I Have a Dog Grooming Business; Can I Work with Ten Golden Rules?

Before today, most small business owners who wished to work with an agency would hear an answer they didn’t like – either it was cost-prohibitive or the agency lacked the scalability to work with smaller accounts. As a sign of the times, Ten Golden Rules is changing all that with new online marketing packages specifically created for small and medium-sized businesses that want to harness the power of the Internet to grow their businesses.

As a business owner, finding time to keep up with the ever-changing world of Internet marketing can be challenging. From Social Media to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to creating a competitive website, navigating the online world can be confusing if not a bit overwhelming. With these new services from Ten Golden Rules, you can now have access to the processes developed for larger companies, like hospitals and universities, without breaking your budget.

Simply visit the website and click on the service you’re most interested in. The entire process is automated for convenience and efficiency, and draws on almost a decade of knowledge from in-market testing and today’s best practices.

Do you do any of your own Internet marketing for your small or medium-sized business? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Test Your Business Plan in AdWords

Thinking about starting a business? A great way to test your business model and get some quick data is through Google Adwords. Using the AdWords Keyword Suggestion tool, you will be able to see how competitive the phrases related to your business are, and how much it will cost to generate traffic from them. For example, let's say you were interested in starting a search engine optimization company. Using Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool, you would know that the phrase “search engine optimization company” would cost you about $11.69 per click, there is a high amount of advertiser competition, and the phrase is searched about 27,100 times per month. You will be able to find all of this data before you spend any advertising money.

By running some small test campaigns with conversion tracking, you will quickly be able to see the return on investment of bidding on keywords. This is also a great way to test your creative, including ad copy and landing pages, because you can control your budget.

In addition, research has shown that of pay per click traffic in general, 80-90% of the visits are new visits. This indicates that there is little overlap with other advertising channels so you will be bringing in a high percentage of fresh leads.

Pay-Per-Click Tip: Getting the most out of your ad space

Pay-per-click for search is some of the most targeted online advertising available. The problem with advertising on a search network, such as Google, is getting your message across in a very limited space. Pay-per-click ads, when served on search engine results pages, usually only provide you with 25 characters of headline space and about 70 characters of ad copy space.

Advertisers always want to get their entire sales pitch out there, and could not imagine fitting it in such a small space. Forget about sales pitches and view the ad not as a selling stage, but as a pre-qualifier for your sales funnel. Sell the visitor on the landing page, not in the ad. By pre-qualifying visitors, those who do click on your ad will be more likely to complete an action on your site. This will reduce your acquisition cost.

The golden question then becomes, “How do I effectively use the ad space?” Well, you should try to include the following items in your ads:

· A value proposition (i.e. “Free Consultation” or “Save 25%”)

· An endorsement from a third party (i.e. “A+ Rating in Better Business Bureau”)

· A call to action (i.e. “Sign Up” or “Buy Now”)

Once you get the type of visitor you are looking for from the ads, you can give them a detailed sales pitch on the landing page.

Another way to fit important information in your ad is to use symbols and abbreviations. For example, using the "&" instead of the word "and" saves you two characters.

AdWords Tip: Identify Negative Keywords

A useful PPC optimization strategy that is often overlooked is including negative keywords in your campaign. Negative keywords are used in AdWords to prevent your ads from being served for irrelevant searches. To paint a clearer picture, assume you are bidding on the term “bass” because you sell bass guitars. If you are bidding on “bass” with broad match, your ad could be served in searches for “bass fishing”. Anyone searching for “bass fishing” is unlikely to purchase a bass guitar from your site. If you included the term “bass fishing” in your negative keywords, you would not be wasting the impression and possible click. In addition, by adding negative keywords, your cost per click is likely to decrease as your click through rate increases.

Understanding negative keywords is only half the battle. Many advertisers know about negative keywords but do not utilize them because they have trouble identifying them. Common sense can certainly get you a starter list of negative keywords, but to really be effective, you will need to constantly be adding negative keywords to your campaigns.

The first way to identify negative keywords is to look for them in your current campaigns. Run a keyword performance report to see which keywords convert poorly over time. Add those phrases to your negative keywords.

There is also a very simple way to identify negative keywords you may not have thought of. Just run your broad keywords through any keyword suggestion tool, like the one provided in AdWords. Look through the list and identify any phrases that include your keywords but are irrelevant to your business. For example, you may have never considered that when bidding on “packaged food”, your ad will be showing up on searches for “packaged food poisoning”. However, if you ran “packaged food” through a keyword suggestion tool, “packaged food poisoning” would be right there for you to see.