SEO is ranking your site well in the organic search results using tips liked by search engine but SEM is much bigger than SEO. SEM includes the complete SEO process but also include the PPC Marketing as well as collecting data for more effective SEO.

But today I am going to present a new perspective on SEM which is can you afford only SEO? I will take the example of number 2 website of the world. Yes you are right Facebook.

Yesterday when I was scratching my head for ideas to write something more about SEO I just started Googling about my family members name in Google.

Sadik Bhimani - My Brother Sadik.in
Lubna Shabbir - My Wife's Name Lubna.in

And see what I saw.

A site as big as Facebook even Advertises for less competitive keywords which are names of the users in their account.

Go check if Facebook considers you name to bet money on?

If you did not found any ads on Google for your name do not worry. I also did not found anything for my name nor does David Beckham have any. So cheer up!!!

Why?

Now there may be various questions in mind and one of them could be "Why does Facebook advertises on such low searched keywords?" The answer is simple

1. Very low or no competition
2. Highly targeted
3. SEO is impractical for so many users and keywords.

Lesson to be learnt

If you have a blog or a website your aim should not be to jump into anything very competitive but you should find low competitive and highly targeted keywords like Facebook did for their business. If you can do that there is no stopping for your business.

Over to you

Have you found something like this for your business? If yes do share with us, if no stop reading and start finding.

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Pay‐Per‐Click ( PPC ) marketing is a form of advertising where marketers display their ads across search engine result pages ( SERPs ) and other websites related to their products. Advertisers only pays when a user clicks on the advertisement and the cost of each click depends on the amount the advertiser has agreed to pay.

Advantages of PPC over traditional Marketing

• Television commercial or newspaper advertisement is shown to a random sampling of people where as your pay‐per‐click advertisement is only displayed to those users who are actively searching for what you have to offer.
• PPC is cheaper. With a couple hundred dollars, you can easily enter the advertising market and become a major player in your niche.
• PPC gives you the opportunity to appear on the first page of search results for your desired keywords.
• With PPC you can track your return on investment very easily.
• PPC helps setting arbitrage which refers to buying an ad for a relatively cheap keyword to generate sales for a higher profit.
• Target your competitor. If your competitor uses Adsense to monetize his website you can target his placement using Adwords to drive traffic from your competitor website to your site till he does not realize the same and stops your ads appearring from his website.

Disadvantages of PPC Marketing

• PPC Marketing can become very costly if not done in the right way.
• You need to constantly keep tracking your return of investment.
• Too many factors can effect your PPC Campaign viz keywords, budget, PPC engine, landing page, Ad format, Ad Text ...
• Keep an eye on your competitor because if you can do PPC Marketing your competitor can outbid you.

PPC does not only mean Google Adwords but there are others players in the market like Facebook Ads, StumbleUpon, Yahoo SM and many more ...

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SEO is ranking your site well in the organic search results using tips liked by search engine but SEM is much more bigger than SEO. SEM includes the complete SEO process but also include the PPC Marketing as well as collecting data for more effective SEO.

So now you have rough idea about how search engine marketing is different from search engine optimization. So how should your search engine optimization and marketing be done. I would suggest few of the things you should do and few of the things you should not do.

Focus on conversions

This is one of the most common mistake the so called search engine expert makes. They tend to focus on bringing more people to the site and does not worry much about conversion. Conversion can be anything.  Page Views, Ads, selling your product or even affiliate product. Consider you have the best website in the industry and hitting digg front page every day, get thousands of users to your site daily and have the most unbelievable user interface any one can ever think of, but if that does not lead to good conversion what do you actually have is a piece of junk which you can admire for the rest of your life. Harsh but thats the fact.

Search Engine is not the only marketing option

Many people at times are stuck with the efforts of only search engine optimization and marketing and does not concentrate on other forms of marketing. Believe me there are many others forms of marketing like word of mouth, social media marketing on sites like facebook, twitter, viral marketing, Email Marketing and many more. I buy from amazon not because I found amazon on Google but its because of word of mouth.

Judge your SEO Expert

Many people tend to outsource SEO work to others thinking its kind of data entry job of doing link exchanges but actually its not true. Links are no doubt one of the most important aspects of SEO but then the person who is doing SEO should know the job and you should also judged him properly. I prefer that the an SEO expert has his own website ranked pretty well because if he is an SEO expert he should rank himself well than others. Does this not sound natural. So before you outsource your SEO work consider judging your SEO expert with what he has achieved for himself and not for other clients. Ask him what he would do for you to out rank your competitors.

SEO needs budget and patience

Many people do not success in SEO activity because they think SEO is something that comes naturally and does not need any effort on your part. This is completely a myth. No doubt vBulletin is one of the best forum CMS available but if you see there are very few forums who do not use vbSEO as an added plugin on. vbSEO according to me is costly not from what it provides but from the point of view that its just a plugin of vBulletin and is priced almost equal to the price of vBulletin. So remember when you go for your SEO efforts remember it needs budget as well as patience.

If you plan to try your hands on SEO yourself or even would like to learn it in an organized way I would suggest you get SEOBook for yourself. Its undoubtedly one of the best resource for learning SEO.

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Negative outcome of my test

• YSM interface is not as easy and user friendly as Adwords. Same is the case with reports.
• As I prefer using Google Analytics I could not see reporting based on Yahoo Organics and Yahoo / CPC like I can see for Adwords which is not expected in Google Analytics for obvious reasons and so Yahoo needs some Analytics Program as well.
• Yahoo need to add functionality where we can set traffic sources like traffic only from yahoo searches or from Yahoo Ad Network or both.
• You do not have the option to select the user device from where you can get traffic from. This was a concern for me because my MBA Forum is not very well taken on cell phone and so I should not be advertising there which I could not control
• I needed a different account for targeting different areas of the world so I did not wanted to get more campaigns into Yahoo because I would need someone just to manage my so many accounts.
• The traffic from Yahoo varies a lot. I had no changes in the campaign from the day 1 I setup and suddenly on days it just becomes half.
  
• The Cost per Click in YSM is not what I could control and I was asked to setup a minimum pre-determined value where as in Google Adwords we can have it 0.01 USD. Lower bid in Adwords means less impressions and so I think Yahoo should adapt to this.
• Yahoo Publisher is not open to worldwide but only to US publisher still very high percentage of invalid click rate. Above 5% and that's just too high. They need to start banning sooner than later.
  

Positive outcome of my test

• I tested on a website where my main revenue source is Google Adsense and as per Google Analytics my Adsense eCPM for Yahoo traffic ( Not able to separate Yahoo organic and Yahoo CPC ) was up by 34.41% of my site Average.
• The campaign in Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords was same when it comes to Ads and keyword but my ad got better Average position in Yahoo than in Google for obvious reasons that Yahoo has fewer advertisers which resulted in increased in CTR in Yahoo.
• No need of separate campaign for Bing, Yahoo Search Marketing also brings in traffic from Bing.

Final Thoughts

Though having good support, Yahoo Search Marketing have too many negatives than positive as of now and unless you have a good exposure on handling CPC advertising and is ready to loose I would not advise you to give YSM a try. I would be stopping the test as soon as my money evaporates and I hope they do not keep on charging me. If they do would have few more negatives to add.

This is based on my personal experience. If you have more to share do leave them in comments and I will try including them to the list.

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Thank you for your email. Due to recent credit cards security changes in India, you won't be able to add a new credit card to your AdWords account. However, you can still use the credit card already in your account.

What does this mean.

• Indian users would not be able to open New Adwords Post Pay accounts
• Old Adwords account would be able to use till credit card expires as they would not be able to add new one when it expires.

So what could be your alternative.

I think Yahoo Search Marketing is the best option nowadays apart from good support it also offers $25 for signup bonus

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1. I had Google Adwords Prepaid account which I thought was not a good option for me and thought of closing that account. I closed account on March 26th 2009 and on March 29 2009 I got the following message and I quote
   

   We have processed your requested refund. Please verify that the refund of INR x,xxx.xx appears on your bank/credit card statement within the next 3-4 weeks.

   I am still not able to get that amount and each time I try contacting Google Adwords support its of no use.

2. With my current Post Paid account I want to edit my credit card to the one which I have more credit limit but I am not able to edit the card details and I try contacting Adwords for last 15 days regularly but no one responds.
3. One more issue I see is each 3 to 4 days I am charged INR 0.01 which is practically no money and so my credit card decline that payment and guess what I could not get hold of Google people for past 4 months to get it resolved.

I am spending almost close to 100 USD per day and still if I do not get support I need what is the alternative. Yahoo Search Marketing. No matter what I see as outcome for Yahoo support it would not be as horrible as Google support.

I also tried couple of dummy question with Yahoo Search Marketing and got reply in 48 hours to the email sent and so for me I guess Google is now too large to reply now and Yahoo Search Marketing may take up on this opportunity. Try it yourself.

Sorry Google but it looks like you seem to be loosing on services to others now. First to Aweber for Feedburner and now to Yahoo SM for Adwords. Hope its not to bing for Google Search.

Soon I would be testing some campaigns and post the review here and so keep yourself tuned.

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Social Network Marketing

These days everyone thinks that to make money online its a 3 step process.

1. Get your website online.
2. Add Adsense to it.
3. Submit in sites like StumbleUpon / Facebook and make tons of cash.

This actually does not work for anybody because Social Networking Traffic is no doubt viral in nature but to start the viral is not easy and you cannot start it single handedly. You would need lots of genuine users to get the ball rolling.

Second is Facebook / StumbleUpon users would never be interested in Ads on your site because they are not on your site searching for something but they are their because they found something. Read Facebook Ads - A Review and Advertising with StumbleUpon to see how I experimented with Social Networking Ad Platform and was disappointed with its results.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is always a long term game where ranking and getting traffic from Google would always build over time and you should concentrate on getting links to your site and Google would recognize it  start sending users to your site.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is one of the most effective ways of marketing your online presence. The reason I say one of the most is because this is where you actually network socially or otherwise. If user has visited your site and signed up for further updates he is very much interested in what you have to say in future and listen to it. He is a targeted visitor who has the highest potential of becoming a customer.

My biggest mistake with CodeItWell.com was not starting mailing list from the word go but sooner I realized it, the better. Now I have my mailing list. The Mailing list is powered by Aweber.

I am going to start a guide on Email marketing in the coming posts. Email Marketing is something that most so called internet marketeers overlook yet this is the biggest factor separating the big guys from all the little guys.

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