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Ever search something on Google and wonder what makes the first search result better than the next? With a little help from AdWords it can help you achieve a higher rank in the search results. AdWords bid on keywords that will help trigger their sponsored ads. How much they bid is one of the things that determines their position on the page of search results. The more their ads are clicked, the less they have to pay for each click.
Google AdWords is Google’s pay per click (PPC) advertising platform. This tool is used to direct traffic to your website. Every time your ad is clicked in the PPC option, the advertiser pays the website owner on the terms that the agreed on. The budget can determine how often ads can appear on Google. PPC’s content usually takes form in advertisements such as sponsored links or ads. They appear either above your search results or along the side.
There are many beneficial factors when taking using the AdWords tool. When someone clicks on your ad, this will take them to your website where they can learn more about your business and make a purchase. Advertising on Google can direct more traffic to your website as you are using the most widely used search engine in the world.
When you first come across Google AdWords, you’ll want to narrow down your audience and attempt to target just your customers. Google AdWords allows you to narrow down your audience by choosing from hundreds of languages, and specific cities and regions. For example, if you own a furniture store in New York City, you don’t want your ads to be seen in Colorado. Set your campaign ads to be read in English throughout the New York City area. Making your ads visible within a ten miles radius of the city or using the zip code targeting can’t hurt either.
After you targeted your audience, you then want to create your ad that will appeal to them. You want your ad to stick out like a sore thumb. In a world full of furniture stores, you want someone to click on your website instead of your competitors. In order for the searcher to click your ad, you want to be able to provide them with the one they think provides the most beneficial information or drives the highest value. In order to make an ad the most effective for your website, you want to choose keywords that are relevant. Choose keywords that relate the most to your site, service or offer. For example, if you are a business that sells furniture, your keywords might include couch, futon, or recliner. You’ll also find it useful to create long tail keywords, like NYC furniture store, or park slope furniture store. The long tail keywords use more terms to narrow your target and often have less competition.
There are a couple of types of keywords, one being negative keywords. A negative keyword is a phrase or word that prevents ads from appearing when a searcher types it in. For example, if your business sells furniture, but doesn’t sell bed frames, you would add the negative keyword but put a hyphen before it like so –bed frames. This eliminates your ads from appearing on irrelevant searches. Another type of keywords include exact match. You want to use exact match when you are using keywords that are exactly what a customer would be looking for when searching on Google. Exact match means that the ad shows for searches only when the search query is exactly the same as your keyword. When using exact match, chose your keyword and put it in square brackets. When someone is looking to buy a love seat, and you own a furniture company, you may want to use [love seat] as an exact match.
After you created your ad, you want to set a pricing. Set your daily budget and cost per click up. You can spend to as much or as little as you want. The average cost per click with Google AdWords is around $3.50 per click but in some cases skyrockets to $20. A useful feature on AdWords lets you change your budget at any time. When you are finally all done with setting up your ad, you want to launch the campaign.
Signing up for Google AdWords can be a good move for your business. It can direct traffic straight to your website which can mean more purchases. Google AdWords generates more visitors, followers, and customers. When you have an effective ad on Google’s search results page, your website will see a whole new world. The tool is one of the best advertising options when you want to track ROI and be able to reduce or grow on the fly. While there is still a lot of other options, using the PPC campaigns in Google AdWords can be a great source for new business.
Coming In Part 2 – Google AdWords, Advanced Options, CPM, Newsletter, Calls, DisplayNetwork
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The content in this article is part of Digital Ethos’s Digital Media Education in the Higher Education Internship Program, the content was created by @KaylaMarzo, a Student at Suffolk County Community college, intern at Digital Ethos.

            Inbound marketing is a way of making yourself or your company easy to find and drawing people to your website by producing content that appeals to your visitors. The term “inbound marketing” was coined in 2005 by HubSpot’s Brian Halligan because he believed that traditional marketing was becoming less effective. Inbound marketing includes content like blogs, enewsletters, and the social media network. Inbound marketing is far more favored by businesses than outbound marketing. Outbound marketing includes content such as spam, telemarketing, and fliers.
            The whole concept of inbound marketing is to get the customers to find you, instead of you reaching out to them. It can be broken down into five stages. One, attract traffic; two, convert visitors to leads; three, convert leads to sales; four, turn customers into repeat higher margin customers; and five, analyze for continuous improvement. A company can attract traffic to their website by blogging, for example. Updating your blog more frequently will attract more visitors to your website and revenue traffic. Announce your website via email, and across the social media networks like Google+ and Twitter to garnish social and search traffic. Email everyone you know about your new website, lead with content and the word will travel. Share it on your social media websites. Include keywords that will draw your targeted audience in. Then, you want to make sure that the material on your page is what the visitor is looking for. Your goal is to make the visitor a customer. After your visitor becomes a customer, make sure they will come back by sending them an enewsletter and keep your page updated with things that will attract them to buy again. After you went through the four steps of the process, you want to analyze everything that you have done and make sure you are doing everything you can to satisfy your visitors, followers, customers.
            In order to make inbound marketing completely effective, you want to give your customers your marketing information, and a little something else. This provides a value above and beyond what they are looking for, which creates a value to the customer experience. For example, if you’re a gardening or landscaping company, write a little side story about your home garden and how you personally take care of it in the newsletter. The three key phases are “get found, convert, and analyze”.
            Inbound marketing can be effective if the communication is interactive and two-way, unlike outbound marketing which is one-way. One way to create inbound marketing is by being found on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, etc. This is a type of inbound content because someone who is looking for something specifically related to you will go directly to your page. By creating valuable content on your website, your website will rise in organic search results. By rising in organic search results, it will benefit you tremendously because the closer you are to the search engines first page, the more visibility you are gaining for your website.
You can try and get your website higher in the organic search result by pay per click (PPC). PPC is an advertising model used to direct traffic to a certain website. Every time someone’s ad is clicked, the advertiser pays the website owner or publisher. Another way to rank higher in organic search results is to make a well put together press release that is filled with information that your targeted audience will click on when they search on a search engine. Don’t use keywords that are commonly used by your competition; be more creative when it comes to keywords.
            A recently new field that inbound marketing has found its way to is the social media network. Social media sites are the most visited websites on the web. When marketing on social media, identify your target audience. Once you have a targeted audience, think about keywords this audience might use to search to find sites like yours. Facebook for example, has seen a steady increase in its search bar for businesses. A basic principle of a social media site is like using a forum, if there is no activity going on you will leave. To make sure that this doesn’t happen to you on your website, fill it with lots of information and useful content. Finally, another way to use the social media network for inbound marketing is to give your “community” something to talk about. For example, if you own a fitness company and you are now selling a new workout machine, tell your social medic community. This is the “network effect”, when your community creates a “buzz” about what you were talking about, it will bring in other users.
            An easy way to get information out about your business or product is to advertise where they are already going. For example, by putting “like us on Facebook” on your company’s website, this will draw people to your Facebook page where you can advertise all about your business, products and services. Another way to generate inbound marketing is to host contests. By letting your visitors and or customers take an online survey about their experience with your website, offer a chance to win a prize if they take the survey. Also give them the opportunity to go through an easy-to-do sign up for newsletters offering them coupons and sneak peeks into the future.
            Inbound marketing is far more effective than outbound marketing. You can prove this just by asking if you have deleted spam mail without reading it. Spam mail is an example of outbound marketing. Since social media is huge growing field, there should be no question as to why inbound marketing is so effective. In the end, it’s all about finding a new way to generate interest, and inbound marketing is the new way to generate interest and visitors, followers, customers.
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