By Kristin Tomlinson-Web Success Team

The catastrophic earthquake in Haiti showed no mercy on the tiny capital of Port-au-Prince and has affected us all with information and images about the devastation to life and property. Many nations have sent their first wave of emergency responders and people throughout the world are sending donations, goods and services. The Web Success Team is also taking action to aid in the relief efforts. As a participating sponsor, we are helping with online promotion and branding for “Taste of the Tropics,” a Super Bowl event geared to raising funds for the earthquake victims of Haiti.

Star Studded Fundraiser at Super Bowl Week

Entertainment & Sports Plus (ESP) along with Sports Entertainment Team (SET) have partnered with the American Red Cross and the Yéle Haiti Foundation to help the victims affected by the January 12^th earthquake. “Taste of The Tropics” is a Latin-inspired culinary tasting event hosted by actress and comedian Kym Whitley with all proceeds to benefit the earthquake victims. It will take place in Miami during Super Bowl Week. There will be special guest appearances by: Michael Boley (NFL player, NY Giants), DeShaun Foster (former Carolina Panthers and San Francisco 49ers player), Vivica Fox (Actress), and Willie Gault (former NFL Player). In addition to enjoying the cuisine, guests are asked to bring emergency and medical supplies to aid in the relief efforts.

Hope for Haiti

Taste of the Tropics will be held at the Epic Hotel on February 6, 2010 from 3:00 PM – 7:00 PM in Miami, Florida. Please visit www.tasteofthegamemiami.com for ticket information. Lives have been shattered, and a country has been devastated. This was a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions. By offering your support you will be giving hope for Haiti. If you’re unable to attend the event, please go to www.redcross.org or www.yele.org to see how you can help.

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I recently came across an article in Advertising Age about re-branding Time Warner Cable.

In my very recent past Time Warner Cable was one of my accounts on the creative services side. Being tightly controlled by the large Madison Avenue Advertising Agency. Creativity was very limited.

In this day and age with all the social media avenues Time Warner Cable can find a viable avenue to re-brand the company and its services.

We are a client of Time Warner Cable and find that the company is “stuck” in the last century, as you can see by the comments on the Ad Age post.

They are competing with the Dish, Netflix and many other more “modern” avenues like watching TV online. Customers are their lifeblood and they need to do a better job taking care of them.

I would STRONGLY recommend that Time Warner get a Facebook page and a Twitter page and USE them for customer complaints and suggestions. That would be a start. Then follow what other strong customer oriented brands are doing. Starbucks, JetBlue and others are using Social Media to better communicate their services, offer discounts or specials, field and resolve complaints, and to gain valuable customer feedback. They gain loyalty and repeat business.

Here is one of many “Time Warner Sucks” pages  that I found on Facebook. It has over 1,000 members.

A Lesson for Your Business

Throw a rock in a pond and watch it ripple. The bigger the stone, the bigger the consequences. But what does this mean for your business? Do not underestimate the value of social media. It is a unique way to reach out to current and new customers. Business is about building relationships and trust. Keeping open new and popular channels of communication will help grow your business online. And it is a good way to defuse negative press before it gains momentum.

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James Cameron’s Avatar has touched a nerve in our collective psyche. Much in the same vein, Social Media has exploded into our digital world, changing the landscape on how we think, react and do business.

What does Avatar and Social Media have in common? They are both brave new worlds that have captured our imagination and have connected us to each other. In a world gone wild with war, natural disasters and the human condition, we all yearn for a place (real or digital) that will give us meaning and a way to express our individuality and our humanity.

Our Primal Need

One of the most striking comparisons of Avatar and Social Media was the interconnectivity of the Na’vi to their natural habitat and to each other. Their umbilicus was a synaptic nerve cord emanating from their head in the form of a long pony tail. When physically connected to another life form, they had pure communication of thoughts and emotions, and could have a symbiotic influence on each other. Social Media networking is fulfilling that primordial need to be connected, to make our presence felt and have the ability to influence and be influenced. In essence, make our voice or vote count. We are not living and breathing avatars, but our digital networking is connecting our avatar to yours.

A modern day analogy happened in the 1960s when the youth felt disenfranchised from our society and found meaning in the proverbial “love-ins.” As the beat poet of that generation, Jerry Rubin, so eloquently noted, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Those words resonated around the globe. The youth were connected through rock n roll, the Beatles, the Vietnam War, and flower power. They influenced generations and these baby boomers are still a force today.

The Bonds that Influence Us

Trust is another comparison worth noting between the Movie and Social Media. It is the glue that holds both systems together. The hero in Avatar, Jake Sully, needed to understand the rules, the customs and learn how to move in an alien world. He needed to gain the trust of the Na’vi, not just live amongst them as a intelligence gathering project. But something happened once he truly felt engaged with his mentor and love-interest, he changed and the world changed with him. Social Media has its rules of engagement and if you are to be successful you need to understand that the process takes time. Watch, learn and build trust. Be a part of an online community and actively participate.

The effectiveness of Social Media is in building relationships, making your presence felt in positive non-exploitative ways. Establish your brand of influence, offer content, suggestions, advice, reliability. In Avatar, the Sky People (aka humans) saw “gold” and wanted to mine it, regardless of the environmental impact. Bulldozing your way through the jungle with purely self-interest objectives is counter productive. Short term gains, long term angst.

Standing Ten Feet Tall and Blue

Social Media enhances your brand image and makes you stand out from your competition and be that 10 foot tall blue Avatar. Take the time to understand it, cultivate it and fall in love with it. Enjoy the experience.

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Note from Web Success Team: Here is part II of the article published on January 7th. When we run into an article that has practical application value, we want to make it available to our clients and our readers. This Guide takes the mystique out of PPC and offers excellent short-cut strategies to maximize your PPC budget and its effectiveness in driving more qualified traffic to your website.  — Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

Creating Killer PPC Ads

1. Include your keywords in your ads (on every line if possible) for higher QS and lower cost per click.
2. Use your headline to grab attention, the first line to mention the top benefits of your products and the third line for a clear call to action. You can use the URL line for including keywords and calls to action as well.
   
3. Use Digg.com to come out with killer headlines. Look for the headlines with the most diggs.
   
4. Tie your ad copy to current events.
   
5. Always split-test ads. Have two ads that look almost the same except for one element. Find a winner and then write a new ad to beat it. Keep doing this again and again to constantly improve your click-though rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR). Start by testing the big stuff (offers, guarantees, marketing message) and move down to the small details. Changing one single word can double or triple your CTR, so test everything. This is a nice tool that allows you to calculate if you have enough data to make a good decision.
6. Avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This is a feature that includes your keywords in your ads. I used to love it but then I realized that it made some of my ads look really bad if the keywords people searched for weren’t relevant to the ads. Stick to one keyword and one ad per ad group and you’ll do great.
7. Use numbers and special characters in your ad ($, #, ®, ©, ¼, &, etc.) They’re a great way to get people’s attention.
8. Call your readers. For example, “hey you, skinny man” or “hey you, bankruptcy victim”.
9. Use negative ads. For example, “Is Bob’s New Book a Scam? Don’t Buy Bob’s Book Before You Read This”
10. Try news-style ads. For example, “62 Year-Old Woman Happy with Husband’s Performance”
11. Try tease ads. For example, “The One Secret to Reduce Taxes by 87%. Get It Here for FREE”
12. Ask questions: “Are You Sick of Spider Veins?”
13. When you write ads for the Content Network, you don’t need to include your keywords. Your goal here is to grab people’s attention, so get controversial, use weird characters and get their attention in any way you can.

The Perfect Landing Page

1. Use landing pages; don’t just send people to your home page. The goal of a landing page is to capture leads. After that, you’ll need to do a good job to monetize those leads.
2. Avoid big headers and navigation menus. If you need a navigation menu, you can have it in the footer.
3. Have an attention-grabbing headline.
4. Use bullet points to get your point across.
5. Have 1 clear call to action. Make it clear what you want people to do.
6. This post will give you copywriting tips.
7. This post will help you understand how the subconscious mind works.

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign

1. The best way to ensure you pay as little as possible for your clicks is by using negative keywords effectively. Read this post on PPC negative keywords.
2. Eliminate keywords with no impressions after 7 days.
3. Eliminate keywords with no clicks after 14 days.
4. Eliminate keywords with low conversion rates after 30 days.
5. Eliminate keywords with low CTR or write better ads to increase the CTR.
6. Eliminate keywords that don’t appear on the first page or increase their bids so they make the first page.
7. Use the Opportunities feature to get ideas on how to improve your campaign.
   
8. Put keywords with a lot of traffic in their own ad groups and write special ads for each of them.
9. Use Google Website Optimizer to test elements on your landing pages (headlines, calls to action, graphics, bullets, guarantees, etc.) This is the best way to increase your conversion rate.
10. Pick your winning ads and write new ads to beat the winners.
11. After 45 days, once your campaign has built a good record of high CTR and QS, lower your bids by $0.03 every couple of days and keep an eye on your traffic to make sure it doesn’t drop. Most of the time, once a campaign has a good record, you can lower your bids without losing any traffic.
12. Look for the “Campaign Limited by Budget” message. If your budget is limiting your campaign, set it extremely high. If you absolutely need to have a budget, lower your bids so you get more traffic for the same amount. Keep lowering your bids until the”Campaign Limited by Budget” message disappears.
13. Look for new traffic segments. For example, if you’re a chiropractor and a lot of people see you for their back pain, create a landing page addressing that issue and create a new ad group with back pain-related keywords and ads.
14. Compete with yourself. If your campaign is doing great, create a new website (in a new domain) and get almost twice as many leads/sales.
15. Buy several domains. Some domain names get 2-4 times as many clicks as others. Keyword-rich domains always win. Domains are only $9/year, so buy a bunch of them and see which one has the highest CTR.
16. Don’t limit your campaign to Google. Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com also have PPC programs. They’ll send you a lot less traffic, but the conversion rates are usually higher.

How To Ensure an Excellent Quality Score
QS is extremely important. If you have a high QS, your ads could get twice as many clicks as your competitor’s while you pay only half of what he’s paying. In fact, having a poor QS is the reason why most people lose money with PPC, so pay attention and follow these guidelines:

1. Have links to a contact us page and a privacy policy page on your landing page.
2. Include your keywords in your ads as much as you can. This is where having one ad per keyword makes a lot of sense.
3. Include your keywords in your landing pages, but don’t overdo it.
4. SEO factors on your landing page are very important. Have a relevant page title, H1 tag, meta description and meta keywords.
5. There must be a connection between your ad and your landing page. If your ad promises a downloadable report and your landing page tries to sell a widget, you’ll be in trouble. You can offer whatever you want, just be upfront about it in your ad.
6. Avoid “trouble” words like “offer”, “guarantee”, “buy now”, etc. Put these words in images and call the images 1.jpg, 2.gif, etc. Don’t put the trouble words in the images alt tags either.
7. For all those images that don’t contain any of the “forbidden” words, use descriptive alt tags.
8. If you’re going after very different markets (such as “beach vacations in Costa Rica” and “ski holidays in Colorado”), have individual landing pages for each of your markets so you can keep your QS high.

I hope you guys enjoy this post. It took me a long time to put it together but it was a lot of fun. – Zeke Camusio.

Source: Zeke Camusio http://www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog

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Note from Web Success Team: When we run into an article that has practical application value, we want to make it available to our clients and our readers. This Guide takes the mystique out of PPC and offers excellent short-cut strategies to maximize your PPC budget and its effectiveness in driving more qualified traffic to your website.  — Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

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By Zeke Camusio

This is a very challenging post. I’ll try to explain my step-by-step Pay per Click (PPC) system in one single article (and I want to keep it short). This is the same system we’ve used to get millions of qualified visitors for pennies. I’m really excited about writing this article and I think you’ll love it.

Keyword Research

1. Use the Google Tool ( to get keyword suggestions for your site.
2. Run the same tool on your competitors’ websites!
3. Use the same tool for “Descriptive words or phrases” as opposed to the “Website content” feature.
4. Use WordTracker ( http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ ) to get more keyword ideas.
5. Use SpyFu ( http://spyfu.com/) to find out what keywords your competitors are using and get ideas from their campaigns. Looks for the 800-lb. gorilla in your market and run SpyFu on their domain. They’re very likely to have a huge budget and a very optimized campaign. Let them do all the research, spend the money and learn from them.
6. Get synonyms from Synonyms.com ( http://www.synonyms.com/ ), Thesaurus.com ( http://www.thesaurus.com/ ) and Quintura.com ( http://www.quintura.com/ ).
7. Get misspellings using this tool: http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi. Almost nobody bids on misspellings so you can get clicks for very cheap.
8. Bid on competitors’ URLs. They’re dirt cheap and extremely relevant. A lot of people do a Google search for YouTube.com instead of typing www.youtube.com in the address bar.
9. Another way to get cheap clicks is by having geo-targeted keywords, such as “Seattle chiropractor”. Make sure that you only bid on the keywords for the areas you serve and that your landing pages contain those keywords. Otherwise, Google might think you’re not relevant and that will hurt your Quality Score.
10. Bid on action keywords, like “FIND local chiropractor” and “BUY PlayStation 3″.
11. Consider the buying cycle. “Costa Rica beach condos” will get you a lot less traffic than “Costa Rica” but it’ll be a lot more qualified if you rent beach condos. Because you’re paying for each click, you only want qualified traffic.
12. Consider “side searches”. Side searches are needs that you can fulfill but so can other products or services. For example, if you have beach condos in Costa Rica, you might want to bid for “honeymoon destinations”.
13. A lot of people recommend starting with thousands of keywords. I don’t think this is a good idea because when a campaign is too big, it’s really hard to manage it. Start small. Ten percent of your keywords will drive 90% of your traffic anyway.

Keyword Research for the Content Network
You’ll need a different approach for the Content Network. Some ideas:

1. Bid on thought strings. If you sell weight loss pills, try strings like “[brand] didn’t work for me”, “has anyone tried [brand]?”, etc. Look for things people would say in forums, blogs and discussion boards.
2. Bid on popular article titles. If there’s a very popular article out there called “The 4-Minute Formula to Lose Weight Eating Chocolate”, bid for it. Your ad will be displayed every time the article gets syndicated on a site running AdSense.
3. Do the same thing with book titles.

Campaign Structure and Settings

1. Have separate campaigns for search and content networks.
2. Have separate campaigns for broad and long-tail keywords. You’ll want to pay less for broad keywords.
3. Use the Google AdWords Tracking code to track your campaign performance.
4. Choose to show your ads more evenly so it’s easier to split-test them:
5. Choose the right geo-location for your campaign. This might sound obvious but you’ll be surprised by how many people ship products to the US only but advertise all over the world. If you are a chiropractor who serves the Seattle area, have two campaigns; one targeted to Seattle with keywords like “chiropractor” and “pain treatment” and another one targeted to the whole world with keywords like “Seattle chiropractor” and “pain treatment in Seattle”.
6. Choose “Accelerated ad delivery”. The Standard option spreads out your ads throughout the day. That’s not good because when prospects search for your ads, they might not be there. By choosing Accelerated Ad Delivery, your ads will show every time until you hit your daily budget. That way you know when you need to increase your budget.
7. If you know that most people will buy your product between 10am and 5pm on week days, use ad scheduling.
8. I set my budgets as high as possible. If a campaign is making me more than $1 for every $1 I invest, I want to invest as much money as Google is willing to take from me. If my campaign is not making me money, then I just kill it. There’s no reason to limit a campaign that is printing you money. Only limit your budget at the beginning, when you’re testing the campaign.
9. The best way to figure out how much you should start bidding is by using the Google Traffic Estimator Tool ( https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox ). Enter different amounts and see how much traffic you can get for each amount. Run your numbers and figure out what is the perfect bid. If you pay more than “the perfect bid”, you’ll be paying too much and you won’t make a profit. If you pay less than “the perfect bid”, you’ll be leaving a lot of profitable traffic on the table. There’s a sweet spot in between and Google’s tool will help you find it.
10. Bids should end in 2 and 7 ($0.12, $0.17, $0.22), etc.
11. There are two factors that determine how much you’ll pay for each click: your maximum bid and the Quality Score. The QS is a grade that Google gives to each of your keywords based on how relevant your ads and landing pages are to that keyword. The higher your QS, the lower your cost per click. You need to have your keywords in your ads and the best way to do this is by grouping your keywords into ad groups and writing one ad for each ad group.
12. Ideally, you should have one keyword per ad group. But, this is very time consuming. If you have a lot of time, go ahead and do it. If you don’t, this software ( do it for you. All the pros use tools like SpeedPPC, but if you’re on a budget you can do it manually the first time. If you don’t have time nor money, you don’t absolutely need one ad for each keyword, but try to group your keywords in groups as small as possible; don’t just throw all your keywords into one ad group.
13. Put the three match variations of each keyword into each ad group. For example, in the ad group “Costa Rica Vacations” you want to have the keywords “costa rica vacations” (use quotes for phrase match), [costa rica vacations] (use brackets for exact match) and costa rica vacations (don’t use any special characters for broad match). More on keyword matches ( .

Look for part II of this article on our next posting “Creating Killer PPC Ads“

Source: Zeke Camusio, http://www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog

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By Eric Pangburn – Web Success Team Contributor
As many web-savvy bloggers know, Google and the other major search engines regularly make changes to the way that web pages are ranked. This has resulted in a fair amount of confusion as you may have imagined, with many website owners being unaware of which way to go next, it seems that no sooner has your SEO efforts gotten you positive results before the rules of the game are changed yet again.

The Changing Face Of Website Ranking

This issue comes into marked prominence nowadays with Google’s recent move to place more focus on branded searches. This shift actually has its beginnings in 2003, when Google issued the Florida update, which radically leveled the playing field as far as SEO was concerned. Many websites that had previously enjoyed high rankings were suddenly nowhere to be found, and many site owners were understandably more than a little upset. It was later revealed that the changes affected websites that had repetitious inbound anchor text with little to no diversity and used keywords phrases too often, among other characteristics.

The Importance Of Protecting Your Brand

This update was probably the first time that that SEO was complicated enough to render most people unaware of how to use it. In previous years, it was enough to buy or trade links, and include your keyword in the anchor text. Do this often enough, and you could get a pretty favorable ranking.

With Google shift towards more brand-oriented search ranking criteria however, it becomes even more imperative to view your branding in a different light. As Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt puts it, effective branding can help a website win the confidence of their customers, and give these customers a clear sign that the website’s content can be trusted. This is particularly important given the huge number of different websites out there, not all of which can be relied on to provide quality content.

Ways By Which You Can Protect Your Brand

There are a number of ways by which you can protect your brand. Some of the more common–and effective–ones are described below.

Brand your blog with a unique company identity

A blog is one of the most powerful tools at anyone’s disposal. Rather than go into the many reasons why a blog can be useful–information you can find from numerous other websites–suffice it to say that if you don’t have a blog, get one ASAP!

After you have gotten your blog up and running, the next step is to optimize it with branded keywords. This will help you with the next step…

Utilize the power of branded social media pages to interact with your visitors

After you have made the effort to dot your website with branded keywords, you will want to put all that effort to good use. One of the best ways to do that is by frequenting social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and finding out how much of a buzz your website is causing. If it isn’t causing the ruckus that you want, maybe you could go ahead and initiate conversation yourself. Join in on any existing conversations about your brand or start up some yourself. If you do come across some criticism or even downright hostility, strive to maintain a cordial and professional online demeanor.

Trademark your brand name

Failing to trademark your brand name can result in a number of difficulties, one of which is the possibility that other websites will benefit from your brand. You may find that several websites may actually use variations on your branded keywords, causing your potential customers to end up in other sites instead of yours! Without a trademark to rely on, you are essentially at the mercy of your competitors, and will have to ask them to remove those branded keywords from their sites manually; a process that can take up to a few weeks.

Buy up any domain names related to your brand

After you have settled on a good domain name that you are comfortable sticking with for the long term, it would be a good idea to buy up as many variations of the domain name as you can, including any possible misspellings. This will help prevent other websites from cashing in on your site’s popularity, and at the same time help ensure that visitors that misspell your domain name in the URL boxes of their browsers still end up at your site.

Get certified

Just like in the real world, credentials often count for something, and the best way to lend your website an air of credibility is by securing a certificate from a reputable governing body such as the Better Business Bureau, This will go a long way in inspiring customer confidence in your site.

Protect your reputation

Your reputation is one of the most effective means by which you can ensure a steady stream of visitors, and since visitors are the lifeblood of any website, you will want to make sure to protect your reputation at all costs. Remember that the better your reputation is, the longer you can stay in business. Keep your site up and running for a long time, and you greatly increase your chances of pulling in the numbers.

Practice only white hat SEO techniques

In the quest to achieve a higher ranking on the major search engines, a number of website owners and SEO “experts” routinely resort to “Black Hat” SEO techniques. These techniques typically involve flooding their pages with keywords without much relevant content to back it up, or hosting too many irrelevant links. While such techniques may get you a higher ranking in the short term, they will likely backfire on you as Google catches wind of your tricks. Stick to white hat techniques for all your SEO efforts, and you avoid the risk of being penalized–and even banned–by Google and the other major search engines.

Use links and affiliate ads wisely

Links and affiliate ads are essential components of any SEO campaign, although it is important to make sure that they are used properly. It may be a good idea to set up a redirect mechanism as well as to implement other techniques that will not only make your website more attractive to the major search engines, but to your readers as well. Keep in mind that this technique can be quite tricky, so you will want to check everything carefully whenever you make any changes.

As you can see, branding and how it relates to Google brings with it many concerns. Although previously unheard of, the many changes wrought by Google have necessitated a shift in the way that branding should be viewed. Stay on top of these changes, and you may be able to get branding to work for you.

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