Pay Per Click

So how do we go about marketing a website? If today I decided I needed to get more visitors to my site Compare Mortgage Rates, what would my very first port of call be?

Well, if you want visitors direct to your website and you want them fast and you would like to know how many people are seeing the advert and how many visiting your site, then Google Adwords and other Pay Per Click (PPC) schemes are an excellent starting point.

Why? Well let's look at the search network today.

Potential visitors are searching on relevant keywords, in my case maybe 'mortgage tools', 'mortgage rates', 'mortgage help', etc. I can pick a number of terms that I think would be useful. To help me in this, the Google Adwords system examines the website and shows suggestions, making it much easier than it sounds.

So when Joe Blogs searches on 'Mortgage Help', my advert is displayed. If I'm paying enough, it's displayed high and gets his attention, so he clicks on it.

Now in some cases it is believed that people are more likely to click on adverts than natural results, trusting the adverts over the results because they are paying to be there. That's just an intersting point to note!

So Joe Bloggs visits my site. I know he's searching on relevant information and using the Adwords system I can even send him to a specific page. What's more, of there are irrelevant keywords in use, I can exclude them so he doesn't see the advert.

Google provides loads of reporting information, which seems to grow by the month! From the number of times the advert is displayed to how many clicked on it. You can place a snippet of code into your checkout routine and they will then track how many people actually buy from you.

There are, of course, some problems with the Adsense system. More about that tomorrow.

Marketing your site

Right, I've harped on enough about how you should not just get a website and expect it to have visitors, instead you need to market it. But what can you do to market a site?

Well there are loads of things! Maybe a quick list here and then in future days I'll return to look at each one in more detail. But I've had customers using forums, magazines, word of mouth, shop adverts, suppliers and more to get visitors to their site.

On top of these, for myself, for likes of CompareMortgageRates and Cottage-Holidays I've used fliers, link building, articles, directory submission, email signatures, PPC, Pop Unders, Expired Domain traffic, paid directories, adverts on other sites, word of mouth, affiliates and probably a whole host of other ideas that I'll remember as time goes by.

So, which of these are best? Well usually the cheaper the are the better - but not necessarily always. One might be a lot cheaper than another, or even free, but if it doesn't bring in traffic, then it's of no use.

If I was starting to market a site now, which would I use? Probably a good mixture. It would depend on how quickly I want to grab visitors and earn an income from the site. A lot also depends on the nich of the site. It's no good having a brilliant new widget and depending on PPC or search engine visitors to supply the sales - if it's a new idea, people won't be looking for it.

Conversely, if everyone is already selling a similar service then it might be hard to get positioned in search results and PPC because of tight competition. And just because something didn't work when you tried it 6 months ago doesn't mean it won't work today.

Have a look through the list, remind me of what I've missed and let me know which ideas, old or new, are working for you.

Affiliate Marketing - Trusting Cookies

I was interested to notice as I logged onto Affiliate Future that they are no longer relying on cookies for their tracking. They instead talk about their new tracking system, that stores non-personal details in the visitor's browser instead.

It doesn't really say what they do different or how they are doing it. It just sounds like cookies, without any personal details

They claim in it's response to an increasing number of people disabling cookies; virus / anti-spyware disabling cookies etc. And probably, they are right. But their system sounds like they are possibly just storing the affiliate details in hidden fields or something similar. Which begs the question, how easy is it to forget to code this on one page and how, if it's not cookies and it's using the browser, do you track returning visitors

Intrigued, I decided to take a look at one of my own links through them. But it didn't work, nor did any of their links I tried! It looks like they have implemented something so clever that it doesn't work on older machines / operating systems

I wonder how many potential sales could be lost through their system by not supporting older browsers?

I was about to update my comparemortgagerates site as part of the follow up to my main provider deserting me, to include one of their merchants through loads of pages - I couldn't test so I'm looking elsewhere.

And Then They Were Gone

I noticed that the mortgage charts on my mortgage site weren't showing properly. I thought maybe after a day or so they would be fixed by the provider, then a week or two later they were still faulty.

These are provided by a third party provider, who passes all leads they generate onto a mortgage broker who then pays me for any successful applications, although he never seems to generate much revenue for me.

So I contacted the guy to ask him what was going on. 'Oh, it's probably because we don't use them any more.' I replied to him, asking him how leads should be sent 'Just email me'.

This is very useful. For at least a few weeks the forms had been down, although I didn't know it. And in that time he's been asking me how's my website traffic and any chance of generating more leads for him.

The main reason I used him was for his mortgage charts. I can't create them myself, so now I've got loads of pages on that website to remove the forms and put something else up - no idea what yet. A quick fix first, I think.

But in the absence of these charts, all of the static pages referring to them are going to have to change as well. I can't proudly boast that the site displays 'every UK mortgage', when in actual fact the removal of the charts means that none are displayed. Maybe, as I've thought for a while, it's time to move that side of the business on to the travel industry instead.

Building Templates

I was sent an email whilst I was on holiday from a company wantint me to build website templates for them. I've not yet got back to them to checkout their offer, but the worry always is in this sort of case that they will continually reject templates and those that they do accept get paid a pittance for.

The problem is that most templates sell for very little. Yet, it's getting the look and feel of the website that takes time. I've started building a holiday letting website. It will be 4 or 5 pages when it's finished. It took about 6 hours to get the style right and it will probably take another 1 or 2 hours to get the content onto the pages.

I'm always happy to help people, but there's always that nagging doubt in the back of your mind when an approach like this is made as to whether they are just mass mailing every web designer they can find and then offering £10 for several hours' work.

I'll let you know next week, once I've contacted them.

Fancy Features Don't Always Work...

A customer insisted that I use drop down menus for his site. He wanted the title that is always displayed to not be a link and there to be no other 'redundant' links on the page.

Sounds harsh, but that's basically what he insisted on for his desired style and when I tried putting copies of the links at the bottom of the pages, he wasn't happy. The drop down menus use pure CSS, with a slight hack for Internet Explorer (thanks for not being fully CSS compliant...).

I've tested the site across Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape and Opera, but apparantly he's found an obscure browser, that I've never heard of before, that they don't work in.

Well, here's the warning. Fancy features are great, but the cleverer the feature, the less likely it is to work across every browser. And if you don't have the redundant links on the page, then some people can't access your site.

Not Top On Google...

"Why's my site not top of Google?"

Why does every customer expect to be top of Google in 4 weeks? Why do they think their 1 page site with about 200 word, mostly taken from other sites (yes, it's them again...), will amazingly appear top of every search engine?

It rarely works like that. A cheap, 1 page site, is not going to rank very highly. That's the truth. You need quality content and plenty of links in.

So why do customers keep asking me the same question? One customer, 2 cheap sites and no, not top in Google.

I need stock control, for Monday

This one has really annoyed me - big time. The customer has asked about it a few times, but I've pointed out the problems of having to control online and offline stock.

On Thursday, he decided to buy separate stock and that it would be nice for a full stock control system to be implemented, including switching off sizes for items (not even done by item, done by size) that run out of stock.

I was told 5pm on Thursday and said it would take a couple of days to write and test the system and all of the reports. 'But I need it live for Monday' was the reply. That's not he needs the system live for Monday, 08:00, but he needs his stock figures uploaded for then. No way I told him, but we can get the rest of the changes in. Don't forget, he's not the only customer with important changes.

So 8:15 Friday evening I get a half hour winge off my sales guy trying to force my arm to work every hour of the weekend to get it done. Eventually I thought of an easier way to integrate it into his system and was up until 2am getting the start of the code in.

You can imagine my surprise when 20 minutes ago, not 6 hours after I gave up and went to bed, the sales guy is winging that the system isn't good enough. A rather strongly worded email went back to him telling him maybe his comments should wait until I've shown him the changes (no idea what he's looking at - he doesn't know where the changes are) and that any more emails with that tone and the changes don't go live!

Maybe it's time for a new sales person. His attitude is really getting to me.

Make It Bigger!

"Make it bigger - make it twice as big" was the request. "I've counted and I need it at least 1,000 characters long."

The customer was talking about the description field in his content management system for his shop. After a few months, he'd finally "been very busy" starting loading products and the fields weren't big enough.

Now, apart from the fact that this is the sort of change that should happen in early testing, when I looked at the database I noticed that he had a massive 2 products loaded to his shop. Not even one per category! Then I noticed the field in question was actually 2,000 characters long anyway.

So not only was the system already coping, he wasn't even using it. He'd just decided to ask for more space "in case", I suppose. Which made be more work. Thanks for that.

Paid Directory Submission

Reviewing a recent blog entry, I noticed a Google advert on the site claiming to help increase search engine ranking within 5 minutes. Skeptical, but interested in what they had to say (I'm still struggling to get CompareMortgageRates back to PR5) I decided to take a look at their site.

Now, before anyone shouts, I didn't click the Google advert! Right click the advert and show code allows you to see the full destination URL - so no need to worry that I've been clicking on my own adverts - even if it was one that was of genuine interest.

I went onto the site and for a "fantastic offer" of "only $29" (previously $39), they offered to submit my site to 100 PR4 directories. "Guaranteed to raise your link popularity in days".

Yes, OK. Do such directories still really help?

I happened to notice they were showing testimonials from a couple of sites - along with the site names. "I noticed the difference within 3 days" said one. So I searched Google for his links - 4 came back in total. Tried the same on the other site that was a testimonial and none came back. Looks like these 100 sites aren't actually that good.

Somehow, I think that as far as Google is concerned, that's $29 you might just have flushed down the drain.