A Net Gain For Revenue » Advertising

Why I Teach WordPress

Anet Dunne — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:19:28 +0000

Great advertising will drive clicks to your website. If the website is weak, the clicks won’t turn into customers. Visitors have to say, “Yes! This is what I’ve been looking for!”

I can create a sensational ad campaign, but the money will be wasted if the website does not convert visitors to customers. How do you create an effective website that will bring in money instead of wasting of money?

Sell the sizzle. What do you have that your competitors don’t? Why should people buy from you? Put it RIGHT UP FRONT. I teach my Blogging for Business students to use a “sticky post” so that their marketing message always stays right on top.

Make your website easy to find. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is just a fancy way of saying, “make your website easy for search engines to understand.” Your sticky post marketing message is right at the top of the page, in text (not an image) so search engines can see exactly what you are selling. Remember that search engines cannot “see” images, they can see text, so make sure you know the difference.

WordPress makes it easy. Easy for me to say… I have been building websites for years and have been building ad campaigns for LOTS of years. Keep in mind that the Web is still growing and changing every day, and that advertising is a fashion business. WordPress offers lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to jump-start your website.

A blog is the cheapest, fastest way to get good organic page rank on Google. Organic is just a fancy way of saying FREE listing on the left side of the page — the side that people trust. Google likes fresh info, and frequently updated blogs are the kind of content Google likes to favor. So put your blog on the home page! I’ll show you how.

It takes time to work your way up in the page ranking, and it can take years to get to the first page in the organic listings. How do you leapfrog to the first page of Google? All it takes is money. I can get your ad on the first page of Google within a month. Will that make you rich?

Only if your website turns visitors into customers. How much does it cost to get a website like that? It costs less than $100 to take my WordPress Class, and everyone left with a multi-page website. Every single student had a website with a blog, an About Us page and a Contact Us page.

Exciting from the ground up — that’s how the students build their blogs.

The best way for me to help established businesses find new customers through the Web is to:

Build great advertising
Send the right prospects to a great website

When they call you, that’s when you make your magic. In this economy, people have more time than money. And websites can look out of date in just a few years because fashion changes so rapidly. WordPress makes it easy to update your website — both in content and in design. Find out more about the Blogging for Business class on Saturday, March 6.

To learn more about WordPress, visit the WordPress Links list I developed for a presentation to the North Bay Internet Society. To find out how to get a WordPress website for your business, contact me.

Post from: aNetGain.com

Why I Teach WordPress

Lifetime Ban from Google

Anet Dunne — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:58:26 +0000

The number of frauds and the rate of scamming has jumped recently. Google is now permanently banning any AdWords advertiser running a scam or linking to a website that places malicious code on your computer (malware). In the past, Google relied on algorithm-based fraud prevention, but that is changing. If Google detects fraud in an ad claim or detects malware on the website linked to the Google ad, they will not only cancel the offending campaign, they will block ALL advertising on the scammer’s account.

Nick Fox, Google’s Business Product Management Director for AdWords told Barry Schwartz of SearchEngineLand that the policy change is to shut down all advertising on an account, not just the offending campaign. This is a drastic step by Google and may signal that they are getting heat from their search engine users, their customers who are legitimate advertisers, and their lawyers who fear government intervention.

Post from: aNetGain.com

Lifetime Ban from Google

Google Sued Over Trademark Advertising

Anet Dunne — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:46:27 +0000

Google’s policy is to allow any advertiser to buy keywords that include their competitor’s trademark. This has triggered an class action suit against Google, according to the New York Times article by Michael Helft. In the past, Google has sometimes disapproved ads that use the competitors name in the text when the trademark holder has filed an objection.

This is what happened to Viking Volvo. This Santa Rosa auto repair shop specializes in Volvos, but Google would not let me put Volvo in the text ad. I could create ads that came up on the search term “Volvo repair,” but the ad itself could not say “Volvo repair.” The campaign results were disappointing and soon abandoned.

Artistic Wine Cellars was furious to discover that a low-cost competitor was advertising on their name. Their domain is ArtisticCellars.com, so I registered ArtisticWINEcellars.com for them also. They trademarked the name, wrote to Google, and asked the offending party to cease advertising on their name. A few months later, a different competitor contacted them, complaining that the Artistic ad came up on a search of the competitor’s name.

At the client’s request, I removed the competitor’s name from the keyword list (the words that trigger ads) and I was relieved that the owner of Artistic Wine Cellars found it uproariously funny that this competitor was advertising on Artistic’s name! He had a few choice words to say about the competitor’s honesty over the years.

Artistic Wine Cellars does not like the Google policy. They agree with Terrence Ross, a partner at Gibson Dunn, that Google’s extracting higher advertising charges in order to get the top result for your own name, “certainly smacks of a protection racket.”

The New York Times points out that defenders of Google’s practice say it is good for cosumers. People who are shopping for a new camera, for example, will benefit from seeing an ad for a competing, and perhaps cheaper, product that theymight not have known about. A key way for a new business to encroach on the market share of a larger company is to advertising on their brand name.

Is this really different from the Yellow Pages, where all the auto glass repair companies are listed in the same column? The policy change at Google bring it in line with Microsoft and Yahoo, which allow similar uses of trademarks in the text ads. “It is a pretty well established principle in the offline world and in the online world,” said Terri Chen, senior trademark counsel at Google.”

“They are pouring fuel on the fire,” said Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University Law School. “Google is making it harder to control the use of their trademarks online.” Eric Goldman’s blog discusses several lawsuits against Google in this matter.

What do you think? Should businesses continue to use their competitor’s trademarks as keywords to trigger ads?

Post from: aNetGain.com

Google Sued Over Trademark Advertising

50+ is the New Green

Anet Dunne — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:35:07 +0000

While many advertisers target high school and college students, older consumers have more spending money. “We advertise to an audience that has assets, not allowances,” bragged Henry Schleiff, head of Hallmark TV, in a NYTimes article noting that demographic shifts and a recession are making older consumers — long shunned in favor of free-spending, younger age groups — into better bets.

Andy Donchin, director for media investments at Carat, a New York agency for Adidas, Alberto-Culver and Pfizer, said that “18 to 49 is going to remain the predominant buying demographic, but 50 isn’t what it used to be.”

Older consumers today “are not as resistant to change” as in the past, Mr. Donchin said. “Show me something better, and I’ll try it,” is the Boomer attitude and they are “comfortable with digital media,” he added.

Brian Gordon of eBeantstalk.com says his sales are up about 65% over last year, mostly from grandparents who “are our most demanding customers” but are more willing than their younger counterparts are to pay full price. He was stunned to learn from a customer survey that 40% of his customers for children’s learning toys were 50+. Read the NYTimes article. If your business would profit by effective online advertising to people 50+, please call us at 707-575-3446.

Post from: aNetGain.com

50+ is the New Green

Google Declines to Fight for Yahoo

Anet Dunne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:54:38 +0000

According to the New York Times, Google and Yahoo worked over the weekend preceding the election to scale back their partnership agreement in an effort to make it palatable to government regulators, only to learn that the antitrust feds were planning to file a lawsuit to block the agreement. Google announced the day after the election that it decided to walk away rather than defend the agreement in court.
“After four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote on the company’s blog. Noting that several major advertisers had objected to the deal, Mr. Drummond added: “Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.”

Shares of Yahoo promptly surged 11% after a report surfaced online that the web pioneer’s Chief Executive Jerry Yang was leaving the company and that Yahoo was in late stage talks to sell the whole company to Microsoft for between $17 per share and $19 per share.

Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $33 a share in May. Yahoo’s shares were trading around $14 on Wednesday. Google’s shares were down nearly 3 percent, around $356.

Post from: aNetGain.com

Google Declines to Fight for Yahoo