Many business owners find Paid Search a scary beast. A place where they can easily drop tens of thousands of dollars without knowing what they’re getting in return. Well, it can be like that if you start with an unlimited budget and set the Content Network to fire at will (I’ve seen it happen and it ain’t pretty).

Success comes from knowing what the heck you’re doing. If I were to collaborate with some of my peers, together we could write a book about responsible Paid Search management. However, that’s not what I’m looking to do. Today I want to discuss budget strategies.

Money, Money, Money… How much to spend and when?

One of the biggest dilemmas that decisions makers face when they are ready to take their business to a reliable Internet Marketing Firm, is the thought that brews inside their heads: “I don’t know what I don’t know.”

Some of them may be thinking that they know exactly what they want the campaign to look like, but deep down inside they understand that they just don’t understand how this technology works.

Hopefully they have found someone who actually knows what they are doing, such as this guy over here.

Let’s say that they found me through my contact form, and after a few phone calls, I bring the eVisibility rock star PPC management team over to discuss how we work, and nail down some details before we start working together.

Now, pretend that we already took care of all of the other stuff pertaining to discussing goal metrics, business metrics, etc. Now we are going to discuss a budget spending strategy (since that’s what this blog post is about). There are a couple of roads that we could take:

1. The Safe, but sometimes more expensive road.
2. The Risky, but often times more cost effective road.

There may be more “roads” one can take to start a campaign with, but those are the main ones I want to focus on for this post.

Say the client tells me that they have $50,000 to spend over the next 6 months, and they just don’t know how much, and at what frequency, they should spend that money.

The Safe, but sometimes costly…

It costs money to be safe, duh! The safe way of going about engaging Google Adwords looks like this:

• The campaign build out is very conservative, we would look for long tail keywords that are very relevant terms
• We wouldn’t use a whole lot of broad matching at first, and really focus on the core business
• Our budget spend would be somewhat this:
  • Month 1: $5,000
  • Month 2: $6,000
  • Month 3: $8,000
  • Month 4: $15,000
  • Month 5: $12,000
  • Month 6: $4,000

In the scenario above, Months 1, 2 and 3 would be the “discovery” months. It could take that long for us to really find a niche that works, and it’s quite possible that during that time the campaign under performs. There’s nothing wrong with the “safe” way, the only downside is that although you would spend less up front, it might take a longer period of time for your management team to really hone into what’s working and what isn’t working. Right around Month 4 they start to find what brings the best, most qualified traffic, and then the campaign really starts to flourish. But by then you’re also starting to run dry on campaign budget, so you would have to make the most with the time left.

Risky, often faster and cost effective…

It can cost you more than anticipated to be risky, and at the same time the results of taking some measurable and intelligent risks can be very rewarding. Here are some things you may expect to see in this scenario:

• The campaign build out is very aggressive, we would look for different terms, competitors, branded and non-branded terms. We would have many ads, many keywords, broad matches, etc.
• Our budget schedule would look more or less like this:
  • Month 1: $5,000
  • Month 2: $15,000
  • Month 3: $13,000
  • Month 4: $ 7,500
  • Month 5: $7,500
  • Month 6: $7,500

The first month would have a lower budget since we are spending a considerable amount of time building the campaign. Then, Months 2 and 3 would be big testing months. We wouldn’t be just tossing the budget away, and we would also be aggressively pursuing our target market. The goal is that you would find your ideal sweet spot somewhere in the end of Month 2 and the beginning of Month 3. Then, the rest of the campaign would be very efficient. Sure we would go a bit over the budget, but as long as the ROI is there why shouldn’t we?

Conclusion

Always consider the end goal when making a decision regarding which path you should take. I know, I know, this sounds very basic. But sometimes it’s the basic stuff that is missing in very important business decisions.

You have to know where you’re going. Then decide how you want to get there: are you going to play safe to take some risks?

If you are reading this and find yourself asking that very questions right now, shoot me a message and let me help you make that decision.

As always, don’t be shy to comment

Images Credit:
Toilet Paper Money: UK2.net
I Has A Money: I Can Has Cheezburger
Piggie Bank (with a slight edit by me): Industrial Clicks

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Budget Strategy for PPC Campaigns

Search Engine Optimization as a product.

SEO as a service, is offered from professional (and hopefully good) individuals like myself, as well as from big internet marketing companies, like eVisibility. The level of service also varies, for example:

• The individual consultant is often limited to how much he/she can actually do, and the level of knowledge is limited to what that person knows.
• The big agency can offer a wide range of services that intertwine and make up a healthy campaign. The level of knowledge is vast as there is a team of clever individuals working on the same campaign (at least that’s the case for good agencies).

The SEO Buyer.

As a prospect buyer of this service, one can be quite overwhelmed with the wide range of possibilities, actual deliverable tasks, personalities, cost, and more!

One of the things the SEO buyer starts to realize, as he/she shops around for their future SEO provider, is that different SEO providers will quote different deadlines to achieve a certain goal (usually measured around rankings).

We will get your website ranked in 3 months!!! GUARANTEED!!!

… oh boy…

SEO IS FOREVER!

Dear Mr. SEO Buyer,

Are you serious about thriving online? Yes? Well I have news for you, SEO is FOREVER!!

I understand that if you heard this during the sales process, you might think that the person on the other side of the phone has gone bananas. How can you even consider spending a bunch of money on something indefinitely (or at least for as long as you have a business that needs the internet)?

Don’t freak out, let me show you a different point of view on the subject at hand..

The 6 Months Trial

Once you find an SEO provider that you can trust, make sure that you have enough budget to run a 6 months campaign. You need to give your new partner some time to get the foundation established before you can expect to see any ROI.

After 6 months you should have a pretty good idea as to whether or not this is working for your business. You should be educated enough in the process to spot the weaknesses and strengths of your campaign.

If it’s working, keep going! If you have gotten great rankings and quality traffic, keep going!! Remember, there will always be someone, somewhere, doing the same thing you’re doing and more..

If you’re serious, Mr. SEO Buyer, you can never stop SEO, it’s forever!

–

Photo Credits:

SEO Blocks: Flashdaweb

Sleazebag Salesman: NVISolutions

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

SEO is FOREVER!

Without a doubt, Bit.ly is the biggest URL shortener service out there. And without question, what made them so popular is this one social network called… mmm..

what is it called again?.. Oh yeah, TWITTER.

Users who like to share links can really use services such as Bit.ly so that they can keep their messages under the 140 character limit. So it’s good news to know that Bit.ly just announced (on Monday) their new partnerships with Verisign, Websense and Sophos.

The goal of these new partners is to ensure that spam and other types of malicious software stay off the Bit.ly network. The presence of spammy and malicious links is a major problem that Bit.ly is hoping to solve. That grey area of not knowing where you’ll end up after clicking on a link shared through Twitter is just where spammers, phishers and scammers like to be.

Bit.ly’s new parterns are planning to solve that problem in three different ways:

Verisign’s iDefense service will screen IP addresses, domains and URLs based on its reputation database, to find those that “host exploits, malicious code, command and control servers, drop sites and other nefarious activity,” according to Bit.ly general manager Andrew Cohen.

WebSense’s ThreatSeeker Cloud will analyze the content on pages linked to through Bit.ly in real-time to identify and block “spammy URLs, malicious content and phishing sites.”

Meanwhile, Sophos rounds out the equation by analyzing the behavior of potential spammers to “go[] beyond blacklists, to proactively detect spam and malware.”

All I can say is YAY!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

URL Shorteners and SPAM

Matt Cutts put up a video about how Google deals with Robots.txt files. This will be a good one if you’re wondering exactly how Google sees your blocked URLs, etc…

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

How Robots.txt works in Google

Google Wave is Google’s new pet project that according to them will do nothing less than revolutionize the way people communicate online. It will go out to 100,000 beta testers tomorrow (Wednesday, September 30th, 2009).

Google Wave is unique because its platform is combining elements from many different online communication tools into one place. Things such as blogs, photo/video sharing, chats, email, documents, etc, will be all streaming in one fluid conversation, or a “wave” as Google likes to call it.

This web application was displayed at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, back in May. If you have a spare 1 hour and 20 minutes, you can watch it here.

The Google team in charge of this project see this as something that will become as main stream as Google itself. To quote one of the creators Jens Rasmussen:

“This should be something everybody uses and something everybody knows”

If you read tech blogs, you noticed the hustle and bustle around this topic today. Many of us want to be part of this beta group but trust me, it is a tight and sealed group at this point. If you’re not in yet forget about it, maybe next time!

Wave has been described as “dripping with ambition” and as a “new communication platform for a new Web.” from places such as TechCrunch.

More to come on this… Are you a beta tester? Tell us what you think!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Google Wave’s big day

Just in case you haven’t followed this story, Project 10^100 (pronounced “Project 10 to the 100th) is a Google initiative that was launched about a year ago and it aimed at having individuals from around the world submit their ideas on how they could help as many people as possible.

The winning idea (or up to 5 winning ideas) gets $10,000,000 funding from Google.

Initially Google said that they would choose individual ideas, but they received such an overwhelming response that they decided to go for themes instead. And now, that those themes have been selected, Google is asking you and me to go to their site and vote for the best ideas!

Voting ends on October 8, so go vote if this is something that resonates with you!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Google’s Project 10^100 themes announced

Too often business owners make important decisions based on non-factual data. Risky assumptions can be rewarding, but the same goes for the Roulette… Do you really want to gamble with your business?

Take this scenario for instance: a site is 100% geared towards lead acquisition. It has “Try us for FREE” buttons and call-to-action all over the place. In fact, you could not buy their product directly if you wanted, all you can do is take advantage of that “free offer”. They run on that model for a few years, and begin to really understand how that machine works.

Then, one day the big cheese decides to skip this lead acquisition process and attempt to go straight into a direct purchase model. He may have his legitimate reasons for doing so, and it might make sense, but it’s REALLY important to realize that doing so is taking a huge leap into unknown ground! Continuing our story, they add a shopping cart to the site and give that “Purchase Now” more attention than the “Free offer” lead gen catcher. They still offer that “Free offer”, it’s just a bit over shadowed by the “Purchase Now” call-to-action.

So far so good, they need to test those grounds and see what happens as it could be a tremendous step forward for their business.

As any goals oriented individual would do, the big cheese asks the team to create some goals around this new strategy, and the problem begins…

There’s nothing wrong with being an optimistic team, but it’s suicidal to setup goals based on the top performing lead generation model when you’re turning your online business into a “Buy Now” machine. EVERYTHING changes!! Sure, maybe there isn’t too much difference to the naked eye, the site is still the same – we only have a new bigger and brighter button everywhere that says “Buy Now” or whatever.

This addition may be a small change in the site, or a small change for the parties in charge, but it’s a HUGE ASS CHANGE for the consumer!!! Now, all of a sudden you can buy something that you used to get for free, WHOA!

Just take this into consideration… Whenever you run into a situation where you’re making changes to your site, however small they may be, really pay attention at how that is affecting your business model. And be really careful at how you’re measuring your success. It’s important to set high goals, and they also need to be realistic – and realistic goals are almost never built on assumptions. Remember the old saying? “When you assume you make an ASS our of U and ME”.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Never Take small changes for Granted!

My Pandora activity widget. I was playing around with it under my Pandora profile. They actually posted this here straight from there, and it was scheduled to be posted 8 hours from now. Kinda weird, but interesting at the same time..

Anyway, here’s my Pandora widget activity… Maybe someday it will make its way to my sidebar, we’ll see. (maybe when they stop advertising ATT on it!)

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Pandora Widget

It has been a long time since I last posted. It’s tough to find time to write when you’re traveling through Brazil, going to the Del Mar Race tracks and winning big, and styling a beautiful mustache in Vegas, so I’m sure you understand why it’s been quiet over here… heh

Now to business. I want to talk about creating something extremely useful on your own, a personalized toolbar. Doing this will save you time and space in your browser.

Before I start, keep in mind that this is not a post about my favorite Firefox add-ons, or toolbars. This is about putting all/or most of your most frequently used resources/tools at your fingertips where you can access them easily and quickly.

In this demonstration, I will go over how I built my personalized toolbar. The tools I like to have at my fingertips (in the toolbar) are the ones I use the most, but there are a lot of other useful tools out there. Don’t think that just because I didn’t list something here I don’t use it, it’s just not in my toolbar. Now, to the demo:

This tutorial on creating your personal toolbar (actually you’ll be recreating mine) is meant to be used on Firefox. Once in Firefox, make sure you have the following toolbars installed:

• Google Toolbar – You will want to have access to info from the source (cache dates, PR, etc)
  
• StumbleUpon Toolbar – Because Stumbling is fun
  
• SEO Book Toolbar – Aaron Wall’s SEO Toolbar. Not super accurate info all the time, but close enough

Now, make sure you have the Firefox Add-on Firebug installed. It’s a sweet web dev tool, very useful and a real time saver.

Once you have all of the items above installed, open a Firefox window and click on “View”, “Toolbars” , then “Customize”.

Now that you’re here, click on “Add New Toolbar”. You will be saving a new Firefox toolbar that you get to name whatever you want. If you read this post you must name it “Ricardo’s Toolbar”.. Alrigh alrigh, nevermind, you can name it whatever you want!

At this point, you can sort through the different features and drag and drop them from other toolbars right into your personalized toolbar. Here’s what my custom SEO toolbar, aka “Ricardo’s Toolbar”, looks like:

In it, I have my most used stumble upon buttons:

I also have the icons I use from the Google Toolbar:

… other miscelaneous tools from the SEO Toolbar and Firebug that I use frequently:

And last but not least, I also have the printer button, downloads and my bookmarks folder:

The coolest thing about my toolbar is that it has my most frequently used features from three different toolbars, but it only occupies the space of one! I just love it. Even though this seems like a simple and maybe even obvious thing to do, I bet you that most of you reading this post don’t have a customized toolbar. I can’t tell you how much time I save with this everyday, it’s awesome! So go ahead, put together your new [Your Name] Toolbar today!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Custom SEO Toolbar

As I was reading through my rss feeds this week, I stumbled upon on a hilarious video that represents the Client Vendor relationship, and it paints the picture so well I just had to re-post it. The original post, or at least original for me, is over at Barry’s blog, which by the way is a good one to follow

I can’t tell you how funny this video is to me… If you run your business and/or deal with vendors, I’m sure you’ll get a good laugh out of it too.. 

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Client Vendor Relationship video