When creating a Google AdWords campaign, there are several elements which have a real influence on how effectively the campaign will work and a number which play a key role in this.

Some of the most important ones are:

• establishing your target audience
• correct keyword selection
• good AdGroup creation
• compelling Advert text
• relevant landing page

There is also the requirement for all of these elements to work together and effectively create a funnel which will help to direct potential customers from when they type their search term into the Search Engine through to the call to action page on your website.

The three main stages along this path are:

Keyword Phrases:ensure that you are attracting the right group of Search Engine users by focused keyword phrase selection

Advert text: the advert should reinforce the keyword phrases you are targeting and, ideally, should contain those words as well.

Landing page: the landing page should be a specific one covering the same area as the initial keyword phrase - let them know they are in the right place

So, in a little more detail:

Keyword Phrases: first of all you need to ensure that you are attracting the right group of Search Engine users and this is achieved by selecting the right keyword phrases. You can choose as many relevant ones as you like but, because the adverts are linked to an AdGroup in Google AdWords, you will then need to divide them into AdGroups focused on keyword phrases that cover a similar area and that can be successfully represented by the same advert.

Advert text: this should reinforce the keyword phrases you are targeting and, ideally, should contain those words as well. This reassures the searcher that they are looking at an advert which will lead to exactly the information they are looking for. It can also filter out those who are not appropriate by focusing further on the products being offered. There is no point allowing someone to click through to your site looking for a solicitor in London when you are based in Birmingham - you pay for the click with little chance of winning any business from it. Judge your audience and adjust accordingly.

Landing page: at worst the advert should point at a specific page on your site which covers the same area as the initial keyword phrase and at best it would point to a special landing page you have created which is focused on the subject matter of the keywords you are targeting. Do not just send visitors through to the homepage - this is just like saying “ok you’re in the right place, now let’s see if you can find the information you’re after”, a bit like “hide and seek” if you like! Not the recipe for capturing that warm lead and showing them that you can answer their needs!

By linking these three elements you are creating both a funnel and a filter at the same time, and when done correctly will deliver only targeted visitors who are interested in what you offer through to your website. But you should not just have a single funnel - remember that each AdGroup is a separate funnel aimed at a different set of keyword phrases, so by putting them all together you get a whole series of individually targeted groups of customers arriving at your website.

There is a new “.eu” top-level domain on the way, which will enable businesses and individuals to choose a pan-European Internet name for their websites and e-mail addresses.

Pre-registration of domains has already started as from 7th December 2005, and this so called “sunrise period” will last for 4 months. During this time, any holders of prior rights can apply for the registration of their domain names, so long as they fulfil the basic criteria, part of which is being resident or having a registered office in the EU.

After that point (7th April 2006), registrations will then be opened up to the general public - rather quaintly, they call this period the “Land Rush” in a way that seems almost reminiscent of the old GoldRush of the Wild West!

So will it be a “Gold Rush”? Well, from an online branding point of view then it is certainly something to be considered - up until now, the two major top level domains for UK companies have been .com and .co.uk so this will now add a 3rd which should manage to grow in strength over time. So , just as I currently recommend UK companies to take the .com domain name even if they wish to trade off the .co.uk, so it may well be valid for companies to consider safeguarding their brand online by registering the .eu domain as well.

For other people the emarketing interest will be if they missed out on the .com or .co.uk version for a specific product or service and still want a top level domain, then this gives them another opportunity to do so and so we may well see a rush for certain sought after domains. Have no doubt that most of the single word terms and acronyms will be snapped up fairly quickly.

Yet with most registrars charging substantial fees for registering during the “sunrise period” and annual price levels being more akin to .com rather than .co.uk levels, then the likelihood is that any initial “goldrush” will be streaming very firmly in the direction of the registrars themselves!

You can find additional info on the EUIRD site.

When looking at how to use email marketing, then the question always arises about how should I send out the emails that I have created to my verified list of contacts. Some look to Microsoft Outlook as a way, and indeed it does have the facility to mail merge from a Word document to a recipient list that you have created. Should you decide to take this route then you will find this overview to be of use.

However, it is a solution that I would have difficulty in recommending to anyone interested in embarking on anything other than a very basic email marketing campaign.

For a more comprehensive and recommended solution to achieving the right elements for an email marketing program, there are a number of options. Firstly you should evaluate between three primary options that exist for you:

1. Use an external agency and outsource your email marketing
2. Run the campaign in house using a purchased desktop / server software system
3. Run the email marketing in house and use a hosted / online system

The initial selection may not always be the most appropriate so it is worthwhile checking out what would best suit your requirements given the internal resources that you have and taking into account the support and advice that you may need to comply with legal and commercial I need to carry it out properly.

a) Use an external agency

Agencies come in many shapes and sizes and will range from large marketing organisations which have added email marketing to their set of marketing services, through to specialist boutiques focused on email marketing or emarketing in general.

In particular, the small agencies may prove to be very effective if they work with you and take help iron out the legal, copywriting that you face, in addition to perhaps designing the emails, personalising elements of the content (essential!!), sending them out and tracking them. The tracking will allow you to judge the success of your campaign as well as permit a better focus as you carry out segment testing that should be standard in an email marketing campaign to achieve the best results.

The flip side is potentially the cost involved, though the Return on Investment (ROI) will almost certainly be a lot higher if they have specialist expertise in the area, rather than using it as an add-on to their offline marketing / mailing services which is a different issue. However, combining the two as an integrated direct marketing approach is perhaps the most powerful and compelling solution.

2. Run the email campaign in house using a purchased desktop / server software system

If you have the necessary in house resource, then buying a system could be an option but do make sure that the software supplier includes upgrades in the purchase price. The market is still developing and the services offered are getting better as well as prices coming down.

A couple of suppliers that offer a service worth looking at are given below, but it is worth comparing the services they offer as this will change, particularly in the tracking arena:

Broadcast (from a company called MailWorkz)
Gammadyne
Lyris

When considering this option, elements that you will want to bear in mind are your internal capabilities in terms of designing the email and working with the software, and your IT set-up including whether bulk email going out through your ISP is something that they will be open to, together with the online processing of bounced emails, unsubscribes etc.

3. Run the email marketing in house and use a hosted / online system

This is probably the simplest method in terms of IT set-up although there is still a learning process with regard to learning the system you select. The system is hosted externally by a company specialising in email marketing and you pay a monthly charge to use the system - this charge is generally either dictated by service level, size of mailing lists or number of emails sent. It is good to check the exact charge configuration if cost is a major issue.

You would import the contacts from your own database or Excel spreadsheet (usually through a CSV format). create the emails within the system and then send out the campaigns from there. Some will offer tracking as part of the package while others offer this as an upgrade so it is worth checking it out if tracking is a key element to your campaign. Some recommended suppliers offering this set-up are:

Constant Contact
Mailer Mailer
AWeber
Vertical Response

If you are combining two or more lists, then you may also wish to consider cleaning the list of email addresses before using it. The basic action will be to “de-dupe” it, which means to remove duplicated addresses or multiple addresses for the same person. Most of the email marketing systems will have a simple de-dupe facility which is probably all that you need – once the system is automatically adding email addresses, then again all of them should do verify current addresses on an ongoing basis before adding a new one. If you have an old list or are unsure about it, then it would probably be wise to verify the recipients as a double opt-in if you want to do this properly, which is what I would recommend.

Email marketing is very powerful but also very diverse in its uses so choosing the right method of sending the emails is key to success. If you are in any doubt about how to run a campaign then it is probably worthwhile finding a small agency to work with you initially to ensure you get it right to - you will then be in a much better position to ask the right questions when you make the move and research your next solution.

Firstly a Happy New Year to one and all and here’s hoping that it will be a successful one!

There are a number of major initiatives that I will be undertaking this year and one of these will be the establishing of a new blog based website focusing on the use of Business Blogging as a powerful online marketing tool called Better Business Blogging.

The site will combine an online set of information together with an email based course covering how to set up a Business Blog and the elements that you will need to consider together with a section on best use of SEO and other methods of promoting your blog and with it your business.

The course itself is a series of emails covering the following subject areas:

• Introduction to Business Blogs and their use for marketing
• Questions to consider (and answer!) before setting up a blog
• Elements to bear in mind as you set it up
• Taking the first steps
• How to keep writing and ideas to help you
• Making best use of your blog for Search Engine rankings
• Mistakes to avoid in developing your Blog
• Promoting your Business Blog
• Round up and help

The series of emails will start in the first half of February which is when the accompanying site will be going live.

If you are interested then post a comment and I can add you to the list. You will then be contacted closer to the time to check that you still wish to receive the emails when it goes live - this is so that we have full “opt-in” from people receiving it.

The site will then focus on the different marketing uses for a business blog whether you are an independent consultant looking to establish your expert credentials in your market niche or a medium sized company looking to find better ways to establish a longer term dialogue and relationship with your customers. We will look at all the aspects and how to use the Business Blog technology to achieve it.

It’s going to be good and your feedback with be much appreciated - I’ll keep you informed as to its progress.

Jakob Nielsen has turned his attention to some specific usability elements in blogs which are certainly different to those that we have come to accept when creating websites. His article outlines what he considers to be the Top Ten Design mistakes that he sees bloggers making.

Although Nielsen’s stated focus is on usability and on blogs in general, if we apply these elements to business blogs then many still remain very relevant, particularly where individual professionals or small and medium sized businesses are concerned.

1. No Author Biographies
As a small and medium sized business, one aim of your blog in terms of marketing you and your business, is to help develop a level of trust with your target audience and to demonstrate your expertise to your readers. A short biography will help substantiate this and fill in some of the details about the person. Don’t forget to put contact details there as well! You also need to make sure it’s easy for people to get in touch!

2. No Author Photo
A photo can contribute to developing that personal touch which should help to show the people behind the company face. In professional services, such as law firms or accountancies, a photo on a website can help develop a sense of trust and the same is true here. Make sure the photo portrays you in the light you would like to be seen, though!

3. Nondescript posting titles
Apart from being clear about what you are blogging about, the title is absolutely key to the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) elements within the blog. A good title should not only be a clear indicator to the reader of what the post contains but should also contain the keywords of the article to help with Search Engines.

4. Links don’t say where they go
Being able to easily find your way around a site or to other sites is fundamental to working closely with your readers and getting them to return, so make sure you “signpost” links as clearly as possible. Additionally, from an SEO standpoint again, the text you use to create the link (so called ‘anchor text’) is very valuable so use it!

5. Classic hits are buried
If there are certain key articles which any visitor to your site must read, then make sure that you highlight it on your blog. Key articles really show what you and your company are all about so make sure everyone has the opportunity to read these gems!

6. Calendar is the only navigation
Generally, when new people visit your blog, they are going to want to read your posts on certain subjects to get to understand what the focus of your blog is all about. So make sure that your categories are well named so that people can find for what they are looking for quickly and easily - then they’ll come back for more!

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
Although publishing when you have something to say is good, regular posting is certainly beneficial so that people can know when to come back to view your updates. Of course, doing this through RSS would save them time and effort!

8. Mixing Topics
In a business blog, if you are able to keep to your specific area of expertise (your niche if you like) then this will help in your marketing efforts to position yourself as an expert in that subject area through the information that you are providing in your blog.

9. Forgetting that you write for your future boss
In the instance of a small business, you are in fact writing for your customers, present and future! Nevertheless, be very clear that anything you write can be found by them and so only write posts that you are representative of yourself and your business, as you are writing not only to them but to the world at large.

10. Having a domain name owned by a weblog service
Having control yourself of all aspects of your business is important– and a blog, with its strong marketing and PR benefits, must certainly be one of those. Therefore use a blogging system that you are able to adapt to your needs through a domain that you own.

Overall, definitely a lot of relevance there to business blogging, including a number of key elements that you should consider right from the planning stage of your blog where possible. So making sure that you consider that you will need to deal with both your readers and the Search Engines from the outset is certainly good advice.

All too often, being a UK marketing consultant means that you are battling against a number of issues from a number of different areas, even within the UK marketing profession. You can come across marketing managers in UK companies who have opposing views on how to best use marketing in a business development context and others who consider UK marketing consultants to be all theory and no action! What a distorted view of UK marketing!

Marketing consultants in the UK also have to deal with the very different opinions from their marketing consultant counterparts in the US who believe UK consultants to be less direct than they should be, both in promoting their own marketing consultancies as well as their ideas. Additionally, as a marketing consultant in the UK, it is important to be able to offer not only consultancy in all aspects of traditional marketing but also be able to offer UK companies a focused vision on online marketing and how best to integrate it with their other offline UK marketing activities.

This area of online marketing, or eMarketing, encompasses much more than just internet marketing and more than just website promotion, although it does include both of those. So while internet marketing will tend to include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Advertising (or Pay Per Click), Link Development, Banner advertising etc., emarketing takes the reach a step further. Emarketing extends to cover all methods of communicating with your customers electronically, not just through the internet but also through email marketing, business blogging, mobile messaging, podcasting and the like. A UK marketing consultant should be au fait with all of these techniques and online marketing methods.

Indeed any UK marketing consultant worth his/her salt should be able to consult on, advise and implement not only traditional UK marketing activities but also have the scope to look at using the full range of emarketing techniques to complement these. A marketing consultant should also be clear from the outset that they are not just there to deal with UK marketing theory but UK marketing practice as well. With this we may be able to enhance the reputation of UK marketing consultants as a whole and demonstrate UK marketing at its best rather than try to drag it kicking and screaming into the 21st Century!

Once a well designed website is in place (together with a plan for its management and updating), attention can then be turned to the online promotion of the business and the creation of an increasing flow of visitors and potential customers to the website.

The range of emarketing methods at your disposal to achieve this share five critical factors. It is these factors which make emarketing particularly attractive and so successful for those companies using it. The principal ones are:

• Highly Targeted: the digital nature of the internet allows you to offer specific and customised content to each individual. As a result, it allows you to attract highly targeted customers to your website who are most likely to be interested in your products and services;
• Easily Measurable: knowing how many people are visiting your website, how they found you and what they looked at are invaluable elements to gaining a better understanding of your customers and being able to supply what they require. Emarketing allows you to obtain full tracking figures and will permits a detailed examination of the Return on Investment (ROI) of any campaign;
• Immediate: time is crucial in business and an emarketing campaign has the advantage of being much quicker to set up and put into play than other marketing methods. Just as importantly, the response mechanisms are equally quick so you can start to see the results (quite literally) immediately;
• Tested and Refined: although the immediacy and speed of a campaign is important, the quality needs to be just as high. To ensure it remains so, you have the opportunity to test and refine any campaign as it is happening to ensure you get the best possible results. By adopting the content and format which is achieving the highest response rates, you can continually improve your results and number of visitors.
• Cost effective: with budgets tight, all of the elements above mean that companies needing clear ROI figures from their marketing activity will be well served by an integrated emarketing campaign. Being able to react quickly and in a very targeted way also means that they can avoid delays and the costs associated with them.

This combination of benefits produces fast acting, flexible yet focused marketing campaigns which can be measured and refined on an ongoing basis. When budgets are small, as is normally the case with small and medium sized businesses, then this is all important to make sure that you squeeze every last drop of value out of what is available!

Good to see an article on Internet News.com which indicates that Corporate Blogging takes off according to a survey which has been carried out recently. A lot of the comments that were made related to larger corporates but are just as relevant to smaller companies and business professionals as well.

The elements regarding how business blogs are being used shows that they are being employed for public relations and marketing, as well as to demonstrate thought leadership in their chosen area. It was good to see that as well as hoping to achieve improved brand recognition and external communications, blogs were also seen as a excellent vehicle for customer feedback. This last point is key again in companies of all sizes wishing to develop better relationships with their customer base.

Recently, Google has launched its Blog Search Engine which works in the same basic way as the normal Google Search Engine that we are all so familiar with, except that it only indexes blogs.

If a blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service, then Google’s Blog Search Engine should be able to find it and certainly so far it seems to be doing a good job in that respect. An added feature, particularly relevant to blogs, is that it allows you to sort the results not only by relevance, but also by date.

However, this is not to discuss its relative merits but rather to highlight some of the special search operators that it has over and above those that we already have available from the main Google Search Engine – a list of these main operators can be found on Google’s site.

In addition to these, Blog Search supports the following new operators of its own:

inblogtitle:
Every blog has its own title as part of its set-up and this is what is searched through to return results. This does not refer to all that is in the “Title tag” which will vary according to the page or all that is included in the URL.

inposttitle:
This searches through the titles of the posts which are made in a blog - again this is a specific field you create when creating a post in your blog, and it is important for this and other reasons to choose an appropriate one.

inpostauthor:
This will return anything where the author’s name corresponds with the search term. For example, a search such as - emarketing inpostauthor:Mark - will return posts containing the word ‘emarketing’ which have been posted by people named ‘Mark’.

blogurl:
This does not return words which are only present in the main domain name of the blog but in the rest of the URL. In many blogging systems, this is likely to return similar results as a search using inposttitle

There is an alternative way to achieve this by using the Advanced Search option which is accessible from the main Blog Search page and will allow you to sift through the results in the same way.

All useful stuff and certainly makes it clear of the importance that Google places on the role that blogs are already playing which will no doubt develop further.

We know that identifying the best keyword phrases is going to be key to our efforts to get better rankings through Search Engine Optimisation or better coverage in Search Advertising programmes. It can also help to achieve a more comprehensive coverage in our chosen area by identifying keyword phrases in adjacent areas that are relevant to what we offer.

To help in this task and find the best keyword phrases, there are a number of tools available to help us achieve this and a lot of them are free!

Here are ones that I have looked at and consider worthwhile.

WordTracker
Probably the best known tool in the field and self styled “Leading Keyword Research Tool”. It is charged for, although there is a limited free trial, but it is also very complete in what it offers across a number of Search Engines.

Google AdWords: Keyword Tool
Gives ideas for new keywords associated with your target phrase but does not indicate relevance or give details of number or frequency of searches

Overture Keyword Selector Tool
Returns details of how many searches have been carried out in the Overture engine over the period of a month and allows a drill down into associated keywords containing your keyword phrase as well.

NicheBot
NicheBot has a mix of Wordtracker and Overture based tools as well as a nice keyword analysis tool which focuses on Google’s results

Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool
One of a set of tools available at the Digital Point website – this engine gives search numbers on keywords from Wordtracker and Overture sources

In addition to these, although some of the keyword tools mentioned above already include it, I would also recommend taking a look through a Thesaurus (online or paperback) to open up other avenues. Sometimes you just can’t beat going back to basics!