Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.

This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.

Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.

People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.

If you have a business today, it is very important to have a website where people can view your services and products and also find out a bit more about your company but that website means nothing if people can’t find your it or if they don’t know what your URL is.

That is why effective online marketing is vitally important. It is essential to have a strong online presence and not be just another needle in the proverbial haystack.

The two main ways to create an online presence is through Pay Per Click advertising and through Search Engine Optimisation. Both of these methods work very well but each one has it’s advantages and disadvantages.

SEO

SEO is where the website is optimized to perform beter for certain keywords on the Search Engine Result Pages. It involves fixing the code of the website and optimising the content for the desired keywords. With SEO your goals are more long term, as it takes time for your pages and changes to your pages to be indexed by the search engines as well as getting a good rank for your keywords.

PPC

Pay Per Click is a type of advertising that is used on websites and search engines. You set up an ad that will display when certain criteria is met and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It works on a bidding system, you compete against other advertisers for the top spot. The placement of your ad all depends on what you are willing to spend per click as well as the relevance of your ad and content to the specific keyword you are bidding on. PPC is a lot more flexible than SEO because you can start and modify campaigns in a couple of minutes. You can see results instantly, so it is good to get a PPC campaign going while you are busy optimizing your site to perform beter organically.

The rest of the week these services will be discussed in more detail, so do come back to find out more.

PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. PPC is a method of advertising where the advertiser selects a set of keywords or phrases they would like to bid on and they only pay when someone clicks on their ads, hence the term pay per click. Pay per click marketing uses search engines to advertise on such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Many people have chosen to steer clear of PPC advertising just because they have heard horror stories about how expensive PPC can be, but the simple truth is that a well executed campaign will earn you a high return on investment.

Today I am going to educate you on the many advantages of Pay per click advertising and what sets it apart from search engine optimisation. So for those of you out there who feel ambivalent about PPC advertising, I offer you the following points to consider:

• PPC advertising is quick and easy to implement, you simply select your keywords and phrases and how much you would like to bid on them and you are on your way. There is no hassle or fuss as Google Adwords (The Google PPC advertising tool) makes the process of uploading your keywords a simplistic one. This is especially advantageous when you have a promotion/sale or there is an event you would like to capitalise on such as the world cup as you can write many ads for one keyword and pause them just as easily when the event is over. While developing a sites search engine optimisation on the other hand could require months in many cases
• You should be pleased to know that with PPC you only pay when someone clicks on your ads and not for each impression (each time your ad is viewed is one impression)
• Google assigns a Quality Score to each keyword, depending on how good your quality score is you will pay far less per click than what you are actually bidding for on that specific keyword. So PPC is not as expensive as some believe it to be after all
• You have complete control of your budget, you decide what to spend and when, for example if you feel a keyword is out of control you have the power to reign it in by decreasing your bid cap or simply pause it or if a keyword is doing really well and is highly profitable you may want to increase the budget to broaden its reach. It is completely in your hands
• You can write highly relevant ads suited to your product and relevant to your list of keywords thus ensuring that you receive highly qualified traffic that are most likely interested in your product or service. Organic listings (SEO) does not have ads that briefly describe your product so the traffic to an organic listing is not as qualified as it would be with PPC
• With PPC advertising even if a user does not click on your ad they will still see it on the Google landscape (impression) when they search for a keyword your are bidding on, so you achieve brand awareness and remember an impression costs you noting at all
• The Pay per click method of advertising generates immediate results whereas SEO is time consuming and is more suited to achieving longer term results.
• With PPC you can choose the language you want your ad to display in and also can target many geographical locations whilst you cannot do this with SEO
• The biggest advantage of PPC for me and what really sets it apart from SEO is that PPC is completely measurable. Google Adwords allows you to generate accurate reports on pretty much any statistic you require from your number of clicks, impressions, cost, conversions, conversion rate and click through rate. You can also get reports on your budget and return on investment.

So with all these advantages I think it’s pretty clear that Pay per click advertising can achieve phenomenal results for you or your business if executed well. Well, now I have armed you with some cold hard facts so that you can go in confidence to your boss and motivate him to try PPC advertising remembering that with more and more businesses are choosing to market their products online, one of them may be your competitor, so why not get a head start.

2010 has started off with a bang and we are already in the second month of the year. Are you well on your way to reaching your goals that you have set out in January?

Well if you are at all like me then you are probably not as well on your way as you would have liked to be by now. I have been struggling to reach all the goals that I have set for myself in the past. Now this could be attributed to me setting up quite an extended list of goals or the more likely reason is because I don’t set up a plan of how to reach them.

Defining your goals consists of much more than just writing down what you want to achieve. You need to set out what exactly you would like to achieve and the steps needed to accomplish those goals. I recently started implementing project management techniques such as divide and conquer to break down my goals into smaller more manageable tasks. By doing this it has allowed me to clearly define the steps I need to take to reach my goals.

This principle shouldn’t only apply to yourself but also to your business. You need to define goals that you wish to reach with your online marketing this year. These could include online brand awareness, stimulating the conversations with your customers, increasing website traffic and direct sales.

If one of your online marketing goals were to improve brand awareness then how would you achieve this? Well social media is definitely the hot topic in 2010 for businesses, so you might want to look at how you could leverage this to increase brand awareness. Investigate what you would like to achieve this year and set out a plan to reach these.

Planning your goals is only the start, as you will need to measure the results by monitoring. In the blog posts to follow we will discuss using Google Analytics and other technologies to monitor your efforts. So please visit our site this week to keep up to date or follow our twitter account.