For many businesses, Pay Per Click advertising is their go to tactic for paid media. Pay Per Click has been the largest spend for over 85% of online advertisers since its inception. However, with the market being saturated, it can be difficult to market your ads to maximize your clicks. The first thing any advertising team must do is to eliminate the mistakes. Here we list 3 of the biggest mistakes that PPC advertisers make:

3 Reasons Your Pay Per Click Campaigns are Tanking

  1. Your Ad Stinks

Listen, no matter how many metrics you can drown yourself in… no matter what new analytic buzzword is being written about on the digital marketing blogs… no matter what new secret trick is being spewed by the experts, one truth remains about pay per click ads:

  • They mustn’t suck

Look at your PPC ads. Are you proud of them? Would you run them in a magazine? If you were handed budget to run that on page 3 of the NY Times, would you use that ad?

Granted, print ads have a different structure, but, the content of the ad is key.

Frankly, most PPC ads are nothing more than follow-the-leader, me-too marketing pieces that are written with weak wording, and yawn-inducing calls to action.

Your headline must be strong. If it wouldn’t pull in a newspaper, sales letter, magazine, billboard, or direct mail piece, then it won’t pull on Google, either.

You can take a different approach. You can get more creative since the feedback loop is faster. But, if the headline is weak, forget about sales.

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You literally have to drag someone by the eyeballs from the white, black, and blue jungle of the SERP to your ad. To do that, you need a strong headline.

You get very limited space in the body, so make it count. If you’re giving something away for free, say it now or lose the sale. PPC ads are nothing more than headline/subhead/CTA. Don’t waste even one character of space.

  1. Your Landing Page Stinks

You wrote a great ad. Congrats.

Now, go make sure your landing page matches the content of your ad, represents the product or service that you sell, and is written with a strong headline, strong benefit-rich copy, and a benefit-rich call to action.

Where most businesses fail with their Pay Per Click Ads

Where most businesses get into trouble is trying to send 100+ keyword-driven ads to the same (or a few) landing pages. Using broad match over a litany of keywords is fine… if you can match the content to the keyword. We all use the internet in a similar way. We are multitasking, multi-windowing, and listening to Adele’s new album while shopping for running shoes. And our phones are buzzing with texts, SnapChats, and Whatsapps.

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In that chaos, you can not expect your customer to make the subtle (but really profound) leap between what they searched for, what they saw in your ad, and what they’re now reading on your page. It’s kinda close but not exactly what I’m looking for… lemme go back to Google and keep looking.

  1. Your Bids are Too Low

In the early stages, it pays to overbid. The number of clicks your ad gets plays into how much a click costs, where the ad is displayed, and the overall adrank.

Early on, it’s better to pay extra and get those clicks so you can:

  • Get a better adrank
  • Formulate data about which keywords are working, which landing pages are testing the best, and which headlines are pulling leads

After you gather this info, you can begin to scale back, underbid, then work your way up.

But, this only works if the first two rules are followed. No matter what your bid, bad ads produce no leads. Check out Retaliate1st and our PPC services to optimize your campaigns and save you time and money.

Starting a new business? You already know that a website is essential, but how else can you promote your new business online?

The reality is, if you don’t have a huge budget for pay-per-click ads in the beginning, you’re going to need to rely on organic marketing methods. These can take time. If you work them to their full potential, you’ll gain traction and the web traffic will start to trickle in. At that point, you can use some of your profits to invest in pay-per-click advertising.

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Until then, utilize these 5 proven ways to get your new business noticed online:

  1. Make a Stand-Out Website

Just about every business has a website today. But, most of them are terrible. If you want to dominate your competitors, make sure that you build a website that helps you stand out from the crowd.

Do your market research. A site aimed a tweeners buying Bluetooth earbuds should look and function differently than one aimed at seniors looking to re-finish their bathrooms.

But, no matter who your audience is, make sure your site is clean, packed with good content, and is easy to navigate. No matter how web-savvy the user, if they can’t find your product page, you aren’t going to sell anything.

  1. Establish Your Social Media Pages

While Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest and slew of other social media sites grow in reach, Facebook is still the king of social media marketing.

Their “boosted” post feature angered a lot of small business owners who went from reaching hundreds or thousands of customers with each post, to needing to pay between $5 and $1000 per post to be seen.

But, as the program has aged, many businesses have utilized the power of boosted posts to reach deep, defined, niche audiences.

Facebook

Combined with its pay per click platform, Facebook should be our go-to early on.

Integrate Facebook with the other social media sites that fit yoru business. Early on, you’ll have very few followers. But, stay consistent, use your budget wisely, continue to crank out quality content, and soon you’ll have a solid base of followers to market to.

New Business Targeting and Content

  1. Use Local Listings

Local listing makes the search easier for your business to be found locally. Make sure you are registered with Google MyBusiness (Google Local). Then, use the same address and phone number for all local listing sites. Google likes uniformity in their local results.

  1. Generate Content

Blogging, with no followers, may seem pointless. But, learn to create, or hire quality content creators, so that your site becomes loaded with search engine optimized quality content such as articles, blogs, videos, picture, and infographics. Google loves information like this, and gives it preferential treatment in the search engine rankings.

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Write content for bigger websites. Everyone needs content. Creating great articles for bigger websites will generate links back to your site. This can help drive traffic to your site.

Don’t neglect writing for your local newspapers. Certain demographics (baby boomers, especially) still read the local paper for info. PR pieces are good, but human interest articles related to your product or service can lead to a solid flow of leads and sales because it not only exposes your business to a large pool of customers, being in the paper also lends your business a great deal of credibility.

For a small or medium business, using social media marketing can become overwhelming and frustrating. There are multiple platforms to choose from and some are clearly not right for your business. Figuring out return on investment can be tough, since most social media marketing doesn’t operate on a dollars-in v. dollars-out model. Converting likes into sales can be a multi-step process, and is best viewed in the long term.

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If you are unsure of how to get your social media marketing on track, check out these 4 tips. They’ll help you get started, or if you’re already going but find your efforts going in circle, these can help right the ship.

4 Ways Make Social Media Marketing

  1. Editorial schedule

If you are using typical social media marketing and networking sites like Facebook, Pinterest or twitter, you need to plan, carefully, what type of content you are posting. Keeping a simple schedule of what was posted, where & when & what type of content, is key. If you have a social media team, have them keep track of this – anything from spreadsheets to old-fashioned notebooks are fine for tracking content flow on social media.

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Scheduling not only helps you keep track of potential ROI, but it will help you re-purpose content, using it multiple times on multiple sites (even changed slightly), which breathes new life into your content marketing and ensures that all content is exposed to the maximum audience.

  1. Simplify

If you are overwhelmed, it is a sign that too much is going on. It is important to simplify. When in doubt, back off, check your content schedule and start again.

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  1. Stats

What is measurable can be improved and measuring metrics on social media can be tricky. Luckily Facebook offers excellent info in their “insights” section and it helps you track likes, reach, click-through rate, engagement, etc. If you are running ads on social media then these stats can help you measure real ROI.

  1. Free Help

Social media marketing is still fairly new and the game changes quickly. This is exciting for young marketers and finding interns to help with your social media campaigns is not difficult. Still-in-college marketers are hungry for experience and social media is time consuming. Bringing an intern or two on board can help you ramp up your production without costing a ton of money.

On-page SEO factors are fast becoming underrated and undervalued. But, their importance is actually increasing. If you implement these three factors on your site, you’ll leapfrog your completion. Let them deplete their budget on excessive link buying and the latest fads while you strengthen your on-site SEO and dominate them.

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

3 Key On-Page SEO Ranking Factors

  1. Title Tags

All of your SEO efforts are wasted if you don’t have good title tags. If you’ve outsourced the building of your site, or its digital marketing, do a quick search of your title tags to make sure they’re strong enough to grab Google’s attention.

Do your titles sound natural?

Do they describe what your service or product is about?

If you’re a local business, do they let potential customers know where you’re located?

A huge problem with small businesses is that when they farm out the building of their sites, the SEO firms either mis-title their pages, giving them generic names, or they only put effort into the site’s homepage.

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Every page, every article, every blog must have a strong title if you want to rise to the top of the rankings and stay there.

A good way to start is to make sure the keyword of that page is in the title.

Selling smart phone covers in San Diego? Start with:

“Smart phone covers stores in San Diego”

In general, the closer the keyword is to the beginning of your title, the more weight it will carry. But, make it sound natural.

You can build content, and great titles, many times over by repurposing

  1. Content

Better content means better rankings. And, good content meets Google’s criteria for being:

  • Uniquely valuable (pages that would be described by 80%+ of your visitors as being useful and high quality)
  • Sharable (remarkable videos, pictures, and text aid your shareability)
  • Naturally keyword optimized

Good content provides a breeding ground for your keywords and key phrases. It allows you to optimize your site without sounding unnatural, because you’re using your key phrases as a way of informing your audience.

on-page-seo

Note for pictures and video: don’t get lazy when it comes to optimizing images and video. Alt tags are extremely important for your media. Sometimes just optimizing your images can push you over the hump, and get your site on page one.

  1. Contact Info Consistency

This is a minor factor with Google, but a major one with customers.

Make sure that a potential customer could land on any page on your site and easily find your contact info. Don’t assume that just because your phone number or email is in your header, that this will be enough. Place your contact info (forms, email link, clickable phone number) throughout your content, as appropriate.

Remember that not everyone will discover your site through your home page. Many will land on deep pages. Give them a way to contact you and you’ll pull more leads. Plus, Google does reward this practice, and specifically penalizes sites that have less than optimal contact information listed.

Content is like water, marketers need it to survive. It is the life-force of all modern marketing engines, especially those that rely on in-bound traffic. Having built many high-speed content engines, we recommend building your brand strategy, content plan and then following these tips to optimize your content.

Simple Content Strategy Flow Diagram

Simple Content Strategy Flow Diagram

2 Ways To Build Your Brand With Content

  1. Focus on the Customer

Just like in sales, if you want to gain and keep your customer’s attention, you need to focus on them. While many businesses are now utilizing content marketing, most miss the mark by using their content to talk only about themselves.

Content --> SEO and Social Media

Content –> SEO and Social Media

Yes, you can use articles, videos, podcasts, pictures, and social media to tell your customers how great you are, how many awards your business has won, and how highly rated you are. But, you have to bend that info back, and let them know how all of that will benefit them.

  1. Storytelling

Telling stories is one of the oldest ways to hold someone’s attention. In sales and business, it’s no different. In fact, good storytelling in your content marketing can build your brand and increase leads and sales.

Tying in with focus on the customer, using stories about people “just like them” helps cement your brand as a solution in their mind.

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So, rather than simply cutting-and-pasting a review from a client, use that testimonial to create a story.

Content Options

What’s more compelling:

“This service is great. 5-Stars.” – Mrs. Jones, Westchester, NY

Or

“Water was bursting out of the pipes, the water heater was rattling, and a small flood was forming in the basement. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when Mrs. Jones called us, she was in near-tears as she watched countless memories stored in irreplaceable photo albums float away.  We were able to get to Mrs. Jones’ home within the hour, patch the leak, drain the flood, and had her waterheater up and running again by morning. Here’s what Mrs. Jones had to say about her experience with us: This service is great! 5-Stars.”

In the latter case, you’re walking the potential customer through a situation we all have been through. The testimonial is fairly weak in both cases, as many are. Most of your customers are going to give a short review. They’re busy, and most people have a tendency to “not know what to say” when faced with a blank page. So, don’t expect effusive praise from everyone. However, even small testimonials, when embedded in the story of how it happened, will implant in the mind of your future customer as the go-to solution when they have a similar problem.

YouTube is a fantastic marketing tool and is the second largest search engine in the world. It is behind only Google and tops Bing. Many savvy marketers have found ways to exploit YouTube to build their brands. Here we lay out two tactics to use YouTube to grow your business and sell product:

Create How To Youtube Videos

No matter what you sell, or which services you offer – YouTube can help. Having your videos rank on YouTube can bring in a significant amount of traffic, leads, and sales into your business.

YouTube

One of the easiest ways to get your videos ranked (and watched) is to create a series of “How To” videos.

  • How To content is being watched more than ever. A recent study showing searches for this type of video increased by over 70% in 2016.
  • Many of these searches coming from millennials (nearly three-quarters). The same research shows that 1-in-3 millennials will purchase a product after watching a How To video tied to that product.

This can be tricky for service businesses. Educating a customer on how to do a job that you offer seems counter-intuitive. But, if you follow the methods of the Home Depot , they often post How To videos of DIY jobs. More complicated projects may get a video too. These companies are quick to point out that the jobs are difficult, costly to do alone, or dangerous, and that a professional should be called in for help.

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This allows you to give your customers a great deal of free content, creating a positive feeling toward your services. When the time comes to call in a pro, you’ll be top of mind.

Just about any product would benefit from a How To series. Never underestimate how little your customers know about your product. Or how to use it. You may love your product, and know it’s every detail. But consumers are blasted with ads for hundreds of products and services every day.

Ask for the Lead

Just because content is free doesn’t mean it comes without a price tag. Most web users know this, so asking them outright for something in return for their free video is well accepted. Don’t be shy about asking for the lead at the end of your How To content:

  • A “subscribe” to your channel
  • Comments, shares, and likes
  • Their email or contact info
  • Them to contact you for help (call, comment, or email)

If you’ve tried Facebook ads before, but got very little results, you’re not alone. The early versions of Facebooks pay per click platform was stiff, counter-intuitive, and downright maddening. But, the improvements that’ve made has turned the once-frustrating marketing platform into a gold mine for business owners.

  1. Learn to Use Both Ads and Boosted Posts

If you are a small to medium sized business owner, don’t overlook the power of boosted posts. While pay per click ads are still more popular, the changes to the “boost” platform has made it a powerful way to reach potential customers.

  • Boosted posts allow you to promote content on your site, other social media accounts, or on your Facebook page
  • Boosted posts reach a large, very specific audience, instantly
  • Boosting posts is a great way to promote sales and events quickly, without wasting money

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  1. Define Your Audience

Google’s PPC platform is enormous, much larger than Facebook’s. However, Facebook blows away Google when it comes to the ability to create hyper-targeted ads.

If Google is throwing a huge net into the sea, pulling in any fish that swim by, Facebook ads are like putting your lines in specific sections of the water, with a specific bait, catching just the right fish to satisfy your hunger.

With Facebook you can target:

  • Gender, age, education, income level, location, family status, language, ethnicity, home ownership status, and much more
  • Interests, hobbies, recreational activities, where your customers shop, which brand of credit cards they hold, as well as where they shop, which gyms they go to, and their political leanings
  • Connections: those that have already liked your page and their friends, those who like pages or businesses similar to yours, those who attend events related to your business, and more

Facebook

Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Facebook also allows you to develop, and market to, “lookalike audiences.” You take your current customer information from your database, then upload it to Facebook, which will help filter it further (using a third-party data broker), delivering you a new subset of audience based on those who’ve purchased from you previously. This method is a bit advanced, and is best viewed as a way to extend your best audience, giving your ads extra mileage. But, save this for after you’ve become a fantastic Facebook ad creator and can craft killer boosted posts.

Has your site been stuck on page 2 or 3 of Google’s search engine results pages (SERP)? Or, worse yet is it foundering in the great beyond of pages 4 through oblivion? Well that could be based on how Google is crawling your site.

Maybe you’ve managed to tweak your site and get it onto page 1, but you can never seem to nudge it into the top 5 results.

In all of these cases, a quick focus on both your on-page search engine optimization (SEO), content, and your site’s craw-ability will boost your rankings, and may even push you into the top three spots on page 1.

What is Crawling?

Crawling is a term for how search engines read a website. They send out bots that search or “crawl” through the content, internally, of every site on the web. The exact pathways are unknown, as Google never reveals all, but the basics are well established.

The good news is that many of the ways your site is crawled by Google are similar to how it’s read by your human visitors.

The bad news is that technical issues need to be turned over to a professional because they are complicated.

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Internal Links

If you build a site that is easy for humans to read, Google will favor your website. In the early days of Google domination, a common theme was that Google liked to give a site the Grandma Test. Could the average grandmother navigate your website without becoming confused and frustrated.

This is still a good measure. And one of the ways to make your business’ site more Grandma ready is to increase interlinking.

  • Link internally on your site, from page to page
  • Make sure your home page is easy to find no matter where on the site the user is – no more than two clicks, one is preferable
  • Link to all email, phone numbers, and contact methods

Think of interlinks like tiny bridges. If your site is a huge park with lots of paths, small streams, islands of grassy land, it can become easy for someone to get lost. But, if you install enough bridges with good directions, it will be easier to find one’s way home.

The easier it is for Google Bot to crawl your site with well-placed interlinks, the higher it will rank your site. Good interlink pathways increases the number of pages the bot will crawl, increasing your Page Rank.

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Detours Wreck Rankings

Do you hate driving through traffic then being forced into a detour without much direction for an alternate route? So does Google Bot.

Broken Links, 404 Errors (page not found) and dead-end links frustrate the bot, and your users. If you have 404’s fix them with good re-directs. Use Google Webmaster Tools to scan your site for broken links. Find them and either delete them or have them fixed with a re-direct.

Even business owners who’ve bought into the concept of content marketing often complain that creating all that content is a lot of work. Yes, it pays off, but even the most dedicated content marketing gurus can go through lulls. These are the lulls where fresh content is hard to come by. This is why re-purposed content can be critical to your content marketing strategy.

re-purposed content 1

If you’re in a lull, don’t worry. Learn how to easily re-purpose your blogs, videos, and articles. You’ll have a never-ending stream of content for your site and your social media campaigns.

Here are three ways to easily re-use content without getting duplicate content penalties from Google:

  1. Transcribe Videos

Transcription of your videos: long or short, self-generated or professionally made, gives you a great piece of SEO friendly content that would normally be lost.

If you have review videos, having them transcribed gives you a double dose of credibility and status.

Re-Purposed Content vs Fresh Content

Not only does the text from your videos give you fresh content, but it gives those with slow internet connections, or those who simply don’t like video content, a chance to read what your video was all about. You can add on to this, tying-in a strong call to action, or boosting thin areas with helpful explanations, or you can simply have the video transcribed, give it an SEO-solid title, and post it as a new blog, page, or article.

Having this done may seem like a lot of time-consuming work, however you can have the task performed on sites like Fiverr or Upwork. It will only cost a few dollars per video and leave you freed up to do more important tasks.

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  1. Turn Blogs Into Social Media Posts

Taking the best lines from your blogs and using them as text-content on Social Media is a great way to re-purpose content. You can generate several good posts from a single blog post.

You could also create a small graphic of the quote and then post a picture and text. Graphic “quotes” tend to be very sharable on Facebook and can give your new content even more life.

  1. Use Blog or Video Content for Infographics

Infographics are popular because they deliver bite-sized chunks of info in a striking, visual package.

This helps you catch the attention of those who only scan information, rather than read it. This makes infographics ideal for your mobile marketing efforts.

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Users seem to engage with infographics more frequently than text. This makes them very sharable and highly engaging. This will help your social media marketing efforts, and can help get your blogs and articles get shared more often, giving your SEO a boost as well.

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And incase you needed any extra incentive:

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