Author Archive
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Indigio has landed Business Controls as a new client. Business Controls offers solutions for companies wishing to improve customer service, employee relations and product quality through the implementation of anonymous hot lines and business management consulting.
Indigio will be working with Business Controls to provide search engine marketing to leverage the Internet for developing and qualifying new account leads and prospects.
This new business came about through our relationship with CSIA and the networking of Dave Higgins, Indigio’s Chairman. Dave went to a breakfast function hosted by CSIA and struck up a conversation with Steve Foster, the president of Business Controls. They talked about Steve’s needs to leverage the Internet to help identify and qualify prospective companies looking for the types of services and products Business Controls has to offer. This led to subsequent meetings with the Indigio team and eventually an initial contract.
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
I attended a session at the NAA conference this week in Orlando hosted by Brian Tierney, the man behind The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com Newspaper group. He spoke about Innovations in newspapers and did a masterful job of showing that if you focus on the opportunity and not on the decline, you can make a difference.
The Inquirer and the Daily News have grown circulation for the first time in 5 years and 9 years respectively since he and his management group bought the company. Pretty impressive considering the state of the industry.
Brian talked about the work they are doing with Avenue A and “other consultants” to redesign the user experience of Philly.com. He spoke of a complete redesign coming in a few months, but he also spoke of an interim design that was done by one of the “other consultants” to get something up and running quickly while they continued to work on the major redesign.
The interim design launched and they have seen page view grow from 20 million to over 40 million.
Unfortunately, he did not mention the name of the “Other Consultant” but I will let you in on the secret. Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
In most worlds, Pay Per Click advertising is very straight forward. Find keywords around your product, write engaging ad copy and drive traffic to your site. However, what if the keywords you are trying to buy are $3 – $5 per click? That means many competitors are buying those terms and it also means the traffic coming to your site has many alternatives to shop you. So, why not think about keywords that led to the symptoms your product or service cures? For example, an attorney might be looking to attract clients related to medical malpractice suit. Buying the keyword Vioxx might cost you a pretty penny. Instead, look for keywords around the symptoms your product or services might address. Use those keywords to drive traffic to information sites about the issue they are experiencing. Then provide links from there to your product or service as a solution to their problem. You will spend less money, achieve high relevancy and improve your cost to revenue over time.
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
The common perception in the world of Pay per Click on Internet search engines is all bidders on keywords are created equal. The thought often is the bidder who bids the most wins the position on the page.
The world of Pay per Click is evolving and this is no longer necessarily true. Most search engines are moving towards quality score and relevancy and rewarding bidders who provide both. Therefore, if you have an Ad group that contains common keywords and those keywords use Ad text that is relevant to their meaning and if you send the traffic that clicks on your ads to a page that specifically talks about the keyword in proper context, you could pay less for the keyword than others.
Monday, November 19th, 2007
I get a lot of questions from clients about the practice of buying completive keywords that are trademarked. For example, you work for a company called Widget and your company has registered a trademark on that name.
You then go to Google and type in Widget and there on the right-hand side in the paid advertising column are your competitors. They have purchased the keyword Widget and are displaying ads in an attempt to leverage your brand into their business.
This is actually perfectly fine and permitted by all search engines. In fact it is a great strategy and I recommend all our clients buy their own trademarked term if you see competitors buying it. In many cases, your organic listing could get trumped if there are competitors lurking in the paid column.
Now, what you need to watch is if competitors are using your trademark in their ad text. If your competitor uses “Widget” in the ad text of their ad, then you can ask the search engine to turn them off and most search engines will.
Indigio has landed Business Controls as a new client. Business Controls offers solutions for companies wishing to improve customer service, employee relations and product quality through the implementation of anonymous hot lines and business management consulting.
