If you are a business owner and you haven’t finalized your marketing budget for 2009, it’s not too late. As the economy continues to suffer, many companies will cut back, but the worst thing they can do in these trying times is to cut the advertising budget. I will agree you should put much more thought where you spend your marketing dollars, but if anything, you should increase what you spend on marketing, not lessen. Your main concern when figuring out your marketing budget should be what will get my message in front of the largest group of qualified people for the lowest cost. To get the most for your marketing dollar you will have to use your noggin and get a little creative.

A great way to stretch your dollar in marketing is to build a blog, this can be a gift that keeps giving. The great thing about a blog is once it’s built you can continue to add posts and content without knowing any computer language or paying a web designer to add content for you. Look at me! I am almost a caveman and I am writing this blog post. Blogs are a great way as well to let your prospective customer and current clients know what is going in your business, but more importantly blog post tend to show up well in the search engines. Along with the great traffic and ease of use a blog will give you a place to build back links for your website.

By using a blog to help in these areas you can really help increase traffic, content, and hopefully if you write well, subscribers, then customers or clients. With that being said, you must have an overall well written blog to pull this off. You can increase your chances of making an effective post by giving tips on your industry, add offers and specials and giving informative information in your blog. If you like this blog you can also go to Directory One’s blog for .

The other day I was sitting with a co-worker and he was explaining how much more he sold while wearing a suit compared to just wearing casual wear. Well, as you may have heard - a first impression goes a long way. This relates to a person’s appearance and the first time you meet them. The same goes for a website when you look at it for the first time. The real question is whether your website is wearing a suit or not? When you go to your website, does it give a good first impression and represent the type of business you are running? If the answer to these questions is no, then you may want to think about some change on your website.
When I visit a site that looks like it was in style when Alta Vista was a major search engine, I usually wonder how outdated their products or service is as well. Your website may be the only thing a potential client can see before making a purchase and it should be a good one. While appearance is a major factor in the web site, there are also other issues which can make a buyer cringe and leave your site.
There are three major components you should pay attention to when evaluating your site:
• The appearance: It should have a modern look that displays company colors, company theme, and represents the business you run. A great way to do this is with photos that add a personal touch with colors like red for active and earth tones for a serene feel. Your site should cater to its audience. If it is a site for children, then it should have colors and pictures a child can identify with.

• The functionality: Probably the most important factor. Your site should be laid out so that the user can navigate the site easily, while it tells them how to react to the site. An example of this would be a button on the site that says “click here” for more information or something to that effect. There is a reason for them to be on your website and you must be able to clearly tell the user that when they get there. At the end of the visit on the site, they should have either bought a product online, given information for a follow up, sent an email telling what they need, or accessed the information they where looking for. Functionality is the small things like putting the number in the top right corner of the site, because that is where most people find the phone number on websites. Having a good call to action goes a long way on a website.

• The content: The content that is found on the page should be conveyed in a professional and competent manner. Content on the web page should also be geared towards your audience. You do not want to have writing that only a person with a PhD can understand or an audience of 10 year olds. The content on the page is how you explain why your product or service is different or better than all of your competitors. You should spend more time on the content for the site more than any other aspect.

By using these tips as a guide as well as looking at what others in your industry are doing you can create a functional, well laid out and written website. Once you get these basic components down on the website you can then explore creative ways to display this information and tools that will also help the user. Here are some as well as some and to help you tell the difference.

I have found many cases where a potential client comes in the office and sits down with excitement and enthusiasm about marketing their costly new website. To there dismay they get news from the new bad guy that their website, although well designed, was not designed with marketing in mind. Making a choice like this is much like picking an outfit to wear when you don’t know what the weather will be like. This one mistake can cost a company thousands of dollars and time.

Before looking for a web design company, you should prepare for what they need and prepare for what you will need, before sitting with a web design firm. This short list will help provide you with the proper information to qualify and inform your web design candidate.

Things the Web Designer Should Know

* What is the purpose of your site (Sell products online, Informational, Sales tool)
* What makes your site different from the rest (Free offers, Customer support, Coupons)
* What is you target Market (Houston, U.S., Income Level, Age)
* Theme (Color, Background, Navigation)
* Pages needed with content and pictures

Things you Should know about the Web Designer

*Client Portfolio (Make sure web designs are modern and functional)
*Should write code in HTML CSS(Cascading Style Sheets)
*Keyword knowledge and keywords are written as text not image

The questions for the web designer should be asked prior to the meeting, to make sure that this candidate meets all the requirements. This will help them build your website business as more user friendly and more SEO friendly. Following these steps will get you the most for your money, but you will have to use some character judgment or call past clients.

Building a website is a lengthy process and requires good communication from both the business and the design firm. By finding someone who understands and communicates your business model in the website, you will be able to capture the viewer as you do - with the charm of a store front shop. To view more articles and tools for .

Directory One, Inc.

Most companies have a goal to grow by increasing their sales and eventually becoming a household name. Some companies achieve this goal almost overnight. It takes other companies many years to do this. I think with a good sales team and a great marketing group this can be an obtainable goal for most companies.

However, be aware that new challenges may arise when that growth has taken place quickly. When sales are at a record high, you have satisfied customers and the money is pouring in, life seems great. Bare in mind those record high sales will call for increased production. Unless you have a detailed plan for handling increased sales and set a realistic timeline for providing those services, you can easily overload the production team. If your team is stressed, they will be unable to provide that quality service you’ve promised in a timely manner.

So, if your companies intention is to increase sales and become a household name, it is vital to also have a growth plan in place. Many times companies become so focused on stimulating growth they fail to develop a workable plan to handle the increased business. Management must be willing to increase their production team so the promised deadlines can be met.

Ultimately any must be able to meet company, staff and customer needs. To be efficient, effective and give quality customer service, your team must continue to grow as your company grows. Knowing what your company can handle will make the company, employees and the customers happy with the end result product or service.

PPC Management & Sales

A colleague and I had the chance to go to a Google Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Training course. This Seminar was held by Sitening LLC but sponsored by Google. This was a crash course in Google Adwords. While it was good for the beginning Adword User; it was very basic. The morning seemed like a drawn out Adwords Instruction Guide, although we both were able to pick up a few new things. I asked myself. Could it be my expectations were a little high?

One great new Keyword Tool that I learned however was the . This tool will actually scan through your Website and tell you what Google thinks of your keywords and then break them down into categories. This is a very useful tool because it can help generate keywords. It also gives you a view of how the search engine is reading your Website.

While this course gave us the ability make better use of the tools Google offers, it did not teach us how to create better ads or market potential clients better. I’m not sure that anything except doing individual market research for each client will insure great marketing.

The ideal seminar for me would have been about more effective advertising. It would be one with many Marketing Professionals speaking about their past experiences and sharing solutions to problems they ran into.

When advertising you ultimately want the best Return On Investment (ROI) possible. Doing some minimal research can help do this. The first question you must ask is, how much profit am I making on this product or service? Next, how much can I invest in advertising to get a sale? Once this is determined, you must do your market research and find keywords that fit within your budget. A small budget means you must use less competitive keywords.A great tool to help you do just that, find less competitive keywords, is . Typically you want keywords with high search volume and low advertiser competition.

Being number one in this game does not always mean you are the winner in paid listings. Only you can determine what position and spending level will make your company a winner with its advertising. Take your time. Do the research before throwing money at any PPC Campaign and you’ll get better results. To find out more ways to make the most out of your Internet Marketing Budget you can read this article about .

When creating a Google Adwords Keywords List, you would be wise to consider a few things before adding every keyword in your business. What some advertisers may forget to consider is how many meanings the keywords they choose have. A keyword can have one meaning for you but a different meaning to another searcher.

When coming up with a list of keywords for your , choose words that explain the product or service you offer. If you repair Personal Computers (PC’s) and use PC as a keyword, you may get people who need to buy a PC or just want basic PC information. These type searchers don’t need PC repair. So, how do you keep these important keywords but lose unrelated traffic?

In Google Ad words, when adding a keyword, you have the option to add negative keywords. Negative keywords are words that, if put in with one of your keywords, will keep your ad from showing. Negative keywords for PC could be Purchase, Buy and Sell. When the searcher puts in these keywords with the keyword PC, it would not trigger your ad. Negative keywords allow you to keep those broad keywords but narrow the searchers to your specific business.

When adding keywords to your Google Ad Group you can choose what way they will show up in the search. You can add brackets, parenthesis or put nothing before and after your keywords to determine how they will be displayed. Your keyword with brackets, before and after, will make that keyword show up only if the searcher types it in exactly the way you have it. This can be beneficial if you have just one service you offer for a product and do not want clicks for the services you don’t offer.

When you use parenthesis before and after the keyword, searchers will see your ad if they type the keywords in any order. This helps to get the traffic that may use the words in a different order. This match type is called Phrase Match.

Broad Match is when you add keywords with nothing before or after them. Broad Match allows your ad to show if someone uses that keyword but also adds some other words that you do not have with the keyword. This is helpful so you don’t spend hours putting keywords in different orders. This match type should only be used with keywords that directly reflect what product or service you offer.

When adding keywords using these different match types you will be able to broaden or tighten your target market, and get the customers looking for what your business has to offer. These match types will help increase your conversions if used right. For more details on different match types go to .

In the months of January and February many SEO companies were scrambling to get their clients set up properly in the new Yahoo Pay Per Click (PPC) management system. While I think it has been updated for the better in most cases, it still has a few problems. Upgrading to the new system placed ads and keywords in many different campaigns and ad groups. While doing this they left out important keywords in the title or description. These were expected changes and easy to fix, however it did cause lower ad performance for many advertisers.

The system change has caused many extra hours on Yahoo and numerous phone calls, but overall the change has smoothed out just fine. Tools that are now available on the Yahoo PPC system are very helpful and allow you to track your keyword performance more accurately. You are able to see what is and isn’t working. The options availible on Yahoo now are more similar to Google and make adding keywords and ads a lot easier.

Will there be problems for Yahoo as they turn into Google mimics? This is a improvement to the old Yahoo but I’m not sure for PPC management systems as a whole. Even though Google is the leader in Search Engine Marketing, I am not sure that following in their footsteps will be Yahoo’s recipe for success. As you probably know, Google did not gain dominance in the Search Engine world from following another Search Engine’s lead.

Both systems could use changes in their budget structure. A daily budget is a great option, however most businesses look at a monthly spending budget for advertising, not what they have to spend each day. This poses a problem if you are in a area with competitive keywords but a lower daily budget. You will not place towards the top. Google and Yahoo work so that your top keyword bids can’t be more than the daily budget. This can hurt customers like lawyers and doctors because if they have a budget of $100.00 monthly their daily budget is only $3.00. With a $3.00 bid per click you will most likely not be on the first two pages of search results for lawyer or doctor keywords. One possible solution to this problem is a monthly budget, so if a customer has a smaller budget, they have the option to spend more on a keyword bid than a daily budget would allow.

I can see the possibilty of changes taking place because nothing stays the same very long in the Search Engine world. Google and Yahoo have maintained their top positions in the Search Engine Industry because they have listened to what the searchers want. I critique these companies to influence change, but hold much respect for the way of life they have created for all of us. They say knowledge is power so Search Engines must be the gate keepers of power, because all the knowledge you want can be at your finger tips.

Directory One, Inc.

Not long ago, when you wanted to be in the number one position on a paid listing, you put the highest bid forward. Then, that number 1 spot became yours on Yahoo. Things have changed for the top bidder these days. The top bid does not necessarily mean the top spot anymore. Search Engines like Yahoo, Google, and MSN now look at a combination of ad quality, relevance, and bid when ranking an ad.

The question now is, how do you get the highest placement for the lowest bid price per click? There are a few things to consider when writing your ad and choosing keywords. The first and most important is choosing keywords that fit your business and website. When you choose keywords that might not be as relevant to get a compulsive buy, the conversion rate often does not make it profitable. For the best results, be sure to choose keywords that represent your product or service.

Next, evaluate the ad quality. Your ad must mention the keywords within it and the location if you are targeting a certain area like a City, State, or Country. Using the keywords in the ad tells the Search Engine that this ad is relevant to the keyword it is used for. Also, the location in the ad really helps the searcher so they know right away that you only service that specific area. This ensures that, if the searcher is outside of this area, another click will not be wasted.

Then, take a look at what page your ad is going to. Does this page have the keyword in it, or does it explain it? Your keywords need linking pages that talk about the product or service. This shows Search Engines like Google how your website page is relevant to the search term or keyword. When a searcher clicks on the ad, it will take him or her to the information pertaining to the keyword searched. They don’t have to keep searching around for the information.

When you make sure your ads and keywords are similar, this not only helps you attain a higher position, but also makes it easier for a searcher to determine if you offer what they are looking for. The closer your ad and keywords represent what you offer, the higher Return On Investment (ROI) you will receive. My hope is that these guidelines will help you ensure that the search gives relevant results and also helps your ad traffic be more effective.