Internet marketing tips for Conklin Company

Would Your Sales Increase If Conklin Company Cu...

Would Your Sales Increase If Conklin Company Customers Wore Vividly Colored Purple Jerseys?

In recent months, I have oftentimes had the honor to acting as a consultant with Conklin Company Independent Business Owners. No matter how many tips I blog, articles I write, or trainings I teach, I still sometimes get people that say, "internet search marketing might be wonderful, but paying a buck a click scares the pajeebers out of me and I'm thinking it is not for my homecare & personal care."

While this always amazes me, I'm certain that one of the reasons I hear this is because the "approach" of internet search marketing is still not understood. Maybe an analogy will help.

Maybe it's a marketer's dream, but think for a second how advantagious it would be if you could plant yourself at the front door of a Sears or Best Buy and immediately spot customers who were looking for your product? Lets say they wore bright Purple tee shirts announcing what they were shopping for. And what if they knew to go straight to you rather than go round and round the store searching out the items on their shopping list?

With Google AdWords, Yahoo's Sponsored Search, a top 10 pay per click search engines, or perhaps even one of the minor league PPC engines, you connect with people ready to make a buying decision almost instantly, just as they want to hear from you.

The power of this idea gets even more enticing if we augment it a bit more... What if you could have a thousand advertising agents at the door of every department store in the country. What's more, you'd have to pay them only if they found prospects and began selling them your homecare & personal care.

Now, even if your competition has posted giant advertisements, hovering over everyone, it doesn't matter. Few shoppers want to be sold in a generic sense rather, they want to 'find' what it is they came shopping for originally. All the while, your "agents" are actively reaching out to every single prospect that seems targeted for what you have.

Managing a pay-per-click ad campaign is like deploying a team of enthusiastic "agents", except that these search agents won't require breaks and they require no pay unless they produce results. Your "agents" will be waiting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for customers looking for your products or services. As soon as customers start shopping, 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)

Conklin Company and Mompreneurs. Is it happeni...

Conklin Company and Mompreneurs. Is it happening?

Source: DSA.org

I recently checked the "gender stats" available from the Direct Sales Association, 79.9% of people in "direct sales" are women. Even without a calculator, I can figure the guys total a paltry 20.1%. Many of the women in our industry (and site visitors we seek) are current or future moms. It's know wonder 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 NBC Nightly News; their mompreneurs online site and Message Board draws millions of visitors each month.

In reading through the Mompreneurs Online web site you'll discover that they've interviewed hundreds of mothers managing kids and a business from home. Their interviews revealed that these at-home business women share certain secrets for online results. 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 Pat and Ellen:

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.
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.
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.

Maybe you think Conklin Company is a perfect spot for moms? Maybe you're hoping to attract mothers managing kids and a business from home to your site, blog, product or business? Or, maybe you already have lots of moms and a true mompreneurial ground swell in the works?

Whatever the case, moms running their own business from home are an important niche and your internet marketing can target these moms. Moms are both a consumer and a business force to be respected and understood.

With any luck, your homecare & personal care will be just the thing these mompreneurs are seeking? 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!

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?

Becoming Relevant to Mompreneurs...

Here's one way you can be relevant and attractive in reaching out to mothers managing kids and a business from 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.

Homecare please check our archived posts for m...

Homecare & personal care are interesting services to be marketed by pay-per-click

For over 35 years the Conklin Company has offered a diversity of high quality products in fact, more than 130 across six major product divisions: Agronomics, Animal Products, Building Products, Consumer Products, Family Care, Lubrication & Vehicle Products and Telecommunications.

As A Conklin Company Independent Business Owner 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 people.

Can your homecare & personal care be sold by pay-per-click or not? This is question number one, right? But equally important, can you come up with a strategy that produces more profits and results than expense?

Guess what, the answer is: "most likely."

Pay per click tips for this week:

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.

That's a 'guess-work' element 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 perceived' about you and the homecare & personal care you offer. Not sure? Then If at best you're guessing, then 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 people consider 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' concerns should be addressed the moment they hit your first web page after clicking your ad; so before you start any traffic generation strategy, put on the eye glasses of your customer and take a hard look at your landing page.

PPC Tips:

Without any further delay, I'll continue with my tips this week.

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.

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.

Visit Google FadSense™

As A Conklin Company Independent Business Owner, 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 Conklin Company" 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 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 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 Conklin Company...

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.

Today in History... After 118 Years, Google Inc...

Today in History... After 118 Years, Google Inc. Closed Its Doors.

www.flickr.com

What started as a a unique approach to solving one of computing's biggest challenges (retrieving relevant information from a massive set of data) and 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?

Larry Page has an interesting vision on being the best... "The perfect search engine, would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want, never settle for the best."

It Happened Today...

In 1997 - After 118 years, the Woolworth Corp. closed its last 400 five-and-dime stores. The Woolworth building (opened in 1919) in New York City was the world's tallest skyscraper until 1930.

Could this happen to Google? Well, yes. Bill Gates is on a mission to build a Google killer. What got him so riled? Google, the darling of search is moving into software and that's Microsoft's turf. Fortune story here. 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 Conklin Company Independent Business Owner

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

The choice for advertisers is clear. Pay-per-click search listings appear to out perform other methods when it comes to delivering a cost-effective way to get customers. According to Piper Jaffray & Co., the cost to acquire a customer is approximately $8.50 for search, $20 for Yellow Pages, $50 for online display ads, $60 for e-mail and $70 for direct mail. Television data was not mentioned.

According to Jeff Saville, "It's a marketer's dream tool because we can monitor it in so many different ways and watch the effectiveness of it." Jeff is a marketing manager with Deckers Outdoor Corp. (Nasdaq:DECK - news)

Are there dangers or flaws in search advertising?

At times, advertisers and their online business affiliates find they are competing with each other in auction-style bidding for key words and pushing up their own costs.
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 :-)

Pay per click tips for this week:

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.

Internet marketing tips for Conklin Company

Would Your Sales Increase If Conklin Company Cu...

Would Your Sales Increase If Conklin Company Customers Wore Vividly Colored Purple Jerseys?

Conklin Company and Mompreneurs. Is it happeni...

Conklin Company and Mompreneurs. Is it happening?

Search engine marketing strategies:

Becoming Relevant to Mompreneurs...

Homecare please check our archived posts for m...

Homecare & personal care are interesting services to be marketed by pay-per-click

Pay per click tips for this week:

Sponsored Ads? AdWords? Help for Conklin Compan...

Sponsored Ads? AdWords? Help for Conklin Company.

Next, We'll Review How Google and Yahoo Deal With Your Bids...

New Google AdWords keyword status changes: Simplified keyword states and quality-based minimum bids.

Search engine marketing strategies:

Conklin Company? What lurks in those consumers'...

Conklin Company? What lurks in those consumers' heads?

Do you honestly think that customers already think this about Conklin Company?

PPC Tips:

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 :-)

My Continuing Tips To Help You With Conklin Company...

Today in History... After 118 Years, Google Inc...

Today in History... After 118 Years, Google Inc. Closed Its Doors.

Good news for the Conklin Company Independent Business Owner

Are there dangers or flaws in search advertising?

Pay per click tips for this week: