Searching For A New Way To Market Your Business

When it comes to attracting customers, many small businesses rely on their annual Yellow Pages advertising buy. But these days, consumers are using the Internet more and more to search for local services and products, so being visible in search results is crucial for small businesses. But tackling search-engine marketing is still a bit of a mystery for many people.

What Is Search-Engine Marketing?

Search-engine marketing involves a variety of tactics to get a business listed within search results pages. Search engines typically display two types of search results-natural and sponsored. Natural results are generated by a search engine's own Web-scouring technology and are displayed in the main body of the page. Making changes to a Web site to help improve its ranking in natural search results can be a cumbersome process, which many companies choose to outsource to specialists.

Sponsored results, on the other hand, allow advertisers to pay to be displayed when people type certain words into a search engine. For example, if you own a restaurant in Portland, you would probably like your restaurant to appear in search results when people type "Portland restaurant" into a search engine. Sponsored results are usually displayed at the very top, bottom and right-hand side of the page and are labeled as advertisements. The process of getting into sponsored results is called search advertising or keyword advertising.

Achieving Positive Results

"We use keyword advertising and would not think about living without it," says David Knox of Lightstreams, Inc., a small business in California. "The return on investment with keyword advertising to date is over 25:1."

Indeed, keyword advertising is among the most cost-effective forms of marketing. The average search-engine lead costs just 29 cents, compared to 50 cents for e-mail, $1.18 for Yellow Pages, $2.00 for Internet banner ads and $9.94 for direct mail (U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, "The Golden Search," March 2003). Search ads can also be geographically targeted to reach the most relevant areas, thereby maximizing a budget.

Making it Work for You

"Many small businesses feel that keyword advertising is a complicated and expensive process, but with adManager it can be simple and affordable," said Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft Office Live.

adManager allows users to create keyword ads, establish a monthly budget and track the results. Small businesses can have their keyword ads appear on both MSN and Ask Sponsored Listings to reach an audience of more than 150 million potential customers.
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com
By: Wendy Mitchell

Microsoft Office Live (www.officelive.com)-a service that helps small businesses take, promote and manage their businesses online-offers a simple, do-it-yourself tool called adManager beta for creating keyword advertising campaigns.

Travel Blog

Travel And Make Money - Profitable Travel Blogging Strategies

Why do we seek to make more money?I'll tell you why, because money buys freedom. Freedom to go where we want.Do what we want; when we want.If you are like me, you love to travel.You've got wanderlust and you got it bad.Simply put: Money finances our wanderlust and traveling makes us happy. Here's one thing many people don't know --you can actually travel and make money at the same time.This article is intended to introduce you to one way to make money traveling by travel blogging.

Travel blogging can be done anywhere in the world where you have a laptop and an Internet connection. And it can allow you to make money simply by sharing your travel experiences.Here are a few key considerations to establishing a profitable travel blog:

*Choose a travel topic with the widest market appeal. A blog is like any other product, to determine if it will be successful before you start you must first determine if there is market demand for the information the blog will provide.Thereare a number of ways to do this.The easiest to is to research the popularity of keywords related to the travel topics you want to cover with your blog.Goggle and Overture have good free keyword research tools.You can find them from any search engine. Make sure that your related keywords are searched at least 10,000 times in any given month.This number is a good minimum threshold.

* Monetize the blog.You won't make any money with your blog unless it is monetized.There are three primary ways to monetize a blog: advertising revenue, affiliate sales and sales of your own products.If you are just starting out, you probably won't have any products of your own so its best to start with ad revenue and affiliate sales. For the beginner, Google's Adsense is a good starting place for getting good contextual based advertising revenue.For affiliate sales there are many travel related affiliate products at Commission Junction and Amazon's Associate program. There are many, many more programs you can use to monetize your blog but I recommend these because of ease of use.

* Build readership.A blog without visitors makes no money. Period.First, your blog should contain good content updated frequently.That's what keeps readers who do find you coming back for more. Next, your blog should have RSS feeders and the ability to capture the email address of visitors who want to optin to your newsletter (that you need to establish) or site updates.There is a decent free blog optin service offered by FeedBlitz.Next, promote your blog by including a reference to it in your email "sig file."Also, readership will naturally increase as you post more.Each time you post most blog software will ping (notify) the search engines of the new entry.The more quality pings you receive the higher your blog will appear in search engine rankings.The higher you get the more traffic you generate.The more traffic you generate the more money you'll make.

These are the very basics you need to establish a profitable travel blog.If traveling and making money appeals to you consider starting a travel blog.
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com
By: Daniel Hall

Daniel Hall, along with Gina-Henry Cook, is co-creator of the Travel Making Money system. Access their system and get exclusive travel blog training to turn your travel experiences into a profitable travel blog see www.travelmakingmoney.com/

Travel Blog