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!

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!

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

At last Yelp has rolled out a new feature, highly anticipated I might add, that lets business owners comment on their reviews publicly. This has been a long time coming, and I’m curious to see what it does to the dynamic of Yelp.com. It just rolled out last night.

The problem with not having such feature is that business owners would create fake Yelp accounts and review their own businesses to detract from what someone real said about them. The thing with that is that they almost always do such a sloppy job at it that you can tell the fakes from the real ones just by reading the reviews.

Now business owners have a serious and legitimate way to come back around. I feel that if a one star review were to be followed up with properly, there would be a good chance that the reviewer would update their review and maybe even increase their star rating.

It’s amazing how some business really do depend on having a good reputation on Yelp, so this is a great feature.

Many businesses have already started taking advantage of this. To get started, they just need to go to biz.yelp.com and claim their account page. Yelp has also put together a Business Owner’s Guide, a document worth skimming through if you’re in this boat.

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

Yelp launches comment for Business Owners

Last week I reached out to my friends over at Twitter for some advice. I was asking them what to do with my profile. Unfortunately I didn’t take a screenshot of my old profile to be able to show you what it looked like, but I’ll attempt to describe it here:

- My avatar was the icon/logo I use here on my blog. 

- The background in my profile was a tile setup of my little lifesaver image with a black background (this was my old avatar). 

That was pretty much it. 

I had been watching my Twitter feed and seeing some discussions here and there regarding the proper way to build a good Twitter account. Being that I was feeling a little in the dark about it since I’m only now starting to really use Twitter the way it’s supposed to be used (I think.. no really, I am!), I thought I’d ask the group of peeps whose Tweets I’m following what they thought I should do. I put out the following Tweet:

Question: Should I change my twitter to my real name and use a real photo? Why? Appreciate your feedback and will link to u on a blog post.

Here are some of the answers I received:

WhiskeyChick: I would do it. Your reach is still relatively small on here so making the switch is better earlier than later.

… then she sent one more: Besides, Real photos and names take you away from the awkward meetings like “Hi, aren’t you ladiesman500?”

IssaHines: If you have a lot of followers it may confuse people especially if you’ve been on twitter for a long time. If not go for it.

tysoncrosbie: http://tinyurl.com/dg7e6w My thoughts on having a photo of yourself.

SearchBuzz: -Yes – i would like to do the same. Why? Well, first time I met you I didn’t even recognize you without your life preserver on?

palisade14: On @twhirl your real name appears below your handle. Consider @leelefever | @commoncraft ’s approach too.

imnotadoctor: Stash it! (I’m hoping he was referring to putting up a photo I have with a mustache… I hope )

I appreciate the advice and after taking all of it under consideration, I started the changing process with my Twitter account. My first step was to upload a real photo of me, and then to change my Twitter profile page. After that, I received a little more feedback from some closer friends and will be making a few more tweaks here and there, but overall I think I’m moving in the right direction. Here are some lessons I learned during this process:

1 – It’s okay to use an avatar and not your real name on Twitter (duh!). However, if you want to network in the real world, then you should try to just have your name there somewhere. In my case, I chose to display my real name within my profile page, but continue to use “seosurvivor” as my username. 

2 – It’s important to have consistency with your avatar, especially while building up your account. I also seemed to have received an overwhelming amount of feedback pointing towards making my Twitter avatar a real photo of myself rather than the logo image since it wasn’t very personable. Since I changed my avatar to my actual photo, I have started to lean towards finding a middle ground. I’ll be spending some time on Photoshop tomorrow trying to come up with a real photo that also incorporates the seosurvivor life raft.

3 – It’s helpful to develop your Twitter profile page with something creative. Feel free to edit the background and make it your own. See mine for example.

That’s it for now. I’m looking forward to connecting with you on Twitter, so get in there and follow me!

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

Improving my Twitter profile

I have just finished upgrading my Wordpress to the new 2.7! OOOoooohh. So far so good. After so many upgrades (c’mon Wordpress, give us a little break) I’ve managed to be good enough at it that I don’t pull my entire site down anymore. It was actually pretty smooth, and I must say, ’tis a good looking dashboard!

Also, in addition to keeping up with the Search Engine Optimization community, I’m trying to expand my horizons into the world of Paid Search as well. I already work in that realm, and have a basic strategic knowledge of running decent campaigns, but I would like to dive a little deeper in there as well, just to broaden my capacity as an SEM project manager. So in addition to picking up some new feeds from good Paid Search resources and blogs, I’m also getting certified with the Adwords program, just so I can flash that little badge. I know all you get is a jpeg that says “Google Adwords Qualified Professional”, but I didn’t see anywhere in their policies stating that I can’t print that image, cut it out and make it into a real badge!

Last but not least, I will make an effort to keep my blog updated more often than I have. I went over one month without posting anything and the theory I had talked about before — that my list of subscribers tends to increase when I don’t write anything — was debunked!

Enjoy this awesome little video that Videogum put together, I grabbed it from Boing Boing! The Most Awesome Viral Videos of 2008!!

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

Wordpress 2.7, SEM, and a Viral Video

Good morning, or good afternoon dear subscribers. There aren’t many of you, but by a weird, mystifying phenomenon the number of people subscribing to my blog tends to increase when I don’t write. It’s hilarious!! One of the first times I stopped writing for about a month and a half, I went from 10 to 20 subscribers! Hahaha, I know my numbers are very, very modest, but hey we’re talking quality here, not quantity

Now I haven’t written anything for another month and a half and it jumped up to 30 subscribers! I’m doing pretty good now eh? Maybe I should stop writing all together. There’s a quote I like, and although it’s a rude one, it applies a lot of the time, and I quote

“don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.”

This is some proverb, and I don’t know who said it first, but it rings true doesn’t it?

Anyway, in the last month I have been called Rodrigo twice, Raul once, and my actual name (Ricardo) the rest of the time. I have been parenting my wonderful daughter, working hard, studying hard, playing hard and steadily increasing my stress level. I finally reached a point where I needed to do what I’m good at doing on online businesses to my body – welcome to the concept of On Body Optimization.

Nothing new really. No diet. No crazy healing thing. Just paying as much attention to me as I do to everything and everyone else around me.

The first step was to clean up my <HEAD>. Inside my <HEAD> there were too many confusing <TITLE>s, and <DESCRIPTION>s with a million of <KEYWORDS>. So, just like I would on a website, I’m cleaning that up in the human being Ricardo..

We can all use some On Body (and Mind) Optimization, so this post goes to all of you stressed out people like me to chill out and remember that even though everything else is important, you’re more important, because without you all of the other things don’t matter.

See, the seosurvivor knows a thing or two about life. I’m not going to get into advices and details, I’m not dietician, but I’ll talk about somethings I’m doing to help me cope:

• Cutting coffee down, going with Green Tea and Yerba Mate instead. It’s all about the anti-oxidants.
• Actually taking an hour for myself during lunch breaks, and eating something healthy, on the lighter side.
• Finding something to do daily that I can get some exercise out of and free my mind from worries for a bit. Ex: Surfing, Basketball, Soccer, Gym, Running, etc.
• Among other things, getting some good daily supplements to help balance my nutrition by covering areas I’m not getting with the foods I eat.

What are some things you like to do to decompress and “optimize” yourself?

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

On Body Optimization Required

Happy Friday everyone!

What a crazy week this has been, and interestingly enough it has rushed by like the ones before! Wow time flies… Here’s a little something funny for you to share with your friends, or should you?

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

Should you forward that email?

Buenas tardes everyone,

It’s another perfect day in this perfect world we live in, and what better than some good updates from the Search Engine Marketing world to make everything fit right in? I can’t think of anything better… Below is a short list of some articles that captured my attention this week, nothing from the main news stream that you already heard about from reading major news sources. This is the good stuff you don’t find out from such sources, these are things that come from “a friend of a friend”. Today I am your friend’s friend, and here are the news I bring to you:

1. imnotadoctor exposed Big Local today. As he was doing the geek’s version of the daily muscle flexing in front of the mirror, which is googling keywords your site ranks well for, he found some major spamming going on. Not only that, but they have a fishy 302 redirect in place taking visitors from the target url (www.clovers.com) to their main site (www.BigLocal.com). You should read up on that story on Search Engine Land.
2. A Twitter Search engine is out. I found http://summize.com/ this week, but I’m not sure how new it is. Pretty interesting tool, and simple concept. It basically searches through people’s tweats and serves results. Here is the search result’s page for tweats related to the seosurvivor.
3. Google’s Porn problem seems to be far from over. In the last month there have been at least two instances where Google was spotted displaying explicit porno pictures in the universal search results box. When searching for “knuckles” and “Hot Celebrities” on regular search, with the “adult filter” on, you’d get a big old explicit image right there on the top of the results. Not cool Google, not cool at all. Granted, it’s freaking hard to keep those spamming porn sites out of the way.



4. Linda Phan, from eVisibility, wrote an awesome post about helping searchers find their way with local business ads. Amongst other things, Linda talks about how advertisers don’t get charged for people clicking to expand the plusbox, clicking on the actual map, or clicking to get directions to the business location, which is nice for all adwords users out there. A good read if your business is local and you use PPC.
5. The SEM industry still rocks! Danny DeMichele wrote a post on his blog talking about some recent studies showing that the Internet Marketing Industry is far from declining, it’s actually gaining more momentum! That’s a good thing to know for all those of us who are immersed in it 24/7.

I’m stirring the brain juice and crafting some fun posts for next week. Have a great weekend and pick up your trash

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

Geek gossip