facebook page and follow her on Twitter at @invinciblekate.

 

How can companies get the most out of a Facebook fan page?

Brandon Whalen: If you want to get the most out of your page, you have to use it! This seems really basic, but too many companies create a page and then never find the time to make updates. If you don’t have the time or resources to manage the page and update it daily, find someone who can, or you could be wasting your time.

Second, you need to have a strong understanding of all of the functions. Sure, you can head to your wall and make updates, but do you take full advantage of geo-targeted updates, photo albums, questions and events?

Once you have a good handle on the tools, you have a strong content strategy, and you have dedicated resources for management, you can think about customizing your page with a cool tab. We have built several custom Facebook apps for our clients: Sanrio/Hello Kitty, The Linux Foundation and Vail Resorts.

George G Smith Jr: Companies can get the most out of a Facebook fan page by understanding what they want to get out of a Facebook fan page. A Facebook page is just an opportunity to engage with people who have opted in to your brand – goals and a creative approach will allow you to accomplish almost anything.

Kate Brown: There are a few things that companies can do to get the most out of their Facebook page. The first is offer great customer service via your Facebook page by utilizing a helpdesk that integrates with Facebook. We use assistly. Every time a question is asked via our facebook page by a DailyBurn user, a helpdesk ticket is auto-generated by assistly. It helps us manage customer issues, plus the solution is played out in public on our Facebook wall. It’s a great way to show prompt and helpful service out in the open. Second, companies should be giving exclusive content to people who like them on Facebook. Zappos does this really well. You have to like their page to access certain tabs.

What type of content receives the best feedback?

George G Smith Jr: It depends on the brand, in all honesty. Some passionate fan bases ONLY want to hear about brand related stuff. Some brands are more lifestyle. The key is to track how your audience is reacting and start adapting. And never stop experimenting! Your audience is constantly changing so you should always look to try new ways to engage.

Kate Brown: When we ask our community a direct question, we get the most feedback. People like to talk about themselves. Rather than pushing content, we get more feedback if we ask a personal question that has to do with featured content.

Brandon Whalen: Each community is different, but photos are by far the most popular content on Facebook. This is not only true for the standard user profile, but on fan pages as well.

How do you encourage engagement from your fans?

Kate Brown: We ask direct questions, we ask people what they think, and we ask people about their experiences with different health topics that we write about. For example, if I post a link to a blog post that I wrote about juice detox diets, I’ll ask, “HAve you ever tried a juice detox diet? What happened?” Then I’ll leave the thread alone. This usually starts a dialogue between fans on the thread.

Brandon Whalen: To truly understand how to engage your community you have to listen. In large communities, it is difficult to respond to every person, but if you pay close attention you will notice the trends and changes in the reactions from fans.

Our client Sanrio noticed that fans were consistently posting photos of their collections, tattoos, etc. Instead of ignoring this trend Sanrio found ways to interact with the fans by reposting fan photos to albums, and launching a custom tab where fans can share their photos.

George G Smith Jr: Asking for it and incentivizing it.

How do you measure the success of your Facebook fan page?

Brandon Whalen: We are big fans of Coca-Cola’s view on measuring social media success. They focus on building “expressions” rather than impressions.

Impressions are more of the connective tissue, which holds everything together, while expressions are specific valuable instances where someone has chosen to interact with your brand. Our CEO Jason Cormier recently wrote up a great article on this very subject.

George G Smith Jr: We try to measure success based on fan engagement – the number of active fans – in addition to many campaign specific goals.

Kate Brown: We look at organic likes, of course, but we measure the real success based on engagement. Monthly active views is the number that I watch. This is the number of people who interacted with or viewed the page or its posts. You do not have to like the page to be counted in this metric. This metric shows active, engaged fans plus people that they shred your content with. This is the true measure of what is happening in your page.

Do you think companies should pay for fans?

George G Smith Jr: Depends on your goals, but I definitely think paying for fans is important.  You’re not paying for the specific fans – you’re paying for awareness that your brand has a Facebook Page.  It’s still something that people opt into.  You need to make sure people know of your page in order to capture everything that could potentially be interested in it.

Kate Brown: No. I know that a facebook like is basically an opt-in facebook marketing opportunity, but paying for facebook likes is not a viable social media strategy. Your marketing budget would be better spent paying a blogger to write great content combined with a great SEM campaign. Who cares if you have more likes if you don’t have the high quality content needed to fully utilize facebook as a marketing platform?

Brandon Whalen: It’s easy to set up ads and get some traffic to your page, but if you don’t create real fans out of those ad dollars, your money is going to waste.

Before you run Facebook ads to grow your page, make sure you have a strong plan for managing this community. What value are you giving to your fans? Why would anyone want to be a fan of your page?

Make sure you can answer those questions yourself before you throw money into advertising.

Anything else you think social media marketers should know about using Facebook?

George G Smith Jr: We’re entering the age where creativity will play an important role. You can’t just succeed by being there – you need to stand out from the ever increasing crowd.

Kate Brown: Facebook is the perfect platform for learning about your customers and testing marketing campaigns before you launch them. Want to know if contests work? Try a small one on facebook and gauge response quickly. Facebook is great for fast feedback.

Brandon Whalen: There are a lot of good reasons for brands to add Facebook into their marketing mix. I read this morning that more US citizens are on Facebook than have passports.

With 700 million Facebook users the opportunity is hard to ignore. The real question is whether you really understand how to use these tools, and whether you can dedicate the time, money and resources required to run a Facebook community.

More Helpful Facebook Marketing Articles:

Leave us a tip of your own for how to market your business with a Facebook page, and the best comment will win a $75 Amazon gift certificate. Woot! Comment must be entered by 12 am MT, Wednesday, Aug. 10.

To stay up-to-date with Trada, join us at Trada’s Facebook Fan Page.

 

Filed Under: Facebook, SMB Marketing, Social Media

What We’re Reading This Week

July 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Baby Reading BookHope everyone had a great week! Here at Trada, our softball team put up its 10,336 straight loss. But this week isn’t a net loss because our account manager, Dan Tisser, brought in his toaster to Trada. It’s a pleasant addition to have toast in the morning.

Now onto the weekly best online marketing articles.

  • Leveraging your SEO for Search Retargeting by Joanna Lord (@joannalord). An in-depth how-to article on how to use your search retargeting and SEO together.
  • Beware the SEO copywriting B.S. – 3 tips about these online tips. Heather Lloyd Martin provides three ways to determine how legitimate the SEO expert advice you’re reading actually is. One excellent point to remember is what works for one company might not work for you.
  • Paid, Earned, Owned & Shared Media – What’s Your Online Marketing Media Mix by Lee Odden (@leeodden). A 30,000 foot view of each media type. It’s important to think about each component of your content strategy.
  • Quality Fans & EdgeRank = Recipe for Visibility by Selena Narayanasamy (@esvienne). Selena covers in this blog post everything you need to know about Facebook’s algorithm that determines who your updates.
  • Mind the Bid-to-CPC Gap in Paid Search by Mark Ballard. A thorough post on what to do when your CPCs are coming in below your bids (woot!) but you know you might be leaving additional revenue behind. This post walks you step by step on when (and if) you should raise your bid.
  • Venture Deals by Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld – It’s not just because they invested in Trada that makes them so smart. These two know venture deals inside out and offer a refreshing and realistic take on all the ins and outs of venture financing. If you’re a startup, this is a must read. As one Amazon review said, “First off, Brad & Jason break down the entire process from soup to nuts. That’s great for first-time entrepreneurs. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book became the bible of startup incubator programs. There’s enough detail to make it feel fresh, but it’s not so dense that it’s hard to get through.”

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ella Thomson. We have no idea who the baby is but we think her parents should read her PPC for Beginners.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »