Christmas is just over a month away. You should already have some plans in place for your promotions, but if you need a few more ideas to increase your sales during December, and indeed throughout the year, here are some you could try:

• Treat your clients by sending them a gift voucher or small gift as a thank you with their invoices. It will encourage return business and ensure your customer’s feel appreciated.
• Offer a free gift-wrapping service - you can subtly brand the paper with your logo.
• Give away a Christmas hamper for purchases during December.
• Encourage customers to add $1 to their purchase for a charity you support and match it.
• Think about how your customers might be shopping over this period - is your website friendly for their mobile browsing?
• Keep your customers thinking about your brand. Sponsor an event that they are likely to attend over the festive season; or invite them to one you are holding.
• Use the season as an opportunity to find out more about your customers. Engage with them on social media to find out what they enjoy doing during their time off or what is on their wishlist. Perhaps you stock that item?
• Encourage spending with a free gift with purchases over a certain amount.
• Encourage purchases with free delivery during December.
• Don’t forget about post-Christmas shopping too. Run a 12 days of Christmas special from 25 December - 6 January. Integrate the promotion with your social media tools.
• Have a longer returns policy over the Christmas season.
• Take advantage of taking a break yourself and consider outsourcing your warehousing and distribution to a company like Brightstar; this easily integrates with your Zeald website.

The Olympics was not without its fair share of drama. The highs, the lows, those nail biting moments; not to mention an explosion and drug testing scandals. A Hollywood writer couldn’t have scripted it any better! With 6 gold, 2 silver and 5 bronze medals, New Zealand certainly knows what it is like to compete against the world and win.

Running a business online can put you in a similar situation. Not only are we competing against our neighbours for a slice of the consumer pie; we have the rest of the world to contend with. We all wish we could turn silver into gold; an expanding market place can increase the demand on each team member to perform to their full potential. This is certainly positive for most businesses.

The pace of world business has increased. Like an athlete who spends four years preparing for an event that is over in seconds; businesses have to invest more and more in the way of time and resources to be ready for a window of opportunity that can be extremely brief.  As the competition increases, the time it takes to move from a concept to a finished product must decrease.

In business, as in sport, there is no substitute for talent. You have to put the right people in the right jobs at the right time. Success in business is also about identifying your weak points and partnering with someone who has strengths in this area; lest your competition identifies it first!

It has been said that there are two main ways of running an online business. Ask yourself: Am I a sprinter or a marathoner?

A sprinter likes to work in focused bursts. They consistently work through the night for a few months on a project or to create a process that will make money for them while they sleep – or lie on the beach!

Some great tools for sprinters are:

• Product Launches: The build-up to a launch is intense. Post-launch there is a lull in activity; events are also similar in this nature.
• Online Advertising: Pay-per-click ads can turn your traffic on and off as needed.
• Automation: Spending time setting up automated email sequences can work for you while you are away from work or busy on other projects.

Sprinting can be a lot of work; you have to have systems that are able to work without you - such as a downloadable product.

Alternatively if you are naturally more of a marathoner, you prefer a slower and steady pace. You probably often fall prey to doing everything yourself, because you can!

Some great tools for marathoners are:

• Blogs: These require time and quality content consistently. Most successful bloggers post at least once a week.
• Newsletters: Content rich but no matter how good your efforts, you will still need to start fresh for the next newsletter.
• Social Media: Fresh content is required usually daily or even on an hourly basis.

Marathoners have the ability to hold a customer’s attention for the long haul. Loyalty is created and the customer often gains much more value for their investment.

Both sprinters and marathoners can learn from each other’s skill sets and win the race together. Smart marathoners will look for a great sprinter as a business partner, and vice versa.

Athletes and businesses alike know only too well the emotional and economic difference between first and second place. Exceptional performance comes, especially as an organisation grows, when a team works towards a common goal; whether that is a gold medal tally or an increased amount of new customers.

Only you will know what works well for you and your business. If you are a sprinter by nature make sure you have the right tools in place to get the breaks you need, as no one can maintain a sprint long term. Conversely if you are a natural marathoner make sure you are building rock solid relationships and are leveraging off them over time.

Are you a sprinter, marathoner or hybrid of the two when it comes to running your online business?

Email marketing is an extremely powerful website promotional tool. It is one-to-one direct marketing that is personalised, with well-defined targets, where the results are instant, accurate and easy-to-understand.

So as you can imagine, many companies and individuals have started sending out promotional emails to every email address they can find. Just about everyone hates unsolicited email- or SPAM. Many people have associated email marketing with SPAM, but it is important to understand that not all email marketing is SPAM.

It is possible to use email marketing legitimately, without fear of being banned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). For instance, people who have agreed to receive promotions from you, and where there is a facility for them to request they don’t wish to receive another message from your company, is perfectly fine. This is called ‘opt-in’ email marketing.

An important website rule is:

Get your visitor’s email address whenever you can!

Once you have a visitor’s email address you can encourage them to return time and again to order from you, for little or no extra cost.

 

Text/HTML

The first thing you need to understand before creating and sending email promotions is the difference between text and HTML emails.

They look different– text-based emails are written in plain text (type)– they do not contain any formatting. You cannot bold or underline anything or change the font in a text-based email.

HTML emails, on the other hand, are written using a markup language, which resides in the backend code of the message. This allows you to use an array of ‘formats’ (typeset/design) in your email.

Text or HTML… which is better?

Some people advocate text-based emails, because they are quick to download by the recipient, are reliable for displaying correctly and do not carry ‘viruses’ or ‘worms’ that may be embedded in the code of an HTML email.

Those who advocate HTML-based emails prefer them for their ‘attractive’ qualities and readability. Most email viewers can display text or HTML-based email perfectly.

Some people argue that email marketers get better results using text-based emails and some people argue the other way. The results differ, depending on your ‘opt-in’ email list.

Test both types of emails and monitor the results. For example, send plain text messages to half your list and HTML email to the other half. Then compare the results. Whatever works best– use it!

 

Segmentation

One of the keys to any successful email marketing campaign is the targeting of your promotions. You can target your promotions by segmenting your customer database as much as possible. Break your customer lists down into groups. You may want to ‘segment’ your customer database based on characteristics such as:

• Existing customers versus prospects
• Customers based on geographical location
• Existing customers– segmented by the products they have bought
• Age
• Sex (male/female)

Once you have your customers segmented you can then target your promotions at those segments at will. For example, if you are writing a promotion for your existing customers, you may concentrate on certain value-added cross-sells, or up-sells, that you have on offer. A promotion aimed at new members may promote a new member offer.

 

Personalisation

Just as in other forms of direct marketing, one of the interesting areas of email marketing is personalisation. In general, the more personalised an email is, the higher your success rate will be.

Remember, the most incredible ‘sound’, with the most impact on any person, is the sound of their name. Good email marketing packages will allow you to heavily personalise your emails. Some of the most common things that you will want to use to personalise your emails are:

• First name
• Last name
• Address
• City or location
• Last product or service purchased
• Date of last purchase
• Most common product category of purchase

Depending on the abilities of your email marketing program, any information you have collected about a prospect can be used to personalize your email promotions to them.

Find Out How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign

In The Benefits of Long Sales Copy on your Website we covered the merits of long copy versus short copy, and how long copy usually outsells short copy. With email promotions, you need to perform more of a balancing act.

Email promotions should be ‘to-the-point’ and not long-winded. Your email promotions should say just enough to get the purpose of your communication across. Remember, your customer’s email inbox is getting busier and busier. Your customers will soon know whether you get to the point in your emails, or bury your message in unnecessary paragraphs or pages of hyperbole.

Email promotions that get to the point are far more likely to be of interest to your readers on an ongoing basis. Your recipients will open and read your email if they know they are going to be able to quickly satisfy their curiosity.

However, your emails still need to be written in a warm, friendly and personable way. Give your regular email promotions their own “voice” and character (which should not be too removed from your brand’s personality). Make them easy for your customers to relate to. Email is a very personal medium and a personable approach to email always works best. Remember, one-to-one!

Email promotion components:

• From line
• Subject
• Headline
• Greeting
• Opening hook
• Call to actions
• Body
• Sign-off
• Signature
• Opt-out information

 

From line

The ‘From’ line is the most important part of the entire email, and despite what some email marketers think, the ‘From’ line is even more important than the ‘subject’ line. If you think about when you are scanning the new email messages in your own inbox, you would usually run your eye down the ‘From’ column, first seeing if you recognise the people your messages are from.

So when you set the ‘From’ line in your email promotions, use something people recognise. If your recipients will recognise your individual name, then use your name. But if it is your company name that they are more likely to recognize, use that. You can even use a combination of both – e.g., “David Kelly – Zeald”. Personalise and perfect it; perhaps use the word ‘team’ in your ‘From’ line; for example– ‘The Zeald Team’.

 

Subject lines

The second most important part of your email is the ‘Subject’ line. It should capture the attention of your reader and draw them into opening your email. The ‘Subject’ line of an email is similar to an advertising headline, except it needs to be more ‘real’. It won’t be as ‘hard-sell’ as an advertisement headline typically is. Remember, just about everyone hates SPAM, so make sure your ‘Subject’ line does not look like a SPAM message, otherwise it will be deleted, or worse still, it won’t even arrive in your customer’s inbox (thanks to Spam filters). Make sure you go easy on CAPITAL letters too, as they can look tacky and Spam-like. Your ‘Subject’ line should be short, friendly and to the point.

Some common themes for subject lines:

• Sell a major benefit
• Offer a solution to a problem
• Ask a question
• Make an announcement

Personalise your 'Subject' line by using your customer’s name. This will often drastically improve your results.

As always make sure you test and measure everything– results always speak for themselves– so do what works!

 

Headline

You may decide to start your emails with a headline. You can use all the techniques for these headlines that we outlined earlier in the ‘Load’ module.

 

Greeting

Personalise your greeting as much as possible. Use the recipient’s name. You may decide to use either an informal and friendly greeting (“Hi David”), or be more formal (“Dear Mr. David Kelly”). It is generally accepted that informal and friendly works best when writing emails. Consider using phrases like, “Good morning/afternoon/evening/”, as these have a nice, warm feel to them, and indicate a degree of familiarity.

 

Opening hook

Your ‘opening hook’ is what should hook your reader into your email. Make it clear right up-front what you are writing to them about and explaining why they should read the rest of your email. Remember, they will be thinking – “So what’s in it for me” (WIIFM)? Show the reader what they will get out of reading your email.

 

Call to action

This is when you state exactly what you want your prospect to do. In an email promotion it is important to include a ‘call to action’ very early in your message. This gives a recipient the opportunity to respond immediately without reading through the rest of the email. In this initial ‘call to action’ you should not use ‘hard sell’– merely point them in the direction they can go if they are interested in your offer.

You should look to include your call to action throughout your message. But the first ‘call-to-action’ should be very ‘soft’ and your final call-to-action will be the complete opposite, almost with a sense of urgency. Summarise the main benefits for responding to your ‘call-to-action’, and then state exactly what you want them to do.

 

The body

The body is the main part of your promotional message. Make sure you focus on the benefits you are offering. It must be obvious what’s in it for them. Use bullets to outline the benefits clearly. Your body should be around two to four paragraphs at the most. Use short, punchy paragraphs and include lots of white space around the paragraphs.

 

Sign-off

Use a friendly sign-off such as:

• Best regards
• All the best!
• Take care
• Yours faithfully (more formal)

Signatures

Email signatures are extremely powerful, and are highly under-rated marketing tools. The next section looks at email signatures in detail.

 

Opt-out information

Don’t forget to include your opt-out information at the end of your email. This information gives your recipient the ability to opt-out from receiving further communications from you. It also shows you have their best interests at heart- that you listen to your customers!

Most email marketing programs will automatically include this information at the end of all emails you send.

 

Formatting

When communicating by HTML email, there are a number of formatting options that will help make your writing more interesting:

 

Fonts

Make sure you use a black font on a white background– anything else is very difficult to read. Do not use a ‘fancy’ font. Generally, Serif fonts are used for print and Sans-serif fonts are used for computer screens. The most common Serif font is Times New Roman. Common Sans-serif fonts are Arial and Verdana.

 

Emphasis

Use bold, italics, underlines and font colours for emphasis, but use them sparingly. Tables and borders can be used to frame specific sections of text that you want to emphasise. Always use emphasis to drive-home your critical points.

 

Lots of white space

Use lots of white space– this makes everything easier to read and is generally more attractive to the eye.

 

Vary paragraph lengths

Vary the length of your paragraphs as well– this keeps things interesting. Make sure your sentences are not wider than 55-60 characters across the page– more than this is difficult to read.

 

Graphics

Only include a graphic or illustration if it is relevant and supports your message. Graphics, for the sake of graphics, are a waste of time as they increase the size of the email and take longer to load. Your recipient might get tired of waiting and hit the delete key.

If you use plain-text email, formatting will be almost non-existent. Again, make sure you use lots of white space and keep paragraph lengths really short. Make sure your sentences don’t exceed 55-60 characters across the page– more than this is difficult to read. Use capitals (sparingly) for emphasis only.

And finally - don’t forget to use your spell checker!

 

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Zeald Example Email Marketing Campaign

OK, let’s try putting everything together, by writing an email promotion to be sent to the Zeald customer base.

Zeald has a new product called ‘Zeald Email Marketing’. This module plugs into the Zeald Website Adminstration Software and allows the merchant to send email promotions to their ‘opt-in’ email database, as well as to track and measure their results.

In this section we will draft an email promotion that can be sent to the Zeald customer-base, promoting the new Email Marketing module.

From Line: David Kelly – Zeald

Subject: New Product Launch – Low-Cost Email Promotion

 

[Element #1 - Headline Start]

Do you collect your customer’s email address? If ‘yes’, you could be using email as an extremely low-cost way of advertising and promoting your company’s products and services to your customers.

[Element #1 - Headline End]

 

[Element #2 - Greeting]

Good afternoon [Customer First Name],

[Element #2 - Greeting End]

[Element #3 – Opening Hook]

You have probably heard of email marketing. Many people have been talking about the power of email and how you can use it to send out monthly, or even weekly, promotions to your customer database, for little or no cost!

[Element #3 – Opening Hook End]

 

[Element #4 – Call to Action (soft)]

The great news is that Zeald has just released a new module for the Zeald E-business Suite. It is called ‘Zeald Email Marketing’ (creative huh!). Jump straight to all the details.

[Element #4 – Call to Action (soft) End]

 

[Element #5 – The Body]

The one question I always have when using any form of marketing or promotion is – can I measure the results? Otherwise– how do I know that the latest marketing or promotional tip is not just the latest craze or buzz? I need to know if it has made a positive impact on my bottom line? If you can’t measure your results then you should probably not bother doing it– especially if you have a tight advertising budget.

The great thing about the new Zeald Email Marketing module (in my humble opinion) is that everything can be tracked and measured. You can measure:

• how many people have read your email promotion

• how many people clicked on your promotional offer

• how many people purchased a promotional item

• what the total value of the purchases were.

This means that you can run email promotions and continually improve them by measuring their results. But ultimately, you can work out whether it is worth going to all the time and effort with an email promotion in the first place.

[Element #5 – The Body End]

 

[Element #5 – Call to Action (close)]

[Customer First Name], many organisations are using email marketing to generate great advertising and marketing results, and now you have access to an excellent email marketing tool that is completely tied-in to your website. Find out more about the Zeald Email Marketing module and sign-up for a FREE test drive.

[Element #5 – Call to Action (close) End]

 

[Element #5 – Sign Off]

All the best with your future endeavours!

With regards,

[Element #5 – Sign Off End]

[Element #6 – Signature]

David Kelly

CEO – Zeald

Zeald E-business Hotline

Your 9am – 5pm access to a Zeald Internet consultant.

If you have any questions or concerns, please call 0800 72 55 23.

We would love to be of assistance!

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Zeald – “Websites that Work!”

E-Centre

PO Box 102-904

North Shore Mail Centre

Auckland

New Zealand

Ph: +64 9 415 7575

Fax: +64 9 443 9794

Mbl: (NZ) 021 434 105

Web: www.zeald.com

[Element #6 – Signature End]

 

[Element #6 – Opt Out Information]

I no longer wish to receive promotional communications from Zeald.

[Element #6 – Opt Out Information End]
 

 

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Promotional Signatures

Email signatures are one of the most highly ‘under-rated’ marketing tools on the Internet. Your email signature should appear at the bottom of every email that you send. Most signatures contain the sender’s contact details, but why not make your signature a small advertisement? This advertisement goes out to every single person you ever send an email to. These small signatures can have a huge impact on your website’s success and your bottom line!

So how do we write a great email signature?

The first key, as always, is ‘know your target customer’. If you don’t know this by now, then you have a problem. What are your target customer’s goals? What do they want to achieve? What need do they want to satisfy?

Your email signature should be based around a great headline that will grab your target customer’s attention. It should focus on the strongest benefits that fit into your target customer’s goals, problems or needs. Use your unique selling proposition (USP) as the basis for the majority of your signatures.

Straight after your headline should be the ‘call-to-action’. Your ‘call-to-action’ should be completely focused on getting your target customer to click-through to your website, where you can hit him/her with your full sales copy… or alternatively, to call you on the phone.

It is absolutely vital that you have a number of different email signatures. Email signatures are generally not a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Think about it– you don’t want to send an email to an existing customer with a signature that promotes a product that they have already bought from you. Instead, you would present a signature that focuses on providing them with the information they need to obtain customer service, support, or up-selling them to other products and services you offer.

For the sake of simplicity let’s focus on a ‘signature’ that promotes your core product. Let’s look at the headline and opening hook that we used in the ‘Load’ module:

---

STOP! Is Your Website Delivering Amazing RESULTS?

Many websites are a complete waste of time and money because they don’t deliver results! BUT if you have a good product or service, it is possible to produce a website that generates excellent results; a website that sells!

---

This can be used as the basis for a promotional signature. In the following way:

---

David Kelly

CEO – Zeald

Is Your Business Website Delivering Amazing RESULTS?

Your business website should make sales or generate enquiries for your products or services. Is Yours?

If not… it will be because of one of three simple reasons.

Visit our website or call 0800 72 55 23 to find out why.

---

Zeald – “Websites that Work!”

E-Centre

PO Box 102-904

North Shore Mail Centre

Auckland

New Zealand

Ph: +64 9 415 7575

Fax: +64 9 443 9794

Mbl: (NZ) 021 434 105

Web: www.zeald.com

 

As with all promotional writing, you will want to review and sharpen your signature until it is perfect.

 

---

 

Tracking & Measuring

Finally, you need to track and measure your email marketing results. The basic figures that you will want to track are:

• Impressions – the number of people that your email was sent to

• Click-throughs – the amount of click-throughs to your website that you received from your emails

• Conversion rate (visitors) – the percentage of click-through visitors that placed an order, or made an enquiry

• Enquiries/Orders – the number of enquiries or orders placed by visitors, generated by your email.

Most good email marketing systems will provide you with the facilities to track and measure impressions and click-throughs. Unless the email marketing system is completely integrated with your website, it will not be able to measure the conversion rate and enquiries… or orders. The Zeald Email Marketing Manager measures all these key metrics including the exact value of the purchases made.

If you are interested in using email marketing to promote your organisation talk to your E-Business Consultant or the Support Team about the Email Marketing Manager.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the way you structure your website and your content so that it can be found and indexed by search engines like Google. When you optimise your website for search engines, it makes your site visible to search engines and therefore to the users.

Why is SEO important?

Studies show that 95% of NZ adult Internet users research goods and services online before making a purchase. This means that even though people might see your offline advertising offline or a sign they are highly likely to jump online to search for the products or services.

It's also well known that most users only browse through the first page and if they don't find answers to their query, they will click through to the second page but very few go past the second page. So if your website is not listed in the first couple of pages, chances are no one can find you. Instead, the users will probably find your competitors. Therefore, being seen on the first page of the search results should be one of your priorities when promoting your website.

To get your website ranking highly on Google, it pays to understand how Google actually works.

> Read our article on how Google works

Last month, we went over the importance of identifying the right keyword phrases for your website and how you can do it yourself. Now that you have gone through and identified them, you can use these phrases to create a pay per click (PPC) campaign with Google Adwords. Why do you need to bother with Google Adwords? Have a read of our post on why Adwords is a great cost-effective way to promote your website.

So how does Google Adwords work?

When you did the keyword analysis, you would have ended up a whole bunch of keyword phrases which are part of keyword segment groups (i.e., the keywords within each segment group share a common theme. So for Giveaduck, one segment would be 'bath toys', with a number of phrases associated with it like 'baby bath toy', 'water toy' etc.) For each of these segments you will create an Adgroup. And for each Adgroup, you will create an advert that Google will display when a user searches for any of the keywords within that keyword segment. If a user clicks on your ad, you will pay Google an amount that you setup.

The structure of a Google Adwords account

The structure of Google Adwords is made up a campaign (which could be area specific like NZ or Aus). Under each campaign, you have an Adgroup (which is the keyword segment) and you will create an ad for each Adgroup which will use the keyword phrases under that particular segment.

How does Google position your ads?

Google calculates your position in the paid search results based on the number of other companies competing on your target search phrases. So if there are no competitors, you will pay the minimum cost of 5c per click and be at the top of the page. However, it is unlikely (and very lucky) that you will have zero competition. So when there are other companies competing for the same phrases, Google calculates your ad position based on an equation which is determined using maximum cost per click (CPC) and the relevancy of your ad and the landing page compared to the keywords.

Make your ads and landing pages relevant to your keywords

If there is one thing that you should always keep in mind when setting up a Google Adwords campaign is RELEVANCY. It is very important that you make your ad and landing page highly relevant to your keywords. This is why we go through so much trouble to segment our keywords. For example for Give a duck we determined a segment “Bath toy” which contains many phrases centered around the theme “bath toys”, such as "baby bath", "bath for baby", "bath toy", "water toys", "bath for kids", etc. So with this in mind we would create an ad using these keywords and we would also make sure that these search phrases were incorporated into our landing page so it all ties in togethere and makes sense for the user.

Create new campaign

Before you create a campaign you'll need to sign up to Google Adwords account - simply follow the directions supplied by Google.

You should create campaigns to target customers who browse the Internet:

• from a specific geographic area
• using a specific language
• with a certain type of device, i.e., only mobile phones
• using different networks, i.e., Google search or display network information sites using Google Adsense programme

Setup different campaigns if you are targeting different geographic locations. For example, we might decide to sell rubber ducks to New Zealand and also Australia. We would create a separate campaign for each country and label them 'Rubber duck nz' and 'Rubber duck Aus'. We can also create a campaigns specific to regions within a country i.e., Auckland and Wellington. For example a photographer in Wellington, will target Wellington only.

A few steps to help you set up your campaign on Google Adwords:

1. Name your campaign
2. Select the relevant location. This can be either entire country, a city or a radius from a certain point or an arbitrary shape that you can draw on the map.
3. Select the language
4. Choose the device type (we recommend starting with all devices)
5. Choose a network (we recommend just the search network to begin with. You can always setup a new campaign to target the display network.)
6. Select your bidding option (we recommend starting out with automatic bidding to maximise clicks)
7. Set your budget, which is the amount of dollars you want to spend per day. This means that if you have a budget of $200 per month you would divide by 30 to give you about $7 per day. We recommend that you start with at least $200 per month, but a maximum of $500 to a $1000 per month. Of course your budget will depend on your marketing budget and how much you would like to dedicate to your website. The number of clicks that you will receive for your daily budget will depend on how competitive your industry is. So how many other people are competing for your same keywords and how much budget they are allocating towards it, which is known a 'bidding' for the keywords. The number of clicks will also depend on how relevant and compelling your ads are to your target keywords and your landing page. We think that $200 is a great start and it will give you a good idea as to your return on investment. This budget per day means that if you receive $7 worth of clicks for the day, Google will hide your ads and not show them again until the next day. If you do not receive $7 worth of clicks then you will save the money.
8. Don't worry about advanced settings
9. Click next

Setup Adgroup

Before we go over how to set up an Adgroup on Google Adwords, we have a few tips below on how to write a good ad:

1. Use your most popular search phrases in your ads, especially the title of the ad. Meaning for every keyword segment you have identified in the keyword analysis, you'll have a list of keywords and you need to pick the ones with the highest search volume and high relevancy. Choosing these phrases means that your ad will be relevant and cost you less to get to the top. Google will also bold the keywords in the ad to highlight them to a user. This will make them more attractive to the user.
2. Check out what local competitors are doing and also look at what what might be working globally i.e., try a google.co.uk search for the same keyword phrases and see what the ads look like.
3. Convey your unique selling proposition (USP) in your ads. For example, “money to charity”, “Largest range”, "Good price", etc. are all good USPs.
4. Add a call to action and it's always great to create a bit of urgency i.e., "Buy Now", "Don't miss out", etc.
5. Add a compelling offer. For example, "Free delivery", "Mothers day sale", "Half price", etc.
6. Think about qualifying your customer. For example if we only sell rubber ducks, we don't want to incur the cost of people clicking on our ad if they are not interested in rubber ducks. So whatever segment you are creating an ad for, you need to make up an ad that compels clicks that result in buying your products or services.
7. Include prices if possible - again this is a great way to make sure that people that click on your ad are actually willing to pay the price. It's also a great way to convey discounts.
8. Split test multiple ads. This means for each Adgroup, create at least two ads with one or two elements that are different so you can find out what's working better. So you can choose to change the headline to see if that makes a difference or you can choose to change the offer in the ad to see what's perceived as more important. It will also allow you to test which ad clicks actually result in sales.
9. Avoid using competitor brand names

Steps for setting up an Adgroup

1. Choose a keyword segment for your first Adgroup. We have decided to start with the segment “bath toys”.
2. Review the top most popular search phrases to work out the keywords that you should use in your ad. Our top phrases include: "bath for baby", "bath toy", "water toys", "bath for kids", "bath toys", "toys bath". We would use phrase “bath toy for baby” in our ad which includes most of the words from all our top phrases, especially the headline.
3. Write your headline
4. Write each description line
5. Set your display URL. Again use your target keywords or phrases that help to qualify the user. For example we used www.giveaduck.org/RubberDuck. Note this does not need to be the actual URL. It is there to give the user an idea of where they are going to be taken. It must incorporate your domain i.e., giveaduck.org
6. Set your description URL. Find the most suitable landing page that the visitor is taken to when they click on your ad. Make it specific to your ad, make it relevant and ensure that it uses the target search phrases. Avoid sending people to your generic homepage.
7. Copy and paste all the keywords associated with the chosen segment from your research, into the keywords field.
8. Save your ad. Once you have set this up, the ad will be sent to a real person at Google to authorise the ad who will make sure that it fits their ad guideline.

Split test your ad

It is very important that you split test your ad. This means just changing one or two aspects of a Ad group to test out what's working better. It will allow you to test which offer is perceived as being more attractive and which ad click actually converts into a sale. But remember not to set up more two ads at a time for each Adgroup, unless you have many 1,000s of people visiting your site.

Steps to create a split test

1. Create a new ad under the campaign. You can do this once you have saved your ad, you can click to add a new ad under the campaign.
2. Avoid making too many changes to the ad - just change either the headline, or your offer or your USP.
3. In our case, we want test out our offer vs. the USP. So we are trialing out to see if users are more motivated to click an ad because of charity or because of free delivery.

Note that Google will start monitor your split tests and if one them if really under performing, it will cease to run that ad so as to make sure that your click rate is high.

Billing

We recommend that you use the Postpay billing option to ensure that your ads are running smoothly. Often a prepaid balance will run out and your ads will dry-up, meaning once your prepaid balance is out, you will have no click throughs. This means that you will start to lose traffic and more importantly you will lose important test data. It makes it difficult to test and tune your ads and your landing pages if you have big holes in your reports.

Postpay billing option doesn't have to be a scary option because you will have set your budget before hand anyway so there is not way Google will let your spend go over your budget and if you decide that you don't want to spend anymore money on Adwords, you can go in and cancel anytime you like.

Going Live

Your ads will not go live straight away because Google will need to review the ads to make sure that they pass their criteria. This will usually take around a day or so before your ad can go live.

Set up the next Adgroup

Follow the same steps to setup ads for the rest of your keyword segments from your keyword research.

We've tried to make this process as simple as possible but if you're finding that this is too complex or it is taking too much of your time, you can fast track it and get us to help you with it instead. Contact us to find out more.

As you might have read our article on the importance of doing a keyword analysis, identifying the right search phrases has a number of advantages. And it is the most important step before setting up a Pay per click (PPC - Google Adwords) campaign and also optimising your organic search engine ranking.

Before we get started....

In this article, we are taking you through a "simplified version" of the exact process our Google Adwords specialist follows to arrive at the right phrases (we simplified it a little to make it a bit easier). We encourage you to follow this process but please note that it is complex and there is no other way to simplify it without losing value. If you feel that the full process is too difficult to follow, you can get started on the first couple of steps which will still give you a good idea of what your customers are searching for on Google. Otherwise, you might be interested in our Pay per click (Google Adwords) service, which includes a keyword analysis - contact us to find out more.

Tools for the job

We recommend that you use Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a similar package to follow this process - and you will need to have sound Excel skills to complete this process. You will also need access to the Google Adwords Keyword tool.

Step 1: Brainstorm seed keywords

Brainstorm all the phrases your customer could be typing into Google to find your business. Now put yourself in the shoes of your customer and imagine yourself in front of Google. What would you type into the search field to find a solution to your problem? This means starting with 'seeds' which is an idea and then thinking of a few search phrases under each seed. So for Zeald's Give a duck website which sells rubber ducks for charity - one seed might be 'rubber duck', another might be 'toy', etc.

• Think about the primary search phrases that describe your website or industry in general i.e., for the rubber duck website we would use "childrens toys".
• Make a big list of phrases - think of every possible scenario including local searches like 'rubber duck nz'.
• Consider famous brands that you might also stock as part of your business - be careful to not use a competitor brand though.
• Also consider related topical themes like "baby shower gift" that might have low competition than say "childrens toy" but still has high traffic.
• Solve the problems of your target market
• For large catalogues consider different product categories. For example rubber duck is a small catalogue, but it might be just one category of a larger childrens toys website.

Step 2: Segment the keywords

Group the phrases you have come up with into various themes, usually the 'seed' you start with can be the segment heading. The segments might be for different product groups that your company offers. Or they could be different target customer groups searching for your company's products and services in different ways. Consider different uses of the same product or different target customers or the same customer at different buying stages.

For a traditional website that does not have a large catalogue, you should have up to 5 different segments initially.  You will use these to optimise your homepage and the site in general.

A large catalogue website may have many more than 5 segments. For example an automotive parts website might have many different themes, such as brake parts, windscreens, wheels, oil, cleaning products, etc. To begin with, you should focus on the general theme of the website which would be something like "auto products", or "car parts", etc. You can repeat this exercise later to research the different categories.

Step 3: Determine search volume

We can determine the volume of each of the search phrases you have brainstormed using Google's Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool also allows you to determine search volume of a phrase specific to New Zealand or other geographic locations.

1. Once you have setup a Google Adwords account and logged in, click on 'Reporting and Tools' in the menu bar and select 'Keyword Tool'.
   

2. First thing change your geographical location to match your business, i.e., for Give a duck this would be New Zealand. Click on 'Advanced Options' (next to United States and English) and choose the your desired location.

3. Now copy and paste your seed keywords, one segment at a time into the 'Word or phrase' box and click 'search'. Google will come back with a big list of search phrases related to your seed word segment along with search volumes for each.

4. On the left hand menu, Set the 'Match type' to be 'Phrase' - Google will return the search results with quotes around the phrases which are the exact search phrases in the order that you typed into the box. It might have additions around it like adding 'buy'. This step will be very helpful later on when you start a PPC campaign.

5. Export the results to Excel using the Download button. Copy and paste the results into an Excel spread sheet - call the tab something like 'Primary keywords'.

6. Keep the words in keyword groups by adding a new column at the start of the sheet and filling it with the segment title, i.e., rubber duck. So every keyword should have the relevant segment heading next to it.

7. Repeat this for each segment and make sure that you run a separate keyword search for every different geographical location. Keep adding the search results back into the Primary Keywords tab and write the name of the segment heading next to the words for each word.

Step 4 - Shortlist your words

We now need to shortlist the phrases to a more manageable number:

1. Tidy the spreadsheet

You can do this by removing unused columns, leaving just the following columns:

• Global Monthly Searches
• Local Monthly Searches
• Estimated average CPC
• Advertiser competition
• Plus keyword phrases and segment headings of course

2. Shortlist by search volume

• Order by 'local search volume' or 'global search volume' depending on the location of your primary target market so that the most popular terms appear at the top. Use the Excel sort function for this operation.

• Delete all the rows which have 0 or low search volume, maybe 10% or 20% of your total search phrases depending on how many you have and how thorough you want to be with this process. The less phrases you have the quicker it will be but the greater the chance you could miss out on a golden opportunity.

3. Shortlist by relevancy

• Remove all duplicates. Because we have researched the popularity of each keyword segment separately with Google Adwords, there is bound to be some cross over. We need to remove this crossover. You can use the 'Remove duplicates' option under the 'Data' tab within Excel. Make sure that you choose the 'Keyword' column only.
• Work your way down each keyword/phrase and remove any rows that are obviously not relevant to your business. For example the phrase "Toy story3" is the name of a movie with a large number of page views and not really relevant to our business. Likewise with "wooden toys".
• Consider removing competitor brand names. It is not considered good practice to use competitor brand names. For example with the Give a duck website we would remove the phrase "Toys are us" because this is a competitor.
• Consider commercial intent. There is a tool available online which can give you a bit of guidance on commercial intent if you are not sure of a certain phrase yourself. Click on the 'query' button, type in the search phrase and click go. The result is a percentage so 'commercial intent of .29' indicates a commercial intent of 29% and 'non-commercial intent .29' indicates a commercial intent of 81%. Phrases with really low commercial intent can be removed as well.

This is a long and can be tedious task that requires a lot of concentration.....have lots of caffeine on hand.

Once you are done re-order the spreadsheet based on the 'Group' first and then the 'local/global monthly searches' using the 'Sort & filter' function.

Pheeeew ! Well done!

If you have followed this whole process, well done! Now you have a comprehensive list of keywords grouped into relevant themes, and ordered by their popularity.

You should also have a sound understanding for the type of language that your target customers are using online.

You should have had many different insights and hopefully discovered some nice little opportunities.

What next?

Now you can setup a PPC (Google Adwords) campaign using these search phrases and the themes you have created will form your Adgroups. You can then craft your ad-creative using the search phrase from each group with the highest popularity as your headline.

Stay tuned for our next article on setting up your own PPC campaign. It's best to work on a PPC campaign before starting with optimising your website for organic search engine rankings because PPC will give you a clear idea of which of these keyword segments and phrases are working well for your business in terms of results. Based on that you can start working on your search engine optimisation.

Directories can have a serious impact on the results that you achieve in the crawler-based search engines.  Submitting to the directories is a good idea – but they can take a substantial amount of time to list you. So start early!

One of the most important things that you must prepare before submitting yourself to a directory is an objective description of your website.  Directories will frown upon any description that seems promotional in nature and will reject your listing.  Make sure you prepare an objective, well-written description of your website before you start.

Some of the key directories to list in are:

• www.dmoz.com

If you are a New Zealand-only business then submit your site to New Zealand-based directories.

• www.yellow.co.nz
• www.searchnz.co.nz
• www.indexnz.com
• www.linknz.co.nz
• www.accessnz.co.nz
• www.netfinder.co.nz
• www.nzs.com
• www.nzsearch.com
• www.nzpages.co.nz

Find more directories relevant to your business

Search for relevant and quality directory websites using Google. Type in the following search string. 'Directory:[keyword describing my website theme]'.  You will need to choose a very generic keyword.  For example a website selling meat to a New Zealand market could try the following searches to find relevant directories. “New Zealand” “Meat” “Butcher” “Recipes”

Keep track of your inbound links

Keep track of your list in a spreadsheet and constantly add to it. Signup for Google Alerts and then Google will notify you when they have found a new website linking to your website.

Christmas is pretty much around the corner now so it's a great idea for you to start preparing your business and website so you can make the most of the busy sales period.

We have a few tips to help you stay ahead of competition:

1. Research the competition

It pays to spend some time finding out about your competition. What are they doing? What products are they pushing? What extras are they offering? This will give you an idea about what everyone else is doing and maybe give you a chance to think of something that others haven't already thought of doing. Even looking at similar companies overseas to see what they have come up with can be really insightful – you might be able to localise something someone has done successfully.

2. Make sure you spend a bit of time on your website as a customer

Go through the motions and check that everything works - and even better if you can get a friend to do it. Set them objectives and watch them use your website and get their feedback. There is nothing worse than having someone visit your website and go through the process of making a purchase decision and then getting an error. Check all your processes and pages so you can rest easy knowing that there won't be any last minute hiccups.

3. Use email newsletters

Email newsletters are a great way to inform your customers about special Christmas offers and new product releases. Even if you don't have an ecommerce site, you can run specials on your services and tell people about it via newsletters. Therefore, if you don't already have a newsletter, it's well worth investing in one before the holiday period so you can take full advantage of all the benefits it can offer. Make sure that you also give every website visitor the chance to sign up to the newsletter even if they don't purchase your products or services – have a clear area on your homepage where they can sign up for updates from you.

If you'd like to enquire about Zeald's Email Marketing package, drop us a line and we'll give you all the info you need to know.

4. Introduce special offers

Once you have a newsletter in place, you can use it to create all sorts of great Christmas related offers. Maybe a countdown to Christmas with an offer each day – like a 12 days till Christmas campaign or if your products or services have mass appeal, you could even try approaching one day sale websites such as Grab One or 1-day sale to ramp up sales.

Also create urgency by letting them know the last day for ordering their presents to have it delivered it in time for Christmas. This will remind them to get in before the rush and it will make it easy for you to handle the delivery schedules.

5. Use social media

Remember to use social media and blogs to promote your offers. Social media is a great free tool you can use to grow your community so you can effectively promote your products and services.

6. Give your store or premises a festive make over

It doesn't have to be drastic, even a few subtle additions can give it a bit of the holiday cheer. Same goes for your website, have a few festive images and maybe update your logo to create a bit of a holiday theme.

7. Add vouchers

If you don't already have vouchers available, it's a great time to introduce them to your store and your website. Lots of people struggle to think of the perfect present so vouchers are a popular option for Christmas.

8. Free shipping

If you have an ecommerce or ecommerce+ site, free shipping around holiday time will give your visitors an incentive to order from you. If you don't want to offer this on small purchases you can set a certain value, maybe free shipping on orders more than $50 or $100. This might even motivate your users to spend more to qualify for the perk.

9. Gift wrapping

Gift wrapping and Christmas card could add a nice touch to your ecommerce business as well. You can do it for free or maybe include a small Christmas card along with the gift and charge a small amount. But think about the bigger picture and the fact that you could be giving yourself the edge with a small perk like this.

10. Think about the late shoppers

There will always be people that will leave Christmas shopping right till the end so offer some form of last minute pick up or an urgent delivery system.

11. Offer gift ideas on your website

Create gift idea sections such as 'by gender', 'by type' and 'by price' making it easy for your website visitors to find what they are looking for. You could even have categories like 'for chocolate lovers' or 'for someone that has everything'. That way you will increase the chance of your website visitor finding the right product on your website.

12. Extend your return period

Holiday period can be very busy and and some people do buy gifts well ahead of time so add a nice touch and extend your return or exchange period. This will help make your visitor feel more at ease when purchasing online or even in your store.

It is a common perception that having video on your website means that you have to hire a professional to come in and do it for you. That's not always true - depending on the purpose of the video and what you are trying to achieve with the video, you can get away with producing it yourself.

Online video is rapidly growing in demand and popularity, and there is a lack of good video content - only few businesses are doing it and even fewer are doing it well, mainly because people think it is hard and are perhaps scared of it. But video is becoming a great and easy way to improve your website results. Read our article on the benefits of online video.

We have a few steps for you to consider when making a video:

1. Plan the content

Have a plan in place for the purpose of each of your videos. Some great examples include:

• Video testimonials - Your customers endorsing your products and services can build trust and credibility
• Video tutorial on how to use your products - How to use and get the best out of your products. If you have a blog, you could do regular features on different products. For example, Belly Beyond, an e-business dedicated for mums and babies have a dedicated blog for their videos and use it to run tutorials on products.
• A video explanation of your service - Great for conveying a complex service and making it easy for your prospects to understand what you do.
• A video tour of your facilities - Great for showing prospects around your accommodation, day spa, sports club etc.
• Video reviews of your product - Get in an expert or do it yourself. Publish regular reviews of your products such as wine, movies, books, games etc.
• Make it social - Get your customers to share with each other through video - for example, Giapo.
• Expert interviews - Get opinions and advice from the experts in your field. This can be someone within your company as well.

Be clear on what you are trying to achieve with the video and plan the content as much as possible. It pays to keep the videos short and sweet - instead of one long tutorial on a topic, break it down into smaller 2-5minute, regular parts so your users can take it in bit by bit over time.

2. Make it unique and memorable

Make your video something memorable. It can be something funny, maybe something a bit bizarre, it can be a useful post on something that adds value or maybe even a controversial topic - but make it very easy to follow so the user can absorb the information quickly. For example:

• An interesting environment and background - For example, The Wine Vault guys often review their wines in a great cosy environment, getting drunk and talking about wine :-)
• Experts having a debate
• Make sure you the video to remove any unnecessary pauses
• Use scripts to ensure that you say the right things and don't forget anything. This will also ensure that the content will not include anything you shouldn't really be talking about.

Give users a reason to subscribe to your video over your competitors channel. If you do this people will be more interested in watching the video and passing it onto their friends.

2. Set up a YouTube channel

You really want to embed the video on your website and make it very easy for your users to watch. You want the video to load very quickly and you want it to play smoothly and without hassle. The best way to do this is to use a third party to host your video such as Youtube, that everyone is familiar with. 

YouTube is the most popular video hosting site which is free for users. To start using this for your business, set up a channel with all the business details and also explain what the channel will be used for. Once this is set up you can upload your videos to this channel as soon as they are ready.

Hosting your video on YouTube can also help with market your video because:

1. Google rewards pages with multimedia rich content - for a Google search, Google likes to serve up interesting and rich content (i.e., not just text, but images and videos). Website pages with video included on them are often favoured over a plain text result.
2. Google including direct links to video in the search results. This means that you will not only have your website (with video) featured highly on the search results but your video itself (on YouTube) will feature in the search results.
3. YouTube itself is the second largest search engine after Google. If you don't have a video on YouTube it will not be found.

Once your video is on the YouTube channel, you can embed the videos on your Zeald website and also promote it using social media.

3. Choose a champion

When looking for a champion, you might want to choose someone from your business that is comfortable with talking in front of a camera. But you may find that someone who is an expert in your field and is passionate comes across very well on video. Don't limit yourself to just one speaker - you can use multiple people if you are getting different opinions on a topic or even covering different areas of expertise.

4. Get a camera

There are plenty of options for cameras that can take videos in the market at the moment and most of them have inbuilt microphones so the audio is recorded through them.

For a more formal recording where you have a dedicated environment, you can use a heavier camera that produces high quality video. It's a good idea to invest in a tripod too because that will make it easier to film for long periods of time (especially if you want a few takes to begin with), rather than someone holding the camera in the right angle for a while. Plus it will make the video a bit more professional and you can do away with the camera man.

For an impromptu interview type video, even hand held smart phones like iPhones and Android handsets can do the job. They can be great if you are filming something off the cuff as they can add a certain rawness which will add to the effect. Just make sure that there is plenty of light and no loud background noises if you are using a phone to film.

5. Keep it human

Sometimes a video with a certain rawness can come across more human and personal that a highly polished commercial video. People know it is not an actor, that it is a real person from your company, it is coming directly from the expert.... and it has a personal feel, builds trust and credibility. And it doesn't look like a commercial advert. But in saying that....

6. Bad video warning

As mentioned earlier, depending on the purpose of the video, the quality of the video can have a big impact especially if you are using the video to showcase your products or something that requires better quality. The video ultimately becomes a reflection of your business and a badly made video with bad sound quality and unclear video can actually be harmful as it reflects negatively on your business. Make sure the video is high quality and adds to the online experience of your visitors, not put them off.

Consider using a professional

Doing video yourself also means that it can take up time, resource and there is a cost involved in getting all the right equipment. Of course if you are looking at doing many videos for your blog with different topics regularly it is still worth it for you to do it yourself. But if you are using a video as a one off resource to load onto your home page or somewhere on your website to explain your products, services or as great video testimonials - something that usually won't change for a few months, it pays to use a professional. You might find that this option is much easier and you can achieve really great results (even the raw effect) when working with a professional.  Please refer to our directory of video specialists.

Just do it.

Pick up the camera and give it a go today..... you might find that it is easier than you think.

Adding video to your website can help attract visitors, add value, and also improve the site's persuasion.

Over the last few years, there have been huge improvements to the Internet speeds thanks to broadband, the readily available video formats and also the cell phone technology which allows users to take videos and also watch videos easily. This means that we are able to produce videos and consume videos easily compared to say a few years ago. And studies are showing that people consume a LOT of video online. According to ComScore, in December 2009 a total of 33.2 billion videos were viewed online... in one month!

Video entertains and educates

Video is both audio and visual which makes it not only more entertaining but also more memorable. It's no surprise that these days more people watch movies than read novels, and scientists have found that using audio and visual content together makes people retain more than twice as much as when using only audio or visual components. We live in an increasingly multimedia based world.

Video gets shared

Website users share videos more often than they do websites or blog posts. Videos are more likely to be shared by email and the ever popular social media websites.

Videos make a site dynamic

Videos add dynamic appeal to a site by their mere presence.  These days website users are overloaded with text information and a video provides a great change from the text.  Videos also show that you are more savvy with technology and possibly a leader in your industry.

Video is great for Search engine optimisation (SEO)

YouTube as a search engine

YouTube itself is now the second largest search engine online and accounts for nearly 28% of all Google’s searches. Without video this massive market cannot be reached.

Google searches

Google own YouTube and have been actively pushing a more multimedia online experience. Google now list video results separately. For an example type “farming” into Google and you will see a section titled “videos for farming”. This effectively means that if you have video content then you have two chances of showing up in any Google search. Either your site or your video could show up independently of one another. That gives you a big advantage when it comes to getting noticed.

Improvements in video search technology

It used to be true that video couldn’t be “read” (keywords extracted) by the search bots, but now it is! YouTube have introduced closed captioning options when a video gets uploaded which means not only is the description indexed (along with the selected keywords), but also every word spoken in the video can be indexed as well by uploading a transcript along with it. This improves your chance of getting to the right people by adding a massive amount of text that can show up on any given search query.

Ideal for new and small sites

Video SEO is also a powerful tool for new and small sites. Normal website results gain strength over time and for their size but video works differently. Google takes no account of how old a video is or its length etc when determining its rank. This gives you an equal footing with more established videos on the results page.

Inbound links

Having videos uploaded to other sites allows you to gain inbound links. Not only can those links be followed to your site but also the fact of having them gives you an advantage with Google pagerank system.

With input from Nathan Hawkins from Insite Media (www.insitemedia.co.nz)

Stay tuned for our follow-up post on how to produce video for your website...

If you already have videos you'd like to add to your website, learn more about how to embed them on your website.

What is a blog?

A blog (from the term "web log") is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging (such as twitter) is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112,000,000 blogs.

How are blogs good for business?

Blogs are a good way to publish and organise content that changes on a regular basis. They are a great way to keep your potential customers, your customers and your staff informed about changes or learnings you or your company have made. Some common examples include:

1. Company news - Let your customers and potential customers know what your company are up to, great for building rapport and trust and credibility
2. PR - Let your customers and potential customers know how well you are doing in the media - Great for trust and credibility
3. Sharing knowledge - Share helpful information and learnings with your customers and potential customers. Great for building trust and credibility, great for customer retention. Prove to everyone that you are knowledgable, interested in providing great value, and helpful; that you are the leader in your industry.
4. Internal help files - Blogs can be used just for internal use, for example these help files could be defined as a blog

Good for Branding
Blogs are a great way for a company to engage with their customers and show their true colours. Blogs are written in a more "personal" manner to a standard website article. They are not laboured over and they give a customer a real and honest window into who they might be or are dealing with.

Searchable
Blogs grow at a rapid rate, and the information is usually archived by time and categorised which allows users to find information from the history of previous posts. The information is searchable, either internally or via the search engines.

Centralised
The information is centralised and available to everyone. Blogs work very well with promotional announcement tools such as email marketing, Twitter, Facebook, etc. When you have something to announce in an email it is often a great idea to publish just snippets in the email and link through to a full article in a blog.

Great for Search engines
Search engines love "up-to-date" content. Search engines are always looking for the most up-to-date information to serve to their users, based on the search query. This is becoming more and more important with the development of social media tools such as Twitter and Google Buzz.
Blogs are a great format to publish regular up-to-date information to the web. Search engines love them. If you are looking to improve your Search engine presence, you need to publish a blog.

'Link bait' - For good search engine results you need to provide quality  content that other people will want to link to. There are so many million blogs out there, you need to differentiate yours by finding a niche and  providing really good quality, interesting, informative, funny, perhaps controversial content. If people read it, enjoy it, and link to it, you have generated an inbound link which is like a "vote" for your blog in the eyes of the search engines when they come to rank your website.

Because of this it is a good idea to setup your blog on the same "domain" or address as your business website. For example www.zeald.com/blog or www.blog.zeald.com

So what is involved in setting up and running a successful blog?

Resource - You need to have someone to write your content. This is the common flaw with most business blogs. You need someone who:

1. Understands and has a passion for your business
2. Someone who is a good efficient writer
3. Someone who's "voice" or "style" matches your companies brand
4. Someone with a spot of "X" factor. Someone who is maybe opinionated, funny, quirky, creative, or very knowledgeable
5. Someone with the time. set aside some days per month to create blog posts, and promote them

Intel - You need some ideas for what to write about. This is especially important if you are setting up a blog to generate qualified search engine traffic. You need to find out what your potential customers are searching for with regard to your product / service. This is where keyword research comes in handy. Another good method is to use your customer FAQ. What questions are your existing customers commonly asking you? Chances are your potential customers are asking the same questions.

Method to publish - You need a blog itself and a method for publishing the content to the web. Remember a blog is essentially a website so any content management system will allow you to do this. There are plenty of free blog publishing software out there such as blogger



Method of promotion - Of course a blog on its own is not much good if you cant tell people when you have published some new information. You need a way to tell all interested parties that you have some interesting news for them. The best method for promoting blog articles is really your trusty email. You can also use Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and a multitude of other social media applications.

Make it easy for users to share - Once you get people to your blog, make it easy for visitors to share it with their friends and colleagues. Chances are if they like it, they will know someone else who will like it. Some common methods for sharing links include: a "Share this" badge, a "Tweet this" badge, or a "Buzz this" badge. You can get a Share this badge from  Addthis. You can then add the code to each page of your blog or website yourself. Or you can get Zeald to add it to the template of your website for you. This means the badge will appear in the footer of every page of your website automatically.

Followers - Once you have the content and the method of broadcasting, you then need some interested parties. This involves building an email database, building a Twitter fellowship or a Facebook fan club. You might already have a good database of customers that you can start with, but you should look to continually build and refine this database.

Engage - Blogs work best when you can engage with your users. Blogs are a core element of the Web 2.0 revolution, where the content is driven and generated by the end user. Users will expect to interact and post comments and discuss issues directly and publicly with you. This can be scary to begin with but once you get past that, you will find it very effective. Let your users write your content for you, let them voice their opinions, ask their questions and have your say.

Setup a third party blog
This is a good free way to setup a blog for your business. You can very easily and quickly setup a new blog with a specialist blog software such as blogger. Using such software you are able to design a "header" and choose from a number of pre-formatted templates to fit with your companies brand.

You should link to your blog from your website in a new window.

You should setup your blog with a sub domain of your primary website address. For example www.blog.zeald.com is a subdomain of the primary www.zeald.com website address. Blogger help will explain how you can do this.

Limitations of Blogger:

• The design options are also very limited and templated.
• Because it is free it is very DIY. You will need to design it yourself or pay a design company to help you. 
• Blogger does not have a phone helpline, so you are reliant on just help files.
• Unable to incorpoarte it within your website. The external blog must remain just that. You will need to link to it in a popup window - It is never a good idea to "Iframe" an external blog into your website, for usability and SEO reasons

Setup a Zeald blog

Try the Zeald blogging tool that allows you to easily post news updates and articles to your sites. It integrates nicely into the front end and back end of your Zeald website. 
Learn about our Blogs and Social Networking product and fast track your blogging and Social media.

Email marketing

Which ever option you choose for your blog platform, if you are setting up a blog, you need to setup email marketing. The two go hand in hand. Build up a database of followers. Send out religiously a new campaign every 2 months. You might like to send more regular campaigns, but make sure that you are not annoying your customers and make sure you have enough good quality content. If you leave it much more than 2 months, your audience might forget who you are.
Email marketing is the method you use to broadcast, how you let everyone who is interested know that you have new content on your blog. You should also consider building a social network using tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Learn about Zeald email marketing

In Summary

Ultimately it is your call, but really the technology you use is the small investment you will be making. The bigger decisions will be in your management resource. Who is going to own this task and make it work for you?

All the best with it! If you have any further queries with regard to setting up a blog on your website, please use our comments or speak with your Zeald ebusiness consultant

Stay tuned we will be adding to these articles to offer further advice and guidance.

Create a keyword rich signature to include at the bottom of your post whenever you discuss topics in an online forum.  Determine relevant forums and blogs to link to your website and contribute to the discussions that are occurring in these places.  Don't forget to include your signature whenever you post. 

Take care to spend some time in the forum getting to know the people, and the etiquette. Do not use forums and blogs to "advertise" your business or your products. This will be viewed as spam and you could find that the exercise has a negative eff

Finding relevant, quality forums and blogs

To discover good forums and blogs, search for relevant and quality forums or blog sites using Google.  You can use a search string similar to the following -'forum:[keyword describing my website theme]' You will need to choose a very generic keyword. For example a website selling meat to a New Zealand market could try the following searches to find relevant forums. “New Zealand” “Meat” “Butcher” “Recipes”

Hint. Keep track of your list of relevant forums and blogs in a spreadsheet and constantly add to it. If you haven't already, don't forget to sign up for Google Alerts.  Google will then notify you whenever they find a new link to your website.

The success of any website is measured by the results that it achieves - and it can be attributed to two main metrics - the amount of 'targeted traffic' to the website and the conversion rate of the website. By 'targeted traffic' we mean that the traffic to your website is well qualified and targeted, i.e., people are actually looking for services or resources offered by your website. By conversion rate we mean the number of visitors that are persuaded into taking action.

The traffic and the conversion rate need to be continually measured together as they are tightly connected - you can have the best marketing and advertising campaigns but if your website is not persuading your visitors to take action, then it's all wasted. Likewise, you can have the best website in the world but if no one can find it, there is no way that it will be successful.

PPC is a great promotional tool available to business owners like yourselves to generate targeted traffic to your website. Not only that, due to the nature of PPC, it is the best and the most cost effective way to manage, measure and optimise the continual improvement of your website.

So what is PPC?

PPC is short for Pay Per Click Advertising, which is a form of internet advertising. In this model, you will need to the pay the provider of this service only when someone clicks on your ad, which makes it a highly results driven approach. You might have heard this being referred to as Google Adwords - Google is a large provider of this type of service.

How does PPC work?

To set up a PPC campaign, you will have to start by researching the top keywords or phrases that people are typing into Google to search for your services or products. Then you choose the search phrases you want to use for your ads so that Google can display your ads next to the search results every time someone types in that search phrase. Then for each phrase you have chosen, you decide how much you'd like to pay each time someone clicks on your ad - this is called your bid for the ad.

If your bid for the keyword is too low, Google will let you know that this won't appear in the first page, which means that you will not get enough clicks or sales from this ad. For each keyword/phrase that you choose, you will have to create an ad that matches and a landing page on your website that relates to the keyword and the ad. 

Once your ads are up, every time someone types in one of your researched keywords, your ad will come up in the Google ads section on the right hand side of the page and a select few ads will appear at the top of the search results on the main part of the page (see picture below).

To decide your ranking in the results, Google will take into account the relevancy of your ad as well as your bid amount. Relevancy is calculated by how relevant the search phrases are to the copy of your ad and also to the copy on the landing page. Therefore PPC is not just about how much money you are willing to pay for the ads - it's about your content as well. Both your ad copy and the landing page copy should use the same or very similar phrases across them so the user has a seamless and consistent experience - they need to get the information that they are expecting when they click on your ad.

Google will give the best ad space, which is at the top of the main part of the page to the most relevant ads that also have the highest bid - as shown in the example of a search for 'wedding photographer' below:

You can set up and manage the PPC campaign yourself - if you'd like a bit of help managing your PPC campaign stay tuned for our next article that will tell you exactly how to set up, run and manage a PPC campaign.

How can your business benefit from PPC?

1. High ROI

PPC is one of the most profitable and cost effective channels for advertising and marketing an online business. Most of the top online marketers share this view - a Forbes study of the top marketers in US showed that PPC is considered one of the top 3 online marketing channels for generating conversions, with SEO and email marketing ranking 1and 2 - see the right hand column in the table below:

As you can see from the table above, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is seen as the most effective online marketing tactic. SEO is the process involved in optimising your website and the copy so it ranks highly in the natural search results. So when someone types in a search phrase related to your services or products, SEO will help you rank higher. We believe that while SEO is highly effective, PPC has a lot of other great benefits that make it a perfect compliment to SEO activities - in fact if you want to see an instant return on your investment, PPC is your best option.

2. It is instant

Unlike traditional forms of advertising, with PPC you can setup a campaign and generate traffic to your website in a matter of minutes. There is no need to contact advertisers, or have to work with deadlines - you can get your ad up whenever you are ready to do so. You can also run it around specific time of the year and for a short period, for example say you are a wedding photographer, you can choose to run a short campaign around non-wedding season to drum up some more visitors and see how effective this is as a strategy.

Also, with PPC the results are instant. To have your website rank highly in search results naturally, you'd have to use SEO (search engine optimisation) and this could take months or even years, so we highly recommend investing in PPC. This will start getting traffic to your site immediately, therefore generating significant sales within weeks. SEO has its own benefits and is a great compliment to PPC activity so we recommend using both strategies in parallel to get the best results. Read more about SEO.

3. Testing

Because of its instant nature and great reporting, you can also test certain offers by looking at exactly what your potential customers are interested in and what gets them going. For example, as a wedding photographer you could test what offer works best for your customers - you could run a campaign to offer 'free photo album' and maybe with another group you could try 'free CD' to find out what your customers find more valuable. PPC allows you to get inside the minds of your customers so you know exactly what they are looking for.

 

4. Measurable

Unlike other forms of advertising, with PPC it is extremely easy to measure the success of a campaign - you have access to information like page impressions, clicks from the campaign, and conversions and from there it's easy to measure your click through rate (CTR), conversion rate and cost per lead. This kind of reporting makes it very easy for us to see if we are on track or not.

PPC also allows you to determine exactly what search is producing the greatest number of sales. With PPC you have the chance to test hundreds of search phrases, but it's always hard to guess if the most popular search phrase will result in sales for your business. For example, using Google Insights, you will find that there are a lot more people searching for the phrase 'wedding photos' compared to 'wedding photographer' (as shown in the image below). But once you run your campaign you might find that the more targeted phrase 'wedding photographer' actually results in more customers. 

5. Helps improve conversion

PPC also helps you find problems with your conversion - with PPC you get highly targeted traffic to your website and if this is converting poorly, you know that you need to investigate your website to see what's causing the hiccup. Low conversion rate after a PPC campaign usually leads PPC managers to investigate what's wrong.

This is another reason why having PPC at the same time as SEO (preferably when a site is being launched) is a huge advantage because with SEO alone, traffic can take months to ramp up to significant levels. If you have a usability or conversion rate problem in those first three to six months, you may not have enough data to detect it or to fix it quickly, and you could be losing valuable sales!

6. PPC offers great control

With PPC you can optimise your landing pages exactly as you wish unlike with SEO. SEO is when you optimise the copy on your pages so that it appears in the search results naturally. This requires the key phrases that people are typing into the search engines to be used on your website repeatedly so that it is recognised as a relevant source of information for the user. Therefore, you need a lot of relevant words on your website.

But this can sometimes be restrictive. Say you don't really want to use a lot of copy, you want to let the images do the selling for you, like in the case of a wedding photographer, your pictures will do the selling. This means that you probably don't have much of a chance for people to even find you on Google if you were to simply use SEO. PPC gives you the chance to show up on the search results if you have a high bid for your ad.

7. Targeted

Besides providing qualified traffic, PPC also allows you to setup campaigns specific to geographical locations. So you could specify that the ad is shown to users that are in a 100km radius of North Shore in Auckland - this way you are not paying for irrelevant traffic to your website, and you also get a good insight into the size of the local market.

8. Strong branding

With PPC you get free branding - even if the users  don't click on your ads, they might still see them and you don't have to pay for that impression. Branding is strengthened by repetition - when people see your name every where, it makes an impression and slowly burns into their memory. So when they do have a need for the kind of products or services you sell, they know exactly who to look for.

9. Improved SEO

Usually, when you set up an effective PPC campaign, it should naturally lead to the development of good content on your website and help you rank well in the organic search results. This is because when you setup a campaign you'll need to investigate which search phrases generate high volumes of relevant traffic and then create a relevant ad and landing page - which is one of the requirements of SEO.

In our PPC work with our clients and on our own website, we've discovered that by incorporating target search phrases in our landing page, we began seeing the ranking on organic search results also improve - which proves that PPC can help with SEO activity.

10. Banner advertising

When you set up a PPC campaign through Google Adwords, you get access to the Google Adsense network which means that you can run banner advertising on other websites that are part of the Adsense network. So for example if you want to advertise your wedding photography service, all you need to do is specify to Google that you'd like to run an advert on all websites that have a theme of photos and weddings. You could even specify the geographical location like North Shore if you choose. This way you don't have to contact every website that offers banner advertising and ask them if they get people searching for photos or wedding related things - it is all done automatically.

The advertising through Adsense network will also report back with the exact same detail as your Adwords campaign so you know exactly which banner designs are working better, which banner messages are more compelling and what sites are bringing more clients.

> Learn how to set up, run and manage your own PPC (Google Adwords) campaign.