Social Media Marketing

This morning I was reading MSN.com something I rarely do, and what do I see on the home page… an excellent article on strong passwords along with recommendations on how to create them. click the link below take a look and learn how to make your password not only easy to remember but very difficult to guess, even with a super computer.

The Art of Creating Strong Passwords
By Michael Scalisi, PC World

When it comes to password strength, educating users is just as important as enforcing policies.

While security has never been more important than it is today, the fastest way for an IT professional to become the most despised person in the company is to start enforcing a strong password policy. A policy perceived as overbearing may cause people to write down their passwords on a sticky note near their computers, circumventing its very purpose. Your policy will be… More

Back in the day (2005 or so) you could sign up for a Google Ad-Word account, and within a few hours you were buying keywords and driving traffic to your website, but then came the iPod, and Viagra merchants offering free laptops and X Box consoles. You see what was going on back in the day; folks were creating Google Ad-Word accounts for their websites then they were bidding on whatever words they thought would to drive traffic to their site, regardless if the words were relevant. (Bait and Switch), for example I am a company that is having a very hard time giving away new laptops and iPods I am up to my eyeballs with these fancy electronic devices, so I go to Google and buy an ad-word campaign for Viagra hoping to trick folks with ED to go to my website and sign up so that I can send them IPods, Laptops and Play Station. After a little while and there were bunch of extra frustrated men that needed Viagra but instead they had mail box full of the latest cool electronic gizmos

Then the folks at Google implemented a solution to help all these poor men that had too many IPods and laptops, their solution was to make the Ad-Words that the advertiser purchased match the content on the linked website, that way if you were buying an Ad-Word campaign for Viagra and your website had to sell or mention Viagara or ED or something related to the need for Viagra. If your site didn’t mention ED, Viagra, or ED related things, your cost per click CPC would be either prohibitively expensive or it would be banned all together.

Now it’s 2009 and things have gotten even more strict over at Google, with all of the competition in the search Engine PPC (pay per Click space) (Yahoo and Microsoft have partnered to compete with Google) companies what to be sure and supply value to their clients, in the Search Engine Owners case (Google) they want to make sure that they are supplying relevant and quality results to the folks that are using their search engines. This is very important because if you go to your favorite search engine and click on a link that doesn’t take you to anything that remotely resembles the ad you clicked on, you will become frustrated and will think twice before you click the link.

Search Engines are very concerned with providing value to both their searchers and their advertisers, this task is very hard to accomplish and the search engines are constantly trying to ensure that their user base it getting the results that they want.

Think about it… What is your favorite Search Engine and why?

Nothing to do with Ad-Words, but i like the photo - muy tranquilo

Erica at the Dorey Design offices found this interesting article explaining how the 2 different aspects of web 2.0 marketing need to get along, The Cool Kids, who understand the technology and the Marketers who want to take what the Cool Kids know and turn it into a profit. I think that Dorey Design Group has the best of both worlds. We have both Cool Kids and Marketers working under the same roof, and guess what we all get along and learn from each other. Take a look at what Sonia Simone has to say, it is a good read, about an interesting subject.

Is Your Tribe Holding You Down?

by Sonia Simone
http://www.copyblogger.com

How can I get my site to show up on the first page of Google?

If I had $1 US for every time I heard that sentence from a client I could retire and if I could make that happen for a client at will I would also be able to retire. So, what do you tell a client that asks that question?

I have come up with a a way to explain how Google PPC works and how to approach the purchase of PPC advertising, this list is designed to quickly help clients understand how to purchase PPC advertizing and make it easier for me to help them make smart cost effective decisions.

• Review
1. Review current website with regards to
1. Organic Search
2. Usability
3. Messaging
4. W3C*  Standards
• Competitive Analysis
1. Review competitors websites to determine
1. Content Quality
2. Messaging
3. Ad-words, Ad-sense, and other PPC (pay-per-click) expenditures (we have tools for this)
• Goal Setting
1. Work with client to determine goals for the ad campaign
• Budget
1. Based on competitors expenditures, and key word choices we recommend a budget
• Campaign Creation
1. Setup ad campaign with various services, Google, MSN, Yahoo, Hotmail, and various other services
• Tracking
1. Install Google Analytics on clients website
2. Install server based stat program on web server (webalizer, urchin etc)
• Recommendations
1. Based on results of web-traffic and conversions; make recommendations to client on budget, PPC locations, and ad-words.
2. Determine ROI for current campaign and make adjustments based on success and budget.

How does this all work? (google)

• Cost: The costs associated with your typical PPC campaign can vary dramatically based on the words or phrases you wish to purchase, the location that you purchase them in and what your competitors are paying for those words or phrases.  Google uses an auction and budget format to charge for their PPC services, Below is an example of how Google sets the price for the word "Condo"
• Location: where do you want to purchase the word, if you just want your ad to appear in Seattle, your cost would be less than if you wanted your ad appear nationally.
• Popularity: if your word is popular, with your competitors the price will be higher than if it is specific or unique, for example 2 different entities are interested in purchasing the same word, the person that is willing to pay more gets first position on the page, until their budget is used up. If you are the only person that wants to buy a specific word then your cost would be very low, an example of this is “Condo” vs “Paul Fasel”  Paul Fasel is very unique and no one but Paul Fasel would want to bid on that phrase. While “CONDO” is very popular, and thus would be very costly to purchase.
• Budget: you pay for views and clicks until your budget is used up, for example you have a $500.00 per month budget, and you are willing to spend 17.00 per day for your word in the Seattle area, you are willing to pay up to $1.00 per click for your word. This means that you will get at least 17 clicks per day before your ad disappears from the page, you may get more if your competitors budget is less and they have used up all of their clicks but the minimum you get is 17 clicks at $1.00 each.  If you do not get 17 clicks that day your budget rolls over to the next day, at the end of the month you only pay for the clicks that you use. If you only got 400 clicks in the month you only pay $400.00 for that month.
• Management: After the initial setup the management fee includes monthly analysis of campaign success and tweaking of ad-words and phrases, and emailing of a simple report showing what words preformed well, and what words did not, along with budget and recommendations as how to change your campaign to optimize success.

*W3C – World Wide Web Consortium www.w3c.org, they are the standards governing body for all websites, web code and browsers. To ensure your site is visible to search engines and your customers, the more compliant your site is the better it will perform in both search engine ranking and in your customer’s browsers. Click here to read more about W3C and how if can affect your search engine ranking.

Sphere: Related Content

Remember my post about your Facebook privacy settings, (original article) well a funny thing happened the other day when I logged on to my Facebook account, I saw an a message in the right hand column that told me that I might not want to make my profile so private and it contained a link to my privacy settings.

Why does Facebook care about my privacy settings? and why does Facebook want my profile exposed to the world? It’s simple, the more people to view your profile, the more friends you have, the more time you spend on Facebook.com, the more ad impressions they sell, the greater the chances of you clicking on an ad = more money for Facebook… simple.