Content Marketing Mistakes and How to Learn from them – Part 2
Content Marketing Mistakes and How to Learn from them – Part 2
Earlier this week we introduced you to part 1 of this 2 part series on content marketing mistakes we have all made at some point. Well if your honest about your mistakes there are times when your advice may get a little long. Welcome to part 2, if for some reason this is your first time joining the series feel free to go back and catch up by reading part 1.
Social OOPs
Like many companies this company knew their survival depended on the scary term social media. Now, just because you know something needs to be done doesn’t mean you just jumped up and do it. Well this company didn’t get the memo and they sprang into action without a marketing plan. Then to make matters worse the person who launched it had no clue about social media. What did all this equal? Yep you said it, a mess. They only had in house links and they forgot that people send messages via social media.
How you can do it different. First of all the name tells the story, social media has the name “social” in it. This means that companies are supposed to use it as a means to reach out and socialize with others, everyone in house already knows what you do. Do be afraid to share the spotlight, so what if someone else says it better as long as it gets said. The end results are still going to be you earning credibility.
Not the End
Yes we only shared one other mistake in the second part, but we promise there is more to come. We can’t give it to you all at once, stayed tuned for more daily tips and resources to help you with your marketing needs.
Now here is a question for you: Who is brave enough to share you content marketing mistake? And if you are feeling really “social” tell us how you fixed it?
Don’t crash your Social Media, take the time to do it right!!!
Content Marketing Mistakes and How to Learn from them – Part 1
We all make Content Marketing Mistakes, question is did you learn from them?
Everyone has to admit that we are capable of making content marketing mistakes. Although nobody likes to be “wrong” we should always look at the bigger picture, learning from our mistakes.
The other beauty of mistakes is not only can we earn from them but if we share what we did wring others can learn from them too. We decided to share some common mistakes and how to recover from them.
A Marketing Teams Nightmare
A company’s marketing department decides they are going to start a company blog. Just like many other great projects someone always complains about being left out or excluded. The company executive looks over the progress of the blog and decides that the blog was not fitting her expectations. All of this confusion was caused by the executive and the marketing team not communicating with one another and sharing the main strategy of the blog. The series of misunderstandings and feelings of mistrust lead to the close of what was turning out to be a very good marketing source for the company.
What is the lesson in all this? When a company plans on running a marketing strategy it is important that the marketing department and those in management have a sound understanding of the plan. How can you do it differently? If you are a part of your companies marketing team make sure a report of all the strategies and the progress being made is delivered to the company executive. This keeps them informed on what is happening and how they can help you achieve your marketing goals.
The Lost Infographics
This particular problem involves a company who has managed to create amazing Infographics on their blog. How is that a problem? As the content continues to grow on the blog the Infographics from the older post stop gaining the attention they once did, or those looking for the Infographics can no longer find them.
The company did all the right things when it came to optimizing the pages but forgot that the search engine looks more at text then images. The company’s way around this was adding meta information, changing the image name, etc. The other solution for your pages of Infographics is a short description of the image rich with keywords.
Email No No
Let’s look at a company that has tapped into the word of email marketing. This company had discovered how to improve their email marketing over the months with successful click, opens, and conversion rates. All of a sudden their email marketing had a sudden decline. Why? It was because their content had increase and the opportunity for readers to click and interact had declined.
Their solution was to decrease the text and increase the chance for interaction. A good blog and article have to contain a certain amount of content to be effective but this is not the case with an email. Make your text between 150-200 words with plenty of conversion opportunities and watch your company grow.
Have you ever experience any of these problems or made any of these mistakes? If so don’t hesitate to tell others how to do it correctly or better yet…share here. Stay tuned we have more, keep a look out for part 2 of Content Marketing Mistakes and How to Learn from them.
E-mail Marketing Done Right Series
E-mail Marketing Done Right Series
The concept of writing an email is not a new concept anymore, but email marketing is still a mystery to some. In looking at some of the questions presented about email marketing we also discovered that even the experts are struggling with opens, conversion, and content. Making a beautiful template is only half the battle. RushLocal.com wants to help; this is why we have created our Email Marketing Done Right Series.
E-mail Marketing is a very important part of all businesses, because it gives them the opportunity to increase their customer loyalty and new business. How hard it is to implement this into your business will depend on your understanding of how it needs to be done and how effective you are at doing it.
About the Series
This series will offer you answers to your e-mail marketing questions as well as give you useful information on how turn the information into a successful campaign. Now if you are already familiar with the concept don’t take the tone personal, remember this series is targeted for the beginners as well. Come join us on Tuesdays and Thursdays for an educational experience.
Some perks to the series: All of the content in this series is written to stand by itself. This means that you can read only the areas you find trouble with or start from the beginning. This series is organized according to 6 separate parts and the necessary steps for each part.
- Part I-Straight out the Gate
This is for someone who has never attempted email marketing, tried it and failed, or just wants a refresher course.
- Part 2-Let’s Make a Plan
This is going to walk you through all the things necessary to have a sound foundation in your e-mail marketing. Without this step all the rest is a waste of time.
- Part 3-The Building Blocks for an Effective Email Marketing
This part tells you all the necessary materials to build your marketing e-mail. From layout and design to content.
- Part 4-Let’s Run a Campaign
The e-mail constructed now we will go into adding it to social media.
- Part 5-Don’t Forget to Keep Track
This part of the series teaches you how to keep track of all the hard work and how it is paying off.
- Part 6: Ten Do’s and Don’ts for E-mail Marketing
This is where we make sure you have something long term to walk away with. This list is tells you all the things to avoid and the resources to turn to for support.
If you find that we have left anything out or would like to know more about the series leave a comment below.
How Does the Pay Per Click System Work?
When you search for a product on Google, Yahoo and Bing, you see results on the right side of the main area of results. These advertisements in the form of keyword returns, which are part of a product website page, are pay-per-click advertisements. The pay-per-click results are bought from the search engine by a website in hopes that by paying the search engine to show their website through a keyword search, they will be able to generate more business.
There are three major companies in paid advertising. Google, which has its pay-per-click system established in AdWords and is the most dominate, Yahoo, and Bing, which has MSN AdCenter. Yahoo and Bing recently combined their pay-per-click sites, so Google might not be the most dominate pay-per-click in the business for long.
How pay-per-clicks are structured
So how is a pay-per-click (or PPC) advertisement campaign structured? Ideally, a website or product advertisement campaign would have different campaigns for different services or different products. It is then broken down into multiple ad groups with multiple keywords. The advertisement campaign for each product would then select key words that are closely related to each other and grouped into what is referred to as ad text. Ad text should closely match keywords in specific ad group.
This is then broken down in such a manner so different advertisement campaigns for different products and can optimize what the search engine generates related to a product campaign. The amount a campaign pays for their investment on returns of their investment is based on a budget. This is also considered as a daily budget that you can allocate for advertisement and you can afford to pay on a daily basis in the form of clicks to your website from a search engine search for something related to your product.
Measure CPC success
Key word or ad group bids are the maximum cost per click (CPC) that advertisement campaigns are willing to pay per click on their product after search engines produce search results for products related to yours and others through certain keywords. It is important for you, as an advertiser, to measure success of CPC advertisement campaign because you will want to have a good idea of what your return on the investment you made by bidding on the search return rankings will be. Each search engine does this generally for a campaign by measuring clicks, which is when the webpage you want to get users to is shown; impressions, which is how many times a campaign add is displayed in the search; and CTR, or click through rate, which is easier thought of as clicks divided by impressions. Any CTR generated above 5 percent is good. A campaign through the search engines tools will pay close attention to how much they spend on a campaign because they want to be sure PPC’s are converting into sales. They will monitor conversions, which tell them which keywords are working best, and conversion rates, which is conversions divided by CTRs.
Cheapest clicks
You shouldn’t always go through cheapest pay-per-click search engines. You should try to analyze carefully the cost benefits of doing this, since the major search engines provide a huge volume of users, and therefore, you may not be saving much after you adjust for lost sales.
How well is your campaign faring?
There is an extensive array of pay-per-click tools available on the search engines to evaluate how well a campaign is doing. The most important evaluating tool on the search engine is the conversion tracking tool. All major search engines have some sort of conversion code in HTML that can see how much each conversion after users order your product costs you. Some conversion tracking tools also show you what items sold using particular keywords. Tracking conversions and tracking keywords to see what keywords are really working helps to evaluate if your campaign strategy is working. The next useful tool in your campaigns arsenal is the traffic estimating tool, which is useful to clean up a keyword list. You can do this by putting in keywords you’re using and Google will tell you which are working best.
The three types of bids
There is a broad match for keywords, which is a wide array of terms that may be related. The exact match of keywords, which generates a hit only if the keyword is typed in exactly. And finally, the phrase match, which is a keyword match between broad and exact match. When you use broad match, exact match and phrase match, most search engines allows can show you which keywords triggered the ads clicks on the keywords. This is helpful when you adjust keywords by cleaning your list up by throwing out bad keywords and emphasize good ones.
It’s important to start off with pay-per-click campaign advertisement before you invest too much money into SEO services, because it can give you a good idea on what terms are important and convert well to sales.
How to make money with Google AdWords
There is a technique to making money with Google AdWords, but the trick is these techniques are always shape-shifting because of how Google continuously updates how they evaluate merchandiser searches. One false move, and you can find yourself banished to the cellar of Google searches. So if you have already picked up the latest eBook on “How to Make Millions with Google AdWords”, you may have just wasted $9.99. The good news is that there is money to be made, but it takes long hours, hard work, and diligence. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Likewise, seeing the fruits of your online labor takes time, too. Here are a few tips to get your feet in the door, to at least make a little extra money, if not a living.
How Google picks those sponsored links
First, it is necessary to understand the way Google handles advertisers and decides which ones to show off to the under sponsored links. On the right side, any time you do a Google search, there is a list of advertisers. This is where you are aiming to get an advertisement inserted into, with the highest rank possible for merchandise you are trying to directly sell from your site, such as an eBook, or promote.
First you need to become an advertiser, and to do this, you have to open an account. Go to Google AdWords.com. Go through the prompts to register an account. Next, you have to sign up as a Clickbank affiliate. Once you are signed in, go to on “Promote Products” on the right. Each of these sites will ask you some semi-personal information to confirm you are who you say you are, but this is a necessary evil. The information isn’t too invasive, just your home address, phone number, and of course, card information to pay for the bids you enter. Once you have done this, you are an official Google advertiser and in the game.
The system of getting bids in is complicated. There are three parties that make Google AdsWorks work. They are the user, who searches for specific services or products online, and the advertiser, who wants the user to view their ads. To do so, they must have good ads. Finally, there is Google, who makes sure the ads are legitimate.
Time to bid
Now you are ready to start bidding, along with a group of advertisers who are also bidding for the top coveted slots. To get a good bid in, you have to follow a few Google rules. First of all, Google takes into consideration how good an ad is and rates it accordingly. It does this with a quality score ranking of ads on a scale from one to 10. To get this score, they critique three things: the click through rate, the landing page, and the relevance of the search to you by the user. The click through rate (CTR) is how many people actually click on your ad verses how many people just see it. Click through rate is the most important part of Google’s consideration for your score. They count this as a vote for your ads’ effectiveness and scores you higher or lower in this regard. The landing page is what you are trying to get people to link to. Google evaluates if the landing page has content that matches your ad. This means if you have a bad website, you will get a lower score. The third criteria is relevance to the user. The more relevant your ad is to a search query, the higher your score. It averages these three things and gives you a score. Once they have this number, they multiply the highest bid by your quality score, and rank your ad from this.
Taking your ROI and CTR into account
After you’ve jumped through these hurdles, you are ready to squeeze a little money out of AdWords. You do this by increasing sales of your products or someone else’s products for commission. To do this and maximize profits, you have to take a couple of things into consideration. They are the return on investment (ROI) and your click through rate (CTR).The ROI helps you determine how profitable your Google Ad is after you subtract the cost of running your ads from the amount earned in your Clickbank account. The CTR helps you fine-tune your ad so that you can increase the number of people clicking on it, especially if it’s a profitable ad. If more people are clicking on the ad itself, it would probably result in an increase in your affiliate income.
Patrick: One of the Major shifts in Google after the last update was toward con...