SMX West 2011 Search Conference Rocked

It’s very apparent based on my wonderful experience at SMX West 2011 today that the search marketing industry is absolutely on fire. There is no time like the present, the SEM career path is the best career path in my opinion. Today, I’m looking forward to sharing with you some of my favorite SMX West 2011 conference highlights!

SMX West Had Some Great Advanced Content

PPC Ian, Marc Poirier, and the Amazing Acquisio Team

SMX West has historically been more of an introductory conference, one geared towards those newer to digital advertising. I consistently attend each year because it’s in San Jose, just a short half hour drive from my job. By contrast, SMX Advanced has been more advanced (as the name implies).

This year, however, I was pleasantly surprised. SMX West 2011 totally delivered and included great content both for beginners and seasoned industry veterans like myself. I was definitely at the edge of my seat, taking diligent notes! In terms of advanced content, it was especially exciting hearing all about Microsoft’s adCenter quality score algorithm directly from Microsoft product managers. Moreover, I was totally floored when a panelist on the Google AdWords Extensions seminar predicted that Google will be launching sitelinks on an adgroup level (they’re currently set on a campaign level). In my opinion, this would be a tremendous opportunity to fine tune ad copy to the next level, now that sitelinks are showing up on many generic queries.

PPC Ian and My Great Friends From Kenshoo

A few other exciting topics from SMX:

I learned all about Google product feeds. I used to be in retail back in 2004-2006 when I managed SEM at comparison shopping giant NexTag. Since then, however, I’ve been in services-oriented verticals. A lot has changed over the years and it was really great to pick up some product feed insights.
Efficient Frontier presented some truly amazing industry trends. Basically, they compiled data across all their clients and reported it on an aggregate level. An incredibly important part of our jobs as SEM professionals is answering questions about macro industry trends. Efficient Frontier helped me out quite a bit with their data points.

SMX Is Great For Networking

PPC Ian and My Great Friends From Marin Software

What’s my favorite part of search conferences? It really comes down to networking. Whether it’s catching up with old friends or making new friends, conferences like SMX West are ideal for networking. When it comes to your long term career within search engine marketing, a strong network is everything. It’s because of my strong network that I’ve made it this far in the world of SEM and I continue to invest in relationships each and every day.

As you can see throughout this post, I had the great opportunity to catch up with my close friends from Acquisio, Kenshoo, and Marin Software. If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you’ll know that I’m totally obsessed with SEM automation. Acquisio, Kenshoo, and Marin Software are three of the absolute top leaders when it comes to search marketing software, and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to establish close relationships with all of them. It was really great catching up with my friends!

I had a real blast chatting with Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO of Acquisio. I had the opportunity to chat with Marc at length about my personal career trajectory and truly enjoyed it! Also, I scored two of those amazing Acquisio t-shirts (one for myself and one for my wife). I will be highlighting them in a future post. Side note: Make sure to check out my exclusive interview with Marc Poirier.

As you can see in the image on the right, Marin Software really went all out this year. They had, in my opinion, the most impressive booth at SMX West. It was truly great catching up with Matt Lawson, VP of Marketing at Marin Software. Side note: Make sure to check out my exclusive interview with Matt Lawson. Making their booth even more enticing, they had an Xbox giveaway!

Last, I had an amazing experience chatting with Geoff Shenk, Managing Director of Kenshoo North America. Kenshoo has a new product called Watchdog that’s truly amazing and I’ll be blogging about it soon! While I don’t have a interview directly with Geoff here on PPC Ian, I recently interviewed Chad Baldwin – Kenshoo’s VP of Sales.

This Year, I Just Went To The First Day

SMX West 2011

This year, I decided to just attend day one of SMX West. Why? I’m in a leadership position and it’s my responsibility to balance conferences with my day-to-day responsibilities. As such, I decided to share the excitement and am having my team cover for me the rest of this conference. This will be a tremendous experience for my team, and I’m truly excited that I got an opportunity to enjoy day one of SMX West while still leaving myself time to get my important projects done! Did you attend SMX West this year? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com

10 Ways To Sabotage Your SEM Career

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 6 8

Sometimes it’s not about what you do. It’s about what you avoid doing! It’s all about being careful and consciously contemplating your every move. This especially rings true in the high stakes game of corporate search engine marketing. Today I’m going to present 10 quick, effective, and easy ways to sabotage your entire SEM career. Now, just to be super clear, you will want to avoid these bad ideas at all costs and in most cases employ the complete opposite strategy.

Bad Idea 1: Ask For a Raise Over and Over (and Over)

Here’s the great thing about careers in search engine marketing: You typically have free reign over your salary. The harder you work and the more results you deliver, the quicker you will get promoted (and earn a raise and/or bonus). It’s that easy. SEM is super measurable. It’s easy to instantly prove how much value you have added (in terms of raw dollar margin).

That said, I must caveat this in that promotions, raises, and bonuses typically happen within your company’s HR schedule. Most companies have a very set, strict schedule when employees will be evaluated. You want to be conscious about this and avoid asking for promotions off-schedule. Also, you want to avoid being the employee that constantly asks for a raise. If you’ve asked a few times and have not been able to secure the promotion (and/or raise) you’re looking for, it’s unlikely you’ll receive it by asking over, and over, and over. Rather, that’s a sure fire way to annoy your employer. As an alternative strategy, I recommend working harder and then revisiting six months later once you have some more results under your belt, even if you disagree with your employer’s short term decision.

Bad Idea 2: Ignore The Numbers on Nights and Weekends

I like to think of pay per click search engine marketing as a 24/7 Wall Street trading floor. SEM campaigns never sleep. Even worse, campaigns tend to tank on nights, weekends, and holidays (Murphy’s Law). Search marketing is a high powered career that carriers great responsibility with it. Don’t ignore the stats! Your worst fears will come true and you’ll look very bad if your campaigns tank while you’re not watching. As an alternative strategy, try to find a backup (another team member) to watch your campaigns if you absolutely must take some time off.

Bad Idea 3: Do Everything Manually

Time is money. If you go about doing everything manually, you won’t get one third of the tasks completed that you should. Your operations will grind to a halt and your competitors will pass you by. It’s absolutely imperative to investigate PPC automation platforms such as Marin Software and Acquisio. Confused about where to start? I highly recommend checking out my SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide.

Bad Idea 4: Invest Minimal Time In Your LinkedIn Profile

Ever since my first online marketing job, every single job has come passively via LinkedIn. I cannot say enough about the power of LinkedIn when it comes to growing your career in online marketing. When’s the best time to look for a new job, one with a better title, higher pay, and at a more promising company? Of course, when you already have one! That’s the power of entertaining passive job opportunities on LinkedIn. Want to learn more? Check out my post about growing your SEM career with LinkedIn.

Bad Idea 5: Stay Away From Affiliate Marketing

Jobs in search engine marketing are tough. We’re in a high powered career path with a ton of responsibility. When you come home, you just want to kick back, watch Jersey Shore, and then go to sleep. I’m here to say, however, that this is a mistake. Want to keep your edge? You need to learn new skills within other areas of online marketing. What’s the best way to do this? Invest at least a small percentage of your spare time learning all about affiliate marketing.

Want to learn more? Check out my post about how pay per click jobs are changing and then my review of EWA Private Network. Then, get out there and sign up for a great affiliate network, such as EWA.

Bad Idea 6: Avoid Challenging Yourself

Most people in the pay per click search engine marketing field have aggressive, “Type A” personalities. They want to get promoted quickly and grow within the industry. If you’re more of a steady player, this can become a real challenge because the world will pass you by. If you’re looking for a steady career path, SEM may not be your thing. Want to get ahead? Get out there and challenge yourself today! There are many ways to do this such as public speaking, learning new technologies, or simply diving head first into the most difficult analysis ever!

Bad Idea 7: Ignore The Latest Trends and News

I’m a huge fan of SEM careers because they provide a direct avenue to partner closely with your executive team. When you’re personally responsible for millions upon millions of dollars in marketing spend, you can bet your senior team is going to be involved. Now, what types of questions are you going to get from your senior executive team? Often, they’ll ask about the latest news and trends (and what you’re doing to react). If you don’t know this stuff, you’re not going to instill much confidence in your executive team. And, if your executive team doesn’t have much confidence in you, you’re well on your way to sabotaging your own SEM career!

Bad Idea 8: Avoid Working Long Hours

I’ve said it over and over: SEM is a high powered career path. You’re going to grow quickly and the sky is truly the limit. With the power comes responsibility. You need to be ready to work long hours and truly “own” the campaigns you’re managing. Now, I think there’s also a question of perception here. If you’re super efficient like myself and leverage SEM automation to the max (see idea 3 above), it’s totally possible to work 8-9 hour days if you’re quick to respond to emails after hours and you also keep close track of the numbers at all times (see idea 2 above).

Let’s look at this from another perspective. I recommend staying away from the SEM career unless you truly love this stuff. Now, if you truly love this stuff it will be really easy to work those long hours!

Bad Idea 9: Don’t Put Much Thought Into Picking Your Employer

I’ve been extremely careful about picking my employers, and made it big in online marketing because of stock options in really powerful companies such as NexTag, QuinStreet, and Inflection. This was all intentional – I exercised great precision in picking my employers and viewed them as investments. If you put a lot of thought into choosing the right employer you could be sitting on a gold mine of stock options!

Bad Idea 10: Be a Poor Team Player

To close out, I want to highlight the importance of being a team player. Search engine marketing is a team sport. Search engine marketing often presents the unique opportunity to manage teams at a very early age within your overall career. Be a team player and it will truly take you places. If you’re not a team player, I recommend avoiding this career. Want to learn more? I recommend checking out my online marketing people management tips.

Image of Banana Peel © iStockPhoto – LuisPortugal

Buy Keyword Winner & I’ll Review Your Blog

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 2 8

I just wrote my Keyword Winner Review yesterday and couldn’t be more excited about the launch of this amazing keyword research plugin. My personal friend and SEO guru Dan Lew poured everything he’s got into version 2.0 of Keyword Winner and it shows. Here’s the deal: I can’t thank all of you enough, my loyal readers. As a thank you for everything, I want to offer PPC Ian readers a special deal.

Keyword Winner

If you purchase Keyword Winner 2.0 through my affiliate link, I will review your blog (or website) for free. It’s that simple. You will be reviewed right here on PPC Ian with exposure of my thousands upon thousands of monthly visitors. I really enjoy these review posts because the sites I end up reviewing are always super interesting and relevant to PPC Ian readers!

Here’s the crazy part! My friend, Daniel Lew, stands behind his SEO WordPress plugin so much that he’s offering a 60 day money back guarantee. Let’s say you purchase Keyword Winner via my affiliate link, but then return the plugin. I will still review you, no questions asked! I’m that confident in Keyword Winner as the must-have SEO plugin of 2011!

Specifics Behind My Keyword Winner Offer

You may remember a while back, I ran a blog comment contest. The winners of the contest got their blogs reviewed here on PPC Ian for free. Check out my review of these awesome online marketing blogs. This time, I’m going to do the exact same thing. I’ll review everyone in the same post, with each blog (or website) getting its own section. That said, the reviews are going to be a bit shorter (probably one or two paragraphs each), depending on how many people take me up on this offer.

My offer this time will span the entire month of March! That’s right, you have between now and March 31st to purchase Keyword Winner. After this month is over, I will write the review post within the first week of April.

Let’s say you want to purchase Keyword Winner via my affiliate link but don’t want your blog reviewed. No worries at all, this is an optional bonus! Last, I will only be reviewing “family friendly” websites.

I want to sincerely thank you for following my blog and wish you all the best! Purchased Keyword Winner via my affiliate link and want your blog reviewed here on PPC Ian? Just shoot me an email with your blog’s URL and also your ClickBank order/receipt number.

Images in this post © KeywordWinner.com

Dan Lew’s Keyword Winner 2.0 Rocks!

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 1 20

Today’s an exciting day because Dan Lew’s Keyword Winner version 2.0 is officially available for purchase. I’m here to say that Keyword Winner is the #1 must have SEO WordPress plugin of 2011. I’ve been leveraging Keyword Winner 2.0 for about a week now (Dan Lew has graciously allowed me to be a pre-launch beta tester) and must say that I can’t live without this tool. Today, I’m going to review Keyword Winner, from the standpoint of someone that lives keywords each and every day (I’m a pay per click professional and buy keywords on search engines for a living).

Optimize Title Tags Instantly With Keyword Winner

Keyword Winner

If you’ve been in online marketing for a while, you probably know the extreme importance of keyword rich titles. When it comes to ranking blog posts in search engines, it’s all about targeting the right “winning” keywords in your page title (both the meta title and also the actual post title on your blog).

Back several years ago, you could just insert high volume keywords in your title and capture tons of traffic. However, these days there already exist hundreds (if not thousands) of pages that already have the high volume keywords. So, what’s the best strategy? Really, it comes down to finding the highest volume search terms that are relevant to your post, yet have the least amount of competition. When you leverage these keywords in your title, you will rank rapidly in search engines (usually within a matter of hours) and will receive great traffic. While this process may take hours if done manually, Keyword Winner automates it, for a one-time fee of only $47!

How Keyword Winner 2.0 Works

So, how does Keyword Winner work? It’s quite slick. After installation (which takes only 5 minutes), your WordPress post dashboard is transformed with new functionality. After you type in a few keywords in the title area and click “Get Keyword Winner Suggestions”, the plugin will return back possible keywords to leverage in your blog title. It looks at many factors including the:

Number of inbound links to rank on the suggested keyword (data gathered from Yahoo)
Overall popularity of the suggested phrase (returned by Google Insights)
Number of competing pages for the suggested phrase (returned by Google)
Monthly search volume trends (returned by Google)

Then, it ranks the suggested phrases with red, yellow, and green color codes. Green phrases are the best because they’re highly searched terms with little competition (meaning, you will rank right away and get some serious traffic). Red phrases are the worst because the competition is too high to easily rank. After you see all of the suggestions, it’s easy to pick the best one and then turn it into the perfect title for your post.

Keyword Winner 2.0 also offers many other great features. Two of my favorite are a little button that allows you to add the suggested keywords as tags, and also the fact that it color codes the posts on my the posts summary page so I instantly know which ones are keyword optimized and which ones are not.

Keyword Winner 2.0 Is Cheap

Now, theoretically I could do everything I just explained to you manually. But, that would involve opening multiple windows and spending hours upon hours contemplating post titles each time I want to blog. However, at only $47, Keyword Winner 2.0 saves hours of time and puts everything right there in my WordPress post dashboard. That’s why Keyword Winner 2.0 is my #1 rated SEO plugin for 2011.

Whether you’re in the corporate world of search engine marketing and manage blogs for your company (if you’re a direct advertiser) or manage blogs for clients (if you’re an agency), or if you’re an affiliate marketer/blogger, you cannot afford to miss out on this essential plugin. Your time is just too valuable.

Dan Lew Is a Great Guy

So, who’s behind this awesome WordPress SEO plugin? Dan Lew – a professional blogger, affiliate marketer, SEO champion, and personal friend. I’m here to say that Dan is a great guy and I’ve really enjoyed collaborating with him on SEO and paid search over the past year. He’s a true expert in our industry and his personal and professional reputation is at stake with this epic product release. That’s exactly why Dan is pleased to offer a 60 day money back guarantee! Like I said, there’s no good reason not to have this plugin if you’re trying to drive SEO results with your blog.

My Special Tip For Using Keyword Winner

To close out today, I want to offer my own special tip for leveraging Keyword Winner to the max. I recommend spending a good five minutes typing in different keyword phrases, scouring the Keyword Winner suggestions, and then picking your favorite phrase (and crafting a complete title around it). However, during all this time, your WordPress permalink will get set to the first keyword you type into the title field, even if it’s not the final post title (which it rarely will be). My suggestion is to update your permalink to match your final post title after you’ve done all your research and tweaking. Just as important as the post title itself, you will rank much better if your permalink is completely optimized to match the title (with dashes between the words).

Ready to start “winning” the game of SEO? Take it from someone that buys keywords for a living: There is nothing more important in online marketing than picking the best, most relevant keywords to complement the message you are trying to get across to your readers.

Images in this post © KeywordWinner.com

Link Building By Being Social

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 28 8

PPC Ian has been all over the press lately. In fact, I’ve been featured on three high profile blogs within the last week. I’ll get into the specific press mentions next, but first want to highlight my link building strategy. I’m a huge fan of this particular link building strategy because it’s a passive one. And, at the end of the day, there’s a real premium on my time (and I’m sure yours as well) so anything that can happen passively for me is truly rewarding.

My Passive Link Building Strategy

Basically, I’ve gone to all of the big online marketing blogs and have become personal friends with the bloggers. I’ve done this by sending direct emails to these high profile bloggers and also via my blog commentating strategy. As a result of being social, I have become part of the community. Because I’m part of the community and all these online marketing bloggers know me on a personal level, they’re happy to link back to me when I post something particularly noteworthy.

This is the real reason that Google values inbound links. They’re a measure of what others think of you and your blog. How can you get others to like you and your blog? Get out there, be social, and make friends! Want to learn more about this strategy? I recommend checking out my recent blog post about PR Driving Great SEO Results.

This Week’s Links

So, where did I get featured this week? It all started off with ZK’s Web Traffic ROI. I’m a huge fan of ZK and his blog. If you’re big on blog commentating like myself, there’s no doubt that you’ve run into ZK. He’s an absolute expert online marketer and one of the top commentators on the Internet. ZK discovered my recent series of six free videos from my Stanford GSB presentation and wrote a post all about my videos. (As a side note, you can view my free videos in the following posts: videos 1 and 2, videos 3 and 4, videos 5 and 6).

Now, just being featured on ZK’s Web Traffic ROI was a huge win on its own. However, my success did not stop there. Because I’m well connected on Facebook and posted a link to ZK’s post, my friend Owen Frager from The Frager Factor picked up and recapped ZK’s post on his own blog. This is a true honor, Owen is a true heavy hitter when it comes to online marketing and blogging. After all, his blog is one of the largest on the Internet.

My third success happened today! My friend Eric from My 4 Hour Workweek wrote a truly epic blog post about 142+ ways to make money online. I highly recommend checking out this blog post, it’s going to be one of the best of 2011 in my opinion. I have become friends with Eric and comment regularly on his blog, and Eric was kind enough to mention me as one of his favorite online marketing blogs in this truly epic blog post. Now, this gets even sweeter because Eric’s blog post went truly viral and made the first page of Delicious today. Cool stuff! An interesting fact: Eric won the blog commenting contest I ran on PPC Ian a while back and I reviewed his blog since he was one of the winners!

Images in this post © WebTrafficROI.com, FragerFactor.blogspot.com, and My4HrWorkweek.com

New Look & Feel For Google Sitelinks

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 27 10

I just searched for my brand name (PPC Ian) on Google and noticed that my organic sitelinks have a brand new look and feel! Check out the screenshot at the end of this post. I’m not sure if this is a beta test or a permanent change, but one thing’s for sure: the new sitelinks rock!

Google Organic Sitelinks: New Versus Old

You may remember from my post Happy Birthday To PPC Ian that I just started seeing sitelinks for PPC Ian around October, 2010. As you can see in the image in that post, the sitelinks were just links with no surrounding text. Moreover, I just had four of them.

More Brand Name Traffic

The new sitelinks that I just noticed today are much more pronounced. There are eight links in total and there is descriptive text below each of the links. My organic listing occupies a lot more space in general. Whenever someone types in my brand name, I’m going to capture a lot more traffic because this enhanced listing with the new style sitelinks really pops. Even better, many of my organic sites that never had sitelinks before now do. With this change, I believe Google is also displaying sitelinks for more sites.

Between the new AdSense formats, the new AdWords mega titles, and these new organic sitelinks, Google is making serious progress through testing. Awesome work, Google!

Screenshot of Google Search Results © Google

Pay Per Click Jobs Are Changing

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 19 12

I’ve been in the corporate world of pay per click search engine marketing since 2004. Back in those days, things were quite different. There was no SEM automation, no AdWords editor, and SEM overall was quite manual. In fact, back in those days it took new search marketing employees at least a month or so to start adding serious value to their employer. These days, however, things have advanced so much. New employees are adding value almost instantly and the leverage in our industry has advanced tremendously. As a result, PPC jobs are changing.

They’re changing in two main ways. First and foremost, advanced analytics, bidding, and testing are becoming mandatory. Second, it’s absolutely imperative these days to go beyond PPC and add value in other areas such as SEO, social media, and email marketing. Today, I’m going to share some quick win tips to embrace these exciting changes.

Tip 1: It’s All About SEM Automation

Change Ahead

I’ve talked about this point quite a bit here on PPC Ian so I’m going to keep my first tip relatively short. It’s important these days to bid more effectively than ever, take your analytics to the next level, and manage your campaigns with precision. Why? Back in 2004, the lack of competition created a scenario of somewhat easy money. These days, you not only have to fight to win the PPC game, but you need to prove to yourself, your team, and your company that you’re doing everything possible to optimize your PPC program to the highest possible degree.

How do you accomplish this? Easy! It’s all about getting the right systems and technologies in place. Want to learn about making the best possible purchase decisions for your SEM platforms? Check out my SEM automation buyer’s guide whitepaper. It’s automation like this that will free up your time to diversify your skillset into other areas such as SEO, social media, and email marketing.

Tip 2: Become An Affiliate Marketer, Today!

I wrote about this topic when I first launched PPC Ian with a post titled moonlighting will accelerate your SEM career. I’m more confident in this philosophy than ever. To be successful in affiliate marketing, you must be an incredibly savvy marketer. You must challenge your intelligence, test wild new strategies, and push the boundaries on online marketing. Simply put, affiliate marketing is the education of a lifetime. The education I have gained from my blogging and portfolio of over 80 SEO websites has been truly invaluable. I’ve been able to take this education back to the corporate environment and perfect PPC operations while taking on major responsibilities within other areas of online marketing.

So, how can you get started? I took the affiliate plunge back in 2007. I basically started from scratch and learned as I went. In this day and age, I’m a huge believer in the affiliate network route. A good affiliate network can truly jump start your affiliate marketing career. You want to make sure to have the best offers, the best payouts, and of course expert advice and mentorship. That’s precisely where industry leading affiliate networks such as EWA Private Network and Blam Ads step in! So, what are you waiting for? Go sign up today!

Tip 3: Read Everything You Can Get Your Hands On

To close out today, I want to underscore the amazing wealth of information out there. If you want to get ahead in the corporate world of SEM, it’s imperative to read all of cutting edge material about PPC, SEO, Facebook, social media, domaining, email marketing, display advertising, and more. These days all areas of online marketing are intersecting and you must become an expert in everything.

One thing that’s really important, in my opinion, is to purchase eBooks and online courses that will take your education to the next level. Sometimes, the best information costs a little money (not much, but some). The leverage on your investment, however, is so much that it’s a no-brainer. Two must-haves include Jonathan Volk’s Facebook Ads Guide and Chris Guthrie’s Niche Profit Course.

PPC Jobs Are Great For Travel

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 14 7

I’m the largest proponent of the pay per click search engine marketing career path around. This amazing corporate career can really take you places! As you may know, I wrote an entire eBook about PPC career tips (I highly recommend reading it). Moreover, I wrote about three different PPC career paths (agencies, startups, large direct advertisers) and also PPC versus SEO careers. Today, I wanted to do a really quick career-oriented post because I just got back from an amazing trip to Boston, all because of my great PPC job.

A Great Leadership Opportunity, Travel For Free

Airplane

Last week, I had a truly great time at my company’s office just outside of Boston. It was a great opportunity to travel and see new things, get a bit outside of my day-to-day routine, and function as a leader in my organization. I really love my PPC job at a large direct advertiser because I get the opportunity to travel a few times a year, the perfect frequency for me. Just within the last year, I traveled to Seattle, Las Vegas, and now Boston, all free of charge thanks to my amazing job (my company pays all expenses).

Different Levels of Travel for Different Paid Search Jobs

Are you someone that likes to travel a lot? How about not much at all? I have advice for you! If you can’t get enough travel, the SEM agency career path will be perfect for you. As you get more and more senior within an agency role, you will have many opportunities to travel extensively and visit your clients face-to-face, all paid for by your company. If you like traveling a few times each year, but not as much as someone in the agency role, the large direct advertiser career path will be perfect for you. If you can’t stand traveling and would prefer to stay in one location, the startup route might be more up your alley. When you’re at a startup, there’s less need to travel, especially if you’re in an SEM role.

Now, let’s contrast this with the affiliate marketing career path. If you’re a super affiliate and are wildly successful, you can travel all you want (but it will be on your own bankroll). However, let’s say you’re just starting out don’t have a ton of funds. Then, you’ll definitely have less of an opportunity to travel. This is just one more reason I’m a huge proponent of the corporate online marketing career path.

Three Ways To Drive More Facebook Fans

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 10 18

There’s no doubt about it: Facebook has taken the Internet by storm and your Facebook Fan Page is very important to your business. Why? Just like YouTube (check out my recent post about YouTube and SEO), your Facebook Fan Page will drive SEO value to your site via a real dofollow link. More importantly, however, SEO is now being driven by social media citations (after the Google caffeine release). Your Facebook Fan Page will drive numerous citations and social buzz to your website, especially after you accumulate a lot of fans. So, how exactly do you get a lot of fans? I’ve been working very hard on my PPC Ian Facebook Fan Page and now have nearly 750 fans! Today I’m going to share three tips on gaining Facebook Fan Page fans fast!

Tip 1: Run a Paid Facebook “Like” Campaign

This just wouldn’t be PPC Ian if I didn’t start off with a tip that relies on paid traffic. There are two types of paid campaigns on Facebook: Campaigns that drive users to your website and campaigns that drive users to your Facebook Fan Page. The second type of campaign makes the most sense if you’re trying to drive likes because the ad itself will contain a like button in it and moreover the user will have the option to click like again once they land on your Facebook Fan Page. From my personal experience, you gain high quality followers (who are likely to read your updates and interact with your page) via this method for around $2 per follower (in the online marketing vertical at least).

Want to learn more about Facebook Ads? I highly recommend buying Jonathan Volk’s Facebook Ads Guide. This is where I really learned my foundation. Moreover, I’m looking forward to writing a future post with some specific Facebook like campaign tips.

Tip 2: Gain Facebook Fans With Fiverr

Have you heard of Fiverr? It’s basically a site where you can get almost anything done for only $5. One thing that a lot of Fiverr sellers can help you with is gaining more Facebook fans. It’s quite simple: You pay them $5 and they will recommend your Facebook Fan Page to all their friends. Some Fiverr sellers have as many as 13,000 friends that they’ll recommend your page to. It really comes down here to the power of personal endorsement. When someone recommends you to their friends, you can often get tremendous results.

Another benefit of Fiverr is the price. When only $5 is on the line, you only need 2.5 followers to break even with the results of a typical paid like campaign. That said, I’ll be honest here and would like to point two things out. First, results will vary by seller. Some sellers will deliver very little to no value. Others will totally hit the ball out of the park. It’s up to you to experiment with multiple sellers. Second, please keep in mind that followers you get via this method are less likely be be high quality followers that will interact with your page. But, you never know! I personally use this strategy to complement the paid strategy (but definitely not as a replacement).

Tip 3: Optimize The Conversion Rate of Your Facebook Fan Page

As my final tip today, I highly recommend spending a few hours and building a custom banner for your Facebook Fan Page. This is super easy. The maximum size of your profile image is 200×600. Leverage all that space and build an image that includes your logo, a picture of yourself, information about your social media profiles, and even some info that entices the user to like your page. If you’re going to so much effort to dive traffic to your Fan Page (especially via a paid campaign), it’s essential to have a professional looking page with a high like conversion rate. If you check out my personal Facebook Fan Page, you’ll see my 200×600 banner.

As a bonus tip: You can even create a landing page on your Facebook Fan Page that further entices users to click the like button. I haven’t done this just yet because I really like my wall being the landing page. So, there you have it! Now, it’s time to go out there and get 1,000 or more fans!

YouTube Channels Offer Great SEO Value

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 6 11

When it comes to optimizing your website’s organic ranking, quality dofollow inbound links are of paramount importance. It makes perfect sense: Each inbound link counts as a “vote” for your site in the eyes of the search engines. I’ve gone to great lengths building inbound links for PPC Ian. My three tiered approach focuses on PR that drives SEO, guest interviews, and social media profiles. Today, I’m going to talk about one of the top social media profile opportunities: YouTube. In short, it’s mandatory to have a YouTube channel for each and every one of your websites, even if it’s a five page minisite.

Get Your Free YouTube Link

Check out the screen shot of my PPC Ian YouTube channel to the right. As you can see, the profile section has a link to my blog. When you view the source code of my YouTube channel you can actually see that it’s a real dofollow link. In my opinion, this is a really valuable link because it’s coming from one of the most popular websites on the Internet, one that’s owned by Google. Of course, as you build out your YouTube channel and your videos get a lot of views, your link will carry even more weight. In an environment where it’s sometimes difficult to get high quality inbound links, this is truly an opportunity you cannot pass by!

Build Out YouTube Channels For All Your Websites

I currently own over 80 active web properties. They range from large authority sites, like PPC Ian, to small five page minisites. If you’re operating an authority website, you’ve probably already have a YouTube channel. (If you don’t, drop everything and go start one now!) However, I’m here today to argue that you should create YouTube channels even for your smaller sites. Even if your site is only five pages, this is an amazing way to market your website while driving SEO value.

How To Scale Your Time With Multiple YouTube Channels

If you have a YouTube channel, you probably know just how much time it takes to shoot, produce, and upload videos! It’s really time consuming. So, you might be a little intimidated to create YouTube channels for all of your long tail websites. It’s actually easier than you may think thanks to a new website called Fiverr.

Fiverr is basically a marketplace where you can get anything done for $5. Many sellers on Fiverr are amazing at quality, entertaining video. (Some are also really low quality so you’ll want to run a few tests to find the best people to work with.) I’ve personally leveraged Fiverr extensively for video introductions and testimonials for my SEO websites. If it’s not one of my core properties, I go to Fiverr to get videos so I’m able to create a YouTube channel while saving my personal time for my larger websites.

With SEO, It’s Always Important To Think About Quality

Now, you may be thinking: Why don’t I just create a YouTube channel without any videos? While this is possible, I don’t recommend it. Just think about it, what’s a channel with no videos? It really adds no value. I’m all about avoiding stuff that adds no value because it will always catch up with you (and I’m all about doing the right thing). If you’re going to create a YouTube channel, make it something useful. With Fiverr you can build out a high quality YouTube channel with a great video for only $5 and about 1/2 hour of your time.

As a closing tip, I also encourage you to embed your videos on your sites. Video adds substantial value to any website. Search engines like websites that have videos!