Here she is.

It’s an affiliate site for the new HTC Thunderbolt cell phone

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Getting a new site indexed

Thank you Rhea, Thank you.

You can read more about Rhea’s heroism from every link in this sentence.

@Rhea sure know’s how to linkbait – Just do a little thing like saving an entire industry

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Rhea Drysdale Saved SEO as we know it.

While I have worked on other peoples sites for as long as I can remember – I just have not had the time to make any of my own affiliate sites. Thanks to a blog post that inspired me I have created a site to sell Benchmade Griptilian knives.

What I hope to do with this site is to do a full on case study – From conception to $$ and outline each step along the way. I will show everyone my results and hopefully write about how it all happened and the steps I have taken to accomplish my goals.

Making money on the web is pretty easy if you know what you are doing – And we at 10kThings want to help teach all of you how to do it.

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Affiliate marketing

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Bye bye those big upfront buys

We want everyone who reads this blog post or watches the video to go out and tell everyone about it by getting on your social profiles and spreading the word. We want to give this guy $100… All he has to do is friend me, Dave Winget – on facebook to verify that he read this blog post/saw the video about him.

Well, what are you waiting for guys? Do you want to help him out or not? I’m sure he’ll thank you for it

Be sure to tell all your friends about checking out the video at http://www.youtube.com/10kthings

If you do submit this video or post to any social media sites be sure to leave a link in the comments so other people can continue it.

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Testing Social Media’s Power

Test, test and then test some more- I can not stress this enough, take a small sample of campaigns and ad groups that work on the big three and try them out on the 2^nd tier network. Run them for a week, if you get bad traffic (clicks with only one page view) yank the campaign. If you measure online success through a conversion metric (online sales, phone call, or other desired behavior) track your cost per conversion (amount spent divided by the number of conversion) and will determine the worth of the traffic. There are a lot of second tier engines out there, don’t be afraid to pull the entire PPC spend from that engine if you are not getting the desired results.

Develop relationships with your account reps- Just how we manage relationships with our clients we do the same with all of our search engine account reps. I have found that there is a lot more negotiation that can take place in regards to refunds, billing and account maintenance. Almost all second tier search engines will accept Adwords Editor .csv files for bulk upload. Their willingness to create your campaigns for you is based on the relationship and how much you spend with them! Work with the people you like, don’t work with pushy reps that align their sales strategies with used car salesmen.

Spend as little time as possible working on 2^nd Tier Campaigns- The second tier will almost never deliver the quality of traffic that the big three does, so don’t expect to find a second Google. Second tier engines should only be used to supplement your first tier traffic, quite honestly a lot of time on the second tier is a waste. Spend the majority of your time working with the first tier engines, it will always payoff more.

The second tier search engines often go ignored, however, to maximize your performance they can be a great asset in your PPC tool box.

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Second Tier Search Engines Are Your Friend

Companies especially can benefit from blogging. They can write about new upcoming products, company life, fun things that happened at the company, new hires, case studies… the list goes on and on. Everything under the sun can be part of a company blog. The only hard part about it is getting your employees ramped up and excited about the company blog.

Something that is asked of me over and over is “Who’s going to blog? How do we get them to blog? Do we have to hire someone special?” No you don’t have to hire anyone special to blog… sure you could and there are a lot of great jobs out there for bloggers and a lot of great writers looking for them.

The people who will write blog posts for you, however, you already pay – they are the ones that are excited (if you’re a good manager) about your company and what is going on.

How to get them excited to blog? My favorite way to do this is to allow time for them to write blog posts and then reward your employees for blogging and/or make it competitive. Contests like “whoever brings the most page-views or comments in a month gets X” where X=something good and not something like a 10$ Starbucks gift card… (sweet 2 cups of coffee for 30 blog posts woooo) No matter what you reward them with it will be cheaper than hiring a blogger and if the reward is good enough it will keep them excited about blogging.

You can moderate blog posts as you see fit. If you trust your employees not to write trade secrets I suggest letting them run with it. Give them each their own login names so when they do post it says right at the top who wrote what (this will also start to rank for their names – another reason they want to keep their writing at a high standard.)

Blogging IS the best way to open up to your customers and the first step into becoming involved with social media. The benefits of being open with the people who buy your products/use your service are many. You put a human face on your company while at the same time getting feedback from your target market. With blogging there is really nothing to lose and only traffic and new ideas from consumers to gain.

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Why haven’t you started blogging?

Good design is, well, good design. This means that a site is easy to navigate, with relevant and congruent content that makes users view multiple pages, spend more time on the site, and hopefully produce the desired out come (a conversion metric such as – a purchase, phone call, leaving a comment, etc) while differentiating its self from the competition, if necessary.

Well executed search engine optimization will ensure proper messaging when being indexed by search engines. This means that the messaging of the site (a product of good design) will match how the site is read by the search engines and then ranked in order by keywords. Once design and SEO is in place only then should proper Pay Per Click advertising tactics should be used.

When all three elements come together this is what a search experience should look like:

1. An internet user types in a the keyword that is targeted by both PPC and SEO
2. The ranking of the site appears in both the organic and paid search listings of the search results page, thus increasing the chance of a click through.
3. With good design, the user finds what they are looking for and a conversion metric is triggered
4. Search engines reward the PPC advertiser because the high relevancy with lower cost per click and higher ranking

PPC rocks but it isn’t the end-all be-all that so many people incorrectly believe it to be. SEO, design AND PPC are all required for the most effective online branding strategy.

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PPC Rocks! Well Kinda…

I then went on to explain that while we don’t have access to the code that makes the crawlers work – we still know how to work with and around the system.  We know these things through testing and thanks to the free exchange of theories and experiment results from people across the world – we know what works and what doesn’t.

Being able to have an open dialog and discuss SEO with thousands of other people who have a very vested interest in SEO and search marketing is an incredible thing.  With this open discussion and rapid advancement of SEO it has caused something, perhaps, unexpected.

As SEO’s get better at what they do, by being able to communicate in such an advanced way, so too does the mighty Google get better at thwarting their efforts.  Each advances the other as quickly as they advance themselves.

It is social media that has allowed SEO professionals to take their game to the next level and keep ahead of the constantly changing Google landscape.  Without being able to go to sites like Sphinn and find the latest news, developments and ideas about search – SEO would be a much more difficult thing.  Only those within the most trusted of networks would know what worked and what didn’t and because of this Google would likely not be where it is today.

Communication is key but it is also a double-edged sword.  Speaking freely with each other is what makes us better at getting our sites ranked and it is that same free speaking that lets Google know where it needs to tighten its defenses… and so the cycle continues.

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SEO and Google – Arms Race

The following are the basic terms that are used every day in the PPC world:

Impression- When an ad displays on a search engine results page, but the advertiser does not click on the ad that would link off the results page.

Clicks- Well, a click is a click. Please don’t use the term, “hit” that is so 1998

Click Through Rate- The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions will result in the Click Through Rate also know as the CTR

Cost Per Click- The amount search engines charge for a click off the results page and onto the Landing Page. Cost per click is set at the Keyword level and is often referred to as CPC.

Keyword- What is typed into the search query and what is search marketers bid on in PPC buying interface such as Google’s Adwords

Quality Score- A system used by Google to help determine the price of keywords. Google will reward advertisers with lower a CPC and higher position on a results page when Keywords have high a CTR and strong relevancy to the search query.

Landing Page- Where advertisers decide to send traffic when a user clicks on an ad. The landing page does not have to be the home page.

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Basic Pay Per Click Terminology