Internet marketing tips for Southern Living Home

Froogle it! In 24 hours your garden accessories,...

Froogle it! In 24 hours your garden accessories, home accessories, decor & books displayed there?

As A Southern Living At Home independent consultant, the first question you need to ask yourself is: "Where do customers shop?"

Customers shop at a place that s convenient
Customers shop at a place they trust
Customers shop at a place with good prices
Customers shop at a place that s well promoted
Customers shop at a place they ve shopped at before.

So what does a customer's shopping habits have to do with the comparison shopping engine called 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 doesn't price or sell anything themself, they do allow shoppers to hunt down good prices and merchants to set whatever pricing they prefer. They've struck 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 easy and free.

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

Froogle Facts

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.

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.

Garden accessories, home accessories or decor & books can be profitably added in Froogle.

What follows are some recommended tips toward getting your garden accessories, home accessories, decor & books added to 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).
Final content review
We will review your feed to ensure that its content is consistent with our program policies.

Mompreneurs and Southern Living At Home... A go...

Mompreneurs and Southern Living At Home... A good match?

Source: DSA.org

According to the most recent statistics available from the Direct Sales Association, 79.9% of people in "direct sales" are female. Even without a calculator, I can figure the men total a paltry 20.1%. Many of the women in our industry (and prospects we seek) are current or future moms. Just when we thought the dictionary had all the words we needed a new term has come on the scene: 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 Good Morning America; 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 work-from-home mothers. Their interviews revealed that these work at home women share certain secrets for success on the wild, wild web. Of the many things mentioned, below is a sampling of why and how mom-owned businesses are surviving and thriving on the web according to Cobe and Parlapiano:

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.
A Natural Niche. Cyberspace opens up a wealth of business ideas, allowing moms to tap into their talents, skills and passions to create products and services for highly targeted audiences.
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.

Perhaps you think Southern Living At Home is a wonderful opportunity for moms? Maybe you're hoping to attract work-from-home mothers to your site, blog, product or business? Or, maybe you already have lots of moms and a true mompreneurial mindset?

Whatever the case, these "mompreneurs" working from home 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 respected.

Perhaps your garden accessories, home accessories-decor & books will be just the thing these mompreneurs are desiring? Now, let's continue (below) with more tips in our series on techniques to assure a successful PPC search engine campaign. Maybe you can get some moms clicking!

Pay per click tips for this week:

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.

Becoming Relevant to Mompreneurs...

Here's one way you can be appealing and compelling in reaching out to work-from-home mothers:

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.

Garden accessories, home accessories or decor &...

Garden accessories, home accessories or decor & books can be profitably sold online through a PPC search engine campaign

Southern Living At Home makes the pages of their magazine, Southern Living, come to life with high quality, fashion forward decorative products. The company's 'Spirit of Generosity' is a key element of their founder Dianne Mooney's vision to empower and enrich the lives of American women. Her vision, the Southern Living brand and professional approach combined with a commitment to excellence are the ingredients that made Southern Living At HOME a very successful party plan company.

As A Southern Living At Home independent 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 visitors to your site.

Can your garden accessories, home accessories-decor & books be sold through a PPC search engine campaign or not? That's question #1, right? But equally important, can you come up with a pay per click strategy that produces more real buyer than expense?

Guess what, the answer is: "YES!"

PPC Tips:

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.

Google AdWords or Yahoo Sponsored... What's Bes...

Google AdWords or Yahoo Sponsored... What's Best for Southern Living At Home.

There are many PPC search engines, with some being better than others. The top two are Yahoo and Google. It's a good idea to start your search engine advertising with a small budget, spreading it out over a few different search engines to experiment and see where your target market may be lurking.

There's no better way to begin than 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:

Sponsored Search: Flash Introduction by Yahoo
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/tu_srch.php
Yahoo sponsored search overview.

Google AdWords: Getting Started
http://services.google.com/marketing/links/awsignup_tutorial
How to fast-start a Google AdWords account.

Navigating your account in Google AdWords
http://services.google.com/tutorial/acct_nav/acct_nav.html
Need help getting around in your AdWords account?

Comparing Keyword Bidding Options at Google Vs. Yahoo:

Yahoo Ad Sponsoring Rules (bidding)

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

Google AdWords

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.

NEWS: 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.

How it 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.

Search engine marketing tips:

Pay-per-click advertising tips for the Southern Living At Home independent consultant continue below:

Forget stupid characters. We are talking search engine listings (not eBay) so cool the clever punctuation it L@@KS stupid!!!!!!!! Don't make SOME words CAPITALIZED; it looks like you're shouting desperately for business. Respect the people who read your search engine listings.
People are by nature often interested in things like 'saving money', 'making money', 'curing something', 'striking a deal', and getting anything of value that is 'free'... but be careful. The addition of such self-interest phrases in your ad copy may skew your clicks upwards while leaving your sales flat. If you're tempted to try such phrases... test, test, test... while keeping an eye on your bottom-line.
Bluntness works: 'Refinance 4.5%', 'Viagra $39', 'No Interest VISA', etc
These are the type words that appeal to searchers: more information, complimentary, love, youthful, safe, new, benefit, gain, money, happy, glad, proven, guarantee, resource, fast, results, discover, how you, how to, your, yours, you'll, healthy, natural, magic, secret, comfortable, save, proud, secure, solution.

Southern Living At Home? What lurks in those co...

Southern Living At Home? What lurks in those consumers' heads?

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

Southern Living At Home

Do you assume people reading your ads already perceive this about Southern Living At Home?

That's the challenge 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 'have heard' about you and the garden accessories, home accessories-decor & books you offer. In most cases you are best to 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 has become 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' challenges must be worked out by setting up 'mindset adjusters' (fancy phrase for good educational content snippets) on the page they hit immediately after clicking your ad; so before you start any contextual ad program, stop and think for a moment about what your potential customer might perceive as they arrive at your landing page.

More tips for your PPC campaign:

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

On the subject of ad copy (the words which will comprise your numerous different listing titles and descriptions) we can sum it up briefly: RELATE your listing to the keyword the searcher has typed, SPARK curiosity in their minds to encourage a visit, be TRUTHFUL, be BRIEF, be CLEAR, don't HYPE, and FILTER out bad clicks.
FILTER OUT BAD CLICKS? Yes, if your product is NOT for certain searchers, be clear upfront before they click. Example: If you bid on the keyword 'herbal shampoo' because your product is an herbal dog shampoo, make sure your ad copy reads: for dogs, pets, or animals. If you only fulfill orders in Canada, state this upfront in your listing ad copy. There is no need to pay for a visitor click if you cannot service a particular customer's needs. Use words to filter out bad clicks.
There are many good resources to help you with ad copy, writing, and knowing what to say about your product. We recommend the eBook by Kim Klaver, "If My Product's So Great, How Come I Can't Sell It". Click here for a complimentary 'Mini-edition' of this eBook.

Dynamic ads on the seat of your pants! A GPS ch...

Dynamic ads on the seat of your pants! A GPS chip allows FadSense to serve Google ads (even where the sun don't shine :-)

I guess Google might have to re-work their privacy policy on this one. Google FadSense; going where no man has gone before.

Check out the site: Google FadSense™

As A Southern Living At Home independent 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 Southern Living At Home" 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 prepare your marketing campaign from the ground up.
How to track your traffic, results, and advertising ROI (return on investment).
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.

My Continuing Tips To Help You With Southern Living At Home...

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.

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?

"For Google, It Took 118 Years But, The Search ...

"For Google, It Took 118 Years But, The Search Is Over..." If Only Bill Gates Could Have Lived Long Enough To Read This Headline. Could it happen?

www.flickr.com

What started as a collaboration between Larry and Sergey and initially lead to a search engine called BackRub (named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website) 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?

Today in History...

One of retail's most successful pioneers, F.W. Woolworth, and his empire of department stores that defined the shopping experience for millions over the course of its 118-year existence. Woolworth, considered by his first boss to be the "worst salesman in the world," overcame repeated failure and financial hardship to open his first store in 1879 in Lancaster City, Pennsylvania. Through trial and error, the young Woolworth learned that selling large quantities of low-priced merchandise led to profit. It all ended on this day in 1997.

Could this happen to Google? Well, yes. Simply put, Google has become a new kind of foe, and that has Bill Gates riled. Google has combined software innovation with a brand-new Internet business model and it wounds Gates' pride that he didn't get there first. It's an eye opening article from Fortune magazine: GATES VS. GOOGLE. For now however, it's all fantasy thinking as the titans of search (Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft) battle it out in cyberspace.

Research shows global Web search advertising revenue, which is big business for the Internet giants, will be almost $8 billion in 2005 -- more than 20 times what it was four years ago. (Source: Reuters 2005)

Good news for the Southern Living At Home independent consultant

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

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know where to spend your advertising dollars... $8.50 for search, $20 for Yellow Pages, $50 for online display ads, $60 for e-mail and $70 for direct mail. Those are the average cost-per-customer numbers based on research by Piper Jaffray.

"Paid-search advertising has become a do-or-die proposition," says Jeff Saville, a consumer direct marketing manager at Deckers Outdoor Corp. "The market is growing fast, primarily because the ads are trackable and target people who are already interested. The medium is also inexpensive compared with television, radio, direct mail and Web banner ads." (Nasdaq:DECK - news)

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.]
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.

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 :-)

PPC Tips list continued from previous weeks:

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.