There are a couple of things you need to know first, before you embark on a paid search campaign.

1. If your sales cycle is longer than 2 weeks from click to sale, your results might suck.

This is an important one, and many people miss the mark here.  If whatever you are selling takes multiple visits, multiple people in the decision process, or is a large, emotional transaction, chances are your paid campaign will suck.  Let’s look at a few examples:

Plumbing Service – you’ve got a overflow situation getting worse by the minute. Do you search 15 plumbers and call for quotes? No. You go to your computer (or mobile phone) and within 60 seconds search for a local plumber and choose the one that looks most   You might even pick the one who mentions “emergency service” or “available 24 hours” or “30 minute emergency response.” You probably don’t care much about the price either – you just want it fixed.

Real Estate – buying property is usually not an impulse buy. We look at lots of options, talk to lots of people, make personal visits and collect a lot of information before making the final purchase. This is definitely not an impulse purchase. Paid search can work in this case if the margins are high enough to where even if the conversions are dismal, one sale could pay for the whole campaign.

Air Conditioning Repair –Like the plumber, you need the next available company to service your system, because it is 100 degrees outside and your AC isn’t working. The first or second listing will get the deal.

Home Health Care – getting a parent or loved one into a home health care situation is an emotional experience. Not only is the sales cycle longer than 2 weeks, but the decision is usually not with one person, which makes it a harder deal to close. If clicks are going for $5-10 a piece, you could spend hundreds before getting a new client.

2. Send your clicks to a very targeted landing page.  Quality score matters and can greatly affect your cost per click.

We see a lot of businesses sending their paid ads to the home page of their website.  Sending someone to a page that has little to do with what the ad said will result in a poor Quality Score.  Secondly, your home page has lots of other links and things to distract a visitor (who you just paid for) to do just about anything other than what you want them to do – convert.

3. Find out what long tail terms in SEO convert well, and bid on those.

This is also an overlooked area in paid search.  If you take a gander at your analytics, you already know which organic search terms convert well.  Many of them are branded (include your company name), but some are not.  Many of them will be long tail, or terms which are extremely targeted and result in fewer visitors, but less bounce rate and higher conversions.  Bid on these long tail terms – they will be cheaper and will likely convert better.

Here’s a video recap by NovusTV of the F5 Expo held April 7th, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada.

(Left to Right) Michael Tippet of NowPublic, Justin Young of Radar DDB, and myself discuss cost effective video marketing at the F5 Expo on April 7th in Vancouver, Canada.

Photos courtesy of www.jeremylim.ca

The F5 Expo held Wednesday, April 7th was a tremendous event. Rich content, well-attended and a powerful keynote from best-selling author of Blink, Tipping Point, and Outliers Malcolm Gladwell. His challenge to people using and developing on the Internet is to use it to create strong ties rather than just weak ties, of which the Internet is already very good at. Revolutionary change can only happen through strong ties Malcolm argued, as he cited several examples throughout history to prove his point. His feeling, and I agree, is that the world needs more social revolution, and if revolution can only occur through strong ties, then we must find ways to use the Internet to foster it. The question is, are we up for it?

Malcolm Gladwell argues that the Internet has only been good at generating weak ties quickly amongst crowds of people. Social revolution can only happen through strong ties.

I had signed up to moderate two panels, the first being Cloud Computing and the other Search Engine Marketing. Thank you to my panelists for a job well done. I got some very positive feedback on these topics from attendees. I was also a last second replacement on the Cost Effective Video Marketing panel and had the privilege of sharing the stage with Justin Young of Radar DDB Vancouver and Michael Tippet of NowPublic. All-in-all, I thought it was a great event… minus the registration snafu! Well done Linz!

Malcolm Gladwell takes live questions through Mingleverse at F5 Expo Launch Party.

I was in attendance at the F5 Expo Launch Party yesterday, January 26th. What a great turnout! The place was packed with over 200 people – and all eyeballs were fixated on the many screens around the V Lounge as Malcolm Gladwell appeared within the Mingleverse online universe (think Second Life) to take questions from the live audience. If this party was any indication of what we can expect of the main event on April 7th, the Vancouver business and tech scene is in for a special treat. F5 Expo is all about online business, marketing, and technology. Hot topics like Search Engine Optimization, social media, video blogging, and cloud computing will be tackled in interactive sessions and panel discussions. I’ve just been added as a moderator on the SEO panel. Should be fun!

If you haven’t registered yet, take advantage of my personal promo code that gives you 30% off the ticket price until Jan 31st.

REGISTER NOW

ENTER PROMO CODE: P1F510

The table below shows the results of ComScore’s study which tested a control group of users not exposed to a banner ad campaign against a test group of users exposed to it across various industry verticals. In all cases, there was an increase in search activity by the test group, in one vertical as high as 77%. The overall average lift being 46%.

It makes sense when you think about it. I see myself behaving similarly. I seldom click on banner ads, but many times I have later gone to Google to search for a brand name or offer from an ad I was exposed to earlier – as I try to recall it. In this common scenario, the banner ad would have no value if it was measured by click through alone. Yet, in reality it entirely influenced the final search activity, which is often assigned all the value as the “last click” to the site. This study gives enough reason to reassess how you value banner advertising and the impact it has on your overall advertising campaign… beyond the click.

• Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote presentation
• Access to all sessions and panel discussions
• Lunch and refreshments
• USB memory stick preloaded with exclusive offerings and savings for your business
• Admission to the post-event networking reception with Malcolm in attendance

BONUS: Your name will be entered into a draw to meet Malcolm in-person. Only 20 tickets will be made available for this private reception.

Order Early Bird Tickets Here

Host of Tech Talk Expert on Global TV News and show organizer, Lindsay Smith asked me to join her advisory board this year to help with the latest edition of the Massive Tech Show to be held in April 2010. The event has lost some steam over the past couple of years and is looking to refocus. We had our first group advisory meeting earlier this month and the overwhelming consensus was the event needed a heavy makeover to make it relevant again for people doing business today. Some of the core decisions included a re-branding, focusing on social media (Twitter and Facebook) and online marketing (SEO and SEM), and placing a greater emphasis on quality content and big personalities. To that end, Lindsay announced yesterday she has signed on Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers as the event’s keynote speaker! Wow. If you haven’t read any of his books, please do yourself a favor and visit Amazon or your local Chapters or Barnes & Nobles and pick up one. A tremendous author with incredible insight on the world as we know it, Malcolm will be quite the draw at F5 Expo (ah yes, the new brand, cleverly named after the “F5″ function button on your keyboard, typically used to refresh your screen).

As the event starts taking shape, I’ll post some more details on it, but expect it to be an entirely different show than past iterations – in a very good way. Congrats Lindz on getting Malcolm!

New search engine Cuil has made no bones about it. They’re going after Google with what they believe is a superior search engine that searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance… and not on “superficial popularity metrics”. Ouch!

According to their site, Cuil searches more pages on the web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. Interesting enough, many of the executives are ex-Google people. Try it out and let me know what you think. Are they a real threat to Google, or are they just trying to use this positioning to generate some early PR attention.

http://www.cuil.com

“It’s impossible to imagine Barack Obama’s rise without the modern methods that his campaign used to organize itself, particularly around the internet,” says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the nonprofit think tank the New Democratic Network. “This really was the most successful campaign of the 21st century.”

“This is what happens when you have a charismatic candidate, and you organize on a scale not seen before,” he adds. “Literally, the size and scale of this is unprecedented in American political history, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the money, and passion, and support of millions of American people.”

The campaign came up with a number of innovations on the internet. It used wikis — online collaborative software — to coordinate and churn out precinct captains in both California and Texas. And it created a counter-viral e-mail campaign to combat the anonymous e-mail smears that question his religious faith and patriotism. It set up policy pages that solicited ideas from supporters, and at one point, the campaign solicited letters from supporters over the internet to lobby the undecided superdelegates.

And Obama’s campaign constantly updated its YouTube channel to keep its supporters around the country up to speed on his latest speeches.

Read full story

I studied their products and services, their corporate websites, but the real studying was done by reading their blog posts. Three of my personal favorite blogs belong to PEER 1, Mailtrust, and MailChimp, names you may already be familiar with if you pay attention to what’s going on in the hosting and software industries.

Okay, so you are probably asking “what’s so great about these companies and their blogs?” I took the time to interview the people behind these successful blogs. The responses I received are quite intriguing. Rajan Sodhi, VP of Marketing and Communications at PEER 1, started “Big Marketing for Small Businesses” and has been posting to his blog (bigmarketing.wordpress.com) since august 2006. Sodhi said, “My blog has been successful in giving me an opportunity to discuss, share and engage with others about my favorite topic – marketing.”

Sodhi enjoys discussing ideas and concepts in marketing on his personal blog. However, blogs are able to do more than just communicate your personal thoughts on whatever interests you the most. For example, Pat Matthews, president of Mailtrust, a Rackspace company, said, “My blog has helped us generate business as well as recruit more effectively.” Matthews has been posting in his “Small Town, Big ideas” blog (patsweblog.com) for over 2.5 years. He believes potential customers and employees like to read about the company they are going to do business with or work for in the future. Matthews added, “My blog has made a big impact on both levels.” Sodhi and Matthews’ blogs are independent of their company’s websites and still help them build business. What happens when you fully integrate your blog within your corporate website?

Download article (pdf): Blogging for Business in 2008