Bidding on branded keywords

According to a study conducted by Hitwise, one in seven brand searches do not end up at the searched-for brand’s website. This is an indication of a number of search trends:

* Bidding on branded keywords, your own as well as those of your competitors, is absolutely necessary.
* When users search for a specific brand name, six out of seven times they already know what they want and who they want it from.
* However, when users search on branded terms they are not always committed to that branded term, but they are searching for similar services/products. Therefore, their search begins with a brand term they’re already familiar with but they are actually in the research phase of the buying cycle.

If you are going to employ this strategy, you have to adhere to the proper copyright and trademark laws, as well as the editorial guidelines governed by the search engines. If you play by the rules you can bid on your competitor’s branded keywords and acquire that one-in-seven users who aren’t committed to the brand that started their search.

First, let’s review the basic copyright and trademark laws as they apply to PPC. For this article I am going to focus on bidding on competitor’s brand names. Bidding on competitor’s names is allowed, and this practice was upheld in the decision of Geico vs. Google in 2005. Geico sued Google for allowing competitors to bid on their name and trademark phrases. The court decided that as long as sponsored ads do not confuse the consumer, then this practice is legal. Marjory Stewart, a Milwaukee-based intellectual property and business law attorney, said of the Geico/Google case:

“What looks like a victory for Google after the early part of the decision of the court, may include liability on the finer points of trademark law.” She said. “A company can be held vicariously liable for trademark infringement if it has the right to control someone else downstream or DOES control them and that party infringes on another’s mark. Some of the results in the Geico case involved sites that used the Geico mark without Geico’s permission. That’s a problem.” She said that it is possible for companies like Google and Overture to be held liable for “contributory infringement” if they intentionally induced another company to engage in infringing conduct.

Bidding on a competitor’s name was deemed acceptable; but it was the advertiser’s intentions that were called into question and how they use competitor’s names within their messaging. As long as an ad is not misleading or misrepresenting your competitor, then the ad is legal. Google, Yahoo, MSN and every other search engine have established their own regulations in order to mitigate any association with contributory infringement. This is where comparison marketing comes into play.

Also, let us make the distinction between bidding on a competitor’s name and using their logo. Using a competitor’s logo for any purpose is strictly prohibited. Unless you have written permission to use a company’s logo or symbol, don’t do it.

If you are going to bid on a competitor’s brand terms, then your intentions can not be malicious or misleading. In fact, if you are going to target these terms you need to make sure that your intentions are pure and that you make this crystal clear to the search engines. The only strategy we use when bidding on these kinds of keywords is to make direct comparisons between the searched-for brand and what our client has to offer. Most searchers are looking for the best service, product, and price. If we know that our offering presents an alternative, then we’ll call a searcher’s attention to our ad and let them decide who addresses their needs best.

We believe in playing fair and generating great results, and hopefully you do as well. If you are going to utilize this strategy, make sure that you follow these steps:

* Bid low on competitors’ names. As stated earlier, six out of seven users have a clear idea of they what are looking for when searching a specific brand name. Your ad should serve as an alternative to the user’s query, and so you shouldn’t bid aggressively, otherwise your ROI will suffer.
* Write relevant, targeted ad text. Yes, you can bid on competitor’s names but take caution when using it in your ad text. I would highlight the service/product that a user maybe searching for, as opposed to using the your competitor’s name within the ad. Remember, each search engine wants to deliver a quality user experience, and in doing so they want to make sure that users are served the best possible results for their query. Relevancy is their core concern, so it should be yours as well.
* Directly compare your services/products to your competition on your landing page. Using a competitor’s name in your ad text could get your ad rejected, but you need to mention your competitor on your landing page, otherwise your quality score will suffer. Making a direct comparison to your competitor, and using branded keywords (yours and theirs) in the process, will let the search engines know that your intentions are not malicious.

Bidding on your competitor’s branded terms can be a successful way to draw qualified traffic to your site and generate additional conversions. However, be sure that you adhere to the established laws and editorial guidelines, otherwise you will have wasted your time and negatively affected your quality score with poorly chosen and executed keywords. Remember, with this strategy you are seeking that one-in-seven user who is looking for what you have to offer, they just may not know they want it from you - just yet.

source: ppchero.com
 

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies.

It seems that most webmasters and internet marketers have the goal of getting their sites onto page one of Google. I admit that I, too, feel a sense of joy and satisfaction when my sites hit the top 10 for my keywords.

But is the top 10 good enough? Should you rest on your laurels once you’ve achieved page one ranking? Not according to the AOL search data that was compromised in 2006. Yes, that data is two years old, but I think it’s important to revisit those results and remind ourselves of what it revealed.

That compromised data gave us the following break-down of the percentage of clicks received by each of the top 11 search results:

 
"Wait," you say, "those numbers barely add up to 50%!" That’s true. According to the AOL data, that’s because 46% of all queries resulted in no clicks — meaning that the user didn’t see what they were looking for and so tried something else or moved on.

There are a few points I want to make about this. First, this is data from AOL, and without being too unkind to AOL users, well, they’re not the savviest of searchers. That makes a difference. I would theorize that Google searchers would be a bit more prone to "dig" for the result they need, especially since in my own experience the figures aren’t quite so drastic as this data shows.

That said, though, this chart helps to demonstrate the vast difference between the #1 ranking for a set of keywords and all of the other rankings. Basically, the number one ranking gets the lion’s share of the traffic, and the other 9 of the top 10 just get the tricklings.

Number 11, the first result on page 2, gets virtually no traffic at all. I included it in the results to demonstrate how little effect a page 2 ranking has on your traffic.

This is one of the reasons I advocate trying to rank for a series of long-tail keywords, and not putting all of your efforts into one set of very popular keywords. Getting to #1 for a single set of competitive keywords requires an exponential amount more effort than ranking #1 for dozens of long-tail keywords. And, as demonstrated by this data, those dozens of "lesser" rankings will be far more valuable to the bottom line of your traffic than a #9 or #10 ranking for a competitive keyword.

Let me illustrate.

Let’s say that your niche has a set of competitive keywords that generates 10,000 searches a day. Sounds like a goldmine if you have a page one ranking right? Let’s see.

If you managed to get on page one, but only rank #9, based on the AOL data you would only get 150 of those visitors to your site (4,500 or so per month). However, if you manage to rank #1 for 10 keywords that each only receive 1,000 searches a day, you would get 226 visitors (6,780 or so per month). That’s 150% more traffic for the long-tail keywords. And I promise you, it’s dramatically easier to achieve (and maintain) 10 less competitive rankings than it is for one super-competitive one. In fact, in many cases you can achieve multiple #1 rankings for long-tail keywords with the same quantity of links needed just to get you on page one for the super-competitive keywords!

Just ask the happy 3WayLinks.net customer who recently posted at the users’ forum regarding their first $369 day in affiliate profits. Or another forum poster who reached his first $100+ AdSense day thanks to 3WayLinks’ ranking his sites for lesser-competition keywords.

So remember, when planning your keyword targets for your web site, don’t forget to target a variety of long-tail keywords. Even if you are planning on going after a competitive set of keywords, still keep the long-tail on your agenda, and give them at least as much of your time and resources. Do so and you’ll reap the rewards to be found in Google’s "low hanging fruit."

source: www.jonathanleger.com

SEO Note

SEO Note is the program that will help you to operate your information and store it in three forms - in the text, rich text and html forms. You can also edit your information, save files and extract them.

The main idea of our program is that you can have great number of separate documents in any above-listed formats within one file. It means, you don`t have to open several files to operate them simulnaneously, you can easily create one file which contains several articles within it via adding them to tree-like structure, that allows you to store a great number of documents within one file and have plenty of taken up articles within one article.

How does SEO Note look like? This is a tree-like editor. Tree structure is situated in a separate window, which contains all your articles in the form of tree links. When you choose some link in the tree structure the article appears for review or editing in the editor window. There is also a bookmark panel with the help of which you can create as many trees as you want. It will let you store more information in more convenient form for editing and review.

SEO Note mainly is used for any structured information, for special information which includes principle of hierarchical srtucture.
SEO Note will provide you quick access to any information being kept into these structures, that you are interested in. The ability to store the articles within one file will deliver you from search of unnecessary files scattered in different parts of your hard disk. For many users it will be enough to create one SEO Note file and add to it the articles which will have their own names according to separate themes (for example, "Todo", "Adresses", "Finance", "Notes" etc).

Moreover the bookmark panel will let you devide trees according to such principles.

Examples of using:

• personal information management
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The Importance of Branding

Branding is all important for those of use who want to be recognized for their name, business idea, business or product. Like the big name brands such as Sony, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc. business professionals such as freelancers, product developers, writers, pro-bloggers all need a brand to be instantly recognized by.

For most, the brand name is either their own name, or else the name of the product they developed. Not only will others know who they are dealing with, but if we brand ourselves properly, then our name will be a synonym of quality further down the track.

We all know that big name bloggers such as ShoeMoney, John Chow, Yaro Starak, Maki and Daren Rowse have managed to do just that. They branded themselves through continuously using their own name or that of their website.

Branding can be done in many ways, but probably the most prominent ways are either:

* Buying your own name domain (ideally this is your name.com) Freelancers should use this to create an online CV, client testimonials and even a little bit of history about themselves as the person they are. I’ve created my own on www.MonikaMundell.com and it will show you what can be done with a simple blog.
* The other way to brand yourself is via your product creations name. So if you develop product XYZ, then you would brand yourself with a XYZ.com domain name and use this as your digital footprint wherever you go online.

Even though branding is essential for some bloggers or website owners, it isn’t for others. If you are a niche blogger, or a black hatter, you won’t need to worry about branding at all, since you will make your money via hidden methods. The same applies for those with free blogs.

Whatever it is you decide to do, if you intent to brand yourself, then do it now, before your name is taken.
by Monika Mundell