Online Advertising We talked about ad words and other forms of online advertising in our April and May tech calls – We’re moving into a new era with advertising.. People are taking their money out of offline and spending it onlineA Dynamic AdReaction survey shows what types of ads consumers are receptive too. (graphic below)  Users seem to be receptive to online search ads and regular online advertising. The Kelsey Group, a market research company in Princeton, N.J., estimates that sales revenue from searches for local businesses and searches on wireless devices will increase to $13 billion in 2010 from $3.4 billion in 2005.So.. we know the experience is generally worth it, though the learning curve may be steep.NOTE: You have to know what you are doing or you can lose a lot of money   Effective Use of Pay Per Click – Recently Built Websites Has Google stopped crawling your page because it’s the same old content as all the other Market Center or Agent Websites?A new website may not get listed in the natural results for its company or brand name for several weeks after it’s built, this is especially true in Google. If this is the case, and you are spending money on offline promotions with the objective of driving visitors to your new website, it would be a good idea to include your business and brand name in an online Google Adwords campaign until the search engines index your newly built siteEffective Use of Pay Per Click – Your Company NameBidding on your own company or brand name in a pay per click campaign –It’s an important issue because a good percentage of traffic to many websites is generated by company name or brand-based phrases,… and often this traffic converts!!Example – Yard sign or other marketing says Keller William’s… the customer gets home and remembers Keller Williams so they type in Keller Williams and the city they live in.. That three word combination can cost as little as $.05/click..–> set a budget of $25/month, if you just want to test the watersWhy one might not bid on their company name: Many businesses are reluctant to pay for visitors that are already looking for their website. It could be described it as feeling like they are paying twice for the same visitor.Why would you just do it anyway? (Information from ReachLocal – international SEM and advertising company)  1)       Pay per Click ‘Quality Scoring’ algorithms (calculations Google uses to determine how much you pay) means you’re likely to get the best deal on your own company and product names. That translates to lower bids and increased ROI2)       It’s insurance. If you slip from the organic rankings for a day or two, your paid ranking will maintain your presence.3)       If you don’t bid, competitors will. In the United States it’s perfectly legal to bid on competitor product and company names. It happens all the time. You can easily outbid them, though, thanks quality scoring (see #1)4)       More often than not visitors using your company name in a search are responding to an offline promotion a word of mouth recommendation or are trying to find a site that they did not bookmark the first time around. Whatever the source, these are highly qualified visitors that have a higher chance of converting to a sale than visitors using other search phrases and every effort should be made to ensure that they can easily find your website.Content? Content! Content Now.. the experts generally advise business owners not to establish a Web presence unless they have time to keep it updated. I found an article by Jean A. Pratt, assistant professor of Information Systems at the University of Wisconsin – She states, ‘A static site may damage the credibility of the business’Remember what the mantra is for SEO, the standard advice to all site owners, regardless of what web space they’re in: most important thing about maintaining a website – CONTENT CONTENT CONTENTWhen creating content, keep in mind that it can come in multiple forms — services, searches, contests, games, video, RSS feeds and even news . It’s critical that the content is interesting and compelling, so it has the chance of being linked to by a fan or customer, It’s also extremely important to have a “yes we can help” customer service attitude. Your loyal customers can be solicited to come back or tell others about their experience. If you are still unsure:1)       look at the competitor’s sites and see what they’re doing, what’s driving traffic to them. 2)       Ask your customers where they go to look for properties or what tools they look for on a real estate website It’s also important to understand that you cannot trick the search engines. Flooding the engines with multiple versions of the same page, repeating the same term over and over – these tactics will only lead to negative traffic from search engines and the likelihood that your site could be banned from being listed in a search engine.You must be diligent in understanding how people are getting to your site and focus on providing quality content that is geared towards the audience that is trying to find you.UsabilitySteve Krug, author of the Web usability guide Don’t Make Me Think (New Riders Press, 2000), says what looks great to a business owner may be totally lost on a user unfamiliar with the site.He suggests that business owners’ watch others test their site. Then devote several hours a month to usability and content. Watching someone use your site for the first time can be a humbling and enlightening experienceAlways ask the question, “Does your site work?” Never assume that it does. Turn your website into a tool people can use repeatedly – build some custom IDX searches, get maptracks (property search using a map, you want people to meet with success on your website or else they won’t go back.  Social Networking and Media   Getting quality, relevant inbound links –
A successful social media marketing campaign can result in many new inbound links to your site.It’s a known fact that inbound links are one of the most important things that influence the rankings of your site. Put two and two together, and it’s easy to see how social media can be a great way to improve your rankings. Using social media websites for reputation management  Getting people talking good things about your business can be a positive way to generate traffic to your site, Conversely, it can be very easy for people to tarnish your reputation on these sites.  Time savers when ranking newly put together sites So if you’re launching a brand new site and you know it’s going to be awhile before it ranks, you might want to consider uploading some videos to YouTube or creating a MySpace profile and building a few good links to it. These sites are crawled frequently and content is automatically considered popular in search engine results Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Digg.com These are all social networking and media, .. all you have to do is add a profile and your name screams to the top of search engine results