Believe it or not, the majority of jobs are not found through the typical job board searching, cover letter writing and resume submission we’re all familiar with. In fact, most of us are probably too familiar with this concept. How many jobs have you applied for using this method, only to never hear back from the prospective employer?
The fact of the matter is, most jobs are gained by a person utilizing their network of contacts. A manager in a company is looking to hire a new marketing person, and one of the designers just so happens to have a friend who dabbles in marketing. You can reach out to all of your current friends, family members, and former colleagues to help you get a job, or even increase sales numbers, and you can use social media to do it.
Linked In
If you’re a professional, you absolutely must have an up-to-date profile on LinkedIn. It’s the number one professional networking website in the world, and can display your resume, work experience, special skills and licenses, as well as recommendations from people you’ve worked with in the past.
Facebook
Once the realm of sex-driven college students, Facebook has quickly become as much a business tool as a social networking site. Facebook has almost one billion users and is one of the top two largest platforms for promoting yourself or your business.
Twitter
Twitter can be a great asset, especially for marketing, public relations and freelance professionals. Many employers want to see that you are familiar with Twitter so you can use it to help them promote their business.
YouTube
If you want to get a message out, there are few ways better than using a YouTube video to do it. If you can upload and market a video that gets a hundred thousand views in three months, any marketing, pr or ad agency would be lucky to hire you.
Blogging
Maintaining a blog is one of the best possible ways to label yourself as a subject matter expert. It serves as a portfolio of your industry knowledge and learnings as well as showcasing your writing skills.
Archive for February, 2012
Internet Marketing Techniques: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns 101
Monday, February 20th, 2012If Google is your search engine of choice, (Chances are it is, as Google holds a 64% market share in search traffic) you may have noticed blue links along the side and above your query results. These are pay-per-click ads. Internet Marketers use pay-per-click ads on various search engines to supplement their organic SEO results.
Most SEO initiatives have about a 6-8 month lag time before you will ever see ranking results. A well-planned pay-per-click campaign can be a great catalyst to raise your organic rankings, or supplement your traffic when your organic Internet marketing initiatives start to plateau.
With any PPC provider, you bid for rank within the search results for any given keyword of your choosing. You are only charged when someone actually clicks on your ad to go to your site. Contrast this with a PPI or pay-per-impression campaign where you pay a set amount every time your ad is shown in the results. You can bid as low as $.01 and there is no ceiling to how much you can bid for a keyword. Keep in mind however, that your ad’s ranking is directly correlated to the price you’re willing to pay per click.
To initiate a PPC campaign, sign up and register with a PPC provider. Google Adwords is likely the largest and most widely used, as referenced by the 64% market share… You will need to provide a credit card number, and in all likelihood a deposit into the account. Design your ads with a keyword-based title, body text and a link to the landing page of your site. Finally, set up your campaign and bid for clicks.
One important thing to remember is that Google’s Adwords algorithm assigns a “quality score” to the relevancy of your ad to the searched keyword. When designing your PPC campaign you may be able to further optimize by designing your ad around the most relevant keyword you can come up with.
Search Engine Marketing Techniques: How to raise your Google Adwords “Quality Score”
Monday, February 13th, 2012If you’re new to running a Google Adwords campaign you may have some initial trouble optimizing your ads, specifically raising their quality score. As I’ve discussed before Google Adwords ranks ads based on their relevancy to the query in what we’ll refer to as a ‘quality score.’ Google’s motivation for using this quality-based ranking algorithm is ultimately to serve the customer, the searcher. This is likely why they’re by far the biggest search engine in the market.
This has the added benefit of allowing advertisers to have effective search engine marketing campaigns regardless of budget. The key to optimizing your ad campaign, and achieving a higher quality score, is providing the most relevant and highest quality content, products, and services. Your Quality Score is made up of very many factors, but the four most important are:
Click Through Rate (CTR) – The number of times your ad is clicked divided by the number of times it’s seen (an impression). This ratio essentially measures how enticing your ad is, or the probability someone will click on it if they see it.
Max Cost Per Click (CPC) – This is the maximum bid you’re willing to pay for a click in the search results of any particular keyword.
Ad Text – The relevancy of the text in the ad to the keywords or phrase queried in the search engine.
Landing Page – This is how relevant the content on your landing page is to the keywords or phrases queried in the search engine.
Here’s an example of how this might stack up in an actual market:
| Max CPC | CTR | Quality Score | Ad Position | |
| Advertiser 1 | 0.60 | 5.9 | 3.20 | 1 |
| Advertiser 2 | 2.01 | 1.6 | 3.06 | 2 |
| Advertiser 3 | 3.80 | 0.7 | 2.28 | 3 |
| Advertiser 4 | 1.20 | 1.8 | 2.15 | 4 |
Notice how Advertiser 1 has the lowest maximum bids for clicks, but thanks to a high click-through rate is able to garner the number one spot. Even though Advertiser 3 is spending a fortune for clicks, his CTR is poor due to (most likely) poor quality or irrelevant content on his landing page.
So, it seems, Content is still king. When designing any Adwords campaign, it’s worth the investment in time to carefully word your advertisements and landing page content. If you’re not confident doing this yourself an experience copywriter can provide you with content that converts visitors and improves your Google Adwords Quality Score.
