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SEO or PPC?
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The two main components of search engine marketing are search engine optimization and pay per click management. The two are very contrasting in terms of their benefits, their costs and how you go about using them for your website. It’s important to understand how both of these components of search engine marketing wok and how you can use them to help your business’s online presence and profitability.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO entails everything you do both on your website and off your website to boost its standings in the displayed results of the search engines. There are many different pieces of effective search engine optimization. For example, you can include targeted keywords and phrases into your content, you can build the amount of incoming links you have on your website and much more.
Results you see from SEO are known as organic. A visitor to your website that arrives there from a normal query in the search engine is known as an organic visitor. You didn’t have to pay to drive that person to your website, instead it was a result of your natural placement in the search engines.
SEO takes time to become effective and is generally a gradual process. You can’t throw up some keywords on your website and expect to be number 1 in Google the next week. Instead, SEO is about boosting the value and credibility of your website over the long haul. With the right strategy deployed continually for a long period of time you will be able to see and maintain substantial results in your search engine positioning. The result, of course, is increased traffic flow to your website and a greater online presence.
Pay Per Click
PPC campaigns entail purchasing sponsored listings that appear in the search engine results. When you make a search in Google, the sponsored results show up right at the top of the page, as well as down the sidebar of the page. Every link you see in these areas has been purchased.
The main thing to remember however is that you don’t really pay for the placement, you pay each time somebody clicks on your ad to go to your website. This offers a direct link between visitors and the amount you pay, and you can control your daily budget to limit how much you end up spending. The way that the listings are determined is through an ongoing bidding process. The more you are willing to spend per click, or per visitor, the higher you will end up getting ranked.
The great benefit of PPC is that it is instantaneous. You may not be able to run a masterful PPC campaign right away, but as soon as you create and launch a campaign, you will start seeing results. Therefore it’s an extremely powerful way to make an immediate impact on your traffic.
As opposed to SEO however PPC of course costs you money. If you don’t target your market appropriately and bid on keywords strategically, you can end up wasting a good deal of money. Another important aspect of PPC management is developing effective landing pages that convert visitors who click on your links. This is extremely important when every visitor you receive has been paid for.
Clearly there are many differences between search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. SEO produces long term results and doesn’t cost you money directly. PPC can produce instant results but will cost you every time someone ends up on your website.
An effective search engine marketing strategy will usually incorporate pieces of both. It’s all about fitting a specific plan into a budget you can afford, and deploying tactics that help you achieve your specific goals. For example, if you just created a website and want to begin seeing traffic right away, bidding highly on some of your important key phrases will help you gain an immediate presence.
However, to keep costs down in the long run while further developing your presence, you will have to use SEO to help climb up the rankings. PPC is also commonly used when you are directly trying to sell a product or service to someone, as opposed to convert them over longer periods of time.
Be sure to consider both PPC and SEO when developing your Internet marketing strategy. Both can pay huge dividends for your website, but as mentioned they are extremely different from one another. Used in conjunction, they can be an extremely powerful tag team of Internet marketing.
When you’re considering opening up your own online business you of course need to learn how to develop a successful online business plan and Jay Kubassek’s InsideOut DVD is a great place to start. An online business plan is all about researching your potential niche and making the connection between which markets are accessible enough to gain entry into but still popular enough to lead to substantial profits. A successful online business plan may take even more research than a traditional business plan, however it will be worlds easier and less expensive to execute.
Starting with the broadest goals, you first have to consider the industry that your business or service is going to fall into. Within that industry you then have to find a smaller niche where you can really find a home. Sporting goods would be an industry, tennis gear would be a niche and tennis rackets would be an even smaller niche.
The more narrow you make the niche, the less potential traffic and prospects you are going to come across. However, you will also be eliminating a great deal of competition as you make your niche more targeted. Therefore, as mentioned, you need to find the correct balance in terms of the scope of the niche that you are planning to go after when developing your million dollar game plan. You obviously will need a strong customer base but you would ideally like to eliminate as much competition as possible.
This is where all of the research comes into play. There are many powerful tools available to you that can help you develop a successful online business plan. Even free keyword research tools such as the Google Adwords tool will allow you to see how many searches are performed related to your niche. You can then manually search for the niche in Google or another search engine to see what the first page of results looks like. Combining these two methods you’ll get a very general idea of what the strength of the customer base is as well as the strength of the competition.
From there the next step in developing your online business million dollar game plan has to be how you plan on turning your site’s visitors into revenue. Are you going to be selling a product that you personally create or manually distribute and ship? Or will you become an affiliate warehouse for another company’s products? If you’re an affiliate you won’t have to worry about any hassles such as inventory or shipping, and you’ll be making your money as commission when someone buys a product for somebody else.
Other potential ways to monetize your new website include advertisements as well as memberships and information products in which Carbon Copy Pro will show you how to do. With memberships, once you build up a traffic base you could offer an exclusive area with more information and guides that people have to buy to gain access to. With information products, you can place a collection of tips and resources in an eBook and then sell and distribute that product through your site. Once again, you won’t have to worry about inventory or any other logistical issues.
Another step in your million dollar business game plan will be how you plan on releasing and marketing your website. Even in narrow niches, the web is still extremely competitive. You are going to need a full marketing plan that will allow you to exploit the openings in the marketplace and reach out to as many potential visitors as possible.
Today, the best marketing plans are going to combine search engine optimization, social networking and social media outreach and potentially PPC, or pay per click campaigns. Analyzing the strengths and disadvantages of each of these areas for your particular niche is another crucial component of a successful online business plan, and another one in which you will have to conduct a good deal of research.But the great thing about starting a business with Carbon Copy Pro is that much of this research is already done for you.
A successful online business plan is going to guide you through the entire process of creating a new website. From picking your niche to focusing it, finding out how you are going to monetize your website and how you are going to market it, research is the most important factor along the way. If you take the time to research every step accordingly, you are going to end up with a site that is excellently planned and will have a great chance at succeeding.
