paid marketing - Cultivating Community2024-03-19T08:47:14Zhttps://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/feed/tag/paid%2BmarketingHow To Make Paid Search Pay Offhttps://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/how-to-make-paid-search-pay-off2013-10-09T14:00:00.000Z2013-10-09T14:00:00.000ZGuest Contributorhttps://cultivate.ning.com/community/GuestContributor<div><p><em>One of the most common pain points amongst those who run online communities is visibility. How do you make your community known and findable? Paid marketing can give new or established communities a much needed boost in exposure. Our friends at <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/" target="_blank">SiteWit</a> know quite a lot about this area and provided us with a great four-part series on this subject. </em></p>
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<p>How can you drive a high volume of traffic to your new social website--and do it right out of the gate? One of the most effective ways is a paid search campaign on one of the big engines, like Google or Bing and Yahoo. It can bring in visitors who are actively looking for the specific activities or services your community provides. Best of all, paid search can start driving people to your community the same day it goes live.</p>
<p><strong>Launch Your Search Campaign Right</strong></p>
<p>Achieving success with a paid search campaign isn’t as easy as simply signing up. Doing it right means that, before you launch even one search ad, you need to understand the work involved. It can be a very daunting endeavor due to the fact that there are many steps you need to take and some risk if you don’t utilize a professional team or software to help you get going. Here are just a few of the tasks you’d have to complete to get started:</p>
<ul>
<li>Open an account with Google AdWords or Bing Ads.</li>
<li>Plan out and build a campaign.</li>
<li>Break up your campaign into ad groups.</li>
<li>Select strong keywords.</li>
<li>Create captivating ads with compelling messaging and visuals.</li>
<li>Determine how much you want to spend for placement.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Manage Your Campaign for Results</strong></p>
<p>After launch, there is still much more to do. You’ve only just begun. You need to carry out ongoing management to optimize your campaign outcome and to avoid paying for ads that don’t work. For instance:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Track keyword performance.</strong> Determine which keywords to keep and which to ax by looking at click-through rates (CTRs), costs per click (CPCs) and ad position.</li>
<li><strong>Identify your most effective ad messaging.</strong> Perform manual A/B testing to see which is driving the best traffic.</li>
<li><strong>Check your keyword bids daily, and bid strategically.</strong> Keep your ad on the first page of search results by bidding according to how the competition has affected the bidding landscape.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Turn to the Pros for Help Driving Traffic</strong></p>
<p>Want to take full advantage of paid search marketing? Try engaging a company that specializes in helping maximize search campaign results. An excellent and affordable example is SiteWit. Use SiteWit to set up a campaign fast — in about five minutes. They’ve found a way to automate all of the set up steps and make sure you are getting the optimal results for your budget range. SiteWit support includes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Quick set up process on Google and Bing all in one place</li>
<li>Keyword development and analysis</li>
<li>Local geo targeting</li>
<li>A/B testing</li>
<li>Automated keyword bidding</li>
<li>Automated budget maximization</li>
<li>Landing page recommendations</li>
<li>Campaign recommendations</li>
<li>Quality score optimization</li>
</ul>
<p>Visit <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/" title="www.sitewit.com">www.sitewit.com</a> to learn how they can help you drive more search traffic to your website.</p>
<p> </p>
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<p><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281911?profile=original" width="190" class="align-right" style="padding: 5px;"></p>
<p class="p1">This post <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/2012/11/29/yola-blog-post-how-to-make-paid-search-pay-off/" target="_blank">originally appeared on the SiteWit blog</a> as a guest blog post from <a href="https://www.yola.com/" title="Yola - Make a free website">Yola</a> about using SiteWit to start a paid search campaign after publishing a new website. To see the post on Yola, <a href="http://www.yola.com/blog/how-to-make-paid-search-pay-off/" title="Yola blog post about SiteWit">click here</a>. This is part of a <a href="http://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/list/tag/sitewit" target="_self">four article series</a> on paid marketing for communities</p>
<p class="p1"><b>About SiteWit</b></p>
<p class="p1"><a href="http://sitewit.com" target="_blank">SiteWit</a> is a Do It Yourself (DIY) online marketing platform specifically designed for small and mid-sized businesses. With SiteWit you can get started with pay-per-click advertising through Google and Bing. Our solution fully automate SEM management and optimization to maximize budgets and drive new customers to your site.</p></div>5 Common PPC Mistakes Made by Marketers with Tight Budgetshttps://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/5-common-ppc-mistakes-made-by-marketers-with-tight-budgets2013-10-02T14:00:00.000Z2013-10-02T14:00:00.000ZGuest Contributorhttps://cultivate.ning.com/community/GuestContributor<div><p><em>One of the most common pain points amongst those who run online communities is visibility. How do you make your community known and findable? Paid marketing can give new or established communities a much needed boost in exposure. Our friends at <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/" target="_blank">SiteWit</a> know quite a lot about this area and provided us with a great four-part series on this subject. </em></p>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">In an ideal world you’d have so much money to throw at online advertising that you could just wait to see what works and then fix it. But here in the real world we need to start with best practices and expand with success. So I’ve put together a small list of the mistakes I’ve made and have seen others make over and over again.</span></p>
<h3><span class="font-size-3">5 Common Pay-Per-Click Mistakes to Avoid</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/3571108692/" title="affirmative by ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3283/3571108692_dab9742389.jpg" width="500" height="306" alt="affirmative" class="align-center"></a></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Mistake #1 – Too large of a scope</strong><br> Within the two major ad networks, you get to choose to display your ads on the primary search network or extend it to context sensitive ads on other sites. While it’s alluring to reach out to a larger audience remember that for most sites the primary search network provides the best and most cost effective results. So, by spreading your budget out you will get less impact and you will typically weaken your ROI.</li>
<li><strong>Mistake #2 – Too broad of a phrase</strong><br> When you’re working in an industry, you start to think that your key terms could only apply to you. However, even terms like “appliances” could refer you a lot of dental related traffic to your home goods store and waste untold dollars in click waste and lost traffic. So, start by adding a qualifying word to all of your keywords. In this example, only buy clicks for “kitchen appliances” and, until your budget expands, use keyword and phrase matching only.</li>
<li><strong>Mistake #3 – Targeting the wrong audience</strong><br> The world is very large place, despite the popular Disney ride jingle that may counter my argument. There are a lot of people who can’t read your site, can’t make use of your product, or can’t have your product shipped to them. So, keep this in mind and set your geographic and language targeting to focus on just those who can.</li>
<li><strong>Mistake #4 – Forgetting about Quality Score</strong><br> You researched your keywords, carefully crafted your ads…Now what? Dump those keywords in your homepage, put together a graphic with a pitch and call it a landing page? No, you need to spend as much time and energy putting together a landing page that matches the keywords that you’re buying. Otherwise, your ad will be seen as irrelevant and cost more per click and get shown less often. So be sure to use keyword relevant text instead of images and make a compelling pitch on all your landing pages, even if it is your homepage.</li>
<li><strong>Mistake #5 – Follow-up</strong><br> This is the big one. It’s so easy to create a great campaign and then forget about it. But things change, keyword bids go up and down, popular culture and trends can both benefit and ruin previously unknown keywords, and some things simply work better than others. It’s important to regularly monitor your keywords, bids, and ROI. This takes a lot of time. We built SiteWit because campaign management is laborious to do right. There are lots of spreadsheets and calculations to adjust bids, maximize ROI, and find the gold in your campaign. So frankly you’re better off letting our giant brain keep track of your campaigns while you focus on building your business.</li>
</ul>
<p><span class="font-size-3">In conclusion, I’d like to say that while there is never an excuse to make mistakes 3, 4, or 5, there is a time and place for expanding your ad scope and casting a larger keyword net. How will you know when that time comes? The best indicator is when you can no longer spend your monthly budget. When this happens you need to start expanding your reach with great oversight, even if it means harvesting a few more weeds with the wheat.</span></p>
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<p>(<i>Image: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/3571108692/">affirmative</a>, a Creative Commons <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en">Attribution Share-Alike (2.0)</a> image from torley's photostream</i>)</p>
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<p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> <img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281911?profile=original" width="190" class="align-right"></p>
<p class="p1">This post <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/2012/11/29/yola-blog-post-how-to-make-paid-search-pay-off/" target="_blank">originally appeared on the SiteWit blog</a> and is part of a <a href="http://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/list/tag/sitewit" target="_self">four article series</a> on paid marketing for communities.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="p1"><b>About SiteWit</b></p>
<p class="p1"><a href="http://sitewit.com" target="_blank">SiteWit</a> is a Do It Yourself (DIY) online marketing platform specifically designed for small and mid-sized businesses. With SiteWit you can get started with pay-per-click advertising through Google and Bing. Our solution fully automate SEM management and optimization to maximize budgets and drive new customers to your site.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p></div>How You Should be Spending Your Time Doing PPChttps://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/how-you-should-be-spending-your-time-doing-ppc2013-09-25T14:00:00.000Z2013-09-25T14:00:00.000ZGuest Contributorhttps://cultivate.ning.com/community/GuestContributor<div><p><em>One of the most common pain points amongst those who run online communities is visibility. How do you make your community known and findable? Paid marketing can give new or established communities a much needed boost in exposure. Our friends at <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/" target="_blank">SiteWit</a> know quite a lot about this area and provided us with a great four-part series on this subject. </em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>If you are unsure about how to spend your time doing PPC management, you need to stop and ask yourself a few questions:</p>
<p><em>1. What am I trying to accomplish?<br> 2. What am I doing that produces the most value?<br> 3. What can I automate so I can increase sales?</em></p>
<h3>PPC can be time well spent if done right</h3>
<p>If you are spending your time trying to lower the cost of your PPC campaigns, you may be wasting time and money. Time should be spent trying to increase revenue, not lower costs. Think about it: If you spend $200 in labor trying to lower the cost of your PPC campaigns by $200, what did you really accomplish? More important, what did you not accomplish? Focus on tasks that produce revenue, regardless of whether they’re part of campaign management or not. Perhaps your time is better spent doing customer service or new client acquisition.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281923?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281923?profile=original" width="500" class="align-center"></a>Evaluate how much time you spend doing each part of your campaign management and see what produces the most value. Where do you spend most of your time? Are your fiddling with your campaign keywords, writing better ad copy, A/B testing, or designing better landing pages? If you spend most of your time fiddling with your keywords, maybe you need to reevaluate your strategy. Although long tail keywords will lower your cost, you’re wasting time if all you’re doing is lots of research. Focusing on ad copy and landing page design will produce much better results for your time investment. Always have new ads in the rotation and always be testing two or more landing pages. Focus on doing things that increase engagement, conversion and revenue.</p>
<p>Let’s look at automation. What in the PPC management process can be automated for less than the cost of doing it manually? There are dozens of tools available to use for managing PPC campaigns or building and testing landing pages. Look at what you can do well, what you can do fast and what you can automate so you can spend your time more wisely.</p>
<h3>SiteWit Analytics, Marketing and Enterprise Platforms gives users the tools to lower the time they spend doing PPC research, analysis, and optimization.</h3>
<p>Our new SiteWit Engagement Index provides users a new way to optimize and report PPC success whether tracking conversions or not. We free up your time so you can focus on ad copy, A/B testing and landing pages. Learn more about how SiteWit measures, analyzes and optimizes using engagement to save you time and money.</p>
<p> </p>
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<p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> <img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281911?profile=original" width="190" class="align-right"></p>
<p class="p1">This post <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/2012/10/08/how-you-should-be-spending-your-time-doing-ppc/" target="_blank">originally appeared on the SiteWit blog</a> and is part of a <a href="http://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/list/tag/sitewit" target="_self">four article series</a> on paid marketing for communities.</p>
<p class="p1"><b>About SiteWit</b></p>
<p class="p1"><a href="http://sitewit.com" target="_blank">SiteWit</a> is a Do It Yourself (DIY) online marketing platform specifically designed for small and mid-sized businesses. With SiteWit you can get started with pay-per-click advertising through Google and Bing. Our solution fully automate SEM management and optimization to maximize budgets and drive new customers to your site.</p>
<p> </p></div>Driving Traffic To Your Community: Why SiteWit Workshttps://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/driving-traffic-to-your-site-why-sitewit-works2013-09-18T13:30:00.000Z2013-09-18T13:30:00.000ZGuest Contributorhttps://cultivate.ning.com/community/GuestContributor<div><p><em>One of the most common pain points amongst those who run online communities is visibility. How do you make your community known and findable? Paid marketing can give new or established communities a much needed boost in exposure. Our friends at <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/" target="_blank">SiteWit</a> know quite a lot about this area and provided us with a great four-part series on this subject. </em></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Hooray you just built an awesome community! Now what? Well the answer is very simple: It’s time to start driving traffic to your site.</span></p>
<h3><span class="font-size-4">One of the best (and quickest) ways to drive traffic to your website is to build a paid search campaign on one of the big search engines such as Google or Bing & Yahoo!.</span></h3>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Paid search is a great way to drive traffic to your site because it will bring in visitors that are already looking for your specific kind of product and/or service. Best of all, it can happen right away! You could have people coming to your website just hours after it has gone live.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/moneyblognewz/5267464508/" title="Google Main Search by MoneyBlogNewz, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5242/5267464508_7326039635.jpg" width="500" height="291" alt="Google Main Search"></a></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">So how do I do start, you ask? Well that’s a bit more complicated. First you’ll have to open a Google Adwords or Bing Ads account. Then you’re going to build a campaign. Then you’re going to break up that campaign into ad groups. Then you’ll have to pick your keywords. Then you’ll have to build ads. Then you’ll have to determine how much you want to spend. Then you’ll have to…see where this is going? And here’s the kicker…starting the campaign is the easy part. After that you’ll have to consistently:</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Check your keyword performance by looking at CTRs, CPCs, ad position, and Quality Score to determine which ones need to stay in your list and which ones need the ax.</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Do your own manual a/b testing to determine which message in your ads is driving the best traffic.</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Look at your keyword bids DAILY to see how the competition has affected the bidding landscape and then determine what the right bid should be today to stay on that first page of search results.</span></li>
</ul>
<h3><span class="font-size-4">In a nutshell, paid search is great but it is no easy task.</span></h3>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Luckily there are companies such as SiteWit that have made it easy to start a paid search marketing campaign with all the confidence and none of the know-how. Setting up a campaign through SiteWit is easy, can be done in about five minutes, and it won’t break the bank. They’ll take care of the technical stuff by performing:</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Keyword analysis</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Automated a/b testing</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Automated keyword bidding</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Landing page recommendations</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Campaign recommendations</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Quality score optimization</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">And so much more!</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Now that you know where to start and what tool to use, let’s start driving people to your website! Visit www.sitewit.com to learn how they can help you market your website with confidence.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p>(<i>Image: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/moneyblognewz/5267464508/">Google Main Search</a>, a Creative Commons <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en">Attribution (2.0)</a> image from moneyblognewz's photostream</i>)</p>
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<p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> <img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281911?profile=original" width="190" class="align-right"></p>
<p class="p1">This post <a href="http://www.sitewit.com/2012/10/25/driving-traffic-to-your-site-why-sitewit/" target="_blank">originally appeared on the SiteWit blog</a> and is part of a <a href="http://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/list/tag/sitewit" target="_self">four article series</a> on paid marketing for communities.</p>
<p class="p1"></p>
<p class="p1"><b>About SiteWit</b></p>
<p class="p1"><a href="http://sitewit.com" target="_blank">SiteWit</a> is a Do It Yourself (DIY) online marketing platform specifically designed for small and mid-sized businesses. With SiteWit you can get started with pay-per-click advertising through Google and Bing. Our solution fully automate SEM management and optimization to maximize budgets and drive new customers to your site.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p></div>