At the risk of sounding sensational, if you understand the concepts introduced in this article it could literally mean the difference between miserable failure and insane online profits for your business. I'm not talking about a magical formula that will guarantee success, but it's something that all online marketers need to understand...
If you spend $50 on advertising and it generates more than $50 in net profits, that's a good investment.
Simple right? Well, through the use of proper testing and a "scientific" approach to advertising, there's no reason you can't turn your original $50 ad into millions of dollars in profits. It's just a matter of developing a system that creates a profit, and then reinvesting your initial profits back into your business in order to further expand your advertising.
By now I am sure you have heard that Ask Jeeves bought a small unknown company called Tukaroo. What you may not know is that Tukaroo was in the business to build a search application which could search both your desktop and the web in a seamless "end-to-end" search experience.
Desktop search is the new buzzword these days, with both Microsoft and Google developing these types of applications. It is kind of surprising to me to see Ask wading into this market. At least until you consider what the outcome could be.
Of course if you take MSN, Google and Yahoo! out of the mix for a while, it does make sense. With the recent acquisition of IWon, Excite and Myway and of course the purchase of Tukaroo, Ask is trying to set itself up as a legitimate alternate to the big 3.
NEW YORK, NY - June 10, 2004 (INB) -- Jupitermedia Corporation (Nasdaq: JUPM) today announced the launch of the SearchEngineWatch.com Forums (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com), an online discussion area allowing readers to share experiences, tips and thoughts about the growing area of search and search marketing.
"Forums are a great way for people to learn and share knowledge. Our Search Engine Strategies conferences have long been the leading way for people to do this in person. Now, the SearchEngineWatch.com Forums allow our audience to do this virtually," said Danny Sullivan, Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com.
About a month ago we brought you an article on the art of PPC bid management. In it we explained how, based on our research, bidding on broad terms might not be as effective as more specific targeted terms. However, if you need to build up your customer's awareness of you or your product then perhaps you may need to bid on both broad and narrow phrases in order to reinforce yourself to them.
So now that you may have defined the most appropriate bid management strategy, the next step you need to take to help the strategy be the most effective it can be is determine where people will enter your site.
Many PPC campaigns tend to send people to the home page of a site. To me this makes no sense. How often have you gone to the grocery store and found exactly what you wanted right by the door? So why would you force your potential customers to wade through a site (which could be hundreds of pages) just to find what they were looking for in the first place?