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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 SiteWit know quite a lot about this area and provided us with a great four-part series on this subject.
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.
Launch Your Search Campaign Right
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:
- Open an account with Google AdWords or Bing Ads.
- Plan out and build a campaign.
- Break up your campaign into ad groups.
- Select strong keywords.
- Create captivating ads with compelling messaging and visuals.
- Determine how much you want to spend for placement.
Manage Your Campaign for Results
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:
- Track keyword performance. Determine which keywords to keep and which to ax by looking at click-through rates (CTRs), costs per click (CPCs) and ad position.
- Identify your most effective ad messaging. Perform manual A/B testing to see which is driving the best traffic.
- Check your keyword bids daily, and bid strategically. Keep your ad on the first page of search results by bidding according to how the competition has affected the bidding landscape.
Turn to the Pros for Help Driving Traffic
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:
- Quick set up process on Google and Bing all in one place
- Keyword development and analysis
- Local geo targeting
- A/B testing
- Automated keyword bidding
- Automated budget maximization
- Landing page recommendations
- Campaign recommendations
- Quality score optimization
Visit www.sitewit.com to learn how they can help you drive more search traffic to your website.
This post originally appeared on the SiteWit blog as a guest blog post from Yola about using SiteWit to start a paid search campaign after publishing a new website. To see the post on Yola, click here. This is part of a four article series on paid marketing for communities
About SiteWit
SiteWit 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.
