When starting a new pay per click campaign, one of the most important decisions you will have to make is how much money you are willing to spend. This should be broken down into how much you are willing to spend per day, per month, and per year. This decision needs to be based off of a few main criteria. Ask yourself these questions when trying to figure out what budget makes sense for your site…

1)How many visitors per day are you hoping to drive to your site?

2)How many visitors does it take to start to see conversions take place?

3)How much money spent is too much to turn a positive ROI?

4)Is there a cap amount where anything over is not productive to your site?

5)How competitive is my market for the main keywords?

6)How much time/energy am I willing to spend setting up and editing these campaigns?

The answer to these questions will be different for every site. When we ask some of our clients these questions, we sometimes get blank stares in return. That is why it may make sense to start with a small budget and work your way to a larger budget, when you see great leads coming in. Some sites can see success with just about $20 dollars a day, while others need at least $500 a day to get a single conversion. Depending on how much money a single conversion earns you, this will help you decide if your advertising budget makes sense. There is a sweet spot for every advertiser that you need to find. This sweet spot is the range where your advertising budget turns a positive ROI. To find that sweet spot, don’t be scared to ask ppc professionals for help.

In contrast, some people advertise their site online hoping to raise awareness of their topic, but not looking to make money from conversions or sales. If you are not making “sales”, you need to ask yourself how much money per day you are willing to spend to generate awareness for your site. Generally these types of sites have smaller budgets, but are also paying less per click.

When trying to create a pay per click budget you need to understand that while the costs seems high, it is usually right on line with any sort of newspaper,radio, magazine ad you might place (per year). The great thing about spending on the Internet, over those types of print and audio ads, is that you know people are landing on your site. That is why ad agencies are placing more of their clients money into online advertising, than print/radio ads. If you are looking to generate sales, please do not be scared to place most of your overall advertising budget into a paid ad campaign. This is a new way of thinking that is scary to some site owners, but this is the way advertising is heading.

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We’re launching a series called “Guide to Search Engine Domination”. Over the next week or so we are going to provide you all of the SEO information you will need in order to get your website ranked where you want in the search engines. With some hard work you too can build your website traffic with search engine optimization. Here we go.

Plan Your Search Engine Strategy Before You Develop Your Website

Before you even think about building a website, you need to first think about how you will drive traffic to the website. People don’t just magically find your website through cyberspace. You need to put yourself out there and you need to do it better that your competition or you will just get buried with the 99% of other companies trying to do the same thing as you. You have to behard-nosed, persistent, risky and know when to make a move. If you sit back and wait, you will not survive.

One of the best and cheapest ways to drive traffic to your website is search engine optimization. Search engine optimization, according to Wikipedia is, the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Now you are saying, what they heck does this mean! Basically search engine optimization drives traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Ask. This website traffic is called organic or natural. This is done by optimization.

In order for your website to draw search engine traffic, it must be properly optimized for the search engines. There are many ways to optimize your site and we will be going over all of these in this SEO series over the next week or so.

But before we dig deeper into search engine optimization, we need to first do some analysis. We need to figure out what we need to optimize in order to drive traffic to our website. We need to figure out our business goals. We need to figure out our primary business keywords and key phrases. Keywords and key phrases are what people type into the search engines such as Google to find your website. Let’s say your website is about brown dogs. Obviously you would like people to find your website about brown dogs through the search engines because it is free or organic website traffic. In order to do this, we need to optimize the website for your primary term, brown dogs. Optimizing your website for brown dogs will increase the likelihood that someone will find your website by typing in brown dogs into the search engine. From here we can dig much deeper and optimize for big brown dogs, furry brown dogs, nice brown dogs or any other search phrases you want to show up for in the search engine results.

So, before you begin to build your website, you need to make a list of your competitors. You need to make a list of your keywords and key phrases. You need to analyze each of your competitors websites and see what they are doing and see how they rank in the search engines. You then need to take your keywords and you need to optimize them better than everyone else in your niche or industry.

How can you do this? Stay tuned for your next step to search engine domination…

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This post has nothing to do with Website Help… but my University is going dancing this year, and I’d like to brag a bit!

This is the best time of year if you are a sports fan. I wait for these few weeks every year so that I can watch basketball until my head hurts. Some of these games involve schools I have never heard of, but they are still great. The best part of this year is that my Alma mater is going dancing! American University is going to their first NCAA tournament, and unless you are familiar with the school, you probably don’t realize how much this means to everybody in DC. During my 4 years in AU, we made it to the Patriot league finals 2 times, only to lose in the last few seconds each time. There was plenty of heartbreak and misery… lots of drinking away the pain. Well, yesterday AU finally sealed the deal, and this team should be proud of themselves for not letting this game slip away in the last few minutes.

Every year there is a school like American who punches their NCAA ticket for the first time, and everytime I see a school storm the court I get excited. Is there any better moment in sports then the infamous “court storming”? It is one of the few moments in sports that you know is coming, but still makes you smile each time.

This morning I woke up to watch another small school from my hometown make the big dance. University of Maryland- Baltimore County will also be dancing for the first time in their schools history. These sort of NCAA births put a school on the map. If teams such as Holy Cross, Winthrop, George Mason, IUPUI had never made the tourney, would you know of them? This publicity goes a long way for smaller schools, and it will be exciting to see what such a win does American University, down the road with recruiting of new athletes and students. Thanks to thank win yesterday, maybe my degree is worth slightly more than it was last week?

So as you watch these small schools get completly destroyed next week against Memphis, UCLA, UNC, etc… just remember how much it means for these undersized, slightly underskilled kids just to be on the same court as those teams on national television. Maybe even consider putting AU through to the second round… anything is possible.

Video of AU students storming the court!

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It’s no doubt we all have busy schedules and our days fill up before we know it. If you’re running a business, you know exactly what I mean. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done so why do we constantly try to add more to our routines? If you and your business needs website help and you’ve been putting it off, it’s now time to move away from the procrastination and move on with your website project. There’s no excuse to wait any longer.

Many business owners think they can handle creating a website on their own. They think they can read a book or look over a website tutorial and they will be good to go. I will tell you that if you do put the time and effort into it, yes…you can develop and code your own website. But, in the meantime you will neglect other areas of your business that should be your main focus while you are trying to learn the ins and outs of website development and marketing.

I’m a true believer in focusing on what you are good at and outsource or contract out what you are not experienced in or lack a skill set. Ultimately this will save you money. You might cringe at the cost of a website but by not having a website up and running for your business, you are losing out on a TON of potential profits by simply not having a web presence.

You have to look at a website as an essential investment for your business. It’s a piece of the puzzle that you must have in order to fully succeed and take advantage of all markets available. It’s like your employer offering a 401K with dollar for dollar match but you don’t take advantage of it. My question is, WHY aren’t you taking advantage of it? If you invest in a website for your business, it will pay off exponentially over the course of your business run. When it comes down to it, a website is cheap related to other advertising mediums such as print media, radio and TV. You can invest a couple thousand dollars into a nice website and some website marketing and it will pay off for years and years to come.

Get Website Help now and take your business to the next level. I can guarantee that your competitors are.

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Move over Apple, iTunes and iPhone, you have just been outdone.  This is seriously one of the coolest technologies that I have seen yet.  You’ve got to give props to Microsoft for taking the lead with the lastes touch screen technology.  How you like them apples, Apple?

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