Let me illustrate the message, personally.

A long time ago, I realized that as the front man of a business, I will probably want to show up in search results if someone is looking for me, so I registered my domain name and those of my family.

Apparently the author, Jack Higgins has written a number of books which include a spy character that shares my name.  In terms of Search Engine Optimization, this is bad news for me and great news for Jack, because he has lots of Internet users talking about his books.

So what happens when you have thousands of links pointing to the pages on the first page of Google results?  You differentiate.  I decided to finally build a site for SeanDillon.com but in real life and on social networks, I always use Sean P. Dillon to identify myself.

I always took for granted that SeanPDillon.com would be available and never registered it.  Turns out, someone else registered the .com years ago.  Now what?  I can wait to see if it expires-then register it, or concede that I lost it and deal with the problem with a slightly elevated level of complication.  Bottom line: hesitation is expensive!

The point is, if I was going to register one domain but use another name all over the Internet, I should have registered both names at the same time.

If you don’t already own your domain name, I recommend registering it and those of your children today.  Do it now.  If you don’t, I can promise you that someday you’ll need it and you won’t have it.
If you’re already there and own your domains, your next step is to register your name as a username on every major social network possible.  You’ll thank us later.

Let’s look at cost per lead.  Here’s how to calculate it:

Dollars Spent / Inquiries Resulting From Those Dollars = Cost Per Lead

This calculation should be performed on all lead generation activities until you determine what your lowest cost per lead is.  This is where you should be spending the majority of your marketing budget.
Once you identify your lowest cost per lead, it is wise to begin researching and testing other opportunities to drive this cost down still further.  There are two tracks one may take at this juncture:

1.  Research opportunities to save money.

2.  Research opportunities to increase the number of leads generated by the same investment amount.

If you’re a local business, I recommend looking in your own backyard first.  If you’re not yet dominating your local market, ask yourself why.  Local customers are cheap!  If you consider the massive search volume associated with local business inquiries and the lack of tactful business participants currently showing in these results, the opportunity becomes crystal clear.  A Google places profile is one step forward.  It’s cheap, effective and professional.  However, if you’re really looking to dominate your local market, consider getting in touch with us to discuss local directory marketing.  With a minimal investment, you could capture the local search volume for your business category in over 100 online directories at once.  Learn more about local directory marketing and call us to learn more and sign up!  212.845.9910

I’m writing this to the entrepreneurs of ten years ago.  If you started your company more than a decade ago, you no doubt had to adapt and change in order to survive this long.  However, have you given any thought lately to the new entrepreneurs entering your space today?  What rules are they playing by?  Do their rules differ from your own?

Any entrepreneur starting a new business today is planning their business around their website and how they will ensure that website is found by their potential clients.  In fact, new entrepreneurs will likely be so oblivious to your rules and how you started your company that they may consider your entire business model obsolete.

We all have seen countless examples of companies new to the game achieving staggering success purely from their Internet marketing efforts.  This doesn’t just happen.  It is not the result of trying SEO or running a simple pay-per-click ad campaign.  This is timing, positioning, targeting and full execution of a solid comprehensive marketing plan.

Imagine this:  What would your wisdom coupled with today’s successfully proven Internet marketing techniques look like if integrated into a customized plan for your business?  Staggeringly successful?

It’s never too late, so what are you waiting for?  The competitors will never cease and they’re only becoming more sophisticated.  You need an ally on your team who can help you navigate the often-confusing Internet marketing landscape.  We would love to help you determine your next steps to relevance on the Internet.  If you’re not receiving a steady stream of leads generated online, we can help you.

I started Cyentist to provide entrepreneurs and small businesses a real solution to their biggest marketing problems.  I knew nobody else could deliver what I can with as much passion and obsession for relevance than I could.  With so many competitors, Cyentist’s point of differentiation is the successful integration of social, search and design as well as my personal drive to stay ahead of the most relevant and timely Internet marketing information affecting our clients.

What about you?  Use the comment space below to share with me your reasons for starting your business and what you’re doing to stay relevant, despite new competition.  Why did you start your business?

This opens the floodgates to a world of implications, but I’ll share three of the most important ones here:

1.  Where are the other 44%?  Asleep at the wheel?  Did they not experience an increase too?  Or is this minority savvy enough to keep their costs per click and their overall keyword advertising low?  The fact of the matter is that two advertisers in the same business, with similar websites could be paying very different costs per click on the same keyword.

Company A manages their search marketing campaign in-house.  They login to their AdWords account once a week and take a look at where their budget is, how many keywords they’re bidding on and which keywords they’re spending the most on.  Company A feels this is adequate and assumes that their competition is doing the same.  Their cost per click stays the same, or increases based on their passive approach to search engine marketing.

Company B knows they need help, so they hire a consultant, a company or have their “IT guy” manage their campaign for them.  They don’t have time to login once a week, so they trust that this is being done for them.  The consultant, company or IT guy does login to the account and adjusts it regularly.  They even report to Company B about how many keywords they’re bidding on and keeps them updated on what their monthly spend is.  As long as this spend doesn’t go up, Company B is happy.  The spend stays the same, but the cost per click on their chosen keywords remains high.  The reason is there is no incentive for the cost per click to go down.

Company C hires a passionate, knowledgeable and very savvy company called, Cyentist.  After an in-depth and exhaustive discovery session, Cyentist is equipped with essential brand-level details and nuances that separate Company C from its competitors.  They also distilled the most important services, products and information that the company offers its market.

From here, Cyentist conducts thorough and complete keyword research, always using the latest professional industry tools.  They find out where the prime advertising opportunities exist and compile a database of keywords on which to bid on behalf of Company C.  Most of the money spent on clicks is saved at the initial bid.

Company C’s campaign is built and goes live.  Cyentist then monitors and measures key campaign ROI metrics daily and aggregates this data into a custom monthly report for Company C.  This monitoring allows for mid-course correction in the strategy and approach as new data is gained and learned from.

Not surprisingly, the investment Company C makes in Cyentist’s services has a dramatically higher ROI than the strategies of Companies A and B, combined.

2.  Your competition gets it.  Even if they are doing it wrong, people who compete against you in the marketplace are now showing up where you’re trying to attract new business.  Your clients and customers have more choices now than ever before.  The cost you pay for a click and for an overall keyword is going up because demand has gone up for the same keywords you bid on.  Essentially, you’re paying for your competitors’ advertisements to show up right next to yours.  You’re welcome.

The question is what are you going to do about it?  You can do the same thing, for what will inevitably deliver ever-diminishing results or you can begin to change your approach.  Those lone rangers out there who never hired a consultant and did it themselves may want to take advantage of a free consultation with Cyentist.

3.  You don’t have to pay more for your keywords; you can find new ones.  Think you’ve found them all?  It is time to start thinking about your own search habits and search nature.

Do you search using the words that come up in Google’s suggestion tools, or do you search using a different method?  Is your method exclusive to you, or could there be hundreds or thousands of others who search this way too?

Then again, maybe you haven’t found all of the popular keywords associated with your brand, products, services or information yet.  Maybe you need to change your bid, the schedule on which your ads appear in search results, maybe your ads need to be rewritten.  Maybe, maybe, maybe!  If you don’t know, you need to find out.  Winning consistently, even in the face of change will be what sets you apart from your competitors more than anything else.  If you feel you’re overspending for the results you’re getting with search marketing, call us today and let us show you how to create real results in a changing advertising landscape.

Marketing via social media and SEO can have long-term benefits even after the initial attempt to direct traffic is exhausted because those links remain intact.  If a link to your web site is found by a prime potential client on a social network years after that link is posted and you win the business, whatever you originally paid for that social media marketing has paid for itself.  Pay per click advertising is not sustainable unless it actively pays you more than you spend on it.

If you want to know how to pay per click for search engine ads, you must start at the beginning and create a solid plan.  First you should ask yourself a few important questions–and answer honestly:

1.  What product(s) or service(s) do I want to promote?

2.  How much of my advertising budget do I want to invest per month?

3.  What type of ROI would be acceptable to me as a result of these efforts?

4.  Do I want to handle this internally or should I outsource the management of my pay per click advertising?

5.  Who will manage this advertising program–and do they know what they’re doing?

6.  What search engine(s) do I use most?  Use what you believe in.

7.  How long do I want to initially run these ads?

8.  If it works well, by how much will I increase my investment – and when?

9.  If it doesn’t work well, by how much will I reduce my investment – and when?  Will I stop after a certain point if no results are achieved – when?

10.  What keywords will I use as a focus to begin building a full keyword list?

Once you have answered these questions, you will begin to experience clarity on the process and automatically have a plan that is more solid than 99% of all businesses that attempt pay per click advertising.  Your answers will indicate the search engine(s) you will create an advertising account on and how much you should spend.  If you choose not to outsource the management of your account, it is advisable at the very least to outsource the initial keyword research if you are not familiar with how to do this.  Choosing the right keywords is often the biggest difference between a successful PPC campaign and one that does not produce a strong ROI.

If you would like to learn more about how to pay per click in Manhattan–or anywhere else, connect with us and someone from our Manhattan office will contact you for a complimentary online marketing consultation.

We know that these elements work together to create online results for business.  Cyentist has always recognized that the relationship between social and search are invariably connected and should be regarded as an opportunity to provide highly relevant information in real time to individuals who are seeking the information in question.

Until Monday, there were not many obvious examples available of search and social as a unit.  Enter a big player: Google!  On their official blog, Google announced the inclusion of real time results in addition to their standard search result page.

Typically the search engine result page or SERP includes Sponsored Links or paid advertisements and organic results, organized by relevance to the search query.

Today, amongst the organic results, you will find a scrolling, real-time feed labeled, “Latest results.”

It is interesting to note the prominent position Google chose for these results.  It is clear they believe this is important, in fact, they have stated that Twitter’s real-time functionality is the future of search.

Welcome to the future.  Real time search has a long way to go, but it is encouraging to see such a rapid progression in this direction from a major player such as Google.

For those of you with questions about how this affects your company’s search engine rank and social media visibility, please get in touch.  We are following these trends very closely and have insights to offer based on the work we’ve done thus far.

It is no secret that in order to achieve high traffic volume for your web site, optimization is key! The process in itself is complex, but the idea is simple:

Major search engines like their users (searchers) to visit frequently. They know that the only reason people come back is because they find what they are looking for. It sounds pretty basic right?

The idea is: give people what they want and they will, in turn, return the next time they need something. Because of the ad revenue search engines generate, it makes sense that their information is well organized and relevant to the search phrase typed into the box. Hence, all search results are organized by relevance to the search term.

Google, of course is the king of search engines. They have this figured out and it makes sense to follow their advice for making your web site relevant. Many studies have proved the need for search engine optimization. People read search results from the top down and left-to-right. The vast majority of people read what is on the first page of results. What shows up on top gets clicked on first.  Check out this Google eye tracking study to learn more.

The goal is to show up on top. SEO is the answer. Give the search engines what they want and they will give you what you want (top ranking for your keywords).

The question is, do you know what the search engines want?

What is the cost of social media?

“What is the co$t of doing nothing?”

“Do you really want to take that risk?

This is a remarkable tool that allows you to conduct keyword-specific search queries that yield real-time tweets containing your search terms.

Searching tweets in real-time is a great opportunity to strike up a conversation about your industry.  Many people are looking for conversations to join that are somehow connected to their brands.  Twitter Search opens the door to just such a possibility. 

The other day, I joined a new gym so I thought I would preview what people were saying about “gym membership”.  As you can see below, there’s something for everyone.

If you’re not sure how to get started connecting with potential customers, try searching the same keywords you’re optimizing your website for using Twitter Search.

Have you had success with this approach?  Please leave a comment explaining what worked.