New Web Host for Ironvine Search Marketing
After more issues than I can count with DotNetPark, I decided to move my web hosting to a different company.
The consistent down time of the database servers has been painful to say the least. And when I asked for a reason, or some kind of recompense three times I was ignored.
So far the transition has been fairly painless and the new host has much more room and services available.
I just wanted to mention in case there were any accessibility issues or down time for anyone during the move process. Things should be up and running better than before now.
If you find any broken links, internal or external, please let me know.
Thanks,
Steve
Technorati Tags: Ironvine, DotNetPark, Web hosting, Downtime
Search Relaxation and Preparation
This week has certainly been the search holiday break. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and most of your search marketing staff personnel are away on vacation. The holiday rush insanity shopping sprees are over and the after Christmas sales are flowing nicely. Me, I am here working hard building more campaigns to help the sales keep flowing.
My take on this week, other than to get a bit of a breather, is to get your marketing campaigns set up for 2007. If you can take the strengths you built for the holiday push and increase them and configure your bids and spend correctly, you should have a decently strong start for the beginning of the year.
Even if you have a great campaign setup, there are always keywords you can find, refine, and kill to manage your spend and returns. Spend a bit of time looking at where your best returns or performance is and build a chunk of keywords to go along with them.
Keyword creation ideas:
- Create keyword mis-spellings for those hard to spell words, or even the easy to spell ones
- Do a Google search on your keywords and find related terms to tack on to create a relative phrase
- Some search programs allow you to add some punctuation to keywords
- Check some of your competitors and use their name as a related search
- Use related url mis-spellings as keywords, "wwwiron vine.com"
- Revisit your brand. Do some looking around and see how other people see you or refer to you and utilize that as a guide
I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday. Good luck in 2007 and enjoy those vacations!
Technorati Tags: Search marketing, Ironvine, Google, MSN, Yahoo, Keywords, Paid search
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas from Ironvine Search Marketing.
I wish everyone the best and a safe holiday with friends and family.
Cheers!
Steve
A Spin on Social Search Marketing
Social search marketing, what does that mean? Well you could explain it with a few other newer web terms like Web 2.0 or the blogosphere effect, but in reality it goes back to the oldest method of advertising, word of mouth. Just with the new technology we speak out online in blogs, such as this one, or social networking sites like MySpace, online message boards, and chat rooms.
There are several ways you can benefit from utilizing social search marketing. From the search engine optimization (SEO) viewpoint it is a traffic generator. If you can get people talking about you, good or bad, you are eventually going to start getting link backs to your website. Links from high quality sites are always desirable as they will reflect on your search rankings.
More Visibility = More Traffic = Higher Rankings - good SEO rule of thumb.
If you have a blog, or your employees, friends, relatives, acquaintances do or they are active in some online forum in some way, ask them for a mention and their feedback about you, your brand, or your website. You have a decent chance to start a chain reaction of subsequent posts from their readers as well.
From a search marketing perspective, every mention you get becomes some type of brand awareness. If you can get good comments from people about your product, example "Hey everyone, I tried Joe's Eatery on 1st & Wall and the food and service we excellent", then if someone is hungry and is reading the post from a real person, you have a good chance that person is going to give it a try versus going to McDonald's again.
With search marketing, especially if you have a specific product, brand, or just sell online you can get thousands of posts and feedback from online researchers, marketers, affiliates, and the average consumer. On Yahoo's Search Marketing blog they have a good post about the effect of Getting the Word (of Mouth) Out. His wife bought a camera after she read a good research report from someone about how good the quality was. That research came from someone's blog.
Some companies have begun to realize this and are recruiting people to post about their products. It is a way to market online, generally cheaply, especially if you can get a "celebrity" blogger to post about you.
If you can get links from posts, great, if you can get a mention in a post, great, if you can get people talking about you in any way (especially in a good way) you will benefit. Social search marketing gives consumers and marketers just another way to spread news via Word of Blog.
A Spin on Social Search Marketing - Go Articles - Steve Terjeson
Technorati Tags: web 2.0, blogosphere, blog, Ironvine, Yahoo, SEO, search marketing, marketing
Google Checkout and ChannelAdvisor in the NY Times
The New York Times published an article today about "Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory" which includes a report from Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor about the waves Google Checkout is making in the online marketing pool against services like eBay and PayPal.
Read Page 1 Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory
The article explains how merchants are starting to take advantage of Google's Checkout service and the marketing impacts it is having. Checkout is slowly pulling some of the marketing dollars away from services like eBay and PayPal (which are partnered exclusively). Their latest marketing tactic has been mentioned before in this blog, Google Checkout Free Until the End of 2007.
The savings merchants get from the free processing seem to be worth reallocating at least some of the marketing dollars they currently spend elsewhere. At least the merchant profiled in the article has taken some of his eBay listing budget to spend on Google AdWords to sell his product.
Read Page 2 Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory
Google Checkout is not the full money processing service PayPal is, which allows you to transfer money, store funds, and withdraw/deposit money to and from a bank account. Checkout is only a credit card storage payment system which allows you to make purchases online securely without having to enter your personal details for each and every purchase. You log on with your Google account and you are set.
If you use Google Checkout and you also advertise online with Google AdWords, you automatically get an extra little shopping cart graphic added to your paid search ads. "So by having a Checkout icon that increases click-through rates, over time advertisers will have to pay less to get the same ranking for their ads. Or, they could pay the same amount for more ads with better placement, Mr. Wingo [CEO ChannelAdvisor] said." Having that extra icon added to your ads helps users find the ad more appealing and the ad will have a higher probability to be clicked through.
They have had some growing pains, and some prosessing delays that have caused some merchants to be wary or back away from using Checkout right now. However, the system is continuing to grow and will eventually become a more dominant figure in the payment market as time goes on.
Stability concerns with a big name company product, sounds like Microsoft product releases. I would imagine that most merchants are waiting till after the busiest (holiday shopping) time of the year before adding a new service to their websites. But, as with Microsoft, I expect to see Google to have a sharp increase in merchant users and transactions in the early part of 2007.
You can read Scot Wingo's take on his eBay Strategies blog - Great Google Checkout Article in NYT today.
Technorati Tags: Google, Google Checkout, marketing, ChannelAdvisor, Ironvine, eBay, PayPal, New York Times, online payment, AdWords
Links Updated
Feel free to visit the links section of the Ironvine Search Marketing blog for useful links to resources I have created or related companies. In the links section you will also find links to articles I have written about SEO and search marketing.
If you have comments, content, or things you would like to write about in the search marketing field please contact me at steve@ironvine.com for publishing on this site.
For more information on programming related things, or to submit programming content to my sister site AjaxKnight.com, please contact me with your requests as well.
Technorati Tags: Ironvine, links, blog, search marketing, ajax, programming, ajaxknight
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AdWords: Download Bulk Sheet to be Disabled
There is a new message on Google AdWords. It looks like Google is trying to migrate people over to use their AdWords Editor instead of having so many ad-hoc tools and utilities spread throughout the AdWords interface.
Your 'Download bulk sheet' link will be disabled soon. Use AdWords Editor instead!
The Download bulk sheet (.csv) feature will be removed from all AdWords accounts on January 23, 2007. If you haven't already done so, download AdWords Editor to continue making large-scale changes to your campaigns.
If you manage multiple accounts AdWords editor is a bit of a pain, where you have to look up each login individually. It does save the last one you were logged into, but you can't mark the password to be remembered or even create a list of clients to log into.
I suppose this is done to prevent mis-uploads or higher security, but if they start taking away tools in the actual interface that you can only use in Editor, then they need to allow the same kind of accessibility, which they currently do not.
Technorati Tags: Google, AdWords, marketing, AdWords Editor, Ironvine
Today without search engine marketing your website advertising cannot be completed. The computers have given a big boost to the marketing process by providing information easily in each corner of the world. The backup of the huge data and cheap web hosting are some of the issues, which have increased the number of websites over Internet within a short time period.. The new method of pay per click advertising is also a big attraction for individuals involved in web development.
AdWords Editor Video Lessons
Google has posted on their AdWords blog that you can now view multimedia tutorials on how to use the AdWords Editor.
You can view this lesson as part of the AdWords Learning Center which are also available in a text-only format.
Technorati Tags: Google, AdWords, tutorials, AdWords Editor, Ironvine
Yahoo Publisher Network
I recently was accepted into the Yahoo Publisher Network beta program. I really like how they have it set up. One unique feature I really liked seeing was the ability to add an RSS feed ad to your WordPress or TypePad blog software.
I added this to my AjaxKnight blog today, but I haven't had much chance to test or play with it. I will be looking around for tips on how best to utilize this and letting everyone know what I find.
The interface is easy to use, not cluttered and the ad code creation section is dynamically updated with changes you make. I think the color selector needs work. I added a custom color but it is not displayed in the 'preview' box, but it does change in the code selection area.
You can find out more or apply yourself at the Yahoo Publisher Network.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, publisher network, ads, online marketing, ironvine, search marketing, blog advertisements
AjaxKnight
In the interests of keeping focused information and relevant content, I have decided to move my programming section of Ironvine Search Marketing to a new blog AjaxKnight (http://www.ajaxknight.com/blog/).
I hope to have more programming information there and posts at least weekly.
You should still get daily updates here about search marketing, search engine optimization and marketing news here on Ironvine Search Marketing.
Thanks! And I hope you visit AjaxKnight soon.
~Steve
Yahoo Search Marketing Bidding Information Changes
Today Yahoo sent out an email letting account managers know that their Sponsored Search accounts have changed the way they now report bidding information.
On the Manage Bids page they have removed the "Top 5 Max Bids," "Position" and "Your Cost" columns as well as the bid tool.
They have been replaced by three new columns, versus the previous announcement of two.
- Latest Available Bid Range
This column displays the latest available bid range for the positions at the top of the search results page for each of your keywords. To see the bid range for each keyword, click the View Bids link. - Average Historical Bid Range
This column uses historical data to show you what the bid range for the positions at the top of the search results page has been for each of your keywords over recent days and/or weeks. - Estimated Average Position
This column displays an estimate of the average position your listing may achieve on the results page, based on the historical bid range. If you enter a new bid in the Max Bid column and click Update Bids, the estimated average position will also update.
You can find out more from their FAQs
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, search, marketing, search marketing, ironvine, sem, bids
PayPal Coupon Code Center
PayPal Coupon Code Center from eBay Strategies
PayPal is currently running a $15 off $30 (and greater) promotion for purchases made between Feb 8 to March 31. There are several caveats so be sure to read the terms and conditions carefully. Promotion details here.
This micro site has some great holiday saving codes for those eBay and PayPal purchasers. They may not always work, as they are issued many times for a specific account type or region, but they are definitely worth a try!
Also take a look at the parent blog - eBay Strategies for the latest tips about marketing online with eBay from industry leader Scot Wingo.
Technorati Tags: eBay, coupons, marketing, blog, paypal, ironvine
Nowadays several financial institutions and insurance companies are providing business loan and insurance policies like life insurance. You can also get student loans if you are studying. Other finances like car finance is also easily available. You can find both secured loan and unsecured loan and pay debt using different bank services. Different companies also offer low cost family medical insurance, making medical treatment easy.