Google Adsense, not for the entrepreneur

I have recently found out, from personal experience, that Google does not like the entrepreneur and they especially hate someone who follows proper development standards to use Adsense.  Let me explain. Recently I applied for membership in Google’s Adsense and was approved. I was looking forward to making a few bucks each month from Adsense. I put up my links, checked everything to make sure it was working and then began to watch the stats. After the first three days I made a whopping $3.60! I was on my way … until it happened … I was suspended from Adsense.

Confused and very irritated, I read the email that Google sent telling me that I MAY have been suspended due to click fraud. What? Are you kidding me! Google aledges that I tried to create revenue by clicking on the links that displayed on my website. This was totally not true! In fact, there was no clicks from my website. The only thing I can figure is that they saw a lot of impressions from the same IP address. The reasons for all of the impressions was because we follow a simple rule of development, we test our code before and after deployment.  With this testing, from the same IP address, Google MAY have decided that I was a threat to their system.

I tried to explain my situation to Google via their disabled account reinstatement form. They say they will contact you in the next 7 days about reinstatement or they won’t. They tell you they may let you know if your account is reinstated or maybe they won’t. They don’t guarantee anything – and they delivered! No response, no one to talk to, no way to find out what happened!  Google is so big they don’t care about the entrepreneur just trying to make a little extra money.

What happened to customer service? What happened to communication? What happened to simple courtesy? I guess if you are an Internet giant making money hand over fist, none of this matters. So this is my salute to Google – the global giant that hates entrepreneurs. Keep crushing us down so you can keep growing bigger.

THE number one marketing tip

You could have a great ad position, great landing page copy, and the best conversion rate in all the land, but it won’t matter unless you have a great product. When you focus on making a product better (i.e. filling a consumer need), people take notice. All the marketing in the world isn’t going to sustain your business unless you have a great product! Take the time to develop you product.

Ranking in Google Blog Search

In a thread in the Cre8asite Forum, they were looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:

• Number of RSS subscriptions
• Clicks on SERP post links
• Blogrolls
• number of “high quality” blogrolls the blog is in
• ability for visitors to tag posts
• whether or not people are tagging them
• References to the blog by sources other than blogs
• Pagerank

Some negatives he mentioned:

• if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
• if post content differs from feed version
• If content includes a lot of spammy words
• duplicate content
• if posts are the same size
• Link distribution
• If posts mostly link to one site

Do you have any additional ideas or suggestions? Please comment to this post.

Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords.  For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”,  “Music, Nicholasville KY”,  and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:

• Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less
• Local Groupings

There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:

• have pages, mentioning your area of service
• your phone number
• your physical address
• directions on how to reach your office
• use landmarks (“after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower” that’s three landmarks altogether)
• have links pointing to you from local websites and directories
• have a domain hosted locally (if locality is your primary concern)
• have ccTLD (country-specific domain – google.ca, for instance)

Do you have other suggestions? Please comment on this post!

Ranking in Google News

Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, “News page views are up to trillions monthly.” More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:

• Only indexes articles three days old or less
• Only indexes it once
• Read Google News Help for Publishers
• Google News XML Sitemap and monitor it
• Section names (keywords in News XML Sitemaps)
• Host “most popular” and “breaking news” sections on your site
• Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description

Do you have any other suggestions? Please comment to this post.

Ranking in Google Image Search

Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, “Other tips to double dip in image SEO include”:

• Add images to your Google Local Business profile
• Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
• Add images to local business citation sources.
• Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

Other suggestions? Please comment on this post!

Ranking in YouTube

As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

A few tips we’ve picked up are:

• An accurate and descriptive title
• Make sure your description is just that – descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.
• Descriptive keyword tags
• Avoid keyword stuffing

It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips include:

• Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags
• Include the word “Video” in your titles because people do search for it.
• Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.
• Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.
• Encourage participation by enabling everything.
• use meta data
• use captions and subtitles
• use watermarks
• use Google Maps integration

Have other tips? Please comment on this post!

4 Important Variables for Segmentation Strategy

Your database holds the key to sending the right email to the right person at the right time, in the right combination with other marketing efforts. Consolidated data from CRM, Web analytics and your email system allows you to perform the right segmentation and make informed campaign decisions.

Data Type #1: Endemic Data

Endemic data — one that is truly unique to a particular record — is frequently collected at opt-in:
o Contact information
o Demographic and geographic data, such as name, location, title and vertical industry (for B2B marketers), age and income level (for B2C marketers)

Endemic data also includes data that the opt-in volunteers as part of the opt-in process, often as part of supplying information via a preference center, such as:
o Projected date of a buying decision
o Budget
o Brand and format preferences
o Preferred language for communication
o Contact preference and frequency

Data Type #2: Transactional Data

Transactional data is any data pertaining to transactions that your opt-in has had with your brand. It’s worthwhile to note that a transaction does not need to be financial in nature to be considered a transaction.

For example, the process of opting-in produces transactional data, including:
o Date of opt-in
o Date of opt-in confirmation (if double opt-in)
o IP Address of opt-in
o Web Page or other channel of opt-in

Data Type #3: Behavioral Data

As the saying goes “Actions speak louder than words.” And that’s especially true for your prospects’ and customers’ online and offline actions.

Behavioral data is perhaps the most actionable of all the database information and can come from a tremendous number of sources. If you use a multichannel approach to marketing, you’ll want to define and capture potential behavioral variables carefully.

Examples of behavioral data include:
o Products put into an abandoned shopping cart
o Recent repeatedly reviewed items
o Clicking on a website
o Opening an email
o Clicking on an email offer (and the type of offer clicked on)
o Clicking on editorial within a newsletter or alert
o Webinar registration and/or attendance
o Live event registration and/or attendance
o Participating in surveys
o Calling customer service
o Interacting with a field rep
o Redeeming a coupon in a retail store

By combining behavioral data with other data, you can develop extremely targeted, micro-segmented campaigns. For example, perhaps you have a segment of customers who click only if they get special offers via email. You may have another contingent of customers who browse your website on a regular basis but are immune to email. You may discover a segment of prospects that will forever remain just that — prospects.

Data Type #4: Computed Data

Computed data is the outcome when one or more variables are used to create a third variable. The resulting variable is usually expressed as a difference between two variables, or as a ratio. For example, the variable of “number of miles from a retail store” is computed data; it’s the difference in distance between the customer’s and the store’s address.

For example, HP assigns each customer a Customer Category Code based on past purchasing behavior (general store, business employee and academic). HP also computes a projected LifeTime Profit score based on a customer’s past purchases and HP’s investment in the customer.

Another form of computed data is a gender code. You can use tables of common first names to predict gender (although some brands will simply ask for this information at some point in the registration process).

Computed data can be extremely powerful in predicting outcomes, and modelers commonly use it for regression analysis. Even without complex data analysis, you can use simple ratios and differences to determine when and how to trigger marketing campaigns to segments of your file.

SOURCE: MarketingSherpa

The Power of 3

The number 3 has a mystical power for humans. Aside from religious references, this phenomenon occurs in other forms, including communications.

Think of some of the most powerful advertising messages ever: “Just Do It,” “We Try Harder,” or even “I Like Ike.” Call-to-action lines often use the power of 3, as in “Buy It Now” and “One Day Left.”

If you can distill your tagline or call to action down to three words, so much the better. But, don’t just use a three-word phrase because it is a three-word phrase. It must fit your offer, product, or circumstance. You’ll know when you’ve got a winner.

Paid Clicks Convert Higher

It’s a difficult decision for every Web professional where should we put our budget, time and resources? Paid traffic or natural/organic SEO for traffic? While there are advantages and disadvantages to both types of campaign, Google and Compete believe that paid clicks are more likely to convert in the online retail space.

It should come as no surprise that the role of SEO and advertising is vital in e-commerce. The findings from a joint study (available through a Webinar here) reveal that while both branded and non-brand clicks were important to ROI, paid clicks are more likely to convert than natural clicks. One retail study they were involved with stated that in 7 out of 8 categories tested (the exception was home furnishings) paid clicks were 50% more likely to convert than organic clicks.

The study aimed to quantify the value of search clicks in driving online and in-store sales. Google and Compete documented shoppers search behavior to understand non-converting clicks by monitoring clicks to leading retails websites (e.g. Ann Taylor, Zappos, Buy.com, Ikea, Walmart to name a few) and tracking consumer purchase activity 60 days after the of initial click. Some interesting findings from the study include:

• Up to 33% of all visitors to retail sites come from search
• Up to 55% of paid traffic comes from non-branded clicks
• Up to 49% of purchasers using search click on non-branded search terms
• 32% of mass merchants purchases occur more than 2 weeks after the initial search referral  (30% purchase same-session, but 70% purchase later)
• Up to 43% of online shoppers purchase in-store

SOURCE: Website Magazine