According to Alec, everyone Google’s themselves even if they don’t admit it. He was paying a relatively inconsequential amount of money for each click as there was no competition on Google’s search results pages for those keywords and Alec managed to secure 4 interviews and got offered 2 jobs. He is now working as a senior copywriter at Young & Rubicam (Y&R) New York. I would say that Alec’s “out of the box” thinking and PPC strategy was a certain success.

In my blog article today I am going to delve into the reasons why PPC is so effective and how you can use it just as Alec Brownstein did to your advantage.

What is Pay Per Click?

Pay per click is a method of online marketing where an advertiser bids and a pre-selected list of keywords and each time a user searches for one of the predefined keywords an Adwords Ad will be shown, now it’s important to note that and advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad, hence the term pay per click. Advertisers bid a certain amount in order for the ad to be shown, if there is a lot of competition (other advertisers) then you will have to pay a higher bid in order to feature higher on the landscape. There was no competition on the search terms that Alec Brownstein was bidding on therefore he had to bid very little to be featured at the top position on the “sponsored links” section of Google, also because his ad text or ad copy was very targeted and specific he did not generate irrelevant traffic. The entire PPC venture cost Alec approximately $6.

How to Get Started with Google Adwords

Step 1: Target customers
Choose from dozens of languages and nearly 200 countries. You can even choose to show your ads only to users in specific cities or regions.

Step 2: Create your ad
Write your ad text and choose the keywords that will trigger those ads.

A. Write your ad text.

Create a headline and two lines of ad text, with up to 95 characters total. The Display URL field is where you enter the website URL that will be displayed in your AdWords ad. The Display URL must fit within a 35-character limit. The Destination URL can be up to 1,024 characters and is the actual web page users will land on when they click on your ad.

B. Select your keywords.

Each keyword should be on its own line. (Press Enter on your keyboard after typing each keyword or keyword phrase.) Make sure that the keywords you enter are specific to your site or product to ensure that you receive the most cost-effective results.

Step 3: Set pricing
Choose the currency you want to use, then set your daily budget and cost per click (CPC). Spend as much or as little as you like each day; no minimum budget is required.

A. Choose your currency.

Please note that the currency you select will apply to both billing and payment. Therefore, if you select US dollars, payment will be requested and accepted only in US dollars. Once you have selected a currency for your account, it won’t be possible to change the currency again later. Also note that in some cases the currency you select will affect the payment options available to you.

B. Select your daily budget.

Your daily budget should equal the amount you want to spend on this ad campaign each month, divided by the number of days in the month. For instance: If you want to spend R3000 in a 30-day month, your daily budget should be R100 per day.

Step 4: Sign up
Finish creating an AdWords account by providing your email address and choosing a password. When you’re ready to activate your ads, log in to your new account and submit your billing information.

Enter your Google Account email address and password.

If you already have a Google Account and would like to use the same login information for your new AdWords account, select the first radio button. Then select ‘I’d like to use my existing Google Account for AdWords.’ Enter your Google Account login email and password in the fields provided. Click ‘Continue.’
When you are ready to activate your ads, sign in to your account and submit your billing information. If you choose a postpay payment method, your ads run almost immediately after you enter your billing information. If you choose a prepay payment method, your ads run almost immediately after we receive your payment

Is Pay Per Click Advertising Effective?

The great advantage Pay per click advertising has over other marketing methods is the ability to deliver almost instantaneous results that are completely measurable, no other form of marketing can make such a boast. However success with Pay Per Click marketing can only be achieved with a well planned marketing strategy and a well constructed online campaign. When planning a PPC campaign you need to visualise what goals you would like to achieve and what aspects and skills you would like to advertise. Once you have your campaigns goals, the next step would be to generate keywords that are closely related to your end goal, in this instance you would ultimately like to gain employment at a suitable company. You may try, like Alec to bid on the companies you would like to work in or bid on the names of the people you would like to work with. Another angle would be to bid on the type of skills that you possess that you think a potential employer would be looking for, such as “copywriter” or “creative director”, you could even try and bid on search terms such as “best copywriter”, the list of keywords and possibilities are only limited by your creativity. The great thing about creating such a campaign is that it will be relatively cheap and the traffic you do receive will be highly targeted. You can further improve the quality of the traffic you receive by ensuring that your ad text is relevant, clear and concise.

So if you are one of the people who are looking for a good job, why not give Pay per click marketing a try, if it worked for Alec Brownstein why not you?

Happy Marketing!

Now in today’s world and with the emergence of web 2.0 it has become vitally important for us to control our personal brand. Why you may ask? Well you quite often attend conferences and networking session to promote yourself and build up contacts. This is a way of advertising your personal brand. Now in today’s age the online world has become so entwined in our lives that it is almost impossible to separate the two. Now what does that mean for your personal brand? Well in whichever stage of your life you may find yourself, you need to make sure you control what people find when the search for you online. Thus if you search for your name you should find your own web properties. For instance if you search for “Chris Calitz” you will find my personal blog with contact information for me and links to my social presence online ie. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.

Thus I have made sure people find info about me, which I control. This means I can then further advertise myself by simply making changes to the web properties I own. Now Emil gave you a quite detailed explanation of how to setup a Wordpress site but you need to take this a step further. You need to do some SEO on your website to ensure you are the first result in search engines for your branded terms.

Now luckily most of our branded terms are not qualified as very competitive keywords for instance “Chris Calitz” is not a very competitive term so the SEO I needed to do was not that extensive. If you do however have a name such as Richard Branson you might have a problem.

1. Choosing a domain name

Now the first step I would recommend is that you buy a domain name that contains your branded terms. So if your brand online and offline is based on your name try to buy a domain containing your name. For instance John Doe or Joe Bloggs would buy johndoe.com or joebloggs.com. Choosing a domain extension isn’t as important if your brand doesn’t compete with a competitive keyword phrases but if you are competing with Richard Branson you might need to make smart decisions. For instance if you are based in South Africa you could buy the local extension richardbranson.co.za, which is available I checked. This could give you a bit of a head start as you will be able to rank higher in South Africa but this isn’t a guarantee.

2. Finding inexpensive links

Now in SEO links are probably the most important ranking factor at the moment. Thus you need to build some links for your site. Now as this is not a difficult vertical to rank for you will only need a few inexpensive ones. You could search online for a few free directories to submit your site to which should ensure you have enough links. Some examples are www.sabest.co.za, www.dmoz.org, www.ananzi.co.za etc.

3. Deciding on anchor text and description

Now before you submit your sites you need to ensure you have decided on anchor text you want to use. These should be branded terms and should vary. For instance “Chris Calitz” and “chriscalitz”. These will be used for the text of the links you receive and they will be important in determining for which keywords you rank.

4. Lastly have content related to your branded terms

You need to ensure that you at least have a page with content or that your homepage has content where the branded phrases you want to rank for is mentioned.

This should put you well on your way to controlling your online brand. Feel free to leave some questions below and check in tomorrow as we will discuss how PPC could help you market your brand.

If you are looking for a quick efficient solution to get a website up and running – Wordpress is most definitely the way to go. Wordpress is an Open Source website publishing software that was first released in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg. In this article I’ll discuss in short what type of hosting you will need to host a Wordpress website, how to download it and upload it to a domain, how to change the look by downloading a free theme and how to install it, how to implement some cool functionality (plugins) and how to use the basic Wordpress features.

Hosting your WordPress website

First of all – you need to find a company to host your Wordpress website on a server. Wordpress requires PHP (Hypertext Pre-processor) and MySQL (a relational database management system) to work. You’ll also need to choose a domain name e.g. www.example-site.com. The hosting company should be able to register a domain name (the one you chose and if it is available) on your behalf. Ask them to send you the MySQL and FTP login information because you’ll need it to set up a working Wordpress website.

Interexcel Hosting

Downloading Wordpress & Uploading it to your website

After you have organised hosting (that will be able to run Wordpress) and got a domain name you will need to download Wordpress CMS. Download Wordpress.

You will also need to download an FTP client such as FileZilla to be able to connect to the server with the above mentioned FTP details. After downloading the FTP client open it enter the Host name (or IP address), username and password (FTP details) and then click QuickConnect (in FileZilla). Then you should be connected to the server. If you struggle with this, phone your hosting company they will be able to help you with this. Download FileZilla

Unzip the Wordpress zip file on your local machine then upload the contents of it to the www folder (usually www or public_html).

Installing Wordpress

If you have uploaded the Wordpress files – go to your domain name e.g. http://www.example-site.com where an installation wizard will be prompted. Fill in all the information you need to e.g. database connectivity login information (usually given by the hosting company) and website name. Continue until you have completed the setup wizard. You can edit the database variables in the configuration file found in the root of your Wordpress installation.

Now that your Wordpress website has been successfully installed you can go to the administrator panel by going to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin where you can then login with the information you supplied in the setup wizard.

Downloading a Theme and installing it

Now with your website hopefully successfully running, it’s time to customize it a bit with templates / themes.

There are plenty of themes out there you can use. To download themes go to the Wordpress website: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ where you can search for themes (many of which are customizable in your administration panel) and download it.

You can also search for themes within the WordPress administration by clicking on Add new themes link on the left hand side (a sub menu of the Appearance link).

If you downloaded it to your local upload it to your wp-content/themes/ folder and if you search for it via the administration it can be automatically installed. Just make sure your themes folder is set to writable (chmod 777). Then go to your administration and enable your new theme.

Extend WordPress even more

Now with your website looking great you can extend the functionality of it. It is easy to extend Wordpress with existing plugins. You can search plugins again from your administration by clicking on the plugins tab on your left hand side and then click on the sub menu “Add new” where you can search for plugins which is installable similar to that of the themes. (Again make sure your plugins folder is writeable (chmod 777)

Basic Use of a Wordpress website

Creating a new post entry

Click on the Posts tab (found on your left hand side) then you will see sub items underneath the Posts tab then click on “Add new “. Fill in the title of your entry, the body, the category the post should appear in and other fields. You can then click on Preview to view the page (before publishing) or just click Publish to make it live.

Creating a category

One uses categories to organise your postings. To create a category you can either create a new post then where you choose a category click on “Add new category” or you can go to the categories section (under Posts tab) and there you will find a create new category form. Fill in fields and click on “Add Category”.

It is virtually impossible to explain all of Wordpress within one blog entry but I am sure this article will help you to set up a basic website in a very short period of time. Wordpress is by far the best most affordable solution to set up a well functioning website.

Alec Brownstein did something like this when he placed an ad on Google Adwords when the top New York creative directors Googled themselves. When they searched for themselves on Google they got an ad from Alec asking for a job, he got interviews with most of the guys he targeted as well as job offers, he now works for one of them.

This week we are going to discuss how to use a couple of online tools to advertise yourself to companies. We will show you how easy it is to set up your own website with no web development knowledge at all. How to start a quick ad campaign on Google Adwords and best practices to get good results from that PPC campaign. We will give you tips on how to apply SEO to your website to rank higher for specific keywords. We will also show you haw you can use social media to get the attention of companies that you can potentially work for.

This is all very easy to set up and with little or even no cost at all. All that is needed from you is creativity and you need to post unique content if you are going to interact with companies and if you want them to notice you. You need to stand out and show them how good you are.

So if you really want to take a different angle to getting a job and go after the companies you want to work for, check back the rest of the week and see how you can use the online marketing strategies to land your dream job.

Directions

Do you get lost easily? Google Maps allow you to get directions (driving or walking) between virtually any two points. Just search for your start destination and end destination (point of interests or physical address) then click the “Get Directions” button. Google then generates visual directions (shown with the blue line bellow Fig 1.1) and text directions (fig. 1.2) which shows you turn by turn directions.

If you do not like the directions Google Maps has generated for you or if you would prefer a different route, simply change the directions by moving the direction indicator to suit you by dragging it to a new point.

Fig 1.1

Fig 1.2

Street View

Ever wondered what it looks like at a destination or a point of interest before travelling there? Google Street View allows you to view a point easily by dragging the yellow man to the point you want to look at. Google will then place the Street View to the closest Street View position available to the point of interest you chose.

With Google Street View you can explore your surroundings in a 360 degree angle and move to another position within the canvas just by clicking on an available position. Street View is made possible by a series of stitched photos that have been taken by the Google Maps Vehicles and is only available in certain countries/regions.

Personalised Maps with Google My Maps

It’s never been easier to create personalized maps – log in to your Google account, create a map (public or unlisted) draw lines, add markers etc. Then personalize it even more by adding photographs, video (e.g. YouTube videos) or saving existing POI (Point of Interest) e.g. your favourite coffee shop. To learn more watch the Official Google My Maps video below.

Find Businesses

To find a listed business in a certain location is easy. Google allows businesses to add their business on Google Maps. Just enter a search phrase and hit enter to see a list of businesses in the immediate area. (Left hand side) You can then click on the business to view more information on the business e.g. telephone number(s).

Websites (Quick implementation)

Google Maps allow you too easily generate a map you can use on your own website. Just search for the point on the map you want to put on your website click link (as in the image below) select the HTML code to embed on your website (you can edit the canvas size of the map by editing the html width/height parameters) and paste it into your html code of your website. It will then display a canvas on your website of the location you chose to embed.

Google Maps API (for developers: Advanced implementation)

Google Maps has a wide array of Map API’s (application programming interfaces) you can use to implement advanced map functionality within your websites / applications.

The Maps API allows you to add your own overlay / multiple overlays which can contain your own data. For example you can create your own markers to show where you company’s branches are and display it on your website to help customers find you easily. You can also customize the map colours e.g. if you want to place focus on a certain element within a map you can highlight that element with a bright colour and give all the other elements darker colours. You can also give your markers custom icons (too make it more personal).

Google is well known for creating tools that are pretty useful and Google Maps isn’t any different. I found the Google Maps tool very advanced, easy to use and fast compared to other mapping tools/services out there. All that is left to say is – Give it a try.

Hootsuite is a handy tool that allows you to easily manage multiple social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, My Space, LinkedIn, foursquare and even wordpress all from within one interface. The interface uses drop downs to switch back and forth between accounts and tabs that allow you to perform different actions depending on what you want to do. Very simple indeed.

What makes Hootsuite so appealing and efficient is that it has many useful features that can help make your life much simpler such as:

• The ability to manage multiple social media platforms

Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social media accounts. It has a tabbed system which can be used to quickly switch between profiles with one click and the best part is nothing is confusing. The interface is simple and easy to understand.

• Easily post your latest Blog articles

This is one of the best features of Hootsuite. It will allows you to easily post your latest blog article to all your social media platforms from one interface without having the hassle of actually logging into each and every account. You can post your articles to Facebook, Twitter, My Space etc in just a few clicks on Hootsuite

• Scheduling Tweets

Tweet scheduling is very important feature which everyone should use as  it helps in driving lots of traffic.

• Shortened URL’s

Hootsuite automatically creates a shortened URL that is used for all your social media accounts. This URL is easily tracked and you will be able to view the response to your posts.

There are many features that make Hootsuite so appealing and a useful tool, I would suggest that you try this application for yourself. Save your time and save your sanity. Manage multiple social networks through one client: HootSuite!

Happy Marketing!

Now I find that I often have time available to me when I’m traveling between clients or even have some time to kill between meetings. These are the times that I need my digital life to be available to me. Now my example is specific to my situation and as such will be based on the iPhone but this is applicable to most phone brands in some form or way. I have my entire life synced on my phone. I can send emails, look up business and personal contacts and even access my important documents. My contacts are also synced automatically with my Mac and visa-versa.  This has enabled me to do business using my phone when I have time.

There are a few tools that you could use to sync your life. If you are an Apple user Apple have a service that integrates into everything called MobileMe this offers you syncing of your emails, contacts and offers you storage space online that you can access from your phone or other computers. There is however a free option. Google offers you functionality to sync your emails and contacts in a similar way to MobileMe the only difference is that it’s free. To have online storage you could make use of Dropbox, which integrates with all platforms, and you can even access it with only a browser. This means that you’re never far away from your important documents.

Other than that my whole life is stored on my phone. I use my phone to store my to-dos, which keeps my life organized. I also have the option to sync this with my Mac or computer, which means I don’t need to always access my phone to see what I have to-do today.

My last but one of the most important tools I use is an rss feed reader. Now these have been around for a long time but I have found that many people still don’t use them. I need to stay up to date in my job and this means reading hundreds of articles every week. I have certain key industry sites that I need to keep track of and checking these everyday would take up quite a fair amount of my time. RSS feed readers have made it possible for me to login to one program where I have subscribed to each site’s feed and then see the new content instantly. I have even synced this with my phone so I can read them on my phone when I have a bit of extra time. This has meant that I really get to use my time more effectively.

As you can see I’m a big evangelist of syncing your digital life so it is always available to you but also so it is always backed up. If you have any interesting tools, which I didn’t mention, please post it below.  And use those feed readers to subscribe to our feed, so you can stay up to date with the rest of the tools we will be posting this week.

Staying in touch with friends, family and co-workers online has become a big part of the way communicate with each other. By using instant messaging services we can quickly chat to friends to invite them to a party or get an update on their situation. In the workplace it can be used for meetings or quickly sending files to other co-workers that are not in the same office and discuss all sorts of work related subjects.

One thing that I have found is that there are a lot of different instant messaging clients out there like Aim, ICQ, MSN, MXit and even Facebook, MySpace and Google has built in instant messaging into their services to keep you connected to all your friends. Now it is a big hassle to log into every social network which you belong to and also login to all the different instant messaging clients on your desktop just to stay in touch with your friends and co-workers.

Luckily you get tools to solve this problem for you. You can download a program like Pidgin that enables you to create accounts for all your existing instant messaging accounts and manage it all from one application, you can even install an add-on that will let you get your Skype contacts in there. There are also applications available that you can use on your smart phone to manage multiple instant messaging accounts in one.

So if you ever felt that all of these online services that are supposed to make our life easier are just making it more complicated because there is just too much to keep up with, keep watching our blog this week for more great tools and tips to help you manage your digital life.

When it comes to Pay Per Click advertising it is imperative to devise a well thought out marketing strategy and carry out extensive product research before actually implementing your campaign. It is important to choose keywords that are directly related to your product or service or else you will generate high traffic volumes with low relevancy. Many PPC agencies out there today will promise you success but I advise you to be wary. When searching for a PPC agency to handle your online marketing it is important that they are a Google Accredited company, meaning that the people who will be marketing your product are qualified to do so. A good PPC agency will discuss your business goals and explain how they plan on helping you reach those goals by devising a relevant marketing strategy.

Now it is all fine and dandy if you have a good PPC agency but what if you find that the results your PPC Adwords Campaigns receive are still unsatisfactory? Well in truth PPC is not a glove that fits all. Before you decide to try Pay per click advertising you should ask yourself these questions:

• Is the product or service something that people will search for online?
• Would I be able to get a good return on my investment?
• I have tried PPC for a while and my costs far outweigh my profit, Is it time to try another avenue such as SEO?

Now if you have selected a good PPC agency, they will be able to advise you on what options are available to you after trying all they can on your PPC campaigns. Remember Pay Per Click Advertising is extremely competitive and if your product or service is still not performing well despite your PPC agency’s best efforts, it will probably be a good idea to try SEO instead. SEO is a longer process and may take anywhere from 3 to 6 months to feature well on Google’s Search Results Page but once you are there it will be beneficial to you as you don’t pay for clicks on the organic listings.

I hope you will take the above into consideration when searching for a PPC agency or when evaluating the results of your current campaigns in relation to the type of service or product you offer.

Happy Marketing!

A way of gauging the effectiveness of marketing is how much traffic arrives at your site. Brand awareness is also a good way of measuring this, and social networking tools like twitter and Facebook are two very popular tools that companies use to build brand awareness.

Comparing the Different Options

As far as online marketing goes Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and Google sell adspace. While Facebook might trail the search engines on number of visitors, it is by no means a lightweight player.

If boasts over 500 million active users as of this year. Those are users that have pages there, and return to facebook regularly. 50% of those are active on their profiles at least once a day.

Let’s put this in perspective – by population Facebook has more people than the USA, 200 million more. Active users are more than the population of Indonesia – about ten million more.

Those are a lot of prospective clients.

The average user on Facbook has about 130 friends, so if you get 1000 people to “like” your product or brand, you have potential exposure to 130 THOUSAND people who know of their friends liking this.

The social aspect of this is important here too – People tend to value their friends opinions, so a “like” means a lot more in marketing value than a simple popup banner does.

Why Doesn’t it work then?

Advertisers complain that placing ads on Facebook are not as effective as placing a Google adword is. Why? Even if you even out ad impressions to negate the obvious advantage that Google has in traffic you get worse results on your Facebook ads.

The reason is actually very simple – People going to a search engine tend to be “on their way” to somewhere. Someone who is on Facebook is already where they want to be.

If you have a targeted ad in a search-engines results your visitor is more likely to visit your site. A search engine is a portal, not a destination.

If someone is on Facebook, however, they are already at their destination. Market research confirms this – people are loathe to leave Facebook. A targeted ad is mostly an annoyance, at best given a cursory glance.

If you read online you will see that Facebook advertising simply does not work for most people.

Click through rates of as little as 0.3% are common – and that is with ads who have millions of page impressions.

Does Facebook have a place in your online marketing portfolio?

Yes. If you use it right it can be very powerful. Facebook pages and groups are awesome marketing tools, but they are a lot of work.

You need to build one for a start, and getting a professional and visitor friendly Facebook Page can be a challenge. Then there is the upkeep of the page, and the interaction with your community.

Hard work, but the rewards are great if you persist.

With Facebook marketing the keyword is “presence.” If you can build an online presence and keep your audience interested there is a real possibility of business, targeted business, coming your way.

Summary

Online marketing is tricky. You have the potential of wasting a lot of money very quickly – imagine paying $0.03 per click and 8MILLION people click your ad! If your advertising is ill conceived or the clicks do not lead to enough business to cover the costs of advertising you stand to lose a lot of money.

If you want to do online marketing for your business, or build an online presence, enlisting the services of a company that specialises in this would be a wise move.