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"As online lead generation starts to establish itself as a separate discipline in online marketing and an increasing number of advertisers start to see the benefits of paying for leads on a CPL basis, marketers will have to start making some decisions to allocate sufficient budgets to their online lead generation campaigns. "

Read The Whole Story @ eConsultancy.com ----> Paid search and online lead generation: can they exist together?

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On the online marketing front for Cyber Monday and Black Friday here are a few things you can do:

* Make sure your paid search ads are in tune with the date of sale. Meaning, on Black Friday, make sure your ad signals the searcher that your business is well aware of the date and doing a promotion for it. People sleep outside of Best Buy on Thursday night, why? Because they know Friday is where it’s at!

* If you do display advertising, make sure your banners, like your paid search text ads, have Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads.

* Include coupon codes in your ads to increase CTR on your ads.

* This next tip may be a little Risky but for SEO reasons, with a very authoritative domain name, you can change the Title Tag and Description Tag to have BLACK FRIDAY and CYBER MONDAY text which can help you rank for those keywords on those dates.

* Make sure you’re watching your paid search closely as bidding can be at full activity as competitors try to fight for the most traffic and market share.

* Send out 1 or 2 newsletters on these days to spike up your traffic given you have a decent email list to send to.

On the ecommerce side of things, here are some things you can do to optimize for Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

* Make sure your website is Black Friday and Cyber Monday ready! Let your logo or page design display these keywords that buyers look for letting them know it is a sale for THAT day.

* Look at your competition on that day and make sure you’re up-to-par with their sales. If there are any days to be very competitive, its here. These dates can bring good sales volume, your margins can be a bit lower.

* Create coupons for each of these dates to have better measurement of which has worked best.

* Given you have a spike in traffic during these days, make sure you try and gather as much data as possible from your visitors (email addresses) to send out newsletter to make them not only a buyer, but a customer.

There is one thing that you’ll learn real quick as you get into building pay-per-click campaigns and that is observe and study the competition. While you’re there trying to figure out what words work best, how to write a compelling ad, what words to build on, your competition has been doing that for longer than you have! Remember, they have gone through the same process you are going through now and trying to figure out, what keywords to use for the best return on investment, what ads will get the best click-through-rate, which ads may have the best conversions, etc.

SEMRush is a tool that lets you do just that, study the competition and get an edge. My strategy is and was never to COPY the competition but build around keywords they use, get ideas, etc.

Some key features that will really help you optimize your campaign using SEMRush are:

* Identify Competitors – By searching for your keyword phrase on SEM Rush, you can pinpoint competing websites that are already ranking highly in Google for your intended keywords, and as a side benefit, you can identify other potentially profitable keywords of each of your potential competitors.

* Ad / Traffic Buyer Suggestions – When you research a website, SEM Rush will display related websites that are advertising via Google Adwords, which, this can give you an inroad to potential advertisers, who are proven buyers, for your website.

* Adwords Ad Overview – If a particular website that you are researching, namely, a competitor, is advertising via Google Adwords, SEM Rush will show you your competitors’ ads, and their landing pages within their simple-to-use interface.

* Side-By-Side Competitor Comparison – You can analyze your domain vs. your competitors’ domain name, alongside your common keywords, your rank in Google, their rank in Google, estimated monthly search volume for the keyword, number of competing pages for the keyword, and the estimated cost per click in Google Adwords.

* Data Exports – Like most keyword tools, SEM Rush offers a few choices when it comes to exporting your research data. However, because this service is so unique in the type of information it provides, we wanted to mention this as it is a major asset for you, regardless of whether you’re a paid or free user.

The way I used it best was always to look at my top competitors in the PPC space. From this, I can go one by one and look at keywords they are bidding, keywords they are ranking for organically, and looking at their ads. A GREAT strategy that I don’t have much search marketers talk about but is great for me is really digging into the websites organic rankings and building of that.

Google ranks many website for specific products and these are great, long-tail keywords, that may have a real chip bidding price and although may deliver very low volume traffic, can deliver a high conversion rate!

You can start a free SEMRush account by clicking on the following URL: http://www.semrush.com/users/register.html

**This review was written for an exchange of a trial period and for the education of a good search marketing product for all PalatnikFactor.com readers.

Here are some ways to increase traffic to your blog:

1- Sign up to forums in your niche. Link out to your post if the thread is relevant and engage users. YOUR READERS are the people in the forums looking for information you may have already written about that they can use.

2- You can use Pay-Per-Click as a channel to drive more traffic. Choose the most affordable keywords and create large ad groups bidding very low for relevant keywords. This will surely increase your traffic. You may pay at first but long-term results can be well worth it.

3- Offer something for FREE. Offering something such as a free EBOOK can increase traffic because either readers will share it with others or other bloggers will link to the page driving traffic. Make sure to include your blogs URL anywhere you offer something free.

4- Write guest post in blogs similar to your niche. THIS DOES WORK. Reach out to the bigger blogs in your niche and ask to write a guest post. They will be happy to add more good relevant content so why not? Also a good network resource.

5- You can always find something worth while about your blog everyone should know. There are plenty of free PRESS RELEASE websites out there that allow you to place a link to your blog.

6- Article marketing is still a good way to drive traffic. It may not be the best SEO resource, but if you write quality content and place a link back to your blog, it will surely make a difference. Submit your articles to websites such as eZine.

7- Twitter has been a great channel as a traffic driver. Place a link to good post from your blogs and try to get as many followers as possible. Remember to add twitter buttons to ALL your post.

8- Social bookmarking websites is still a MAJOR source of traffic and can not only help you with link building but driving traffic. Submit your post to pages such as DIGG.com, PROPELLER.com, and others. You can find good list online for these.

9- Create and Submit RSS Feeds. Feeds can always be a good source of traffic. Submit your blogs RSS feeds to all the blog rss feed directories you can. If you find some with good PR, even better.

10- Comment on other related blog post and IF POSSIBLE AND REALTED, place a link to a related story you wrote.

“Many ads are aimed at interrupting a consumer to get them to pay attention to the ad, but this approach has proven less effective on the Web, as consumers often come online to pursue an interest or perform a task, such as finding a local restaurant or booking an airline ticket. To address this, many advertisers are moving away from interruption toward helping consumers accomplish their tasks by offering commercial messages that are useful, helpful and relevant.

Hear more on this strategy from Jim Lecinski, Managing Director, U.S. Sales, and think about incorporating this idea into your 2010 planning:

Many companies do seek a translation company to translate their website and build a whole new page with their page in secondary languages. Google has just released a widget that can make this way easier to the customer. In the click of a buttom, this widget will turn the website to the language of your choice.

Google tells all about this widget in their new blog post, as they state, “Today, we’re happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site’s content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they’ll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor’s language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.”

All this takes a simple piece of code to put into your website. You can find it now in the Google Website Translator.

As a tip for those of you who deal with international customers and have experienced issues in your customer service department with customers (potential and current) sending emails in other languages other than English and your customer service reps dont speak that language, try to Google Translate tool.

As someone suggested in the post as a comment, most average users, in my opinion and experience, have NO CLUE what organic and paid search results are. Meaning, people have no clue that ads on the right or top are actually being paid for while the organic results are not.

Will there actually be an increase in CTR? I wonder if this change is really permanent or just a quick trial run Google is going for to see how user behavior changes and if they can capitalize more on their paid search.

Like I said in the beginning, just take a look at YouTubes traffic and then you can figure other traffic video sources of video sharing websites that can generate traffic to your video.

“Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched online video on a video-sharing website, a figure that has nearly doubled from 33% in 2006, according to a research report (pdf) from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project, which also found that 19% of online adults use video-sharing sites on a typical day (compared with 8% in 2006).

The April 2009 survey found that video watching among young adults is near-universal, with nine in 10 (89%) internet users ages 18-29 now saying they view content on video-sharing sites (up from 72% in 2008), and 36% do so on a typical day.”

Let’s take a quick example. Let’s say you repair XBOX 360s for a living and you want more exposure. Look at this video in YouTube when you type in Xbox 360 repair.

Its got 317,719 views and over 560 comments. Now, I haven’t watched it but this alone can be a great source for branding OR, you can even edit the video possibly and try to charge for advertising if you can generate a good amount of daily views!

The study found that local search — the practice of using online search tools to find local businesses, products, or services — grew 58 percent in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches. By comparison, overall U.S. Web core searches grew at a much smaller rate of 21 percent year-over-year, nearing 137 billion searches by the end of 2008. Local searches stand at 12 percent of core searches on the top 5 portals.

Buoyed by the growth in local search, Internet Yellow Pages and locally-focused online business directories also saw double-digit growth of 23 percent in the same period, totaling 4.6 billion searches in 2008.”

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