Search Engine Marketing can be an effective, low-cost way to get new customers to find your business online because you only pay when a prospective customer clicks on your ad. Therefore, an important step in setting up your campaign is determining your target budget and how much you are willing to pay each time your ad is clicked. This price may vary by keyword, and can fluctuate from month-to-month.

Keyword Bidding

When setting up your search engine marketing campaigns you set a maximum bid for the price you are willing to pay each time someone clicks your ad. Your maximum bid amount in combination with the relevancy of your keywords to the content on your website influences your ad’s position in the search results. In general, the more you bid, the higher the position your ad will have.

How do I decide the right amount to bid for my Keywords?

Keyword Bidding is driven by supply and demand. The more advertisers that are bidding on your keywords, the higher price value those keywords hold. Keyword value is subject to what the market will bear.

When you enter your keywords you can see the estimated bid required for your ad to reach position number one in search results and determine how you would like to bid based on that information. It should be noted that holding the first position is not always imperative to driving traffic to your website. A compelling offer in your ad can make it successful regardless of position in the search results.

One way to consider pricing your keyword bids is to determine how much you are willing to spend to acquire a new customer for your product or service. For example, if you sell bicycles that cost $700 and your profit on each sale is $100, how much of that profit do you want to put into advertising? This amount will vary by company, but let’s say you are willing to spend $20 per bicycle in advertising costs.

The average conversion rate for paid search campaigns is about 2%, so you would want to bid no more than $.40 per keyword ($20 x 0.02% = $0.40). Remember, your bid is only half of the equation in your search ranking—your keyword’s relevance to the content of your website also plays a factor.

As your campaign progresses an historical data is collected, you will begin to see trends in the performance of your keywords. This data allows you to adjust your bidding strategy and reallocate your spend to keywords that are most effective. A good rule of thumb is to review your campaign performance at least once per month and optimize based on factors such as quantity of clicks and conversion rates.

» Sign Up for Yahoo! Search Marketing and get $199 of  FREE Marketing Credits

Source: Start adCenter

Having your company appear when a prospective customer is searching online for your product or service is important because you’re reaching out to people when they’re ready to buy.

There are two pieces involved in playing the search engine game: Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the process of informing search engines that your website exists. To make sure that your business appears as often as possible, you need to:

1. Submit your website to be crawled by search engines. Most major search engines provide a way to list your site.

2. Make sure that the keywords related to your products or services are listed throughout the text of your site. Most search engines are sophisticated enough to read through your content to pick up those keywords. Once a search engine has crawled your site and determined that your content is related to a given search term, your site will generally be listed higher in search results.

Search Engine Marketing

Advertising with a search engine is an effective, low-cost way to help new customers find your business when they are online looking to buy. When customers type words into a search engine, and those words match what your business has to offer, your advertisement appears in a special section of the search results page. You can target your advertising campaigns by audience type and demographics, and you only pay when a prospective customer clicks on your ad.

Advantages Of Search Engine Marketing

Reach: Use the power of the Internet to drive awareness of your business and find new customers.

Research: Track your traffic, measure your results, and use your research reports to plan your next search marketing campaign.

ROI: Use targeting tools to reach out to the right audience at the right time, which can help improve your return on investment.

Sign Up for Yahoo! Search Marketing and get $199 of  FREE Marketing Credits

Source: Start adCenter

Search Engine Marketing can be an effective, low-cost way to get new customers to find your business when they’re online looking to buy. Maybe you’ve heard about search marketing, also called keyword advertising, but as a small business you wonder if you can justify the expense of advertising online. Search marketing isn’t just for big companies with big budgets.

What is search engine marketing, really, and what can it do for your business?

In today’s marketplace, being a competitive business typically
involves hosting and maintaining a Web site as a means of
communicating with your customers. Search engine marketing is the art of using search engines as a way to drive more traffic to your website. Think of it like the yellow pages for the Internet. But, unlike more traditional marketing methods, you don’t have to spend a lot of time or money to stand out in the crowd!

When you advertise via search engines, your advertisement appears in a special section of the search results page when customers search for goods or services that match what your business has to offer. 80% of Web usage starts with a search engine, so a search engine marketing strategy makes sense if you want to acquire new customers through your website.

Can we afford it?

Compare cost per lead on an average is about $0.29 versus $1.18 for yellow pages advertising and $9.94 for direct mail inserts as you set your bids to match your budget.

How Search Marketing works:

1. You pick your keywords and set your own price per click.

2. You can target your keywords by the cities, times of day and
   customer demographics you want the most.

3. Your ad appears when someone searches for a word that matches one of your keywords.

4. You pay only when people click your keywords.

How to get started

In about an hour, you can start your search engine marketing campaign:

1. Create a campaign based on demographics targeting and
   tracking preferences.

2. Build your keyword list, set your budget, place bids, and submit.

Sign Up for Yahoo! Search Marketing and get $199 of  FREE Marketing Credits

Source: Start adCenter

What is Microsoft adCenter?

Microsoft adCenter is a platform that enables you to create, manage and optimize your search marketing campaigns to targeted buyers from a pool of 99 million search users on the MSN and Windows Live Networks. 81% of them have recently purchased online, and they convert at a higher average rate than Google and Yahoo users in three out of five categories.

Make the most of your marketing budget

Online advertising isn’t just for big businesses with big budgets.
Keyword advertising can be an effective, low-cost way to get new
customers to find your business online. Microsoft adCenter makes
it easy to begin using paid search (also called keyword advertising). You can start with just a few keywords and build from there—and it only takes $5 to open an account.

Reach out to a qualified audience

Not all search engines bring the same audience, so the wise search marketer considers using more than one in his or her marketing tool bag. A little research can be of great help in determining where to start. Microsoft adCenter puts your ad in front of MSN search users, who converted to customers at a higher average rate than Google users in three out of five categories. It’s a qualified audience of proven buyers to whom you can start advertising your business when you sign up for adCenter.

Target your marketing efforts

By adopting adCenter’s targeting capabilities, you can reach out to the right audience at the right time and help improve your return on investment. Audience selection criteria helps improve your audience targeting strategy including with the ability to target based on geographical location, day of the week, time of day and age and gender.

Let Microsoft adCenter be the ticket to search marketing success for your small business

Microsoft adCenter is an advanced platform for online advertising— powerful enough to allow you to reach out to millions and millions of viewers on the MSN and Windows Live networks and precise enough to target your potential customers.

Get started right now

Sign Up today and get up to $75 in free clicks towards your first Microsoft adCenter campaign.

Enter the coupon code displayed at the Sign Up page while entering the billing details to receive the Free Credit.

Microsoft adCenter Promotional Coupon Code Guidelines:

Offer valid only through 06/30/2008 (midnight Pacific Time), while supplies last. Microsoft adCenter Promotion Code is valid only for new advertisers opening a new account with Microsoft adCenter. The $75 Microsoft adCenter Promo Code does not apply to the one-time, non-refundable $5 activation fee required to open a new adCenter account. Promotional credit not redeemed in click spend will expire 90 days after sign-up. Advertisers will be charged for advertising that exceeds the $75 promotional credit. Advertisers will need to suspend their ads if they do not wish to receive additional charges beyond the free credit amount or after 90 days from sign-up. Promotional credit good only to residents in the 50 United States and Washington, D.C. Limit: one promotional credit per customer. Promotional credit may not be combined with any other offer or discount, separated, redeemed for cash, transferred, sold, or bartered. There is a minimum bid requirement of $0.05 per click through. Search listings are subject to editorial review. See Advertiser Terms and Conditions for more details at sign-up. Other terms and conditions may apply.

Source: Start adCenter

First Setup Your Blog

The first step to Make Money Online Blogging is to setup your blog. Even if you already have an active blog, I recommend reading this section, as I’ll talk about specific options to setup for the best results. If you’ve never setup a blog, or a WordPress account, this will give you a good idea what’s involved.

First of all, if you don’t have a domain name and a web blog already, then you need to buy a domain name and web hosting. I don’t recommend using a free host, because they are not reliable web hosting services. I really recommend HostGator Baby Plan Web Hosting it allows you to host all your domains within one account. It costs $9.95/mo. and yes you can pay your hosting bills monthly, no annual contract or setup fees. Want to try HostGator? You can sign up for one month of HostGator Web Hosting for just 1 Cent, with no obligation using the coupon code “JURY” with no quotes.

You’ll need a domain as well. I really recommend GoDaddy as your domain name registrar, since they’re ICANN certified, and have great prices. Plus they’ve got a great interface to sell your domain in an auction format. This is a good strategy if you don’t have the energy to keep posting and growing your blog, since once we get monster traffic for a short period of time, the domain will be much more desirable to buy, and you should be able to make a good profit (in addition to all the affiliate commissions you’re going to make). Or you can go for a cheap $1.99 Domain Name from Yahoo! Domains or get a $4.95 Domain Name from Netfirms.

If you do sign up for HostGator, then you can use the feature called Fantastico that will automatically install a variety of different programs on your site. It enables you to setup your WordPress blog in few clicks. All you have to do is click install, fill out a few fields of info about your blog, and it do the rest for you.

Once you’ve got your site set up, there are a few things to do to make sure you’re ready for tons of traffic:

1. Install a good looking theme (Get a WordPress Theme)

2. Delete the default Blogroll links, post, and comments

3. Install the WordPress plugin Sociable

4. Setup your permalink structure as custom and enter this in the field: /%postname%/

Now your blog is ready to go, the next step is to sign up as an affiliate that I’ll discuss in the next part of this article.

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What makes a good web page What makes a bad web page? Here are some guidelines to design a better web page:

You Should Have A Theme

Define your theme clearly and make sure that your web pages, graphics and text all focus on that theme. So that the web page looks useful for the visitor or customer.

Don’t Add Images Unnecessarily

Make sure that the graphics used in your web page are small in size so that it loads quickly. Reduce the size of each file as much possible as you can. Use GIF format for your images as it loads faster than JPEG files.

Your Web Page Should Load Fast

Make sure that all your web pages are less than 50 KB in size including all animations, images, navigation and text.

Use HTML To Build Your Web Pages

Use HTML as far as possible and never use java, DHTML or similar codes which require your visitor’s browser setup correctly to show your page.

Respect Search Engines

You must respect search engines if you want traffic from search engines like Google, Live Search, and Yahoo. So read the webmaster guide lines of popular search engines before you design your website. Use the following link to read the guidelines of major search engines.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Live Search Site Owner Help

Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines

Love Your Surfers and Visitors

Design your web site so that surfers using a slow internet connection can also download and use your website easily.

No Horizontal Scrolling For Your Web Pages

Design your web pages so that you never force your surfers to scroll left or right regardless of their screen resolution.

Know Your Traffic

Use a good traffic analysis program which gives detailed information about the visitors to your web site. This information helps you to analyze the nature of your visitors. Use the traffic analysis programs Google Analytics & AWStats.