Are You A Pelican Marketer?Written by Willie Crawford
Watching pelicans catch fish near my house reminded me of how some online marketers behave. These pelicans fly high over water where unknowing fish don't notice them. The pelicans spot a big fish and dive at high speed into water. A few seconds later pelican surfaces and gulps down fish.There's only one problem with way this particular species of pelican fishes. Their method eventually leads to their demise. You see, as pelican dives into water at high speed, intensely focusing on target fish, he is damaging his eyes. Eventually, these pelicans go blind, then they starve to death. There are other water bird that slowly swim along, and when then spot a fish, they dive for it and seem to have just as much success as pelicans at getting a meal. Their tried and true method provides them with a nice meal too. Swimming along looking for fish rather than flying above water has other hazards, but they don't blind themselves in process of getting a meal! Many online marketers, are "pelican marketers." They fly high above market place looking for an unaware victim or prospect. Then they swoop down forcefully and offer them a product or service that marketer really doesn't even believe in. He eats that day, he makes a profit. However, in process he often destroys all possibilities of repeat sales. He burns bridge to future business, in effect "putting out his own eyes."
| | Selecting and Evaluating Keyphrases for Search Engine MarketingWritten by Scott Buresh
Many businesses recognize that search engines can bring volumes of highly targeted prospects to their website, typically at a fraction of cost of traditional marketing. Unfortunately, these same companies often overlook most important part of their search engine marketing campaigns, which is keyphrase selection and evaluation. Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using to find products or services on search engines) are building block of any search engine marketing strategy. It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else remainder of campaign, no matter how effective implementation, will likely be in vain. What follows is a three-step process that goes over process of compiling, selecting, and evaluating ongoing performance of keyphrases for search engines. 1. Compiling a keyphrase list: Usually, companies are sure that they already know their ideal keyphrases. Often, they are wrong. This is typically because it is very hard to separate oneself from a business and look at it from perspective of a potential customer (rather than an insider). Compiling a keyphrase list should not be, despite common practice, a strictly internal process. Rather, it is best to ask everyone outside of your company for their input, especially your customers. People are often very surprised at keyphrase suggestions they get- and sometimes dismayed to realize that an average customer doesn’t speak same language that they do. Only after you have put together a list of likely phrases from external sources do you add your own. As a last step, try to add variations, plurals, and derivatives of phrases on your list. 2. Evaluating keyphrases: Once you have compiled a master keyphrase list, it is time to evaluate each phrase to hone your list down to those most likely to bring you highest amount of quality traffic. Although many individuals will base their assessment of keyphrase value based only on popularity figures, there are really three vitally important aspects of each phrase to consider. Popularity By far easiest of three to judge is popularity, since it is not subjective. Software like WordTracker gives popularity figures of search phrases based upon actual search engine activity (it also gives additional keyphrase suggestions and variations). Such software allows you to assign a concrete popularity number to each phrase to use when comparing them. Obviously, higher number, more traffic that can be expected (assuming you are able to obtain good search engine positions). However, this number alone is not good enough reason to pursue any particular keyphrase, although too often keyphrase analysis stops here. Specificity This is more abstract than sheer popularity number, but equally important. For example, let’s assume that you were able to obtain great rankings for keyphrase “insurance companies” (a daunting prospect). Let’s also assume that you only deal with auto insurance. Although “insurance companies” might have a much higher popularity figure than “auto insurance companies”, first keyphrase would also be comprised of people looking for life insurance, health insurance, and home insurance. It is very likely that someone searching for a particular type of insurance will refine their search after seeing disparate results returned from phrase “insurance companies”. In second, longer keyphrase, you can be reasonably sure that a much higher percentage of visitors will be looking for what you offer- and addition of word “auto” will make it much easier to attain higher rankings, since longer term will be less competitive.
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