By Robert Lockard

Submit Solution has four new Squidoo lenses, all focusing on different aspects of the Internet-marketing company’s services. Web pages on Squidoo are called lenses, I suppose because they give you a view into someone’s mind, life or company.

I’ll give a brief description of all of the new lenses below. Be sure to check them out and rate each of them, if you like.

One lens focuses just on Submit Solution’s Internet-marketing blogs. As you can tell, each of these blogs has a different focus: search engine optimization, paid search, social media and Web design. You can find it here: Submit Solution – 4 Internet Marketing Blogs.

Another lens gives you more information about Submit Solution’s services, including Web design, SEO, PPC and website content. You’ll find it here: Submit Solution – The Best Internet Marketing Services.

Submit Solution’s website launch is spotlighted on another lens. It includes the news release announcing the updated website’s release in September 2009 and the company’s new features and services. You can find that news release on Submit Solution’s website under “Press.” It’s entitled, “Submit Solution Launches New Web Site with Web and Logo-Design Services.” The lens can be found here: Submit Solution Online-Marketing Website Launch.

The final new Submit Solution Squidoo lens is short and sweet. It includes some of the newest blog entries from the site’s four ecommerce blogs, as well as Submit Solution’s contact information. If you want to get a hold of a Submit Solution representative, that’s a good place to go. Check it out here: Submit Solution: The one-stop hub for internet marketing.

Don’t forget about our four other Squidoo lenses for Submit Solution, eHarbor, Inc., Magellan Commerce and Real Estate Promoter that we built back in March. I talked about them in the eHarbor Blog back when we created them. Learn more about them in my blog entry, “eHarbor, Inc. launches Squidoo pages.” We recently updated these lenses with additional information about our companies’ history and high-tech services.

You can find them at the following links:

Submit Solution - Search Engine Optimization Tools

eHarbor, Inc. - eCommerce and SEO Experts

Magellan Commerce - Website Design & SEO

Real Estate Promoter - Website Design & Marketing

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Submit Solution’s four new Squidoo lenses.” The Submit Solution logo is the copyright of Submit Solution.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

Online business are often plagued with this internet marketing question: Should I hire a PPC agency or do the work in-house?

Most of the time, the question is not only based on cost alone.  Many people feel that managing their own Pay-Per-Click campaigns is more cost effective, but the truth is, it is not as simple as that!

In-House vs. PPC Agency: For your consideration…

A lesson in specialization:

Because PPC Agencies specialize in the current trends, techniques and methodologies of search engine marketing, their agents are more able to deliver work that reflects their expertise.  A do-it-yourself technique may be adequate for a small amount of time, but professional PPC agents will do better work in less time.

It’s a question of perspective…

Now this one can be tricky.  While in-house employees will have a deeper understanding of company philosophy, products and services, a PPC agency can provide a fresh look, as they are uninhibited and uninfluenced by company procedures and past work.

What’s this gonna cost me?

Now to consider cost: With in-house work, you will need to pay salary or wage, benefits, 401K, etc. With a PPC agency, you may pay more for the actual work, but will receive quick, successful results.  This can be looked at in a short-term / long-term basis. For the short-term, a PPC agency can handle the work without creating steep costs. If you can handle the increased costs, in-house PPC reps would be better in the long-run.

Hopefully, this post has provided you with some things to consider before hiring (or not hiring) a PPC agency.  As with most internet marketing techniques, a DIY strategy may work for small businesses, but professional services are the way to go for growing businesses with much at stake.

By Britnee Nguyen

If you’re planning on doing a PPC campaign or any type of internet marketing through the winter months, you’ll want to take the holiday season in consideration. Undoubtedly, there’s going to be a rise of on-line traffic during the holidays as many people turn to the web to find gifts. You’ll want to make sure you have your PPC campaigns properly set up to make the most of your on-line advertising investment. Use these guidelines to be successful during the holiday season through your PPC campaign.

Use keyword reports from the previous holiday season to see what keywords did well during that time. You can use the search-based keyword tool to see these reports. Most likely, these terms will do well again this year. You’ll want to use Google’s sbKT (search-based keyword tool). When you’re on the website you’ll see how well keywords are ranking and how much they are per click. This is really helpful any time of the year, but can be of great assistance if you’re trying to sell your product or service during the holidays.

The one day out of the year you should have your PPC campaign geared for is Cyber Monday. This is like Black Friday which is the day after Thanksgiving where every store has discounted prices on items. Cyber Monday occurs the Monday after Thanksgiving and is for sales available on-line. You could bid higher this day compared to other days to take advantage of the increased traffic on Cyber Monday. To get the most clicks, you’ll need to get your ads in the top 3. If you don’t, then it might be useless to do it since your competition will dominate you. You’ll want to be part of the holiday revenue that day so make sure you maximize your ROI the best you can on Cyber Monday.

Also, even after the holidays come and go, many sales happen after the holidays. Consumers are looking for the best deals after the holidays, so don’t miss out on this opportunity either. Don’t end your PPC campaign on Christmas Day, instead you should keep it and monitor it to make money off of the post-holiday shopping. You’ll might want to alter your keywords a bit after this to make sure you’re still targeting the on-line shoppers.

This holiday season, don’t miss out on increased revenue from your PPC advertising. Be sure to plan and prepare it in advance to get the most ROI. If you’re busy taking care of your own holiday shopping, it’s best to hire a professional company who can handle your account during the busy season. Submit Solution is an example of a company who are experts in pay per click advertising and will maximize your ROI this holiday season.

By Robert Lockard

Optimizing your website’s content for search engines costs about half as much as relying solely on a paid-search campaign for getting customers to your site. So says a recent study by Frommer’s Unlimited I read about in the Travolution article, “WTM: Rich content ‘more cost-effective than PPC’.”

Of course, the main flaw I saw in this study is that it analyzes SEO and PPC results separately when many ecommerce companies use a combination of the two. SEO and PPC have different strengths and weaknesses. SEO is slower but more cost-efficient while PPC is fast, but each click costs money.

It’s essential for a website’s long-term future for it to have strong content that is designed to attract search engines’ attention and increase its ranking in their search results. But that doesn’t mean PPC is irrelevant or too expensive for companies to take advantage of in their Internet-marketing campaigns.

According to Frommer’s study, it costs about 17 cents per visitor to optimize a site’s content. On the other hand, it costs about 33 cents per visitor through PPC ads.

The company based its findings on the results of eight companies focusing on travel, hotels or airlines. They divided the total cost of an SEO package by the total number of visitors who clicked on the sites’ natural search results to get the cost per SEO visitor. They divided the total amount paid for a PPC campaign by the number of visitors who clicked on PPC ads to get that average cost.

They found that 70 percent of their site visitors clicked on an organic search result, not a paid-search ad. Thirty percent isn’t bad, though.

What are your thoughts on this paid-search vs. search engine optimization debate? Which works best for you, or do they both work well together?

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Is SEO a better deal than PPC?” The photo of the SEO, PPC Scrabble game is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of therichbrooks.

By Britnee Nguyen

When you have a PPC ad in Google AdWords, you’re only given 25 characters for the headline and 70 characters for the body of the text. You probably thought writing in 140 characters on Twitter was hard! But after seeing the very limited amount of space you’re given for a PPC ad, you realize you have to be extremely clear and concise to get your message across.

While being concise, you need to make sure that you include relevant keywords, explain the benefits, stand out and have a “call-to-action” message. In addition, you need to remember that you are speaking to real humans so don’t sound too wordy or stuffy.

When writing PPC ads, you need to focus on the goal. The immediate goal you’re looking for is to convey why the person should click on your ad. The next long-term goal is how to convert those clicks into sales. But for this post, we’re just talking about the goal of getting them to click. Getting someone to click with just 95 characters total to entice them can be difficult. The last sentence I just wrote was 87 characters which shows just how concise you need to be.

Headline (25 characters)

Your headline is the attention grabber.

If your headline isn’t interesting, the viewer won’t continue reading the rest of your text; therefore, won’t click your ad. It needs to simply say what you have to offer. If you are selling free birthday cards on-line and want to do a PPC ad to promote your website. If you wanted your keyword to be “birthday e-cards” then you should keep the headline simple such as: Free Birthday E-cards. It’s basically just blatantly stating what you have to offer because you don’t have room to do much else.

Body (75 characters)

When you write the body text, this is where you’ll want to explain more about what you offer. This is typically one sentence long and you’ll want it to be “call-of-action”. This means that you are telling them to do something with action words. You can do this by starting off your sentence with words such as “Send”, “Choose” and “Make”. In the example of using “birthday e-cards” as the target keyword, here are some good examples you could do using the call-to-action and keywords:

Send a personalized birthday e-card to your loved one today.
Choose from 550+ unique birthday e-cards delivered right to the inbox.
Make your friend’s day special with an interactive birthday e-card.

So just make sure you get to the point of what the person will get if they click on your ad. Remember to keep it clear and concise and don’t use too much flowery words because they’ll just skip over it. Make sure to use an action word so they will actually take action and click on your link instead of just reading it. PPC ads can be very effective when written properly. Take the time to write your PPC to make sure it targets the right keywords and creates a call to action.

By Robert Lockard

An excellent blog post on Practical Ecommerce got me thinking about how paid-search campaigns are handled. The blog post is entitled, “Pay-per-click Advertising: Seven Pointers for Smaller Campaigns.”

I was amazed when I read all of the pointers on how people can improve their PPC efforts because basically all of them are easily handled by Submit Solution. I think it’s a great idea to be educated on the best practices of online promotion, so you should definitely read that blog post and take its advice to heart.

After you come up with a plan and thoroughly research your keywords, you can present your ideas to a Submit Solution PPC expert, and he or she will be able to improve upon your ideas and fully implement them for you. Submit Solution offers a number of pay-per-click solutions, including one-on-one support, easily updatable keywords, up-to-date reports and more.

The seven things you should keep in mind when using PPC in your marketing strategies include learning about negative keywords, long-tail keywords and match types. Negative keywords are phrases that include your selected keywords, but attach unfavorable or irrelevant words to them. I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t want to pay for people who click on its ads when they type in words like “Nintendo Wii defective,” or something to that effect. Those people are more likely to be looking for information or venting rather than hoping to make a purchase.

Long-tail keywords are great because a relatively small number of people search for them and so they used to be less expensive to advertise on. But now that the secret is out that Internet marketers want those targeted keywords more than the general ones, they’re becoming more expensive. A long-tail keyword is a search term with more than one or two descriptive words in it. Terms like “Internet marketing” have a high amount of competition to be number one on search engine results pages. Terms like “Internet marketing solution Orem Utah” will have fewer searchers, but they will be much more targeted.

Match types help you get even more targeted traffic to your website by adjusting how precisely you want people’s search terms to match your selected keywords and phrases.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my discussion of PPC campaigns. This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Submit Solution offers PPC solutions.” The photo of the bad advertisement is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Unlisted Sightings.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

Running successful paid search ads is almost a “guess and check” type of process.  It can often seem like ages before you find an ad that works for you!  However, there is one main aspect of internet marketing that is often underplayed in the world of PPC: landing pages.

Your paid search landing page should be carefully crafted to suit your visitors so that each click from your ad counts.  If you, like most companies, run multiple PPC ads at once, catered to different key words and phrases, you should create corresponding landing pages for each ad you run. The “one size fits all” method, with all your paid ads running to the same, generic landing page, is a thing of the past!

Here are some of the reasons why you should create separate landing pages for different keywords:

Targeted Marketing: When you’re running more than one PPC ad, it’s likely that they all cater to a different feeling or benefit.  For example, one of your ads can claim to save people money while another can boast of its ease of use or low price.  All these ads create a different meaning to the visitor who clicks on them.  If they are looking for an easy to use product, you should create a landing page that outlines how easy to use your product is!  Your visitors will not only get the information they are looking for, they will also get a targeted marketing strategy that will prove profitable for your business.

Multi-Faceted Approach: If you were stuck with one generic landing page for every paid search ad you ran, you would only be able to address two or three benefits of your product in the same place.  For example, “Our product is easy to use, cost effective and will save you money!”  When you cram too many benefits into one page, your marketing starts to sound gimmicky and will be ineffective.  By creating multiple landing pages catering to different facets of your product, you can be more successful, for each specific page will be stronger than one catch-all page.

Keep these things in mind when embarking on any internet marketing endeavor you have.  And remember, if your landing page stinks, your paid search efforts will have been in vain, no matter how successful they were!

The photo of the friends smell bad sticker is from Flickr, and is the copyright of evelynishere.

By Britnee Nguyen

A new and free research tool, Google Insights, provides e-commerce owners with the ability to improve their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with its search data. Many on-line retailers depend on PPC services to get more customers to their shops. If less people are clicking, then that means less business coming in.

Some may not see the relevancy in PPC or even understand how many people actually use it. Google reported that most of its $5.5 billion revenue in the last quarter was from PPC advertising. This is why Google has a keen interest in paid search ads and want to help on-line retailers receive the best support in it.

So the newest tool is Google Insights which helps hone a marketing message. You can choose three different ways to describe your product such as “environmentally-friendly”, “portable”, and “high-tech” for example and plug them into Google Insights which will tell you which term is searched for most in the U.S. or whatever area you’re in. This gives you a starting point on knowing which phrase will benefit you the most.

You can also see how a certain keyword tends to trend each year. For example, “softball cleats” trends to be the highest on March when softball season is about to start. You can also see which states search for the most and other related keywords and how they trend. You can see below how each divot and peak occur around the same time each year.

Note that Google Insights doesn’t tell you exactly how many people search for that keyword, but instead scales it accordingly. It is a helpful tool to help those with pay-per-click and to use it more efficiently. It’s not the only tool needed to succeed in PPC, but it is definitely one you’ll want in your toolbox.

By Robert Lockard

In September, Google introduced a new way for its customers to buy and sell online display ads. It’s called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and it allows Internet marketers to find a variety of Web pages to advertise on and quickly make a bid. This speeds up the process for both advertisers and publishers looking for ad revenue.

I heard about this development in a Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Google Unveils Market for Display Ads.”

Google has literally thousands of partner websites scattered across the Web that display its online ads. However, Google has never been very good at display advertising. It bought DoubleClick back in 2007 for $3.1 billion and has been trying to come up with a good way to jump into this part of the paid-search market. This appears to be its big move.

This isn’t the first online-advertising exchange service. Actually, other major search engines, like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have had them for some time, though none of them has been able to make them particularly big or useful, yet. Maybe Google will find a way to make this exchange service popular and profitable.

Google’s move comes with plenty of risks. What if few ad publishers and advertisers sign on to the service? Who would want to participate in a service that no one else is using? Internet marketers are looking for ways to reach the right audience in simpler ways.

Surprisingly, Google is far behind other search engines in the display-ad market. Google is definitely the king of PPC with about a 70-percent share of the industry’s total revenue, but it only received 1.3 percent of all display-ad views. Yahoo is actually the leader in display ads.

Apparently, Internet marketers who want to target a specific audience with simple Internet ads turn to Google. But if they want something more dynamic, appealing to customers’ emotions more than their intellect, they are more likely to turn to Yahoo or TV advertisements.

This is a complete version of the blog post on the eHarbor Blog: “Google tries to expand into new PPC forum.”

The photo of the fiery wok is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of liber.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines are usually what comes to mind when one thinks of Pay-Per-Click ads.  However, there is another huge market for PPC ads that is often overlooked by online businesses: Facebook.  That’s right, Facebook ads are offered in the PPC format, allowing online businesses to take their targeted marketing to the next level.

Facebook paid-ads work much the same way that PPC ads in Google and Bing work.  However, the subtle differences between the two methods of paid search may make all the difference to some industries.

Here are some of the specs on Facebook PPC ads:

->  BIG Market Share: Facebook is big.  Okay, Facebook is huge.  It’s probably the biggest time-waster known to mankind.  And it’s still growing!  The point here is, Facebook hosts a monstrous aggregate of young and old, educated and uneducated people alike.   Most target markets would be greatly available on Facebook.  However, there are some that would more profitable than others.  For example, an ad for handmade jewelry like you see above would be fairly successful on Facebook, because it is targeted towards mostly educated, middle to upper-class women.  If the ad were to be targeted to mostly uneducated or lower class women, research shows that Myspace would be the more appropriate place to advertise.

->  Not as Powerful: Let’s face it — no matter how big Facebook gets, it can never trump that search engine giant, Google.  While you’re reading this, you may be thinking, “Wait a sec! Didn’t she just tell us that Facebook ads can give us access to a big market share?”  It is important to realize that while Facebook is indeed growing, it is still a social networking site that not accessible to anyone (because it requires login credentials), while Google is the most popular search engine in the land.  Another thing to consider is that your Facebook ads will not be visible in search engine results!

After reading this article, you should have a pretty good idea about whether or not Facebook ads will work for your business.  If you’re not ready to make the leap into Facebook paid ads, you can always just focus on your free Facebook pages or even add Facebook Connect to your website or blog.  Once you see how those campaigns work out, you can have a better idea about where to take your next step.