So they assume the problem must be in their own execution, and begin following the advice (and blogs, tweets, facebook postings, etc.) of SEO Gurus and Social Media celebrities who supposedly know all the secrets to free targeted traffic and turning online community into profits…But still their business struggles, and before long they find they’ve over-invested both money and time into this web based venture and allowed themselves and their business to fall into a seemingly inescapable hole.

It’s scary, and it happens daily.

Having worked with small businesses online for the past eleven years now, I’ve seen a lot of things change, but one thing that’s remained constant throughout that time has been a simple truth that’s almost never spoken: For most small businesses and startups, everything you need to know about engaging with your customers online is probably already in your head.

Sure, So-and-So knows how to get 50,000 followers on Twitter, and Miss-Smarty-Pants can help you rank your website at the top of Google (possibly in the results pages displayed to visitors from China) for some obscure terms that she’ll make a case for as being relevant and necessary; but what do either of them know about your specific customers?

Has So-and-So or Smarty-Pants ever sold Tempered Coil Springs to Industrial buyers before? Do they know what your product is used for? Why it’s used that way? How it’s superior to others on the market?

You know these things, which means you know what it takes to engage your target customer and make the sale.

Is there any real value for your business in having thousands of followers and fans on social networks if none of them even know what your Tempered Coil Springs are?

Yes, there is lots of value in being able to connect with and engage your target customers online, and there are SEO and Social Media experts out there who do know how to do that in ways the average person would never think of, but it’s an added value to look at after you’ve already got a profitable operation up and running, not the foundation point to start from.

As for everything you ever really need to know about SEO–it’s handed to you straight from the Search Engines themselves, and takes little more than an hour or two to consume. It’s not the rocket science that it’s made out to be. In fact, if you just learn and get a handful of things right from the start, you’re leaps and bounds ahead of your competition already.

And with social media marketing, it can have a huge impact on your bottom line, but it can also be a huge time-suck with little to no ROI at all, and that often happens when a business or entrepreneur invests too heavily into it before having a smooth running operation already in place online.

It’s much easier to use these added-value paths like specialized SEO services and social media marketing to enhance your existing operation than it is to use them to support your new venture, so focus on what really matters to your business first, get it running smoothly and profitable, then look for that Golden Ticket to ramp it up with.

Now, I want to offer some practical tips here on getting more out of your PPC efforts, but I want to make sure that I’m very clear about two things:

1. this is NOT an all-inclusive guide to PPC marketing, that would require several books to provide
2. these are things that work for me, but with all of the variables involved, from what you may be promoting to how you write your ad copy, I make no guarantees that these will benefit you. You should judge for yourself whether or not some of these tips seem logical for your own campaigns, and don’t blame me if they don’t work or cost you money later

Okay, with that preface out of the way, here’s some of my thoughts and tips on PPC marketing:

1) Decide whether you want to make conversions or get traffic. There are valid reasons for both. Obviously, if you’re selling something you want conversions, but sometimes you may be attempting to increase the brand awareness for your product(s), business or website. If branding is a major component of your campaign, then getting traffic to click your ads is vital.

However, if you’re using PPC primarily to increase immediate conversions then you don’t actually want to get the most clicks on your ads, but rather the most targeted clicks.

It’s important to decide up-front what your goal is because it will affect how you approach your PPC ad writing and targeting decisions.

For example, if you’re promoting an offer for free 30 day supply trials of some product where the customer just has to pay the shipping fee, then either of these two ad headlines could work:

• “30 Day Supply of BLANK - Free Today!”
• “30 Day Supply of BLANK - only pay s/h”

However, the two headlines will likely have very different results. The first headline would get more clicks (which you are paying for) but have a lower conversion rate when visitors reached the landing page and found out they had to pay the shipping fees.

While the second headline might attract less clicks, but those clicks would convert much higher because the headline itself pre-qualifies visitors by telling them up-front that there is a shipping fee attached to the offer. This means a much higher ROI for your paid clicks.

A lot of marketers, especially when new to PPC marketing, think that the more traffic their ads drive the better, but that isn’t always the case. If you’re not branding your products or site with your PPC campaign, then you should have the mentality that you’re “paying for sales” with PPC, not “paying for traffic”–and design your campaigns so that you only attract and pay for the most qualified visitors to your offer.

2) Invest in lots of landing pages. Whenever I start a new PPC campaign, I usually start out with a short list of keywords that I may expand upon later, but initially I won’t have more than about 30 keywords to target because I want to judge the quality of the keywords, traffic and my offer before expanding.

I then break my list of keywords down into groups of 3’s that fit together, and create a separate landing page for each group. So, if I have 30 keywords to start, then I will have 10 landing pages to start, with each landing page targeting 3 keywords from my list.

This helps with your quality score (I believe) so can lower your per-click costs with AdWords, but more importantly it makes a direct connection between the keyword that your visitor searched for and the offer/landing page you deliver to them, which can increase conversions.

And yes, as I grow my keyword list once I know an offer is performing well, I will also continue to add more landing pages as well.

3) Add some personality to your landing pages. For me personally, as a web browsing consumer there’s nothing worse than to click an ad and end up on a dry, stale product detail page. Long before I began using PPC to promote my own sites, I was simply a consumer online and I can tell you that I’ve never made a purchase after clicking an ad and landing on a product details page of an ecommerce site.

If you run or are promoting an ecommerce site (as I do), take the time to create unique landing pages for the products you’re going to promote through PPC and add some personality to them. Give visitors a compelling reason to read through your copy or continue with your offer.

To sum this up, decide if you want to pay for traffic or pay for sales, then tailor your ad copy to that mission. Remember that each visitor who clicks your ad is an opportunity for you to interact and impress someone with your product(s), services or business, so make the most of that opportunity and don’t serve up a boring sales page.

It may not seem like much, but these simple concepts are missed by a ton of people using PPC and I know they’re losing conversions and opportunities because of it.

In many instances, I limited my banner and media advertising purchases to locations where the banner links would also count as “dofollow” links for my site with search engines. I never purchased links just to get the “link juice”, but I thought I was just being frugal by using my marketing campaigns to serve a dual purpose.

But I really wasn’t helping myself, or my site, in any way–and was actually wasting almost all of my marketing budget and time.

The truth is, online advertising already serves two purposes when done correctly. First, it can drive immediate, direct traffic to your site; and if that traffic is targeted (by where you did your advertising) then hopefully some of it will convert for you.

And the second purpose, which I think a lot of people overlook in online marketing, is to generate awareness for your business and inventory that translates into future customers.

I’ve spoken with several customers of my site who told me they heard of us from seeing banner ads we had purchased, and then acknowledged to me that they didn’t actually ever click on the ads.

But, just from seeing those banners the seed was planted in their minds that whenever they want or need something we carry, they should visit our site. And it worked.

It’s easy to get caught-up in the instant gratification that the web offers. To want to account for every penny of your advertising budget with direct clicks today that you can easily track.

But marketing has never worked perfectly like that because most people aren’t wired to respond immediately. It takes between 5 and 10 exposures to an advertising message before the average person will respond. This is why so many online marketers value “the list” so highly. They know they’re not going to make a sale on first contact with most people, so by getting you on their list it gives them those additional follow-up mailings for exposing you to their message over and over.

The upside is that once I figured out where I was doing it wrong, I began to look for ways to stretch my marketing and advertising budget out that would give me maximum exposure with my target audience, and the web is full of opportunities once you focus in on a goal like this.

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a definite no-no for me. Sure, it’s quick and easy to get going, especially with Google AdWords or on some of the major social networks now, but it only gives you a “first contact” interaction with potential customers.

Some will convert for you, especially from search listings, but most will be lost to you unless you can get them to join your mailing list from that first interaction. So, while PPC is effective for the right type of campaign, if you’re just trying to build a customer base it’s not really the best method in my opinion.

CPM (cost per thousand impressions) advertising is much better for building a customer base and brand loyalty; if you can find the right places to advertise that allow you to target your market audience.

With CPM advertising it gives you the opportunity to put your message in-front of potential customers over and over again, to plant those seeds in their minds. The downside is it’s a lot harder to track results because you’re actually hoping for responses that won’t involve the direct clicking of your banners–in addition to some direct clicks.

What I’ve done to compensate for that lack of tracking is to attempt to interact with new customers to my site as much as possible. This again serves two purposes. First, it’s just good customer service policy to make new customers feel welcomed, which goes a long way towards earning repeat business from them.

And second, it gives me the chance to ask how they heard of us, where they saw our advertising or whatever I want to know to help me judge what’s working in our advertising and what’s not.

Another problem with CPM is that it can get very expensive if you target heavy traffic, popular sites. You might find a site that looks like it meets your target demographic perfectly, see that they offer affordable CPM rate advertising and think you’ve got a golden opportunity–only to see your advertising budget exhausted too quickly because you miscalculated how many impressions that site would give you.

Or, in some worst case scenarios, you might purchase CPM advertising with an unscrupulous site owner who uses bots to inflate (steal) ad impressions. It’s not common in my experience, but it does happen.

So, my referred method of advertising buying has become time-based purchases. I look for sites where the general audience is going to match my target demographic, and where I can purchase advertising for a set rate and specific length of time; normally a month.

This works best for me because most of my advertising campaigns will last for 4 to 8 weeks, for example I’ve just begun advertising our line of Halloween Costumes for this year, and will run those promotions from now (mid-August) until mid-October, when because of shipping times our Halloween sales end. That’s an 8 week set period, so over the last 2 weeks I found a bunch of websites and blogs that I liked and felt would match my target needs, and purchased banner advertising on all that had openings for the next 8 weeks. Every purchase was for the time period, not for CPM’s or PPC’s–and none of the purchases had anything to do with my SEO efforts. It’s strictly about putting my website and products in-front of potential customer’s eyes at a time when I know they’ll be considering Halloween costumes.

I’ve also found that buying for time periods rather than even getting into discussions of CPM’s has opened up more advertising opportunities for me.

Many times I’ll find a blog or site that I’d like to advertise on, but the owner doesn’t normally sell direct advertising. I’ve found that if I approach them and start talking about CPM’s and click rates they seem to sometimes become overwhelmed and get nervous about being in over their heads.

However, by sending a simple email that says who I am, and that I’d like to advertise my website (always give them your link so they can make sure they would approve of the destination) with a banner on their blog or site for 1 month, or 2 months or whatever set period of time–I get a much better response rate.

I never mention pricing in that first email, and don’t even request pricing from them. I wait to hear back and confirm their interest in selling me ad space, and if they include pricing information that’s great, but if not (which happens often with site owners who don’t normally sell direct advertising) then in my follow-up email I’ll suggest a fair rate and ask if it’s agreeable to them. Sometimes they will negotiate, and sometimes they’ll accept my offered rate. Once in a while they’ll counter with some outrageous price, at which point I just decline and move on. It’s not worth the time and hassle to try negotiating with anyone who has unrealistic expectations from the start I’ve found.

The point is, many blog and site owners who don’t normally sell direct advertising get overlooked by advertisers who focus in on known advertising locations, or search Google for terms like “advertise here”–so when approached in a friendly and fair manner, you can often get great deals with very targeted traffic for your ads.

Another place I love to look for deals is article directories. Some of the bigger ones are a bit expensive, but some of the medium to smaller and niche directories offer great rates for time based advertising, and the key bonus with these is you can often purchase ad locations in specific categories of the directories, so you can target very narrow demographics. A couple of good examples are WAHM-Articles.com and ContentCaboodle.com but you can find many others with a little searching. Typically with mid to small sized article sites you can get a full month of banner ads in a category for under $50, and with niche directories I’ve gotten deals as low as $25 for a full month.

Obviously blogs and article directories get less traffic than major social networks or Google search does, but the one thing these sites get is highly targeted long-tail search traffic, which means you’re advertising is showing to very targeted eyes. That makes these very effective resources for purchasing advertising in my opinion.

So keep your SEO and marketing separate, and become a little creative with where you do your your creatives purchasing and it will really pay off for you.

Actually, there are a lot of ways design can affect your bottom line that have nothing to do with colors. For example, just ensuring that your pages load fast will lead to less visitors leaving your page (bouncing off) within a few seconds, and of course having more visitors spend longer amounts of time on your pages can increase conversion rates or advertising revenues.

But the little spoken of secret I wanted to focus on is simply offering your visitors an ugly design.

That’s right, despite conventional wisdom which suggests the more impressive your design the better your site will do, the truth is visitors who land on your site pages are looking for what they’re supposed to do next even before your page is finished loading.

It’s just human nature, and the eyes and brain are faster than the browser. Even before a page has finished loading the surfer is scanning it from top to bottom and left to right looking for some “call to action”. Some form or link or whatever that they expect to be expected of them to act on.

Pretty and impressive site designs line the pockets of web designers who create them, and those designers are usually worth every penny they charge, but they don’t always help the site owner increase revenue for one simple reason, the more bells and whistles and media/graphics your page holds, the less likely your visitors are to read your sales copy or find your advertising links that you want them to follow.

All of the bells and whistles just distract the visitor from quickly finding that “call to action” you want them to use, whether it’s reading your sales copy and placing an order, or clicking on the Google AdSense ads… if you distract your visitors with an impressive design or lots of media then they’re more likely to leave your page without following your desired path.

Image Source: sxc.hu user fishmonk

Now, I’ve used the term “ugly”, but what I’m really talking about is “plain”. In other words, less bells and whistles and more attention for your revenue stream path on the page.

A great example of this being done well (and not really ugly by any means) is www.ezinearticles.com - if you look at any inner page there from a design perspective, you’ll see right away that the advertising units are the primary draw for a visitor’s eyes as the page loads. The actual design and page structure is pleasing and functional, but nothing on the page really stands out to attract the attention of scanning eyes other than the advertising links. Google AdSense even did a case study of eZineArticles because they were so effective with the program.

And that’s really what I’m talking about here, not so much “make your page ugly”, but rather prevent your design and content from distracting visitors away from your revenue stream.

The same is true if you’re selling a product or service on the page, but in this case instead of advertising units you want to draw your visitor’s attention to your sales copy, which is easily done by making sure it stands out right away from the overall design by using in-text images, different fonts or etc.–anything that just gets your visitors eyes focused where you want them on the page right away.

So, there you have it. If you want to improve or increase the income from your site, start working on making your site a little less pretty and turn your “calls to action” into the eye candy that grabs your visitors first.

I understood that keywords were words or phrases of words that people typed into Google or some other search engine to find what they were looking for, and I knew that getting a listing in the top results for those words was vital to obtaining traffic.

But I was naive as to how online searchers function, and wrongly assumed that since I was selling women’s clothes and lingerie that I simply needed to focus on basic keywords like “lingerie”, “bras” and “panties”; and the shoppers would come.

What I have learned since then about the methods of searchers has shown me that ranking high, even for a word that gets tons of searches every month, does not mean you’re going to see any additional sales.

As a matter of fact, ranking well for the wrong keywords is going to drain your resources, everything from costly server bandwidth to labor time, and can end up costing you more money than it generates for you.

The key is to rank high for your most effective keyword terms. Even when they result in less traffic. And to do that you have to be intuitive, you have to place yourself in the mindset of your customer and deduce how they might search for the products you offer; and you need to watch your monthly stats for insights into your customer’s minds based on the terms they do find your site with, because you can often find gems there that you hadn’t thought of and build upon them.

Once you start finding the terms that bring qualified buyers to your site, even though they may result in fewer daily visitors than broader and more generic terms do, you’ll start seeing the impact on your bottom line.

I would much rather rank high for 5 terms like “PRODUCT blue free shipping” which may only get a hundred searches per day each, than for almost any single word that gets thousands of daily searches; simply because people searching for a product by color and shipping options is looking to make a purchase. People searching for a single word can have a million different motivations for making their search, and none of them may be to purchase anything.

In the end keyword research for marketing purposes is all about first recognizing the type of visitor you want to attract to your web site, and then understanding how they might “drill down” beyond the single word terms to find exactly what they’re looking for… and then developing content that will rank high for those terms.

So, while search engine traffic is certainly high quality and often high volume, it shouldn’t be your only traffic source. And you really shouldn’t only focus on one single search engine either. Many site owners hang on all things Google and lack any focus on Yahoo! or MSN or any of the smaller niche search engines out there.

One of my most profitable web sites last year was nearly non-existant in Google’s index. In-fact, Google sent me less than 500 visitors for the whole year on that site. However, Yahoo! sent me nearly 500 per day; and MSN has been a steady traffic source too.

And here’s a little theory I’ve developed over the last decade online, Google search traffic is far less qualified than Yahoo! or MSN search traffic. Sure, Google has the large share of traffic, but it also has the larger share of casual browsers who tend not to convert for site owners too. On the other hand, MSN traffic tends to convert at a slightly higher rate than Google traffic for me, and Yahoo! search traffic tends to convert at almost double the rate of Google traffic for me.

So, if just getting high volume traffic to your site is the goal then Google should be a priority, but if you’re trying to build a loyal community, or membership, or if you’re selling a product or service then I caution you not to overlook Yahoo!, MSN and other niche search engines.

When it comes to other methods for building buzz and traffic for a new site I always try to focus on efforts that will serve dual purposes for me. In other words, if I can generate some buzz and get a few backlinks to my site for SEO at the same time that’s a bonus, and it leads me to the first method I recommend,

1. Article Marketing

You’ve probably heard this before, maybe a million times, and maybe you’re like many who think it’s out-dated due to over use by online marketers–but the fact is it still works like a charm to get people talking about and visiting your site if done right.

Don’t fall into the trap of churning out garbage articles just to get lots published quickly. This will have the opposite effect from what you want. People who read them will think (and maybe talk) negatively about you and your site, and the articles will be buried in archives sooner leaving you with little or no SEO value from the links.

To really work your articles need to be impressive, informative, entertaining… in other words, amazing. That may sound like a tall order, but it’s really not. If you’re launching a site on any topic then you should have some unique ideas and thoughts about that topic, and that’s what readers are looking for and will respond to.

Write your personal views and perspectives down as a bullet-point list, then expand on each point to explain it further and emphasize your unique thoughts on it. With a little time and care you should be able to turn each bullet-point from the list into its own article.

And if you can’t, then use your list with detailed explanations to guide a freelance writer you hire as (s)he turns them into articles for you.

2. The Social Web

The web has become a very social place, and services from Twitter to YouTube allow you to not just share your message, but to also engage and gain feedback (market insights) from others.

Two years ago if I wanted to get insights from potential users of a product I was developing I would build a special web site that offered some free gift or eBook/Report in exchange for the user answering a handful of Survey questions I designed. Then I’d spend some money on PPC (pay per click) advertising to get people to the new site and hope that I could get about 100 surveys filled out before I spent a fortune on the traffic.

That was a fast and easy way to gain feedback and insights, though it could be costly at times.

Today however, thanks to social networks I can get the same information from my potential market without having to buy a new domain for the survey, without having to spend time designing the survey and site it sits on, without having to create or find a free gift to give away… and without having to spend a penny on PPC (pay per click) traffic.

There’s also the dual purpose (remember I hunt for these) of being able to start slowly building some buzz for my new project even while I’m still gaining the feedback from potential customers that will determine how I develop it.

Think about that, I’m getting people to talk about my product even before I start building it at times, that’s powerful mojo. And it works just as well for launching a new site as it does for a new product.

3. Offline Promotions

It amazes me how few people are taking advantage of this given how cheap, easy and successful it can be for getting buzz and traffic to a new site.

It can be as simple as posting a Flier with tear-off tabs that contain your web site URL on the community board at your local grocery store, or as elaborate as renting a Blimp, having your web site URL displayed on the side of it and then offering free rides over the city through some local radio show contest.

The bottom line is you can be creative and stay within your budget, yet achieve grand results with offline marketing strategies.

This again can serve a dual purpose if you’re creative about it. I know of one site owner who ran an offline “scavenger hunt” at a local college, but the way the hunt was set up contestants had to find certain things and take digital videos of themselves next to the items, then post those videos to an online video service like YouTube, Google or etc. to get points.

And for “extra points” the contestant could also write a blog posting about their experience finding the item, either on their school provided web space (free .edu links there) or by creating a free blog online at Blogger, WordPress or a similar site.

With a single scavenger hunt that had a prize worth a couple hundred bucks, this guy had lots of people talking about his site, sharing and spreading videos that talked about his site, and a ton of college students online building backlinks to his site for him.

4. Word Of Mouth

This is more of a wrapper for the three points already mentioned than it is an individual tool, because word of mouth advertising isn’t something you really “create” as much as it is something you can guide.

If you get your message out there, and generate some buzz, then people will be talking about you or your site. The key to success is to do all the other things right so that you can guide them to be talking positively and saying the right things when talking about you.

So the point here is to remember not to cut corners on anything you do while promoting your site. Always be engaging, informative, helpful, respectful, entertaining… always be amazing and you’ll get the kind of word of mouth promotions you really want.