Web development, design, and site optimization.

Whether you are Canadian, or you have interest in selling to Canadians, the time is now to ramp up your spending on your online presence and online marketing specifically targeting Canadians.

According to e-marketer, by 2009 Canadian online spending will reach over $16 Billion. A dramatic increase year-over-year as you can see in the graphic below. And while Canadians are spending more online, marketers in general are still slow to catch up. In fact some reports show that Canadian businesses as a whole spend as little as 6% of their advertising dollars on online activities.

So, you’ve been in business a while now. You have built a reasonably strong brand for yourself off-line and are now looking at or your being told to look at online marketing. Your marketing budget is already tied up for the year in print advertising, tv, radio, etc.  You don’t know where to start as far as planning for your online marketing, or how much to spend, or where to get the money from.

The answer may or may not be this simple depending on your situation, however I would suggest that you break down your current marketing budget. How much do you spend per month now? How much business are you getting back in return? Likely you know how much you are spending but measuring the the return on traditional marketing tactics can be very difficult. So why not take a percentage, maybe 20-25%, of your existing monthly spend and apply it towards a Pay-Per-Click marketing campaign? Your money is still being spent on advertising, you are still advertising in your traditional mediums, and you are  expanding yourself online. You are also getting to see real numbers and data on your return per dollar spent.

I would suggest you also look at investing that 20-25% of PPC ad spending across Google and Yahoo. They are the two biggest  draws for you and both will bring a different type of user.  You can split your budget 50/50, or 60/40, or whatever you feel is appropriate.

There seems to be no end to the amount of programs that advertise themselves as being able to make you money. Sometimes choosing your partners can be a chore. I recommend you try many, its the best way to see what works for you and what does not. However, if something is not working, dump it.

At the moment I am using:

Google Adsense- Delivers Ads to my site where each click delivers revenue to me.

Kontera Contextual Links - Delivers ads based on keywords in my content where each click delivers revenue to me.

MoreNiche - Affiliate marketing program where I choose the ads I want to display on my site and each click/sign up delivers revenue to me.

As you can see I am running 3 different monetization tactics on this site. This is a recommended approach for many reasons. First and foremost, you will make more money. But the real benefit is that at any given time a particular program may not do so well, having multiple sources helps offset that problem.

For some the thought of spending a little money to get quality, targeted traffic is a scary proposition. For many Pay-Per-Click is still something of an unknown. How do I get started, how much do I have to spend, can I manage it myself, what if I can’t do it, and on and on.

The truth of the matter is you can get started without breaking the bank. Even if you are an everyday individual without a huge budget. In a previous post I shared a promotion Yahoo! is running where you can setup a new account with them, deposit only $30 and they will add another $100. So right off, you have $130 to play with.

Obviously your first step is setting up an account with them. So what else should you know about using Yahoo! PPC?

1. You will be bidding on keywords that people search for on Yahoo!. Obviously you want to choose keywords that are both relevant to your site and that people actually search. To choose your keywords, try using a tool like the free keyword tracker. The popularity of a keyword will determine the amount you are likely to spend per click if you choose to bid on it. So I recommend you avoid the really generic, one word keywords.

2. The keywords you choose are not set in stone for any length of time, you can change them at anytime. If your site content changes focus, or if keywords just aren’t bringing you results, swap them for new ones.

3. You won’t spend more than you want to. You can set your max daily budgets, you can set an end date to your campaign. This allows you to make sure you don’t spend outside of your means. I am currently running a campaign using the $130 promo with a daily spend limit of $4. My estimated costs for the month will be right around $130.

4. Within your control panel you will have access to a number of reports that are easy to read and understand. The key things you may want to look at are the stats for your keywords. You can choose to display what your keywords currently are, your average positioning within the ad space, how many impressions your ad has received for each one (how many times your ad was displayed to a user), and how many clicks you had for each keyword. Using this information you can determine what keywords can and should be removed and replaced and you can determine if maybe your ad needs to be made more attractive. You may find that you are getting lots of impressions, but no clicks.

5. In building your ad you should look to make you ad short but to the point. It is also recommended that both the title and the description contain all or a portion of your core keyword. My website which is found at both Dropthemike.com and Helpwithtraffic.com is bidding on numerous “traffic” related keywords and my ad looks like this:

More Traffic, More Revenue
Get informed. Get traffic. Get paid. Learn from a professional.
www.helpwithtraffic.com

Ever wanted to compare the search results given by two providers at once? In the same window? Well you can with SearchBoth.com The service is not just limited to search engines they also allow you to compare Travel sites and Internet Yellow Pages sites.

Definitely worth your time.

When it comes to promoting yourself online, one of the key components to any campaign is still via email. The problem is its not quite as simple as grabbing hundreds or thousands of email addresses and sending them a mass email via Outlook.

You need to worry about plenty of things but here are some of the highlights :

1. Is your email list a list of users who opted-in to be contacted by you?

Email SPAM is receiving any unsolicited materials that were not requested. If the users have not opted-in to receiving email from you, you are likely wasting your time and theirs. Not to mention you are ruining your reputation as an emailer. Something that will greatly affect your ability to email users who do want to hear from you.

2. Is this a recurring mail list? Have you emailed it before? How large is the list?

Email reputation is based on many factors. A red flag is raised by ISPs, SPAM Companies, Email providers, etc when a particular IP performs questionable mailings. For instance not sending bulk email for a long time (or never having done so) and then all of a sudden emailing 20,000 users would be a red flag. Or perhaps you send a bulk email to 20,000 users and more than 10% bounce back (invalid email addresses), that is also a red flag. To prevent raising a flag, throttle your email campaigns. Break them up in batches. This makes you look less suspicious but also gives you the added benefit of being able to test marketing messages. If something seems to work better than another, change it in your next batch. The other item to increasing effectiveness should be a no-brainer, but make sure you weed out the bad email addresses from your list to prevent unwanted bounce backs.

3. Do you know what your email reputation is?

If you have not participated in mass mailing before, your rep is starting from scratch. You should build your rep up before engaging in too big of a promotion. Again throttle and weed out. Your rep is tied to the IP Address of your mail server(s). If you change IPs your rep starts all over again. So be careful.

4. Do your email servers have a dedicated IP?

This is important, as your email reputation is tied to your server IP. If you share an IP, another user’s practices can negatively affect yours.

5. Are you using the same email server for your corporate email?

Mistakes happen. You should never use the same server for you corporate email as you do for your bulk mailing campaigns. You run the risk of having your corporate email being blocked in the event that you develop a bad rep from your campaigns.

More often than not, unless you are doing huge amounts of mailings (1 million + per month) you are better off outsourcing the actual mailing piece to an Email Service Provider. Recently recommended to me were ExactTarget.com & SilverPop.com. But there are many others. Shop around. The one key bit of advice is make sure you get a dedicated IP address, and be sure to ask about any potential hazardous histories with that IP address. If less than a few months ago a big SPAMMER had the IP address, it is virtually useless to you. If it has been largely unused for a several month or even years, you may be ok. But talk to your ESP (EMail Service Provider) just the same.

Andrew Sloss of Ebay Canada gave a compelling and insightful presentation recently at a conference I attended. While the whole presentation was of interest, one key point really stood out to me.

According to Andrew, Ebay Canada processed some $1Billion in transactions last year. A pretty hefty number. However, 80% of those sales were Canadians buying from US Sellers. That is a huge number. Now admittedly the Canadian/US dollar played apart in that but 80% still gives me the impression that Canadians are just not seeing the opportunity to sell online.

Another stat that proves this case, in 2006 only 15% of Canadian businesses had even a portion of their inventory available online. That is pretty pathetic in all honesty. Especially when you consider my previous posts about the Canadian Landscape and how users research on line and then buy off line. If consumers can’t find your products online, even just to research, you are potentially losing out on significant additional in-store traffic and revenues.

I recently attended 2 Canadian conference/trade shows and had the pleasure of listening to some great presentations regarding Internet Marketing in general and Internet Marketing with a focus on the Canadian landscape.

The keynote at each conference was that of Kerry Munro, GM of Yahoo! Canada. Here are some of the highlights I picked up from his presentation:

* 78% of Canadians (over 5 years of age) are online.

* 78% of Canadians research products and services online before purchasing either online or in-store.

* Their research shows that house hold income can be directly tied to online usage. The higher the household income, the greater the amount of time spent online.

One of the points that really hits home is that while an online presence and ecommerce functionality may not result in greater sales via the web, it is almost guaranteed to have a direct and positive impact on your bricks-and-mortar store. Best Buy was sighted as an example of a company that saw a 19% increase in in-store traffic directly as a result of their website. Canadians like to research online but tend to purchase off line. It was noted that the average buyer will visit a website 42 times to research a product or service before making a buying decision (usually buying off line). The real key there is that users, no matter where they buy, first look online.

As you may or may not know, Google and other search engines have various algorithms in place to make sure their search results are relevant and that everyone is starting on a level and fair playing field. Those sites who do not play nicely…. they get blacklisted, usually FOREVER!

Are you aware of some of the things that may get you blacklisted? Here is a great read courtesy of WhiteHatMedia.com:

How To Get Blacklisted By The Search Engines: Black Hat Techniques

Cloaking

As a general rule, websites designed for ease of use by visitors will attract search engine spiders. That doesn’t stop some less than reputable individuals from disguising their pages in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage. What you see is most definitely not what you get.

The information presented to the search engine is not the same that the human visitor gets to see. One example is to put in some text the same colour as the background. In this way, the spiders but not the human eye can pick up keywords. This enables the website owner to present well written content but give the search engine the impression that the copy is filled with keywords, thereby attracting searches for those keywords.

That said, it is not difficult for competitors to detect such practices. Rest assured, that if the offending site were holding a high search engine position, it would be spotted, reported and banned from search engines.

Duplicate Sites

Search engines would prefer to find unique content throughout the net. When affiliate schemes first became popular, some web owners would post duplicate sites in an attempt to outrank the site being promoted and siphon off sales from the original. Subsequently, the search engines now have procedures in place to stop duplicate sites. Sites that may have been altered slightly to avoid detection can be spotted by competitors, reported and banned.

Keyword Stuffing

The easiest to spot and most common example of “black hat” methods, keyword stuffing relies on targeted keywords being placed en masse on a web page in the anticipation of being picked up and indexed by the search engines. Usually found written in a tiny font size at the bottom of a web page in order for the main content to make sense.

Link farms

Link farms have evolved from the strategy of building inbound links in order to raise search engine rankings. Sites have been built specifically to provide links, which are not particularly relevant to the site concerned.

Search engines expect links between websites to be based on relevant content. Sites that build links of no relevance, purely for the sake of search engine optimisation, can be banned from search engines, maybe for life.

Doorway Pages

Probably the easiest way to get blacklisted and lose even genuinely earned rankings, doorway pages are appended to a website, giving no value to a visitor. The page exists solely to attract search engines to the targeted keyword or phrase. These pages are usually mass-produced and posted automatically by software.

Redirects

Used in connection with doorways, redirects automatically move the visitor to a genuine page. Illegal methods are constantly being devised to beat attempts by search engines to detect this practice. The search engines do generally catch up with them and ban the sites. If not, competitors do pick up what’s going on and report the offenders.

What colour is your hat?

Many of these practices are blatantly in use today. Some webmasters tread the thin line between illegality and shady practices. Search engine rankings can still be achieved by operating a “black hat” strategy. Generally though, any gain is at best temporary and offenders do face the prospect of being blacklisted by the search engines. SEO agencies that operate legitimately will not tolerate competitors getting an unfair advantage and will report offenders. Some bans can be permanent, but even in cases where a site is only banned for a temporary period; it is increasingly difficult to get back up the ladder.

Best advice: play it clean!

The following is a great posts written by Dave Bascom of SEO.com, a company which one of my past interviewees (Mike Mann) has his hand in. Mike Mann knows this business, so any tips coming in from him or his affiliated companies are worth reading:

You should be paying very close attention to which keywords are driving traffic to your site. If someone at your company isn’t digging into your keyword referral reports in your analytics tool, you are leaving money on the table. Here’s a list of seven ways to effectively leverage your keyword analytics (for both organic and paid search traffic).

1. Peek inside the minds of searchers
Often we as marketers think we know a lot about how people search. The truth is, there are a lot of different ways to search and it varies by industry and from one individual to another. By analyzing the keywords and phrases that are driving traffic and sales to your website, you can find out how your customers search to find your site. What adjectives or other modifiers do potential customers search on? What order do they search

2. See which keywords are working for organic search
If your site is showing up on the first page for some of those keywords, how much traffic are you getting from those organic listings? More importantly, how many leads or sales are you getting from those keywords? You will sometimes be surprised at which keywords drive the most traffic. Often it’s not the keywords you think will be best, and that’s why you have to watch your keyword referral reports to see which keywords are working.

3. Determine which keywords are not driving traffic
If you’re on the first page of Google and you get zero clicks, it’s time to find some new keywords. Stick with the keywords that drive sales and ditch the keywords that don’t work. There is a huge difference in click through rates depending on the position your site is listed in, but if your site is anywhere on the first page of Google, you should expect some level of traffic, or you’re not targeting the right keyword.

4. Find keywords that work in PPC that can be used for SEO
The nice thing about PPC search advertising is that you can choose exactly which keywords your ad shows up for. The thing that sucks about PPC is that you have to pay for every click. So why not take what you’ve learned from your PPC campaign and make sure you’re focusing your SEO efforts on the right keywords? You’ll usually find that a first page organic listing for the same keyword will send a lot more traffic than a paid listing for the same phrase, and the price per click is way better

5. Find keywords that work for SEO that can be used for PPC campaigns
The same idea for taking PPC keywords into your SEO campaign works the other way, too. Organic search listings will bring people to your site for all kinds of different keywords–including tons of keyword combinations that you never would have thought to include in your PPC campaign. If you notice a particular phrase that drives a lot of sales from a unique organic search keyword, you should try it out in your PPC ads. You’ll usually see a similar conversion rate, or maybe even better conversion from PPC on the same keyword!

6. Identify keywords to add as negative matches
Negative matching with PPC campaigns is when you tell the search engines to not show your ad when certain words are included in the search query. This can come in handy when you’re doing broad matching on keywords that have multiple meanings or connotations. They can also help you eliminate keywords that are driving a lot of traffic without resulting in sales. By watching your conversion metrics on a keyword level, you can identify keywords that drive traffic without sales and add those keywords to your campaigns as negative matches. You can even save yourself some money by looking at irrelevant, under-performing keywords from your organic search that should be excluded from your PPC campaigns before you even spend a penny on PPC ads.

7. Get ideas for new content and products
You’ll start to notice that people find your site for all kinds of different, sometimes strange, keywords. Watch the keyword list for new ideas for topics you can write about on your blog or even a new product you can add to meet the needs of your customers. If you’re getting significant traffic on keywords that you don’t have content about, it’s a good indicator that traffic would flow to your site if you create content to match what people are looking for.

I find it very interesting to review the keyword referral data in website analytics reports. As you dig in you’ll find all kinds of hidden gems that you can apply to make your website better and more profitable!

Any other ideas of ways you’re using keyword analytics to grow your business?

Today I came across a very interesting site/service/social networking platform called Entrecard.com. The concept is this, blog owners can swap ads (blog ads) with one another using a points system. You gain points by visiting other blogs that are within the Entrecard.com network. You also gain points by selling ad space on your site. The costs of either your ads that you sell or the ones you are trying to buy are all tied to a rating system that rates user activities in the system. The more you visit other blogs and the more ads you sell, the more points you earn to buy premium space on premium blogger sites and the more valuable your avaliable ad spots on your sites become.

I have been using it for just one day, not even a full day, and I have already noticed a considerable boost in traffic. I am still working on getting more people to comment and interact. :)

Ever wished you could manage all of your domain names that are with multiple registrars in one location? If you are like most, you probably have.

A new service has hit the web that may help many of you. The service is known as DNZoom.com and is still in Beta. Here is what it does at the moment, for free:

Enter Accounts

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Once you have your security preferences setup, you can choose from the available registrars and parking companies supported in DNZoom Beta 2.0 and connect your existing accounts with DNZoom to allow you to manage your domains inside the application.

Import Domains

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DNZoom offers three ways to import domains into your DNZoom account: upload a spreadsheet of domains, bulk add domains through a text box, or enter the login credentials for your accounts which are then securely encrypted and used to pass data over your registrar or parking company’s API to integrate directly into DNZoom.

Filter/Organize

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Once your domains have been imported, you are free to browse and organize them as you wish. Filter your portfolio by registrar, parking company, folder, keyword, and/or TLD. Save filter settings to create “shortcut” tabs or virtual folders. From the portfolio page, you can also perform mass updates across a number of domains, including nameserver modifications, URL forwarding, Whois contact changes, and domain transfers.

Manage Domains

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On an individual domain level, you can view and manage all the pertinent information related to that domain name, including the nameservers, contact information, registrar lock status, and more. The latest Alexa stats and live Whois lookup for your domains are also at your fingertips.

Search, Spin & Register

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Expand your portfolio of domains by using our name spinner to generate suggestions based on keywords you enter. Search drop lists and domain auction marketplaces to find additional domains. You can even register new domains using your existing registrar account from within DNZoom!

Generate Reports

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The dashboard displays aggregated data about your domain portfolio, including a breakdown by TLD, last 7 days parking revenue, and a list of the most popular and profitable domains and keywords. The new reporting section goes deeper, letting you apply filters to generate revenue reports for domains at specific registrars or parking companies over a specified period of time.

For the last few weeks, Dropthemike.com has featured embedded Google Adsense ads in its posts. There are a number of different ways to approach this. Probably the easiest way in the long run is by installing a plugin for WordPress. There are a number available.

I however have not taken this approach. I have not played around with any plugins as of yet. Too focused on content at the moment. But what I have been doing is manually adding the code in each post that I make.

Here is the code you need to input in your post:

<div style=”display:block;float:right;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;”>

Insert you 250×250 Adsense code here.

</div>

Now if you want the embedded ad to be located to the left rather than the right, simply replace “right” with “left”. It is that simple.

On February 1st of 2008 I started using a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) suite in order to help me better promote and optimize my website (in this case blog) on the web. It has now been 18 days since I started using the tools at my disposal. Traffic has increased, and looking at my domain reports I get more and more traffic that came to me via search engines and particular keywords searched. This I can directly attribute to the tools I am using.

Now when I say traffic has increased, I do mean marginally. SEO, especially SEO which follows search engine guidelines, takes some time to take full effect. After about 2-3 months the full impact should be noticed. Anyone promising faster results beware, the last thing you want is for Google and other search engines to blacklist your domain name. They will if improper and deceitful methods are used to optimize a site.

So at this point you are probably asking what are you using, what is this SEO suite you speak of? Well I have been using a newly launched SEO suite offered by my company to it’s reseller channel. Meaning if you want to use it, you need to sign up as a reseller/partner of ours. That in itself is very easy to do. Just contact me and I can set you up.

The suite has numerous tools that allow you to manage and have more visibility into your site or blog. These tools include everything from submitting your site to search engines on a monthly basis, to helping you manage your Paid Advertising campaigns (PPC).

How does being a reseller for this service work? Easy. We set you up with a management portal (or you can be setup with our API for integration into an existing site). You can then setup individual users to have access to all of the tools. We bill you on a monthly basis for each package and you bill each user directly for what ever you feel is appropriate. The difference between your costs and what you charge is 100% yours to keep. Only sell a couple of packages a month, we only charge you for a couple of packages a month. There are no minimum volume requirements.

So what sort of pricing are you looking at for our packages?

1. Basic submission only: $5.00 monthly

2. Marketing package: $11.25 monthly

3. Professional package: $13.25 monthly

I have more information in the .pdf document here.

Also of note, all packages come with a FREE 30-DAY TRIAL for both you and your customers. Now as I stated previously, a solid SEO campaign will take 2-3 months. But just as I have noticed some improvements in just 18-days, you will be most definitely be able to see if the solution works for you during the 30-day trial.

I read a good insightful post today from one of the top blog earners these days about how he structures his blogs as Corporations in order to decrease his taxes paid come income tax time. He is Canadian, so some of the information may not completely apply to everyone, but I think it has information of benefit to just about anyone earning income from a blog. While we may not all have to worry about paying as much in taxes as John Chow, it is still worth knowing what to do in case you ever do.

Here is an excerpt:

“I run this blog as a corporation instead of a proprietorship. The number one reason for doing it this way is income tax. The corporate tax rate for a CCPC (Canadian Control Private Corporation) is 17% (15.5% for 2008) on the net income up to $400,000. While paying $68,000 in tax may seem like a big dollar amount, it’s far better than paying $160,509 if that $400,000 was earned as a proprietorship.”

Read more…