Internet marketing tips for Two Sisters Gourmet

Would Your Sales Increase If All Two Sisters Go...

Would Your Sales Increase If All Two Sisters Gourmet Customers Wore Vividly Colored Yellow T-shirts?

Over the past, I have oftentimes had the enjoyment of acting as a consultant directly with Two Sisters Gourmet consultants. Regardless of all my attempts to explain, I still sometimes get entrepreneurs that say, "promoting with a pay per click strategy might be the best thing since sliced bread, but paying money everytime somebody clicks scares me to death. Perhaps this is not best marketing strategy for my food & beverage."

I'm certain that one of the reasons I hear this is because the "idea" of promoting with a pay per click strategy is still not understood.

I'll attempt a little analogy to see if I can get everyone confortable with the concept...

How fun it would be if you could plant yourself at the front door of a Home Depot or CompUSA and immediately spot customers who were looking for your product? Lets say they wore vividly colored Yellow shirts announcing what they were at the store looking for. Think of the business you'd generate if these buyers somehow knew to go straight to you rather than wander the store aimlessly looking?

With Google AdWords, Yahoo's Sponsored Search or a Major Second Tier PPC Player, you connect with targeted site visitors immediately, the second they want to hear from you.

Let's take this concept a step further. What if you could have a thousand little helpers at the door of every shopping center in the country. What's more, you'd have to pay them only if they found prospects and began marketing to them your food & beverage.

Now, even if your competition has posted montrous billboards, hovering over everyone, it doesn't matter. Few shoppers care for a general ad when something more targeted to their wants and needs is more readily available. All the while, your "agents" are continually monitoring every single prospective customer.

Running a pay per click ad is like deploying a team of enthusiastic "agents", except that these search agents won't require breaks and they'll work for free until they deliver a ready-to-buy potential customer. Your "agents" will be waiting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for customers looking for your products or services. As soon as prospects start search, you'll be the first to know.

Search marketing will represent 39% of all online advertising spending this year and will account for 44% of online ad spending in 2010. (Source: Forrester Research 02/2005)

Two Sisters Gourmet; Think you'll find Momprene...

Two Sisters Gourmet; Think you'll find Mompreneurs here?

Source: Direct Sales Association

I recently checked the "gender stats" available from the Direct Sales Association, 79.9% of people in "direct sales" are female. Figure it another way and the men total a paltry 20.1%. Many of the women in our industry (and site visitors we seek) are current or future moms. Just when we thought the dictionary had all the words we needed a new term has appeared on our horizon known as 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 NBC Nightly News; their mompreneurs online site draws millions of visitors each month.

In reading through the Mompreneurs Online web site you'll enjoy reading that they've interviewed hundreds of these "mompreneurs" working from home. Their interviews revealed that these at-home business women share certain secrets for online results. I borrowed a few points about mompreneurs from their site... below is a sampling of why and how mom-owned businesses are surviving and thriving on the web according to Ellen and Pat:

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.
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.

Perhaps you think Two Sisters Gourmet is a wonderful opportunity for moms? Maybe you're hoping to attract these "mompreneurs" working from home to your site, blog, product or business? Or, maybe you already have lots of moms and a true mompreneurial team working toward your goals?

Whatever the case, mothers managing kids and a business from home are an important niche and your pay-per-click marketing strategies can target these moms. Moms are both a consumer and a business force to be understood and admired.

Think optimistically that your food & beverage will be just the thing these mompreneurs are seeking? 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!

Search engine marketing strategies:

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?

Reaching Out to Mompreneurs

Here's one way you can be appealing and compelling in reaching out to these "mompreneurs" working from home:

STORIES FROM THE HEART: Mompreneurs provide great stories to share in your advertising and promotional campaigns. Millions of moms dream of starting a business or turning their hobbies into profits. By showing successful mompreneurs who are thriving both at home and in business, you can tap into a powerful desire.

If you're selling food & beverage products, tha...

If you're selling food & beverage products, that's great! But you're asking, how can these be sold successfully by pay-per-click

Two Sisters Gourmet (TSG) offers versatile and fabulous gourmet food products, convenient recipes and ideas for their consumers, Traveling throughout the United States, Two Sisters Gourmet searches for new gourmet product trends and product ideas that exceed and surpass the "standard" run-of-the-mill food items. All TSG products are simple to prepare, enhance the ordinary, have multiple uses and offer "Gourmet Taste in Take-Out Time!"

As A Two Sisters Gourmet 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.

Can your food & beverage be sold by pay-per-click or not? You've got to answer that first, right? But equally important, can you put together a pay per click strategy that creates more real customers than cost?

Guess what, the answer is: "probably yes."

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

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.

Basics of Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Se...

Basics of Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search for Two Sisters Gourmet.

Sometimes you feel like flipping a coin when choosing a pay per click search engine. Which one is really best for you? The top two are Google and Yahoo. It's a good idea to start your PPC customer acquisition approach 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. Start your exploration below, 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: Bidding and Ranking
http://services.google.com/tutorial/bpr/bpr.html
How to improve your AdWord rank and manage your PPC costs.

Google AdWords: How to Optimize
http://services.google.com/tutorial/opt_tips/google_opt.html
Edit your Google ads to attract more qualified visitors

Google Vs. Yahoo? Do the bidding policies make a difference?

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

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.

UPDATE: 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.

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

Pay-per-click advertising tips for the Two Sisters Gourmet 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.

Two Sisters Gourmet? Have you considered what c...

Two Sisters Gourmet? Have you considered what consumers think of you?

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

Two Sisters Gourmet

Do you truly believe that customers already know this about Two Sisters Gourmet?

That's an important point you must not overlook 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 food & beverage 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 has become 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' 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 marketing push, put on the eye glasses of your customer and take a hard look at your landing page.

Search engine marketing strategies:

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.

Google going to the dogs? Fadsense: Google Adse...

Google going to the dogs? Fadsense: Google Adsense for Fashion?

Hey, maybe Google is barking up the wrong tree, but again, maybe there's more than possum up there?

Visit Google FadSense™

As A Two Sisters Gourmet 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 Two Sisters Gourmet" 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!

Much of it boils down to learning a few key things:

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 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 Two Sisters Gourmet...

In my last few blog posts 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.

After a Googol of Searches, Google Finally Clos...

After a Googol of Searches, Google Finally Closed Its Doors; It Took a Mere 118 Years. Fantastical?

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?

"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."

On this date...

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. 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.

Global search advertising revenue, which was $369 million in 2001, is expected to hit $7.9 billion this year, according to research from Piper Jaffray & Co. Those who work in and cover the industry see further expansion as paid search grows overseas and is embraced by ever- larger companies following audiences to the Web. (Source: Reuters 2005)

Good news for the Two Sisters Gourmet 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?

"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. Paid-search advertising has become a do-or-die proposition," says Jeff Saville, a consumer direct marketing manager at Deckers Outdoor Corp. (Nasdaq:DECK - news)

Are there dangers or flaws in search advertising?

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.
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.]

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.