oday I want to talk about a powerful way to improve your rank with the search engines so more people can find your business.

If you’ve ever gone or even watched someone mountain climbing, you know that to get to the top takes strategy.

You carefully look for the best rock or crevice to grab onto, find a place to plant your foot and slowly make your way up the side of the mountain.

One faulty step can cause you to lose a lot of ground—quickly.

This reminds me of SEO link building.

Done methodically, you can drive traffic and watch your Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search ranking climb higher.

However if it’s not well thought out and well executed, with one bad move you can fall fast and furious in the search engine rankings.

If you’re not familiar with SEO link building, it is one of the primary elements search engines look at when determining the value of your site and where they rank it on their search engine results page.

Link building is the act of getting other websites to link to you. Each link acts like a vote. The more votes that your website receives, the better you will rank. Without links, your site won’t get the authority it needs to rank higher organically.

To avoid being penalized by Google and other search engines there are several things you need to focus on:

Construct high-quality one-way inbound links. When you have quality in-bound links, you build authority in your niche and are viewed by Google as a more credible, valuable and relevant site.

To determine if your links are high quality, ask yourself the following questions:

What is the reputation of the site I’m getting links from? Trusted sites linking to you using the keyword or product name you are trying to rank for helps build authority in your niche. For example, if you have a business-related site and Forbes.com linked to your site it would be more valuable than a site that was less well-known or had a lower PR (Page Rank). Also, links from .edu and .gov sites are considered more credible and valuable than .com, .net or .org links.
How relevant is the anchor text to this link? A generic link such as www.yourcompany.com or a link with your product name only, is not as valuable as one which includes both your product name or target keyword and the credible site. For instance, www.Forbes.com/yourproduct. Or if that’s not possible, a link that has your product name or target keyword is more valuable than “click here.”

Build links naturally and slowly. You should have a clear, methodical and precise strategy for how you will attract links to your site.

Spend time developing interesting, valuable content that stimulates conversations in blogs, forums and social media. Make sure that you plan this out rather than trying to follow a “cookie-cutter” strategy or randomly piecing things together. Reciprocal link exchanges and getting cheap links from “farms” doesn’t work and can damage your credibility.

Create great content and tools. Develop a reputation for writing content and offering tools and widgets that create value. Writing something just to get content up on your site that doesn’t stir up some sort of response or placing a widget that isn’t in some way useful to your audience is a waste of your time and effort. More importantly, it’s a waste of your customer’s time.

Provide content that stimulates conversation and comments. Ask your readers to participate by creating an action step in everything you write. You’ll find your traffic increases because you’ve developed a reputation for sharing great information and tools. Plus people will start conversations, link to you and share your articles on social media sites.

Put up boring, irrelevant content and worthless tools, and people will not only stop visiting your site, but you’ll develop a bad reputation which is hard to overcome.

Develop a hierarchical structure. Instead of loading up every page with tons of navigational links in the hope that something sticks, create a structure that emphasizes your most important content.

For example, your home page and pages with content that leads to revenue conversion will most likely contain your most important content so they should be at the top of your structure. This is what people will look at first and will lead them to take action.

Part of your structure should also include creating internal page links which link from keywords on your site to other pages on your site. This not only can significantly impact search engine rankings and search “crawlability”, but it also makes it easier for your consumers to “get around” and find what they are looking for, enhancing their user experience.

Take time to develop a great link building strategy and you’ll build your traffic, increase your visibility with search engines and improve your reputation in your niche.

Remember that the process matters. Using gimmicks, spamming blogs and forums, or loading up pages with hundreds of navigational links will only waste your time and effort and could risk your website being penalized by search engines, causing your website to fall drastically in the rankings.

The good news is it’s possible to build your traffic (and your profits) using a well thought out, well planned SEO link building strategy. It may take some time and effort, but remember, Edmond Hillary didn’t get to the top of Mount Everest without a lot of planning and a slow, measured, strategic climb to the top.

If you take the same approach, you’ll reach the top of the search engine rankings too, plus it’ll be a lot more profitable than Edmond Hillary’s climb too!

To your online success,

John Pfeiffer

P.S. Remember, if you want to rank organically and hold the highest rank over time, you must be in this for the long haul…because even though you achieve the top spot doesn’t mean your competitors will stop adding links and trying to knock you off. So if you want to learn more, just give me a call at 1-800-861-3776 or send me an email with your questions.

Vanilla or chocolate? Spring or Summer? Mountains or the beach?

Some debates never seem to die.

One of the classic debates in the Internet world is search engine optimization (SEO) vs. pay-per-click (PPC).

Which is superior?

I believe a better question to ask is…

“Which is right for your business?”

Billions of people begin their search for products and services by typing a keyword or phrase  into search engines  like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. In fact, research firm Comscore recorded 19.3 billion searches in the U.S. alone during the month of May of this year (up 7 percent from the month before).

Upon users hitting the search button, they are presented with thousands of results. Some are organic SEO results and some are PPC results.

Organic SEO refers to how your website appears naturally on the results page based on your design, use of keywords, content and inbound links.

If done right, a site will appear high on the first search engine results page. The dilemma is that if it doesn’t appear high in the results, no one will see your listing as most people don’t search much beyond the first page of listings.

To help you determine which is right for you, I’ve put together a comparison of both marketing strategies:

• Costs: There  are costs associated with setting up and continuing to keep your site search engine optimized, but there are no media costs associated with individual clicks to your website when you use SEO.  An SEO campaign ideally has an SEO specialist who analyzes your site, maps out a strategy, implements a strategy, tracks results and is accountable for your campaign.  With a PPC campaign, the initial cost will be lower to set up your campaign, but there are on-going media costs for each individual click .  Ideally you will have a PPC specialist who helps you select the best keywords, keeps you within budget and helps you get your desired results.
• Volume of clicks: Organic search results are typically viewed more positively because they are seen as non-biased since you aren’t paying for your results. Therefore, more people click on organic search results than on paid results.
• Conversion rates: PPC drives immediate action which results in higher conversion rates than SEO. In a study by Internet Retailer, visitors who arrive on a site from pay-per-click advertising are 50% more likely to buy than traffic generated by search engine optimization.  This is due to the fact that PPC drives traffic to targeted landing pages which can be refined, something SEO can’t really do.
• Control:  With SEO, there is no control over ranking and results. Therefore there is no guarantee that your efforts will result in a higher search engine ranking or that you will maintain your ranking once it’s achieved.  With PPC, there is a high degree of control because you can determine where on the page you are positioned depending on your investment.  PPC is also flexible and scalable. This means you have better control over how much you spend and the timing of when to increase and decrease the flow of traffic to your website.  Changes to your PPC campaign are immediate. Changes to your SEO campaign can take  months to take effect.  With SEO you cannot do split tests or track click-through rates.  PPC campaigns can track click-through and easily test new ideas. Pricing and offers, new products and services, and time sensitive offers and promotions are examples of things you can test with PPC.  The small amount of copy in a PPC ad which requires no design work, coupled with the fact that PPC campaigns can instantly be turned on and off means you can also run tests quickly.
• Value:  SEO builds long-term value by continuing to pay off for you years after you put it into place. PPC only draws value when it is running because the instant you turn it off, it stops drawing traffic.
• Speed: SEO is a long-term strategy which can take a long time, usually three months or longer, before you see results.  PPC produces results fast, in minutes or days rather than months or years.
• Maintenance: For your website to remain high in the rankings with SEO, you’ll need to do two things:  You’ll need to add fresh, relevant content to your site on an ongoing basis.  And you’ll need to continually adapt to algorithm changes from search engines. For example, Google’s Matt Cutts says they make between 350-400 algorithm changes per year. For most of these changes, you shouldn’t need to make adjustments because you won’t necessarily see a major difference in your results.  However, you do need to know what’s happening to make sure what you are doing is legitimate and doesn’t need adjusting. (In 2011, Google is focusing on placing original content at the top of search results which means unoriginal content or content copied from somewhere else will be bumped.)  PPC campaigns require monitoring performance and making adjustments on a regular basis.
• Campaign Results: With SEO, wildly sought-after keywords can take time to get rankings. However, you will benefit from niche-specific long-tail keywords that show up more quickly because these often attract qualified leads who are further along in the sales funnel.   As for overall strategy results, SEO results in continuous traffic over a longer period of time.  PPC gives an immediate boost in traffic. It is useful for getting keywords which aren’t ranking naturally in the organic listings or to test keywords and promotions. However, when the campaign is complete, the traffic stops immediately.

So what’s right for your business?

SEO makes sense when you want:

• A long-term marketing strategy with a high ROI
• A free strategy (meaning no media spend)
• A high volume of people clicking-through to your website

PPC, on the other hand makes sense when you want:

• Immediate traffic
• More control over things like where keywords appear, the message searchers see, ranking and the ability to test to optimize performance
• Higher conversion and the ability to use higher diversity to send many more keywords to a landing page

Ideally, an integrated approach which uses both PPC and SEO to reach top rankings will give you the best results.  You’ll appeal to all audiences across all points of the spectrum when you get a good mix of SEO and PPC.  This is because paid and organic listings serve different purposes reaching different audiences at different points in the buying cycle.

You’ll also increase the credibility of your company and awareness of brand. In fact, Brand Lift of Search (a study by Google) found that the most clicked on areas of their results pages are those where companies have good organic listings combined with paid listings.

When a searcher sees your business high in organic results and high in PPC, it gives the impression that you are a solid business that will be around for the long haul. This increases consumers trust in your company.

Lastly, from an accounting viewpoint, combining SEO and PPC helps keep both the unpredictability of SEO and the costs of PPC in check.

The other day I read a story about boxing that reminded me of a winning combination to turn your PPC traffic into money…

I read that former heavyweight-boxing champion, Evander Holyfield, is hoping to line up a world championship fight.

During an interview he said, “Back then when I was young, I made a lot mistakes. But… I had the stamina and all that to overcome. Today, you have less stamina but more focus. Either way you go, if you play with what you have, you win.”

Similar to Holyfield, “back then” when businesses were first using the Internet to sell products, you could put out a bunch of ads, mistakes and all, and still win.

However, today consumers are faced with thousands of messages on the Internet every day. Which means, like Holyfield, in order to win you have to be more focused with how you approach your campaigns.

For example, the other day I was looking at a Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign. A decent amount of traffic was being driven to this site.

But once these prospects landed on the site, they died.  A stream of hot prospects landed there and quickly clicked away—wallet in hand.

The mistake this client made?

He didn’t  test dedicated pages for his traffic to land on. Plus, he had no way to capture his traffic’s names and email addresses so he could market to them in the future and keep his product top of mind.

Years ago, when starting out on the Internet, marketers, like Holyfield, had lots of enthusiasm. Not knowing any better, they directed their traffic to a general sales page or to their home page.

They often got lucky and made sales despite this mistake because there wasn’t a lot of competition—however, now there is.

To compete in today’s market, you’ve not only got to be able to deliver a winning campaign to beat the competition, but you have to get them into the “ring” to compete in the first place.

Today I want to show you how to collect names and emails from the traffic that lands on your site from a known source (like your PPC campaign) and then deliver a one-two combination that will result in more sales. (If you are already familiar with this strategy, you can see how I do it by clicking the link here: http://ppcforsmallbiz.com/Unpublished_PPC_Secrets.html.)

But first I want to define the elements you’ll use so you’ll have a better understanding:

A landing page is a page on your website written and designed with a specific source of traffic in mind. Once there, your prospect is prompted to complete a precise action, such as sign up for a free sample, get a free report or request your top tips for solving their problem. It’s different from a sales page because the traffic arriving there comes from a known source such as a PPC ad, an email or banner ad. In many cases, you can’t even get to the landing page through regular navigation and can only arrive from that original source (such as your PPC ad or a radio spot). The page is clean and focused—clearly written, strategically laid out and designed and optimized using best practices to guide your prospect to take the one action you desire.

An autoresponder campaign is a series of strategically written emails that drives traffic back to your sales page and increases profits.

A sales page sits permanently on your site and is usually two or three levels down from your home page. People will arrive from a variety of different pages on your site and a well-optimized sales page will also attract traffic from search engines and inbound links.

Combining these elements together can provide superior sales results and turn your PPC traffic (and other sources) into money in the bank.

Here’s how it works:

Like Holyfield you need to make focused strategic moves…

Step one: First you send the people who click on your PPC ad to a dedicated landing page not a general sales page or your home page.

You should have one and only one action for them to take with no distractions that could tempt them to click away.

This one action could be a variety of things such as to sign up for a free report, register for a free event or receive a series of tips.

To get this information, your prospects will provide you with their email address. This gets your prospects into the ring when they aren’t ready to buy and keeps them from disappearing from your prospect list forever.

Your goal is not to go for the knockout punch prematurely, but to pace yourself and pepper your prospect with strategic marketing jabs. This is where the autoresponder series comes in.

Step two: Now that you’ve captured your prospect’s email address, you can begin sending him a series of emails. These are designed to get your prospect in the right frame of mind and help him overcome his objections before he is sent to your sales page.

Like the left jab to a right cross, the better your message is in these emails, the more likely the right cross (your sales page) will score a knockout punch and win the sale.

Step three: There will be a series of links in your autoresponder emails perfectly placed where your reader considers finding out more. These links will go to your sales page where you will deliver your winning sales message, make your offer and ask them to make a purchase.

This is one of the most effective ways to increase your sales because it doesn’t just wait for your prospect’s level of interest to pique, instead it helps speed up the sales cycle by addressing different objections they have before delivering them to your sales page. This puts them in a frame of mind to buy instead of arriving already resistant to your sales message.

In fact, this technique often doubles, triples and has even quadrupled response.

See how I do this here: http://ppcforsmallbiz.com/Unpublished_PPC_Secrets.html

So even if you have no control over the exact timing of when your prospect is ready to buy, you can control your ability to keep your product or services in front of prospective customers and help them overcome objections they have to buying.

This will not only make your product or service visible when your prospect is ready to buy, but will help speed up the sales cycle as well. Nothing will get qualified, targeted prospects into your sales ring better and achieve this one-two knockout punch as effectively as the landing page to autoresponder series to sales page campaign.

To your online success,

John Pfeiffer

P.S. For more information on how you can get this set up, email me at john@onlinepromarketing.com.  If you’d like to see an example of how this works, check out my sample by entering your name and email into the boxes on the landing page located here:  http://ppcforsmallbiz.com/Unpublished_PPC_Secrets.html

Are you looking for a way to increase your internet presence with effective and targeted marketing that meets your budget needs and return on investment expectations?  Consider partnering with a ppc marketer to help guide you through the process of pay per click advertising.

When you work with experts who specialize in pay per click advertising, you can eliminate a major burden for your business because someone else is there to do the heavy lifting for you.  The right ppc marketer will focus on your pay per click needs, so that you can focus on your business.

One amazing tool many businesses can use is white label ppc, which is kind of like having your own in-house pay per click marketer right there when you need them.  Since you just don’t have the time and energy to devote to managing your pay per click program, along with all of the other important task you have to accomplish every day, having someone in your corner who is experienced with how to use pay per click effectively can make a huge difference when it comes to your bottom line.

No longer do you have to be concerned that you are wasting time and money on advertising that may be ineffective or poorly targeted.  With white label pay per click, you now have a team of professionals who really do know exactly what they’re doing, which leaves you free to focus on other avenues of creating and maintaining a successful business.

These are difficult economic times for many people.  Everyone is out there looking for a bargain and when most people see a good deal, they grab on to it because they know that opportunity knocks but once.  So make sure you don’t let the opportunity to increase web traffic and thereby increase sales with the best pay per click advertising out there pass you by.  It is imperative your business remain competitive, and the only way to compete is to make sure you have the best advertising strategy you could possibly have.  If your competition is utilizing white label pay per click advertising and you are not, your business can lose out on a lot of potential revenue.

Every business has to find ways to minimize costs and maximize profits, and one key area you can make efficient cuts in without doing damage to your bottom line is your advertising budget, but only if you do it the right way.  Advertising is critical to a business’ success.  If people don’t know who you are or how to find you, how can they possibly buy from you?  Don’t let those potential customers miss out on how great your business is for them.

Effective advertising is crucial to growing your business.  No business can afford to waste huge chunks of their advertising budget on ineffective or poorly targeted ads.  So when was the last time you evaluated your advertising strategy for its effectiveness?

Increasing traffic to your site will lead to an increase in sales, so getting new visitors to find you is the key to online success.  What methods have you been using to drive more traffic to your site lately?  If you’re not using an affordable pay per click strategy, you are really missing out on a lot of potential revenue.

Perhaps you already are using pay per click advertising.  Have you been pleased with the results?  Do you feel like the return on your investment has been worth it?  If the answer to those questions is no, then you may not be partnering with the right company for you and your business.  If you have been paying too much for your pay per click advertising, then you won’t see the kinds of results you need to succeed.  Nothing could be more important to the success of your business at this juncture than affordable pay per click advertising.  No matter what the size of your business’ advertising budget, every dollar has to be spent wisely.

The right pay per click management team will make sure you aren’t wasting your advertising budget on poorly targeted ads that are too expensive for the return they offer.  Affordable ppc can make all of the difference in the world when it comes to returns on your advertising investments.  Everyone is always looking for a good deal, and you as a business owner or manager are no different.  You have to be a bargain hunter in order to help reduce overall costs to keep the doors open and the books in the black.

Developing a strong relationship with the right professionals who know and understand pay per click advertising is an important step in the right direction for your business; and one that you will never regret.  Internet sales are a tough business and you have to remain competitive.  There is no time to just sit back and let events unfold and the chips fall where they may.  No, in order to be the best in the business, you have to be proactive and go out and get customers instead of just waiting and hoping they will come to you.  And a smart way to go get those potential customers it to use pay per click advertising to your advantage.  Remember to always work smarter, not harder.  You can and you will make it to the top of the mountain if you use the right tools.

Last month while vacationing with my family at Disneyworld, I observed first-hand how Disney draws customers to its theme parks…no matter what the economy is doing.

In fact, despite significant downturns in the economy, Disney theme parks have not only maintained attendance rates but at some of their parks, attendance has actually gone up!

They do not spare any expense in creating an experience that will bring people back. In essence, they understand that to attract customers, they have to spend money in multiple places. They also realize that once someone decides to attend the park, they are more likely to spend a lot more money not only on their current visit, but on future visits as well.

From souvenirs to Mickey Mouse shaped ice-cream bars…to themed hotels conveniently located on the property. Plus there’s the business of repeat customers, which is big business. Not to mention the referral business that goes on when customers show their photos they had taken at Disneyworld to their family and friends.

Of course, Disney isn’t unlike most businesses…in that the key to success is how to get a hot lead to your door the first time. Because as you know, getting a lead to your business is more than half the battle. Get potential customers to your business and based on your sales closing ratio, you’ll know how much new business you can expect. And once you close a sale, as long as you deliver, you’ve automatically increased your chances of your newly acquired customer spending more money with you.

Understanding the potential worth of your customer is clearly an important take-away lesson from Disney. However, what I really want to share today is how they keep prospects flowing to their business.

You see, it’s because of this potential customer worth that Disney understands they really can’t afford not to spend money to get a lead and keep a consistent flow of traffic coming to their door. In addition, they know how to crank up the volume of leads when something like the economy is affecting the amount of traffic that shows up at their door.

Just like Disney, it’s important to know how to keep a consistent flow of business showing up at your website or business…no matter what happens.

So today, here’s what you can learn from Disney about how you can eliminate your worries of where your new customers will come from forever…

Don’t rely on free traffic from a single source.

You’d think that Disney could just stop advertising all together…I mean everyone knows who they are and what they do. Plus think of all the free publicity they must get from guests…pictures on Facebook™, stories shared by guests, and more. But they don’t rely on free sources of traffic alone or just one source for leads and neither should you.

Here’s why: Internet marketing has been a great addition to marketing tactics, but one of the downfalls is the belief that having a website and using free marketing resources such as social media is all that they need to attract leads, brand their company and increase sales. The problem is if your free source dries up, you are left fumbling to find a way to replace it.

How might your free source dry up? Here are five common examples:
1. Google or other search engines make an algorithm change and you lose your first page rankings. Suddenly your prospects can no longer find your website by typing in search words related to your product or service.
2. Social media stops driving traffic because you aren’t able to engage or push information due to a busy time in your business or personal issues that prevent you, such as sickness or vacation.
3. A slow economy stifles repeat and/or referral business because people are spending their money differently or more cautiously.
4. A store featuring similar products or services opens nearby.
5. Competitor websites add more relevant content that cause them to outrank you in organic listings.
Not being able to instantly drive traffic to your business causes you to run the risk of major problems…and not just loss of revenue.

Like in the case of Mahalo.com. Recently, according to Sistrix.com, Mahalo lost rankings for nearly 70% of their keywords overnight due to a Google algorithm change. Unfortunately, because they relied too heavily on free traffic and just one supplier, they had to lay off some of their workforce, affecting hundreds of lives.

Just like Disney, paying for leads from multiple sources means you’ll always have a steady stream of traffic flowing to your door.

So if you’re looking to avoid the loss of revenue and the problems associated with that loss, advertising on several online properties beyond Google and sending that traffic to high-converting landing pages created by internet marketing professionals can be your ticket to success. That way you’ll always be certain you can immediately generate traffic and instantly replace any leads you lose.

To your online success,

John Pfeiffer

P.S. Can you really afford not to spend money to keep leads coming to your business through online advertising? After all, leads are what generate business and keep your business growing (or shrinking if you’re not getting any). By installing a repeatable, scalable and proven system that guarantees prospective clients coming to your front door, you can eliminate your worries of where your next customer will come from, no matter what loss of traffic you experience. If you’d like to learn more, just give me a call at (800) 861-3776 or contact me directly.