MSN Adcenter just released the Beta of their desktop campaign management tool. The “so what” of this for b2b companies looking to begin or expand online marketing in the paid search space is that you have a much better opportunity to test MSN traffic.

MSN’s search reach is only about 10% of the US market. Plus, more sophisticated searchers like most of your clients tend to use Google. Add in that MSN’s web interface is maddening to use at times, and that worked out that most companies skipped MSN and their 6-7% market share.

However, for that same reason, b2b organizations should absolutely be marketing on adcenter. Why? Less competition means lower prices and in some cases, you could be the only advertiser. Pick your pages and keywords correctly and you could get the equivalent of a full SEO program’s results in MSN for a fraction of the cost.

If you need someone to help save your ailing pay per click campaign or get you started, give us a call. About 90% of companies using pay per click are losing money on it. Our clients are in the other 10%. Enough said. 

Categories: Random Musings
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Here is an apology from the famous Seth Godin for sending an email to people without permission. If it’s good enough for him it’s good for us. Opt-in and full permission is becoming key in the world of B2B Internet Marketing. It’s not enough any more to just “get an email address” and send people anything we want, especially with penalties regarding CAN-SPAM compliance and the risk of being blacklisted by major ISPs as a “spammer” even when your intentions were pure.

If either of our companies are going to be truly effective, we have to be ruthless that people are getting only what they give us full permission to send them. We intend to clean up our act among all our clients and apply these practices to all future projects.

• There is a strong business case that we are just making people angry when we send them something they didn’t ask for.
• When our own website visitors opted-in to our email autoresponder, we have seen nearly a 100% conversion to personally contacting us.

We will be putting attention on getting new leads to double-opt-in with

• an irresistible offer
• and compelling message.

If they don’t double-opt-in, too bad for them but we won’t be sending them info to jam up their inbox with what could be easily called spam.

Fortunately in the B2B community, it is accepted practice to request phone numbers on lead forms so we can follow up with a phone call but that’s the end if there is no double-opt-in. They would then be scrubbed from our lists.

Categories: email marketing
Tags: b2b, can spam, double opt in, email, spam, spammer

As hard-core pay per click marketing veterans in both the world of B2B client services as well as ecommerce and affiliate (performance) marketing, we are always pleased to test out new keyword tools and see if they will give our clients an edge

Mindvalley labs, creator of Underground Keywords (also known as Keyword Butler) is their most recent addition to the keyword community. They had quite large shoes to fill given Google’s recent addition of quantitative searches to their (free) keyword tool, so could Underground Keywords prove it’s value?

Scam Factor?

It’s funny - this is actually a really great tool and something that many Internet marketers and ad agencies have had coders produce similar versions of in-house. However, the product is promoted via Internet Marketing circles so it looks like a rip-off. You know the tell-tale signs, right? Long copy sales letter, wild, attention-grabbing headline (Russian Mafia? C’mon) and the list goes on.

What I want to tell Mindvalley is that they don’t have to stoop to such depths to sell a product. You know what their reply would be? “You’re right - we don’t.”

Mindvalley sells this same product under a couple different brands in order to attract different customers. The tool is the same - just the marketing tactics to reach their target market are different. Somehow you and I both ended up hearing about Underground Keywords so I’m not sure what that says about us but no matter. The tool could be rebranded as something that appeals to the stuffiest b2b marketing consultant (like me) and I would still buy it.

Case Studies: What does Underground Keywords Deliver?

We tested Underground Keywords in many different scenarios but I’ll tell you about the one you would probably care about first

Case Study #1 - Retail product test in narrow niche

We have been working with a particular retailer and have what we would call a “mature campaign”, in that we now only search analytics for new keywords every few months. We’ve pretty much mined every keyword out of this market besides the really long-tail terms that might bring a click every few months.

So for fun we ran Underground Keywords on this campaign…

It returned over 117 negative keywords for another brand sharing that name that was in a completely different field. We were aware of this field but only had about 20 negative keywords for this.

Why is this so important? In Google Adwords and other PPC platforms, your clickthrough rate is a major determining factor in your ad price (even with the addition of quality scoring). By removing our ads from displaying on all these irrelevant searches, we vastly improved our CTR, allowing our ads to display for less at the same ad position (better profits) or show higher on the page for the same cost (more sales volume). Either way, we win.

We didn’t get a slew of new keywords but as we mentioned, we’ve figured out about every permutation of how to ask for it. What we hadn’t considered was how NOT to ask for it.

Case Study #2 - Wide retail market niche

We picked a wide market in the diet field (can’t tell you since we’re entering that one - sorry). Google adwords keyword tool returned 144 keywords with that in the root. We love google’s keyword tool. Underground keywords returned 322 and these aren’t junk keywords - they are ones where we went, “Wow, I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

Basically this tool helps shortcut the learning process of becoming an expert in the field. It’s essentially a supercharged keyword scraper and while you can probably code something similar yourself, I can’t even imagine how long it would take or how much it would cost. Plus, whenever search engines block scrapers (as they are prone to doing), we can just let the maker of Underground Keywords take care of it. That leaves more time for us on campaigns.

Underground Keywords vs Wordtracker

At only $97/yr it stands about 1/3 the price of wordtracker. Another advantage over Wordtracker is that Underground Keywords pulls its data from more than just Dogpile and other minor metacrawlers. WT’s searches are estimated from slightly over 1% of overall search and the people using those engines are not what I would consider to be a representative slice of the overall population on the web

Bottom Line about Underground Keywords

When we consider how much extra revenue can be brought in with such little incremental effort, we can’t help but give Underground Keywords a definite thumbs-up for anyone from a budding independent Internet Marketer to a full-service advertising agency.

Categories: Random Musings
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Did they get 100% on the SEO cartoon quiz? We did. If your SEO experts didn’t then you need better marketing nerds.

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MarketLeverage has been sponsoring a slew of affiliate blog contests over the past couple weeks as a well-timed move to gain substantial visibility in the market and perhaps score a few good affiliates in a highly-competitive market.

Plus, it’s a nice opportunity for us to win some swag in the process.

Contest #1 - Affiliate Confession

The first contest comes from upstart affiliate confession, whose blog contains great nuggets about handling relations from the affiliate side of transactions. What many b2b companies don’t realize is that affiliate offers can be a way to monetize commercial or retail traffic that may end up on their site and offset their otherwise wasted ad costs

For example, a company who produces Asian and vietnamese wholesale products bids on keywords that also could bring them homeowners looking to buy just one.

What do you do with all those irrelevant leads? How about at the contact form, segregate them - if they match your lead scoring criteria, work on the relationship. If they don’t though, send them an autoresponder series of related retailers of whom you are an affiliate - and use these costs to offset your ad costs. Whoknows, you may find this pays well enough to split out your own site just doing this.

Almost forgot - this second contest at affiliate confession is cosponsored by vat19.com and ends soon so get those entries in!

Contest #2 CDF Networks

Chad over at CDF Networks who worked out a nice little contest to promote his blog along with Market Leverage, one of the strong up-and-coming networks in 2008.

Chad’s blog is one of the top ones we’ve seen in the pay-for-performance marketing space and eschews the typical earnings claims and self-aggrandizing comments seen from affiliate marketers (work on commission basis from large web companies to increase sales & leads) and instead reveals tactics and methodologies to increase leads and sales.

Definitely worth putting in your RSS if you either work as a pay-for-performance marketer or if your company is considering employing an affiliate program to boost revenue.

Contest #3 - Jonathan Volk

Last but certainly not least is super affiliate Jonathan Volk’s contest with Market Leverage. His age by no means reflects his experience and overall knowledge when it comes to pay per click and pay for performance marketing. Besides giving back to the affiliate community via his blog, which keeps marketers up to date on the latest trends, he also engages in contests within the industry to keep it light (SEO battle vs. Jon Fisher & Aojon.com)

Categories: Random Musings
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