3 Important Factors in Selecting Your Internet Marketing company

As you’ve seen from my book, The Winning Way – Ultimate Checklist of 500+ Proven Internet Marketing Strategies, there isn’t a shortage of methods to market your online business and drive traffic. In fact, the opposite is true. There are so many options out there that the real question is, what can you focus on that will yield the greatest results?

In ideal circumstances (unlimited time, money, and knowledge) you’d work on incorporating every Internet marketing strategy imaginable. Think of all the traffic you’d get. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible for any company, big or small. Much like selecting a topic for your business, Internet marketing is most effective when you go niche and focus in on a few things.

When I wrote The Winning Way, I covered a vast range of marketing tips. However, it wasn’t my intention to imply that you had to check off each of items in order to be successful online. What I did was present you with a lot of different options. It’s your job to look through them all and find the ones that work best for your site.

How do you find the best marketing strategies for your needs? That largely depends on 3 important factors – effectiveness, skills, and resources. I’ll cover each of them here and explain how it applies to you.
1. Effectiveness of the Method

As you might have guessed, not all marketing tactics are equal – especially across different niches or industries. For example, while social media might be a great channel for a technology review site, it would probably be less beneficial for a site selling industrial tools. Similarly, display advertising works well when used for branding purposes, but usually lags behind other channels like PPC when used for lead generation.

Understand your business goals and your target audience. Where do your potential customers go online? What do they respond to? Once you have that down, analyze each of the different marketing strategies and see if they are good fits for your business. After that, it’s just a matter of testing and going with what yields the best results.
2. Your Skills & Experience

If you’re an independent webmaster, you can’t just throw money at marketing like some the big companies do. A lot of times you’ll have to do all of the promotion yourself. Sure, the effectiveness of the strategies is still important here, but that will depend heavily on your skills and experience. Are you a good writer? Then start a blog and build authority in your chosen niche. Don’t have much technical knowledge? Then stay away from tinkering with your site’s code for SEO purposes.

Focus in on the marketing that you’re good at. You don’t need to be a jack of all trades to be successful. For everything else, you can either bring on a complementary partner or outsource the work.
3. Your Resources – Time & Money

Finally, the last criteria for selecting marketing strategies to focus in on is resources (time and money). Time and money are limited and you have to spend each of them wisely to achieve maximum results. For example, if you have a lot of time, but little money, it makes sense to engage in guerilla marketing (e.g. forum posting, blog commenting). However, these practices are a waste of time if you have a lot of money. You can outsource these tasks and spend your time more efficiently. Same goes for SEO and PPC. If you’re strapped for cash, SEO makes the most sense. If you’re rolling in the dough, PPC is the way to go.

What Internet marketing strategies are you focusing on today to build your business? Have you analyzed effectiveness, skills, and resources to utilize methods that will get you the most exposure in your particular situation?

Get Your Company to Pay You to Blog

I recently read that for every person who starts tweeting, another blog dies. But here’s the thing. Back in 2004, blogs were dismissed as a fad, and today there are billions of them. Blogging is not going away anytime soon.

You might be interested in blogging yourself, but don’t have the time or inclination to write one independent of your day job. What if you could be like the hundreds of people at Microsoft who count blogging among their daily responsibilities? Here are a few steps to proceed in that direction:
Develop your area of expertise:

It’s not realistic – or even a good idea – for every employed person in the world to have a blog. For one thing, the blogosphere is cluttered enough as it is, and blogs that have no real purpose for existence will just muck things up even more. You should write a blog because you have a unique opinion on an industry issue and can establish yourself as a credible expert. Hone your perspective by reading literature and other blogs in your field and determining where there’s an unmet need.
Get your writing up to par:

Not everyone has the natural ability write and/or maintain a blog that requires a concise outpouring of coherent thought several times a week. If you want to blog but sense that your command of the written word needs a little fine-tuning, consider a writing class and study how the top bloggers construct their most popular posts.
Test launch outside of business hours:

Your first foray into corporate blogging should not discuss the company you work for – that could get you in trouble. Instead, become involved with the blogging community in your industry, and make your blog as general and helpful to readers as you can. Piggyback on recent news, cite other writers’ work, and watch the accuracy of your facts. While you get the ball rolling, make sure you research/write your posts and do your commenting at home.
Showcase your blog to marketing:

As your blog is gaining traction, study the social media efforts (hopefully there are some) being conducted by your company’s marketing department. Determine the most logical way that your blog could fit into the mix, and then, once Google Analytics says that your platform is flourishing, meet with marketing to discuss it. Make it clear to all involved that your blog is currently independent of your job.
Work out the details:

Marketing may feel that you can add value as an official blogger for the company. This may mean continuing your own blog with company sponsorship, or forming a partnership with a senior executive or group of employees who are already blogging. Ask marketing if they would be willing to contribute to your salary in exchange for using your blog as an outreach tool.
Approach your boss:

Even if marketing offers its support – keep in mind that it may not – you will need to approach your boss about your proposed new responsibility. When you do, talk in terms of value provided to the company. How can allotting you an hour a day to blog pay huge dividends in terms of organizational awareness, genuine customer engagement, and search engine real estate?

As you undertake this process, remember your patience and your humility. I know several people who turned blogging as a side project into full-time gigs at their companies, but all of them started with the heartfelt desire to provide useful content that creates a win for both the reader and the organization.

Prevent and Monitor Invalid Clicks, and keep an AdSense Account in Good Standing

Over the last week or two there’s been an increase amount of chatter on forums and blogs about invalid clicks and AdSense. Some of the talk has contained information that has been a little confusing and perhaps even ill-informed (and some ‘influenced’ by companies with their own agendas) - so I got in touch with AdSense and asked if they had any information to help their publishers protect themselves against invalid clicks.

The following is what they replied with - in their words it is ‘a concise guide to how to prevent and monitor invalid clicks, and keep an AdSense account in good standing.’ I hope that it is helpful to AdSense publishers everywhere:

The Google AdSense team has heard many concerns about how Google treats invalid click activity on publisher’s sites, and there have been questions on how to keep your AdSense account in good standing. The Google Ads Quality Traffic Team wants to help all publishers keep their accounts in good order, so here are some tips to keep in mind.

We understand that it’s not always possible to control the behavior of your users, but you can be proactive about monitoring your traffic, and you can take steps to ensure that your site provides a helpful and safe environment for users and advertisers. Here are some top tips for keeping your account in good standing (which you may have seen before): https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23921

Expanding on the tip “Be aware of how your site is promoted.” we’d like to remind you that, should you purchase traffic to promote your site, you do so at your own risk. There are many site promotion services out there that appear to be legitimate PPC advertising companies or search engines, but actually may be sending artificial traffic to your site for their own gain. (For legal reasons, we’re not allowed to disclose the names of such services.)

To combat this, we highly recommend that you use channels to segment your traffic by source (e.g. a channel for your site’s Google AdWords traffic only). If one channel’s reports look particularly suspicious, you may want to consider unsubscribing from that traffic service. We also recommend using Analytics to slice and dice your traffic reports further to ensure that you’re receiving clicks from users who are genuinely interested in your ads.

Though we encourage you to be proactive about monitoring your site and ad traffic, we highly discourage the use of click tracking via third-party software or custom ad implementations. These methods may:

* inadvertently disclose sensitive information about you or your site to a third-party
* disrupt Google’s ad delivery or click logging in a way that violates our Terms and Conditions

In addition, click tracking may not provide you with significantly more information than you can already find in your AdSense or Analytics reports. We believe that the creative use of channels can help you gain detailed insights into your account.

If you see unusual activity on your account, feel free to submit this form to let us know: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact Please note that we will only respond if we find a significant issue with your account.

Invalid clicks can come from many sources, as described at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=16737. While we’re unable to go into the details of our monitoring system, you should know that invalid clicks don’t always mean clicking on your own ads or using click bots. Our Ad Traffic Quality Team looks for numerous types of activity that may inflate advertiser costs, then takes the necessary actions to protect our advertisers.

That said, we still find that many publishers are clicking on their own ads, possibly because they feel that Google is disregarding those clicks. Keep in mind that even though we filter the revenue from an invalid click, we don’t ignore it completely. If we detect significant invalid activity on your AdSense ads, we may take action on your account to protect our advertisers from inflated costs. Here are some examples of situations in which clicking your own ads is prohibited:

* Clicking out of interest in the ad content
* Clicking to see an ad’s destination URL, such as for filtering purposes (we recommend trying the AdSense Preview Tool, available at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10005)
* Clicking to ensure that Google is properly registering clicks on your ads (we log all ad clicks, but it can sometimes take up to 24 hours before your reports are finalized)
* Clicking to test your website

For general invalid click questions, you can find more information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8426

For questions about AdSense accounts disabled for invalid clicks, you can find more information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.