ADUTAINMENT: Advertising as Entertainment
JellyBasket.com - JELLY by the CASE or as a GIFT BASKET.

Faction Media Receives Top Honors for B2B Marketing at the Business Marketing Association's 22nd Annual Gold Key Awards Competition
Faction Media, a leading B2B marketing and advertising agency based in Denver, Colorado, was recently honored with one Gold Key award and one Silver Key award in this year's BMA-Colorado Gold Key Awards Competition.

Choosing the Right Work Shirts for Your Small Business
Company attire says a lot about your business philosophy to your customer. Company shirts project professionalism and advertising.

Made For Adsense, PPC Business Model - Still A Viable Plan?
There are currently many discussions in the webmaster forums on contextual advertising programs and the changes they are going through. Which program currently has the most ?publisher friendly? terms of service? Which company values it?s publisher?s more? Which will pay me more? Which will be better in the long term?

Paul Flood Marketing Announces Launch of Online Greeting Card and Referral Program
Send Out Cards, an online greeting card customer contact and referral program, is now available from Paul Flood Marketing. Savvy entrepreneurs are using greeting cards to strengthen customer relationships and generate steady streams of referrals.

Internet Marketing Online: How To Make Your Customers To Keep Coming Back To Buy From You
There are a few internet marketing online secrets that when implemented, will force your customers to keep coming back to buy from you.Some of the factors that are involved in getting repeat business are: pricing, quality of products and services, excellent customer service etc.

How good cash flow management can help your business
For a business, whether they are a start up business or an established business cash acts as their lifeline; it is the one aspect that allows a business to survive. The amount of cash that a business has at its disposal often demonstrates the health of a business. A business, especially a start-up business would be able to survive for a while without sales or profit but without cash it will fail.

Tag Cloud Module? Innovative Idea for Your E-Business
You, as the owner of online store, are constantly looking for some fresh, innovative ideas to make your store more attractive for customers. There is a new trend which is called Tag Cloud Module. It offers quite interesting approach for web site navigation and provides visitors with instant illustration of the main topics of your sites content.

Resolving the Dilemma of Ethical Marketing
Many service professionals will tell you that the words 'ethical' and 'marketing' don't belong in the same sentence While you'd be opening another can of worms by asking for a precise definition of 'ethics', let's just say for the moment that often marketing leaves us feeling a little dirty, or sleazy if you prefer

Centralizing and Automating Your OnLine Business
You started your internet business and have been quite happy to run it manually, but now it's becoming too big and your time is constantly taken up with mundane tasks. If this is you, then you are becoming less productive and more under pressure because of the extra workload.

Achieve Network Marketing Success By Differentiating Between Sales And True Marketing
Network marketing success comes from a representatives ability to work smart, rather than an ability to work hard. So how exactly does a representative work smart in this industry?

BizForm Bar improves its encrypted password and forms management system. (Graphic: Business Wire) -- Form Filler and Password Manager Toolbar Adds
PBHLLC, a developer of online marketing software and IP Marketing Concepts, Inc., an online marketer, announced new upgrades for the BizForm Bar toolbar. Targeted to both business and home users, the toolbar has many productivity improvement features designed to help manage passwords and automatically fill out forms, protect against unauthorized access while users are away from their computer, and provides the security of keeping their data fully encrypted.

Business Grants, Business Funding
Business grants are not easy to get hold of but there are genuine opportunities available for those who preserve to get them. They are a way of getting the finance that is needed to get your business idea off the ground.

Why Your Small Business Needs an Intranet
MAG Studios assigns a team of experienced consultants who have significant experience in the defined verticals and those who have number of successful projects to their credit to back them up. In addition to our IT consultants, our top management, consisting of IIT alumni with more than 30 years of industry exposure takes an active interest in the projects and are instrumental in defining strategies, which not only serves the purpose, but also exceeds it. As custom web development company in India, MAG studios has perfected the process of working and delivering from the remote (offsite).

AngelNetwork.com, LLC Continues to Educate Entrepreneurs
Angel Funding versus venture capital funding.

Great Marketing Ideas
When a business is trying to promote a product or service, great marketing ideas are generally welcomed. Business is very competitive and finding a unique way to intrigue customers is crucial. Creativity is the key when seeking effective marketing ideas. The business person has to be prepared to go all out in order to attract potential customers. Most companies and businesses will use the same basic marketing tools but how they use them can make a huge difference.

Improved PPC Marketing Performance from Time-Tested 80/20 Principle

As marketers and business owners, we're always looking for "the next big idea or strategy" to maximize our business performance. Yet, the application of time-tested principles consistently achieve greater results over efforts to create newer ideas and strategies.

For example, Stephen Covey's New York Times best-selling and world-renowned book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a self-proclaimed synthesis of principles taught by great teachers and philosophers over 150 years ago 1. The world-wide success of this book is evidence to the time-resistant power of principles.

In addition, many hugely successful Internet Marketers generated significant fortunes from applying 50 to 75 year old direct mail principles to the new Internet medium. Marketing strategies used by greats like Claude Hopkins, Robert Collier and John Caples have significant application in today's digital environment.

Although pay-per-click marketing is a relatively new Internet marketing strategy, its performance relates well to an old principle called "Pareto's Law" or better known as "the 80/20 Principle".

The meaning of the 80/20 Principle is best explained by a recent book, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less", written by Richard Koch:

"The 80/20 Principle states that there is an inbuilt imbalance between causes and results, inputs and outputs, and effort and reward. 80/20 relationships typically will show that 80% of outputs result from 20% of inputs; that 80% of consequences flow from 20% of causes; or that 80% of results come from 20% of effort." 2

When applied to pay-per-click marketing, 80% of outputs (or desired visitor actions on your website), result from 20% of the inputs (your keywords.)

Applying the 80/20 Principle to Pay-per-Click Marketing

One of the benefits of running a pay-per-click marketing campaign is the control gained from selecting keywords to bid on. In essence, the keywords you select enable you to target specific types of individuals among varying demographics and at various points within their buying cycle.

But because it is difficult to know specifically which keywords (inputs) will ultimately generate the most actions (outputs) the process of "keyword selection" should be applied liberally. This means that all possible keyword variations and associations should be selected to figuratively "blanket" or span across all potential search queries for your products or services. By relying on your keyword-level tracking system, over time, the resulting website actions will sort the top performing keywords from the poor-performing ones.

Under the 80/20 Principle, if you initially select 1,000 keywords for your pay-per-click marketing campaign, over a month or two depending on visitor volume, your keyword-level tracking system will uncover 20% of keywords that produce 80% of your results. Likewise, the 80/20 Principle will expose roughly 80% of the 1,000 keywords selected that produce minimal to no results.

Aside from seasonality variations and marketplace trends that effect keyword performance, the 80/20 Principle pinpoints a significant operational process that all Internet marketers should implement immediately. By tracking your pay-per-click marketing campaign at the keyword level and identifying the specific keywords that produce maximum results, you can eliminate roughly 80% of your poor-performing keywords. Through this "keyword filtration process" you will re-allocate budget dollars to the top performing keywords and reduce keyword management time spent on poor-performing ones.

Remember These 5 Keys...

1. During your keyword selection process, "blanket" your target market with every relevant keyword variation and association used by your target market to find your products or services. Use Overture or Google Adwords' editorial review to define the relevancy boundaries (or "the ends of the blanket") for your target market.

2. Define at least one value-oriented action such as an opt-in, subscription, registration or sale that you seek a visitor to perform on your website. This action (called your "marketing objective") is the determination point for measuring how your keywords are performing.

3. Implement keyword-level tracking to identify which 20% of your keywords produce 80% of your actions.

4. Pay close attention to seasonality variations and marketplace trends that may cause fluctuations in keyword performance. Instead of eliminating all 80% of your poor performing keywords, identify the most relevant ones to your products and services and the ones with the highest demand volume and work on adjusting their bids, re-writing their titles and descriptions or re-engineering their landing pages to increase their performance.

5. If branding is your primary objective as opposed to "performance" remove your brand-oriented keywords from your 80/20 Principle analysis and associated performance metrics.

Analyze your pay-per-click marketing against the 80/20 Principle to see if an imbalance exists between your inputs (keywords) and outputs (actions). You will discover that a simple revamp of your pay-per-click marketing campaign will significantly increase your visitor-to-action conversion rates, reduce your cost per action and enable a more efficient allocation of your budget across your top performing keywords.

Sources:

1 Stephen Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1989) pg. 18.

2 Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less (New York: DoubleDay, 1998) pg. 4.

Kevin Gold is a Partner and Co-founder of Enhanced Concepts, Inc., which specializes in turning website visitors into leads and sales through tested website conversion strategies and performance-focused search engine marketing. To learn how to generate greater performance from your search engine marketing and to turn more website visitors into leads and sales go to http://www.enhancedconcepts.com.