SiteProNews |
- Searching Social For Search
- Are You Missing Out By Not Having A Membership Site
- How To Geotarget Ads For Localized Leads
| Posted: 19 Aug 2009 09:23 AM PDT I recently wrote about how, in future, search could greatly benefit on-demand digital television, but the future of search doesn’t start there and isn’t even that futuristic. I think search is about to undergo a major evolutionary shift that will change the underpinnings of how search works, is used, and is defined. Advertisers want to fish where the fish are, and the fish are very social these days. Social media sites are coming of age and Twitter search is all the rage. But if social is the new flavor of search, we need to break it down and understand the how and the why. The first factor in this comes from a cautionary tail of jumping the shark. MySpace did not protect the sanctity of community, which is the single biggest value driver for social. As the community grew, everyone befriended everyone and thus the community lost its value. To avoid a similar fate, Facebook and Twitter must protect their community like the engines guard their algorithms to maintain relevance. At some point, these companies need to start taking some liberties to protect the community for us to ensure long-term value. Twitter, for example, needs to do some serious housekeeping, as there are too many accounts a tad on the shady side, to say the least. If Facebook and Twitter can avoid diluting the community and jumping the shark, they can change the game of search. To understand how, lets look at why we search. I’m oversimplifying here, but there are three basic need states that dictate our search behavior that I will use to prove out my theory.
If I want to go on vacation, I’ll type in “vacation.” Once I learn a little, then I start searching for “cheap holidays to Spain” or “Bahamas cruises.” After I have compared prices, used multiple engines over multiple sessions, and I have decided what I want, I type in the company or brand that has it and I convert. Why is this important? Because if community adds value, then some of the aforementioned search activity will start to shift to social areas. I would rather ask my close friends, family, coworkers, or anyone with a shared interest than hunt and peck my way through algorithmic search results. Not only does this have the potential to speed up a consumer’s search journey, but it also comes in the form of trusted sources in real time. You can never underestimate the power combination of immediacy and word of mouth. But given the nature of what social search can be, it will never add a lot of value navigationally — so I see that search activity staying at an engine. This shift in behavior (if it plays out) has huge implications for our industry. When we do multiclick attribution analysis for our clients, we see about 50% of the value of a last click and conversion being re-attributed to early funnel keywords in the discovery and informational search phases, where the battle for awareness and interest is really occurring. This is because the vast majority of last clicks and one-click search journeys come from navigational searches. More often than not, this is your brand terms. Google right now owns navigational search because it owns the browser-based search box, so using last-click attribution, it gets all the glory. This was part of Yahoo’s search undoing – - our research indicates that Yahoo is typically used in early search phases with nonbranded keyword queries that don’t result in a direct click to conversion. When we changed our attribution weighting we saw that Yahoo received roughly 4% more credit for revenue generated. If early funnel keyword activity increasingly happens within Twitter and/or Facebook versus at, dare I say, a traditional search engine, then the game has changed in two major ways. One, this shift in behavior represents a sizable amount of monetizable query volume for the social communities. Two, if we attribute roughly 50% of the value of the last click back to earlier exposures, then the price I am willing to pay for that click drops proportionally. Think about it — search under last-click attribution still runs on the 80/20 rule, meaning 80% of revenue comes from 20% of the keywords. So Bing and Yahoo risk a loss of volume and Google risks a drop in click value. This bodes well for social communities trying to find revenue streams, because early funnel nonbranded keywords, which is where social search can add the most value, come with higher CPCs and scale. So maybe the Google killer is not one engine, but a collective change in behavior where a growing volume of search activity starts happening in social environments. There is a lot of revenue at stake here, especially as advertisers get savvy and move away from last-click attribution. Rob Griffin is Director of Search & Analytics at Media Contacts, the digital (that’s the frosted) side of Havas Media. Rob can always be reached on his Crackberry at rob.griffin@us.mediacontacts.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Are You Missing Out By Not Having A Membership Site Posted: 19 Aug 2009 09:18 AM PDT Everywhere you turn these days, you read about membership sites. You read how easy they are to set up, and how lucrative they can be. That should naturally lead you to the question, “Should I be operating my own membership site?” Are they really that easy to set up and maintain? First of all, a membership site is nothing more than a system for password protecting some “content,” and a system for handling recurring billing of members. So they can be very simple, and in fact can be set up using all free resources. You could even think of a membership site as another type of list, only one where you don’t have to contend with email filters. You communicate with your “list members” inside the site instead of via email. In deciding to set up a membership site, the first question that you should answer is what niche or topic would the membership site be focused on. Are there enough people interested in that topic to make it profitable? Do people interested in that topic spend money on it? The simplest way to answer the above questions is to ask yourself, “What phrases would people interested in my proposed topic type into a search engine?” Come up with a list of keywords they’d likely use. Next, go to Google.com and enter those keyword phrases into their search box, and look at how many searches there are for those terms as well as how many webpages there are out there targeting those phrases. Look off to the right side of the page and see if there are “Google AdWords” ads displayed. If you see ads off to the right side of the page, that means that people are paying to advertise to people interested in that topic. That’s generally a strong indicator that people searching on those terms are also buying! Your research shows you how many searches are done on your keywords each month, and indicates if there is a large pool of potential members for your new membership site. There is no hard and fast rule for how many searches there should be. This just gives you a feel for if this is a viable niche for a membership site. How many members do you need for a successful membership site anyway? If you have a site that has 200 members each paying $20 per month, would you consider that a success? What if that site only took 2 hours per month to maintain? The secret to making a site easy to maintain, by the way, is to have your members interact a lot with each other, and generate most of the content! There are many successful online entrepreneurs who have a dozen or more small, simple, memberships sites, each with only a few hundred members. Most of these sites don’t generate a fortune, but collectively they afford a very comfortable lifestyle. There is no reason that you have to stop at one simple, easy to maintain, membership site. You could easily launch one a month, and in a year have a dozen. If each produced just that $4000 in our example above, that would be $48k per month. If your goals aren’t that lofty, you could stop with just one simple membership site producing just that $4000, or you could go for a lot more members. If you set your site up properly, you’ll have to spend very little time actually maintaining it. So, are you missing out by not having a membership site? Probably. Willie Crawford has been marketing goods and services on the internet since 1996. He operates numerous simple membership sites. To learn how you can set up your own membership site in under six minutes, using all completely free software, visit: http://YourNewMembershipSite.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources Are You Missing Out By Not Having A Membership Site |
| How To Geotarget Ads For Localized Leads Posted: 19 Aug 2009 09:15 AM PDT
So what’s the significance? If you should do a quick search with, say, the term “Internet Marketing” you’ll find both sets of results in google.de and google.es are different. The similarity is each contains some numbers of sites based on their native country-specific domain extensions and languages. This is Google’s attempt at presenting the best possible results based on localization and as you can see, it also becomes possible for you as the business owner to take note of the combination of factors that enables your localized site—if you should design one—to rank high in the “localized Google”. Possibly the most influential factor is, as mentioned, the country-specific domains. Invest in website.co.in when there is a compelling reason to target the India market. You can still take on the lesser recommendation of sticking to just one domain. Some corporate websites I’ve seen have subdomains created to represent their various country offices e.g. india.website.com or website.com/india. The IP address of the web hosting server with which you run your website also contributes some weightage to the localization effect. From the SEO point of view, it is more effective to publish content in the local language since localized Googles run on the same language. Though there are many free and paid translation tools, you cannot afford grammar and vocabulary mistakes and miss out on subtle nuances of language when you’re in business. It pays to get a professional human translator to edit the content. The benefits of inbound backlinking to increase PageRank still applies. So far all that’s being said refers to on-page optimization to influence free traffic. In Google AdWords there’s also some work to do for geotargeting ads. However, AdWords have always been well known for ease of use so you can clear this hurdle in minutes simply by clicking on “Edit Campaign Settings” in your campaign and modify under “Target Audience” section. Here’s the interesting part. Consider 2 phenomena in searches:
When you geotarget AdWords ads, it’s not necessary to put in location to the ad’s title, but consider carefully whether your business should accommodate travelers. Travelers would have done their homework before they make their travels, so you cannot restrict your ads from appearing depending on where these would-be travelers conduct their searches. Example: your business may be renting out vacation homes in Florida, but surely it’s not only the Florida natives who rent vacation homes. What about the Brits? Unless you’re highly aware of where your overseas sources of customers are likely to come from (Google Analytics will be helpful for tracking), you can switch off geotargeting option and put in title “Rent Vacations Home In Florida”. You may also put in negative keywords for locations where you know you won’t convert. Alternatively, create and geotarget a separate ad appealing to British travelers for Florida vacation homes. Let me end off by saying this post does not end conclusively and I’m sure there’s more to geotargeting strategies than meets the eye. I’m writing as a creative response to a query by a client of mine about targeting specific crowd and demographics, and I hope this article contains enough information to get you on a good start. Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources How To Geotarget Ads For Localized Leads |
It is a missed opportunity for businesses not to promote on the Internet. For those which are already doing it, it is another challenge to execute a geotargeted marketing campaign to accurately attract location-based leads. In this article I will write about the key steps and tools a webmaster must know in order to harness them for such a campaign creation. Google, being a global, multinational corporation, does not have just one search engine at google.com. There’s google.de in German, google.es in Spanish and so many other languages. To learn of all the available languages, visit Google’s Language Tools.| You are subscribed to email updates from SiteProNews Recent Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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