on Oct 5th, 2006
Internet Marketing with Paul Allen - Search Engine Marketing Part 1, Paid search engine traffic.
Team FamilyLearn, Here are my notes from last week:
Brief Overview: Search Engine Marketing using affiliate marketing programs, paid search engine traffic (focus for today), free search engine traffic (next week). Why use paid search engines? Instant, traceable results.
Fun FREE internet marketing Tools:
- Inventory.overture.com “Key word selector toolâ€
- Trends.google.com
- Overture.com > visit the resource center> View bids> Tells you what it is going to cost.
- Bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm
Book to read: Scientific Advertising
Combine notes from Lindsey Nehring and myself:
Team assignment: 3 person groups, we will be given an American express credit card with a $100 limit. We will design a lead page to a website. Then all of the people we send to the site and sign up can be traced back to our team and we are rewarded. Great story from Paul about Domain Names: They purchased the domain MyFamily.com for $18,000 in 1998. They had originally considered DearFamily.com but they knew they needed MyFamily. They also had worldhistory.com (I think this is the right domain name). They forgot to renew the name and a “squatter†(a squatter is someone who buys domain names and then squats on them until someone needs to buy them, some people have made millions doing this) in Scotland snatched it up. The Squatter posted porn and all kinds of terrible things on it. Paul was furious. He asked MyFamily to buy it back, but the squatter wanted $100000 for the name. MyFamily said no. Paul finally got MyFamily to agree to buy it and the squatter to agree to $60,000. That is a huge mistake! Don’t loss your domain name. Perhaps we should buy something in the new .mobi names?Telecommunications is a $3 Trillion Dollar industry. MySpace hopes to take a piece of this market with their new cell phone deal.
Search Engine Marketing
Two most popular online activities : email (95%) and search engines ( 88%), NFO/search
If doing market research look for pew (peu)?, a company that produces a yearly consumer study
Favorite ways to increase site traffic
- Offer a Free Product or Service (MyFamily’s success)
- Affiliate Marketing Program (most important for ancestry)
- Paid Search Engine Traffic (focus for today)
- Free search engine traffic (next week)
- Email Marketing
- Viral Marketing
Google has well over 8 billion pages indexed
Google, Yahoo, MSN are largest search engines respectively
Bruce Clay – updated version of search engine relationships Bruceclay.com The search engine world is very complicated Bruce Clay made this sheet.
Search engine related chart. Use this chart to learn where to spend the bulk of your time. LEARN THIS CHART.
Bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm
This is important to know, because as marketers we need to know who is supplying who with search results so we know where to spend our money. Ex. Paid adds at yahoo show up on yahoo and msn, so only buy with yahoo and you get double exposure.
At the top of each search in any search engine you have paid results. Then you have the natural ones. Yahoo gives alltheweb.com their results. Yahoo owns alltheweb. If you bid on Yahoo you will also come up on MSN. Not anymore because MSN is no longer using Yahoo.
Yahoo started as a free directory of websites. People wanted a competitor.
Dmoz is an open directory project. Google uses them and many others. As an internet marketer you need to get your website in Dmoz.com. It is really hard to get listed. You could try but you probably won’t succeed. If you do get listed in dmoz you will have your company found. It is worth doing but it can be extremely frustrating. Dmoz is what yahoo once was.
Buy or Build/Partner decision has been very interesting in the past. Because some of the partnerships have helped one company grow very quickly and compete with the other partner, and bit them in the butt. Yahoo used Google until they realized that it was going to destroy them.
“Which brand has affected your life the most?†Google more than Coke, Apple and StarBucks. All but one person in my class uses Google as their primary search. “It is like breathing… we need air… we need googleâ€.
Around 40% of searchers click on the first natural search result. Then it drops to 11% click on the second result. How do you get your website up when you are competing with millions of websites?
Solutions
- Advertise on search engines through keyword bidding
- Fast (takes less than 15 mins in google)
- Easy
- Increasingly expensive
- Can be profitable
- Free tools for finding key words
Book: Scientific Advertising For marketing with tracking
Inefficient advertising model is one that :
Takes a lot of time to negotiate& get the commitment, and then you are locked in for a period of time. 3 months to get a print add up and going and to see the results. If it takes 10 tries to get the brilliant add then it is going to take 3 years to know what works. Radio is at least a week. TV is much more.
FREE tool by Yahoo! Inventory.overture.com “Key word selector toolâ€. This is so cool. You can just type in a key word and it will tell you how many times these have been searched. With this you can do a new test every hour.
(Multiply this number by 4.44 to get an even more accurate idea of how many searches have been done)
Don’t ever bid on obscure keywords unless you are bidding on extremely large amounts of these obscure search keywords at once. Ex. Surname bidding at ancestry.com
Overture.com then click on visit research center, view bids tool, this will show us how much it will cost to be the number one slot.
Rare names for ancestry were more likely to be your names. I think we need to do this with Funeral homes. We need to put every funeral home name in the industry in the our search terms. Bulk Key Word approach. Trends.google.com is another great site. Overture.com > visit the research center> View bids> Tells you what it is going to cost.
Multiply this result by 4.44 to get the total (this accounts for google and others)
As marketers get more advanced with back end analytics then they are not going to spend as much for some of these biddings, because they now realize that they are way overspending.
Click fraud – over 1 billion dollars last year in click fraud.
My Comments on Pauls Teaching: I was happy to find out that Paul is going to be quizing us once a week on MarketingVox newsletters. He feels these are very important. I really like overture.com. After walking out of this class, I didn’t feel like I had anything to apply. After the first class we were told to make blogs. The second class to put analytics on them, but after this one I didn’t quite know Paul wanted us to do. Lessoned learned for my future: always give an action assignment after teaching anything to anyone. If I go home and just tell someone about something wonderful but don’t help them, or challange them to get started, they are way less likely to retain what I taught them.
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