Internet marketing tips for Arbonne

What's Froogle? Can people find your skincare, ...

What's Froogle? Can people find your skincare, cosmetics, nutritional supplements & aromatherapy products in Froogle?

As An Arbonne consultant, the first question you need to ask yourself is: "Where do customers shop?"

Consumers frequent places that are familiar
Consumers frequent places that are convenient
Consumers frequent places they trust
Consumers frequent places with fair prices
Consumers frequent places that are well advertised

So what does a customer's shopping habits have to do with the comparison shopping engine called Froogle? Well simply put; many people are familiar with Google's Foogle and they trust Google because they've been there before, it's well promoted, and as always it is convenient. While Google's Froogle does not sell or price products or services themself, they do allow shoppers to find good prices. They've hit the consumer's nail right on its head.

Perhaps is one of those unusual exceptions to the old expression, "there's no such thing as a free lunch". At Froogle, if you're looking to marketing something, lunch is on them. It's 100% free!

Let's start with a few facts about Froogle and then the 'feed' steps for listing your products or services in Froogle.

Froogle In A "Nutshell"

You can list your products on Froogle for free.
Unlike other online shopping sites, Froogle costs nothing. There's no spending account to set up and maintain. No cost-per-click. No cost, period.

At Froogle you control your product information.
Simply upload a new product feed at any time to ensure Froogle displays the most accurate descriptions and promotions for your products.

Froogle provides store ratings and product reviews.
Google's technology scours the web to identify relevant information about listed stores and products. This information is in the form of review 'snippets' from independent ratings sites.

Froogle is forever free to merchants who wish to participate.
Upload your product info (data feed) and you'll be listed overnight. The entire system is supported by 'Sponsored Links' which are paid advertisements Froogle displays along side the regular Froogle listings.

Can skincare, cosmetics, nutritional supplements & aromatherapy can be found in Froogle.

Below are some simple tips toward getting your skincare, cosmetics, nutritional supplements & aromatherapy products found in Froogle using their data feed system:

Sign in to the Froogle Merchant Center
Create or use your existing Google Account to enter the Froogle Merchant Center.
Create an FTP account
Set up your FTP account, which you'll later use to upload your 'product info' feeds to us.
Specify your feed's settings
Set your feed's filename and other parameters.
Create and upload your feed
Create a feed according to Froogle's instructions and upload it to them. Be sure to name your feed using the filename you chose in Step 3 (above).
Check your feed for errors
Sign in to your Froogle Merchant Center account to check for any formatting errors in your feed.
Final content review
We will review your feed to ensure that its content is consistent with our program policies.

Can Arbonne Breathe Freash Air into Mompreneuri...

Can Arbonne Breathe Freash Air into Mompreneurism?

Source: Direct Sales Association

According to the most recent statistics available from the Direct Sales Association, 79.9% of people in "direct sales" are women. Any way you look at it the males total a paltry 20.1%. Many of the women in our industry (and prospects we seek) are current or future moms. It seems natural that a new term has entered our vocabulary... Mompreneurism.

Mompreneurs Online: Using the Internet to Build Work@Home Success Yes, you're reading it right. According to authors Patricia Cobe and Ellen Parlapiano, who trademarked the term "mompreneurs" and were recently featured in Time magazine and various other programs like Fox News Channel; their mompreneurs online web site (www.mompreneursonline.com) draws millions of visitors each month.

In reading through the Mompreneurs Online web site you'll discover that they've interviewed hundreds of mothers in business at home. Their interviews revealed that these goal directed women share certain secrets for success on the wild, wild web. Don't miss the interesting points they offer. For example, below is a sampling of why and how mom-owned businesses are surviving and thriving on the web according to Ellen H. Parlapiano and Patricia Cobe:

Team Work. Mompreneurs® forge powerful alliances--both online and off! Together they harness technology to build an instant network of personal and professional support through online communities and marketing cooperatives.
The Control Factor. Moms start home businesses for family flexibility, so they grow their enterprises slowly and steadily to retain control over their work/family time. The 24/7 availability of the Internet lets them work when THEY want to.
Money Smarts. Moms don't overextend their financial resources and are less likely to use outside funding during start-up. So they don't have to worry about venture capitalists pulling the plug on their businesses.

Maybe you think Arbonne is a wonderful place for moms? Maybe you're hoping to attract mothers in business at home to your site, blog, product or business? Or, maybe you already have lots of moms and a true mompreneurial mindset?

Whatever the case, work at home moms are an important niche and your marketing campaigns can target these moms. Moms are both a consumer and a business force to be respected and understood.

With any luck, your skincare, cosmetics, nutritional supplements & aromatherapy will be just the thing these mompreneurs are wanting? Now, let's continue (below) with more tips in our series on pay per click strategies for gaining highly targeted traffic. Maybe you can get some moms clicking!

Tips, Tips, Tips... They just keep on coming!

Sometimes people type in web addresses in those search boxes! So bid on those if the search engine allows it: 'www.website.com', 'website.com', 'http://website.com' and every combination full or partial you think a searcher might actually type.
Match up keywords with words in your ad copy. Even though a 'spa', a 'hot tub', and a 'whirlpool' might mean the same thing in your mind, if a searcher types in 'hot tub' and your listing says: "Relax and save in your new Spa", you will miss out on many interested customers.
Think negative... yes, people search for herbs that can kill, plastic surgery pitfalls, mlm scams and sundry other peculiar things. Invite them to explore your related listing. Do you offer cosmetics or skin car as an alternative to plastic surgery? Is you mlm a beacon of light in a sea of seemingly dubious scams?
Get creative with interest spikes in the news. 'Mad Cow' might be a great keyword for your all vegetarian product line. The 'SARS' outbreak might have generated millions of searches that your 'immunity booster' could have benefited from (just don't make any false claims). And where were all the bra ads when a gazillion people typed in 'Janet Jackson' after the 2004 Super Bowl surprise?

Becoming Relevant to Mompreneurs...

Here's one way you can be compelling and relevant in reaching out to mothers in business at home:

SUPPORT: Create strategies to support this emerging entrepreneurial niche. Provide convenient pathways and remove as many barriers to entry as possible. Almost every industry can tap into the mompreneur market by making their lives and their businesses run more smoothly.

Can skincare, cosmetics, nutritional supplement...

Can skincare, cosmetics, nutritional supplements & aromatherapy can be sold successfully by Google or Yahoo

Arbonne's skin care products, based on botanical principles, became a reality in the United States in 1980 and are now shared throughout the world. Arbonne's product line has since grown to include both inner and outer health and beauty products that are unparalleled in quality, safety, value, benefits and results! The wonderful thing about Arbonne is that it's not just about great products, it's also about great people.

As An Arbonne consultant you know your product and you've set your goals. Your web page, site, or blog is up and you're pondering methods to get search engine traffic.

Can your skincare, cosmetics, nutritional supplements & aromatherapy be sold by Google or Yahoo or not? You've got to answer that first, right? But equally important, can you orchestrate a plan that generates more profits bottom-line results than promotional expense?

Good news, the answer is: "probably yes."

Tricks of the trade for the successful PPC campaign...

When thinking up keywords, use examples of specific things your product is used for: 'clean floors', clean countertops', 'wash floors', 'mop floors', 'polish stove top', 'remove grime', 'shine appliances', 'disinfect bacteria', 'hide furniture flaws' etc.
Explore variations: 'soy milk', 'soymilk', 'soy-milk'
Add plurals: 'protein bar' and 'protein bars'
Use abbreviations and acronyms
Use US and UK spellings
Keyword phrases may be questions: 'how to repair bad credit', 'when should I diet', 'how do I lose weight', 'where are discount cosmetics', etc.

Will Google or Yahoo Pay Per Click Ads Work for...

Will Google or Yahoo Pay Per Click Ads Work for Arbonne.

When comparing the primary pay-per-click search engines, you might be challenged to figure out which is best for you. The top two are Yahoo Sponsored Search and Google AdWords. It's a good idea to start your search engine marketing strategy with a small budget, spreading it out over a few different search engines to experiment and see where your target market may be lurking.

We recommend you begin by viewing the wonderful tutorials and flash overviews offered by Google and Yahoo. View the sample tutorials below, you'll find others at Google and Yahoo:

Pay-per-click Yahoo Search: Overview
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/tu_srch.php
Flash presentation explains Yahoo sponsored search.

AdWord Options for Keyword Matching Explained
https://services.google.com/marketing/stats/tutorial_redirect
Perfecting your Google AdWord targeting and filter worthless clicks.

Targeting a Local Market with Google AdWords
http://services.google.com/tutorial/adw_loc_target/adw_loc_target.html
Reach local area prospects by region or locale.

Google and Yahoo Handle Bidding a Bit Different, Let's Look...

Yahoo Sponsored Ads

Yahoo adjusts your bid to 1 cent over your next lowest competitor. Thus, if you bid $3.00 per click, and the next highest bid is $1.95 per click, you will only pay $1.96 per click.
Yahoo allows you to see who you are bidding against and what they are bidding, so you know exactly where you will rank, and how much you will pay.
Yahoo's maximum bid is $999.99
Yahoo's minimum bid is $0.10

AdWords by Google

Believe it or not, Google never reveals what you will pay per click. Thus, if you bid $3.00 per click, you will pay anywhere from $0.05 to $3.00 per click.
Google does not allow you to know how much your competitors are bidding per click.
An advantage with Google is that you will rank higher if your click-through rate (CT rate) is better (a CT rate is the ratio of clicks on your ad to the number of times your ad is shown). Thus, you may have a better rank than your competitor, even if he or she bids more than you (because of your CT rate).
Google's maximum bid is $100.00
Google's minimum bid is $0.05

New Google AdWords keyword status changes: Simplified keyword states and quality-based minimum bids.

IMPORTANT: Google announced in early August 2005 that they will simplify their keyword status system and introduce quality-based minimum bids, giving us more control to run all keywords we find important.

Google' New Policy

Each keyword will now be assigned a minimum bid that is based on the quality (also called Quality Score) of your keyword in your account. If your keyword or Ad Group's maximum cost-per-click (CPC) meets the minimum bid, your keyword will be active and trigger ads. If it doesn't, your keyword will be inactive and will not trigger ads.

Previosly, keyword statuses were called normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled. Under the new rules, this will be replaced with active (triggering ads) or inactive (not triggering ads). No more slowed or disabled keywords if no do not have a minimum clickthrough rate (CTR) threshold.

Pay per click tips for this week:

Pay-per-click advertising tips for the Arbonne consultant continue below:

If your product or service is something that can be related to a locale, like a city, state or region you may be able to find some ripe tomatoes in phrases like: 'retirement homes in Florida', 'Mississippi flat rate phone service', 'herbal sunscreen for southwestern sun', 'indoor air filters for Los Angeles'.
Discover more keywords by narrowing down to extreme specifics. People can be VERY specific when they search. Use names of months and years like '2004 tax savings', 'May flowers', 'Christmas of 2005' or 'September back to school supplies'.

Let's say you are marketing a broad line of herbal products... why not get a list of all herbs (there may be thousands) and use that list as a keyword list. Maybe your product doesn't contain every herb on the list, but people searching for any ONE herb specifically may be interested in others. Try specific model numbers, makes and designs if your products are sometimes referred to this way: 'Epson stylus CX6400', 'Apple G5', etc.
Add adjectives to your keywords like: big, purple, new, cheap, affordable, soft, aromatic, healthy, etc.

Arbonne? Have you considered what consumers thi...

Arbonne? Have you considered what consumers think of you?

Have you ever thought about the public's perception of what you do?

Arbonne

Do you assume consumers have already heard this about Arbonne?

That's an important factor in any search engine marketing campaign; you should consider upfront (as you are preparing your keywords, your ads, and your landing page) what the majority of visitors already 'know' about you and the skincare, cosmetics, nutritional supplements & aromatherapy you offer. You might consider playing it safe and assume they've never heard of you. That's always the safe bet.

If you're selling iPODs or something very well known, you can approach things much differently. Less time explain 'what' you've got and more time explain 'why' they should buy from you.

If your selling something that could be clasified as a common commodity (vitamins, shoes, cosmetics, telephone services, etc), then you must differentiate your product from the other seemingly similar things the public possibly will associate you with.

Much of these consumer 'mindset' conflicts should be handled on your landing page, that is, the page where they land after clicking your ad; so before you start any advertising effort, think like a customer and look at your landing page.

More Pay Per Click Marketing Tips Below:

Below are this weeks tips for better search engine marketing (using pay-per-click):

Expand your keywords by asking your spouse, friends, neighbors, relatives, existing customers and strangers to look at your web page and offer their keyword suggestions. In this phase you cannot have too many cooks in the kitchen.
Put your biscuits in the oven and watch'em rise... That is, use web based 'keyword expanders' and research tools to expand your keywords beyond what you can come up with on your own.
Remember, searchers may type in something that describes your product, but more often than not they will be typing in words describing their problem. If your product or service solves, fixes, heals, masks or even distracts them from their problem, you want those keywords on your list.
"In-house" keywords (those used frequently by others in your industry or business) are often the most costly because lazy business owners don't often think beyond their own nose. The result is these limited keywords get bided-up sky high. Customers on the other hand seldom search using "in-house" keywords. Your goal is to find keyword niches popular with customers but less popular with your competition.

FadSense? A fabric-embedded electronic technolo...

FadSense? A fabric-embedded electronic technology from Google?

The decision for Google to introduce FadSense as the first application using this technology, was made largely on the success of their AdWord and AdSense advertising programs. For people to adopt this type of wearable advertising, it has to be profitable for the participant and profitable for the advertiser. Can Google really pull this off?

Is this the future? Google FadSense™

As An Arbonne consultant, you might be wondering why I'm talking about a futuristic contextual AdSense (AdWord) program like FadSense. It's partially because it's funny, but more importantly, it's because I feel the type of advertising we have been discussing here at my "Internet Marketing Tips for Arbonne" blog, is critical to your future. What I'm hoping to teach you are skills and tips that will not only work for Google today, but for any similar type advertising in the future. Google FadSense, real or not!

Some of it turns out to be as basic as:

How to find keywords related to your products and services.
How to determine "tags" that help categorize your content.
How to prepare your marketing campaign from the ground up.
How to create a destination or landing page that works.
How to manage your advertising budget.
How to create eye catching headlines for your ads.
How to use the internet effectively in any marketing campaign.

My Continuing Tips To Help You With Arbonne...

Over the past few weeks we have hammered away with dozens of valuable tips. This week we continue.

When cooking-up your keyword phrase list, use an extended "keyword discovery" phase. Your competition, like you, will do basic keyword research. You can only beat them if you take it to the next level, and that won't happen in the first day. Having a large number of targeted keywords in your campaign is a side effect of an extended period of brainstorming, discovery, research, or whatever you want to call it.
Not very wood with gords? There is a hidden target market of quality visitors who type in incorrect spellings of what they are looking for. Site owners often overlook this. In a recent 30 day period on a major search engine at least 108 people where searching for a 'buisness'? Hundreds more were searching for: 'vitiamins', 'vitimans' and even 'vitamens'... You can bid on misspellings and have very little competition on the search results page.
Assume that at least half your keywords will be rotten eggs, that is, no one will ever look for them and end up at your site. Because there is no extra cost to add as many keyword phrases as you can think up, treat them like biscuits and bake-up as many as you can... 100 or more keyword phrases for each destination page you list in any PPC search engine.

It Happened Today... Google Inc. Closed Its Door...

It Happened Today... Google Inc. Closed Its Doors, After 118 Years Searching for Answers.

What started as a play on the word googol, becoming the search engine everybody loved (or envied) and grew to become the "five-and-dime" of pay-per-click search engines, pulled the plug on the last server on this date in Mountain View, California. It's a story of a future time that could be soon, or beyond our horizon.

If anyone back in the late 1800's or early 1900's had been thinking ahead to the future of Woolworth Corp., it's unlikely they would have ever predicted that the famous five-and-dime would be a line item on a "Today in History" script published to millions of readers across this thing we call the internet.

Yet today, has I opened my RSS News Reader, there it was. I can recall shopping at the five-and-dime as a kid. It was the "best" store in town. Just like Google; the best. Now, its history. Perhaps the best is not good enough?

"The perfect search engine, would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want," says Google co-founder Larry Page, "Never settle for the best."

It Happened Today...

In 1997 - After 118 years, the Woolworth Corp. closed its last 400 five-and-dime stores. The Woolworth building (opened in 1919) in New York City was the world's tallest skyscraper until 1930.

Could this happen to Google? Well, yes. In the Fortune story, "Search and Destroy" It states that Bill Gates is leading a charge against Google. Forced to watch Google's stock soar the way Microsoft's used to, while Google's Brin and Page enjoy new roles as tech's rock stars, Gates brings to the fight a ferocity that nobody has seen since the Netscape war a decade ago. Google's popularity gets under his skin. For now however, it's all fantasy thinking as the titans of search (Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft) battle it out in cyberspace.

People searching for information on the Internet are driving some of the fastest-growing profits on the Web, whetting advertisers' appetites by signaling what they want.

By typing in search terms, users are also sending advertisers a clear message about merchandise they might be interested in buying, and search providers like Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news), Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) MSN are cashing in. (Source: Reuters 2005)

Good news for the Arbonne consultant

The Cost Per Lead using Pay-per-click is Cheap Compared To Other Ads

Your cost per click might run you 25 cents or 50 cents or so, but if the research done by Piper Jaffray & Co. is correct, the only thing that counts is the cost-per-customer and those numbers are: $8.50 for search, $20 for Yellow Pages, $50 for online display ads, $60 for e-mail and $70 for direct mail. PPC search wins hands-down.

"It's a marketer's dream tool because we can monitor it in so many different ways and watch the effectiveness of it," said Jeff Saville, a consumer direct marketing manager at Deckers Outdoor Corp. (Nasdaq:DECK - news)

Are there dangers or flaws in search advertising?

An estimated 5 percent to 20 percent of clicks are believed to be fraudulent -- the result of people clicking on ads to drive up advertiser costs or to make a profit for Web site publishers who get a cut of revenue.
Some worry that new advertisers are rushing blindly into paid search and inflating key word prices -- a concern underscored by WebTrends data.
Certain campaigns fail because they are ill-conceived or unsuited to the medium.

Adding all this up, we come to two conclusions: 1) It pays to get good at pay-per-click advertising if you plan to do business online and 2) we may only have 118 years left with Google :-)

Search engine marketing strategies:

Remember that with PPC campaigns, you are not sending search visitors to a site, you are sending them to a web page (called: a destination or landing page). You must discover keywords and set-up ONE page at a time.
Remember that people search by typing in more than one word:
The 7 most used word phrases in search engines according to OneStat.com:

2 word phrases 32.58%
3 word phrase 25.61%
1 word phrases 19.02%
4 word phrases 12.83%
5 word phrases 5.64%
6 word phrases 2.32%
7 word phrases 0.98%

Start your "keyword discovery" process by visiting the destination page you intend to send your search engine visitors to. Put on the 'reading glasses' of a customer and look at your page through their eyes.
Ask yourself this: "What keywords might a person type in a search box where when they arrived at this destination page, they'd say 'BINGO' this is what I was looking for?" Find these keywords and you've discovered your best keywords.