Pay Per Click Advertising

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Printwear Magazine, June 2010.

Although I've covered Pay Per Click Advertising in previous issues and blog posts, I recently discovered first hand the power of Pay Per Click Advertising through social networks. Long story short, social networks have a distinct advantage over other Pay Per Click Advertising programs due to the fact that they can broadcast your promotion to a targeted audience. Care to advertise directly to people in certain geographical areas? How about a certain age group? Let's not forget about targeting an ad campaign towards users with a common interest!

Check out my short adventure in Pay Per Click Advertising in the June 2010 issue of Printwear Magazine, the comments section is open for further discussion and to share your success story.

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Are Your Social Networking Updates Keyword Friendly?

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Are you aware that your status updates from many Social Networks are now appearing in real time search results from the top search engines? If not, now that you do know you might bear in mind that posting some keyword friendly updates throughout the day could be beneficial.

Here's a brief look at what's been happening:

Google leads the pack with results from groups, companies, celebrities and fan pages from Facebook. Twitter has of course led the way in terms of hitting Googles real time search results, and MySpace is now included as well as FriendFeed. Throw in the new release of Google Buzz and they've just about tackled all the real time Internet activity you can imagine surfing through.

Bing has secured a partnership to provide the on-site search engine for Facebook. Bing is bringing tweets to their search results but according to my research they have not yet started to include updates from Facebook or other networks, although clearly public updates from Facebook will soon be included. You should note that only the status updates that are visible to everyone within your Facebook Fan Page privacy settings will be included in the search results from Bing.

Yahoo search results contain updates from Twitter... I could go on but this isn't about the techy details.

What is it about?

As I've mentioned many times in regards to Do-It-Yourself Internet Marketing, it's not about getting visitors in the billions to your web site and Social Networking sites. It's about getting as many qualified visitors as you can if you want to really generate sales. Having seen how the search engines are beginning to treat real time updates within their search results, I see an opportunity to find qualified fans to visit your Facebook Fan Page, qualified followers to hit you up on Twitter and overall a qualified audience in terms of marketing within your Social Networks.

Which of course brings me back to the title of this blog post. Are Your Social Networking Updates Keyword Friendly?

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Another Thumbs Up for HootSuite

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Back in November 09 HootSuite added some great features to their super useful service for managing Twitter accounts. I've recommended HootSuite in the past along with a handful of other options, but after using these new features for a few months I think I'm comfortable with HootSuite on a whole new level. Now in addition to managing multiple Twitter accounts and having the ability to import up to five RSS feeds per account, the following features have made busy days quick and easy when it comes to Social Networking tasks.

Support for Twitter Lists

In October 09 Twitter integrated a great feature called Twitter Lists. Using that feature you can organize those you follow into categories. With HootSuite now supporting the lists you can create tabs and/or columns for following Twitter users in a much more organized manner and in a lot less time.

Support for Facebook and LinkedIn

With Facebook and LinkedIn tuned in you can now create columns for these networks, read your friends’ status updates and update multiple Facebook accounts. The Facebook integration also offers in-line commenting. I find this a huge time saver as I can check in on My Dart Shirts Fan Page, Dart League Fan Page, Profile and LinkedIn all while doing the daily task of logging in to update my Twitter accounts.

Log In Once, Update Them All

To sum things up, MySpace now offers you the ability to have your Twitter feed update your status on your MySpace Profile through RSS. With that feature enabled and a quick login at HootSuite consider how quickly and easily you can update your Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, MySpace status and LinkedIn all within a few keystrokes and clicks! Then easily browse through your tabs and columns faster to read up on all of the Social Networks you follow.

I've found these new features to be an absolute time saver on a daily basis. And despite this being old news as things travel online, I wanted to give it a full test drive before blogging away about it. The comments are open for discussion, way to go HootSuite!

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5 Creative Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website

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There are many ways to direct qualified buyers to your website, and I see many website owners missing those opportunities. It seems that the simple phrase SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has either intimidated them or has them distracted from the variety of other avenues available for promoting their websites.

I recently posted some advice and suggestions in an online forum, and I received many private messages with positive feedback as a result. After reading through my post again I realized it is something I should elaborate on and share here on the blog.

1) Create and Submit iGoogle Desktop Themes

Internet users who utilize iGoogle enjoy the desktop themes, widgets and the many features that go along with it. By creating iGoogle desktop themes and branding them with your web site URL you can expose your website to thousands of Internet users. You can also put links to the themes on your web site to offer them to your customers, or those browsing and not buying that particular day.

I created a darts theme last year to promote my dart shirts web site. Currently over 2,000 people are using it (they give you a counter that stays current). I've seen the number of users as high as 4,500+ before. Considering that is just one theme and a small number of potential iGoogle users that are interested in darts, anyone with some creativity and a feel for their target audience could create themes to target any demographic.



An added bonus for the technically challenged, as I looked up the link and point you to where you can get started I discovered that Google has now added a Theme Maker feature!

2) Create Wallpapers for Computers and Cell Phones

Everyone with a computer has a desktop, and virtually all of them like to personalize it with wallpaper. The number of cell phone users in the world has now exceeded the number of people who own computers, and most cell phones these days offer personalization as well.

By creating custom wallpapers for both desktops and mobile devices and brand them with your web site URL, you can then offer them as a free download AND submit them to free wallpaper/cell phone web sites. Consider how many people would end up with www.yourwebsite.com right on their desktop and/or cell phone every day. Plus your website would get additional traffic from users searching for wallpapers and themes.

To give you a jump start on this, here are the screen resolutions you should offer:

Windows and Mac Desktops: 640x480 Screen Resolution 800x600 Screen Resolution 1024x768 Screen Resolution 1152x864 Screen Resolution 1280x960 Screen Resolution 1344x1008 Screen Resolution 1280x1024 Screen Resolution 1400x1050 Screen Resolution 1600x1200 Screen Resolution 2048x1536 Screen Resolution

Mobile Devices: 101X80 Screen Resolution 128X128 Screen Resolution 128X160 Screen Resolution 176X220 Screen Resolution 240X240 Screen Resolution 240X320 Screen Resolution 320X240 Screen Resolution 96X64 Screen Resolution

3) Create MySpace Themes

If you really want to get busy, you could create some MySpace Themes. Brand them, link them to your web site and offer them as a free download. Sooner or later your web site - with links to your web site - would be all over MySpace. In addition to the added traffic you'd get from search engines on MySpace Layouts and Themes, all those in-bound links will help your SEO efforts. To repeat my comment regarding iGoogle desktop themes above, anyone with some creativity and a feel for their target audience could create themes to target any demographic.

4) Create a Facebook Application

If you're a savvy developer you know this already. For the rest there's the built in Gift Creator application on Facebook that is as easy to use as a toaster. Using Gift Creator you can create an app that lets users share your artwork, products or anything else you decide on with their friends. This is a major viral tool. I created one in December of 2008 for my dart shirts and currently there are over 4000 daily users - all trading my dart shirts with each other - and all those pages are branded and linked to my website. That number climbs by an average of 100 users per week.

5) Create Twitter Backgrounds

Twitter is growing into quite the social networking/micro blogging experience for millions of Internet users. By creating backgrounds specific to Twitter - and the demographics you wish to target - you can brand them with your website URL and offer them as free downloads. You could even create a Twitter account to promote the backgrounds as well as link to your products on a regular basis.

I am considering buying a domain name and creating a web site just for this purpose. I think it is a great channel to dive into and take advantage of.

Now to get creative!

Consider these ideas and the ways you can put them to use to drive visitors to your web site! The comments feature is active for any questions, comments, suggestions. Tell me what's on your mind.

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MySpace: The Final Frontier

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Promowear Magazine, May/June 2007.

"Space... The final frontier..." To continue following up on my January/February column Opportunities For The New Year, welcome aboard the good ship Niche Marketing on its maiden voyage into MySpace.

Feel free to have a look at my Profile despite my Internet Marketing efforts being channeled through other areas of MySpace.

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