Froogle it! In 24 hours your cosmetics & skin care products listed?

Froogle it! In 24 hours your cosmetics & skin care products listed?

As A Kara Vita consultant, the first question you need to ask yourself is: "Where do customers shop?"

• Consumers frequent places that are convenient
• Consumers frequent places they trust
• Consumers frequent places with fair prices
• Consumers frequent places that are well advertised
• Consumers frequent places they ve shopped at in the past.

So what does knowing the habits of a happy shopper have to do with Google's Froogle? Well simply put; many people have been to Google or Froogle before, it's well promoted, and as always it is convenient. People are basically familiar with Google's various search engines and they trust this newer comparison shopping engine because it's backed by Google. While Google's Froogle never sets prices on items or markets stuff themself, they do allow shoppers to compare various prices. While many other comparison shopping engines are good, when it comes to helping small merchants get their products in front of customers "ready to buy", Foogle has hit the consumer's nail right on its head.

It is obviously an exception to the old expression, "there's no such thing as a free lunch". At Froogle, if you're attempting to promote your products or services, lunch is on them. It's free,

First some interesting facts and then the various steps (below) for adding your products or services to Froogle's comparison shopping engine.

Info About Froogle

Froogle is on the Google home page.
Millions of people come to Google each day, and many are actively looking for the products you're selling. Froogle connects shoppers with merchants.

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.

I sell cosmetics & skin care. How can these be listed in Froogle.

What follows are some recommended steps toward getting your cosmetics & skin care products listed in Froogle using their data feed system:

1. Go to the Froogle Merchant Center and sign-in
   If you do not have an account, open one and enter the merchant area.
   
2. Set-up an FTP account
   Set up an FTP account so that later you can upload your 'product or service' feeds in the Froogle system.
   
3. Adjust your feed's settings
   Your feed will have a filename and other parameters. You must set this up as well.
   
4. Upload your feed
   After you create a feed according to Froogle's instructions you'll upload it by FTP. Check that your feed name matches the filename you chose above in Step 3.
   
5. Check your feed for errors
   Sign in to your Froogle Merchant Center account to check for any formatting errors in your feed.
   
6. Final content review
   We will review your feed to ensure that its content is consistent with our program policies.

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Technorati:
Kara Vita | Froogle | Dan Hollings | skincare | cosmetics
Other recommended blogs:
Big Planet | Binney Smith At Home | Body Shop At Home

A Mompreneurial Business might be Kara Vita?

A Mompreneurial Business might be Kara Vita?

Source: Direct Sales Association

Based on statistics available from the Direct Sales Association, 79.9% of people in "direct sales" are female. Guess what that means? Yes, the guys total a paltry 20.1%. Many of the women in our industry (and prospects we seek) are current or future moms. It was only a matter of time before a new term has marched to the forefront: Mompreneurism.

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 Lifetime Television; their mompreneurs online website draws millions of visitors each month.

In reading through the Mompreneurs Online web site you'll find that they've interviewed hundreds of mothers in business at home. Their interviews revealed that these special women share certain secrets for online results. 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 Patricia Cobe and Ellen H. Parlapiano:

• Web Wisdom. Work-at-home moms understand that a dot.com name alone is not enough to power success. But the Internet can be a very valuable tool when used in conjunction with more traditional business strategies.
• 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.
• 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.

Maybe you think Kara Vita is a ideal 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 revolution underway?

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

Think optimistically that your cosmetics & skin care will be just the thing these mompreneurs are desiring? 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!

More Pay Per Click Marketing Tips Below:

• 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?

How to Appeal to Mompreneurs

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

FLEXIBILITY: Understand that mompreneurs have unwieldy schedules. Strive to deliver your products and services with to fit their schedules. You might develop e-learning courses that are conducted by live phone coaching or web conferencing. This is much more convenient than scheduling babysitting to attend an in-hotel seminar.

Last week I posted the another round of search engine marketing tips and even more tips in the weeks before that. Check previous weeks for more suggestions.



For additional lead generation ideas visit:
Internet Marketing Tips for Kara Vita

Check back next week for the next in this series of pay per click marketing tips...


Technorati:
Kara Vita | mompreneur | mompreneurs | mompreneurism | entrepreneur | PPC | pay per click | Google AdWords | Dan Hollings | skincare | cosmetics
Other recommended blogs:
Arbonne | AtHome America | Avon Cosmetic

I sell cosmetics & skin care. How can these be sold online through a PPC campaign

I sell cosmetics & skin care. How can these be sold online through a PPC campaign

The effectiveness of Kara Vita skincare products can be credited to the discriminating selection of ingredients combined with the patented LyphaZome™ delivery system. Nature has provided, through plants, the source of the most significant healing and regenerative elements. Plant derivatives, known as botanicals and essential oils, bring many of these same healing and regenerative powers to the skin. Kara Vita capitalizes on the scientific community's growing knowledge of botanicals, offering a line that is absolutely rich in natural healants.

As A Kara Vita 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 traffic.

Can your cosmetics & skin care be sold through a PPC campaign or not? That's question #1, right? But equally important, can you implement a strategy that produces more buying customers than lost money?

Encouraging news, the answer is: "YES!"

PPC Tips:

• 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.

For additional tips that might improve your pay per click ad campaign review the tips in my previous posts.


Are you learning valuable ideas? We recommend you check out our previous blog posts for many other marketing ideas. In fact, why not add our RSS feed to your "Feed Reader" so you don't miss future trainings?


Technorati:
Kara Vita | PPC | pay per click | Google AdWords | Network Marketing | Yahoo Ads | Dan Hollings | AdWords | skincare | cosmetics

Yahoo Sponsored or Google AdWords? What's Best for Kara Vita.

Yahoo Sponsored or Google AdWords? What's Best for Kara Vita.

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 Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search. It's a good idea to start your strategies for getting targeted visitors with search engines 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. Check below for a few examples, 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.

Let's compare how Yahoo and Google handle keyword bidding:

Sponsored ads at Yahoo

• 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

• Google keeps secret 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.

NEW: 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.

Let's See How This Works

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.

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

Pay-per-click advertising tips for the Kara Vita 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.

For additional tips that might improve your pay per click ad campaign review the tips in my previous posts.


Check back next week for the next in this series of PPC tips...


Technorati:
Kara Vita | PPC | pay per click | Google AdWords | Network Marketing | Yahoo Ads | Dan Hollings | Sponsored Ads | Contextual Ads | AdWords

Kara Vita? Does the public really know what I do?

Kara Vita? Does the public really know what I do?

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

Kara Vita

The effectiveness of Kara Vita skincare products can be credited to the discriminating selection of ingredients combined with the patented LyphaZome™ delivery system. Nature has provided, through plants, the source of the most significant healing and regenerative elements. Plant derivatives, known as botanicals and essential oils, bring many of these same healing and regenerative powers to the skin. Kara Vita capitalizes on the scientific community's growing knowledge of botanicals, offering a line that is absolutely rich in natural healants.

Do you truly believe that people reading your ads already know this about Kara Vita?

That's an important factor in any search engine marketing campaign; you should factor in from the start (as you are preparing your keywords, your ads, and your landing page) what the majority of visitors already 'have heard' about you and the cosmetics & skin care you offer. If you're not sure, 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 might be considered a common commodity (vitamins, shoes, cosmetics, telephone services, etc), then you must differentiate your product from the other seemingly similar products or services that customers 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 PPC campaign, jump into your customers shoes and take a stroll over to your landing page.

Search engine marketing tips:

So as promised, below you'll find this weeks installment of search engine tips...

• 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.

Last week I posted the another round of search engine marketing tips and yet more in the weeks before that. Check previous weeks for more ideas.


To make certain you don't miss this series of PPC tips, you might consider subscribing to my RSS feed.


Technorati:
Kara Vita | PPC | pay per click | Google | Network Marketing | mlm | Dan Hollings | internet marketing | Contextual Ads | AdWords

I'll never go naked again! Google FadSense Beta... Check this out.

I'll never go naked again! Google FadSense Beta... Check this out.

Why go naked when you can get paid to wear clothes. I'm sold. Sign me up. And ship me out two pair of those sneakers. Imagine that?

Check it out now: Google FadSense™

As A Kara Vita 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 Kara Vita" 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!

Before we continue with this week's tips, let's look at what we must concentrate on:

• How to find keywords related to your products and services.
• How to determine "tags" that help categorize your content.
• How to track your traffic, results, and advertising ROI (return on investment).
• How to write effective ads.
• 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 Kara Vita...

This week I shall continue with my PPC search engine recommendations. If you have been following (or subscribing by RSS feed) to these tips, you are aware that 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.

In earlier blog posts you'll find the first, second, third and fourth installments of my PPC tips.


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Technorati:
Kara Vita | PPC | pay per click | Google | FadSense | AdSense | Sneakers | Dan Hollings | internet marketing | Fashion | Contextual Ads | AdWords

Search all you want, but you'll not find "Google." On this day (after 118 years) someone typed in the last keyword and got no results...

Search all you want, but you'll not find "Google." On this day (after 118 years) someone typed in the last keyword and got no results...

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Woolworth. Make your own badge here.

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?

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

It Happened Today...

The rags-to-riches story of Frank Winfield Woolworth and his worldwide chain came to an end on this day in 1997, as the last of the Woolworth's stores closed their doors after 118 years of operation. Across America, this closing had a huge emotional impact on countless shoppers accustomed to the finery of the five and dime, a concept of merchandising invented by Woolworth.

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 Kara Vita consultant

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

When it comes to delivering a cost-effective way to bag customers, Web search ads appear to trump other methods. According to Piper Jaffray, the cost to acquire a customer is about $8.50 for search, $20 for Yellow Pages, $50 for online display ads, $60 for e-mail and $70 for direct mail. Data for television was not included. Where would you put your ad money?

"When someone conducts a search, only two things can happen. They'll either find your business or a competitor's business. Game over," states Jeffrey Herzog, chairman and chief executive of iCrossing, a search engine marketing company that helps people create and manage Web search campaigns.

Are there dangers or flaws in search advertising?

• Certain campaigns fail because they are ill-conceived or unsuited to the medium.
• According to WebTrends the data suggests that 60 percent of marketers do not measure sales, leads or key actions resulting from campaigns. [This is a dangerous number because that means you are competing with people who don't know what things are truly costing them. You need to be extra analytical when going head to head with this guy.]
• Some worry that new advertisers are rushing blindly into paid search and inflating key word prices -- a concern underscored by WebTrends data.

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 :-)

More Pay Per Click Marketing Tips Below:

• 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.

In earlier blog posts you'll find the first, second and third installment of my PPC tips.


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Technorati:
Kara Vita | PPC | pay per click | Google | marketing tips | search | Woolworth | Today in history | online advertising