While I think today’s article on the Small Business Branding blog was well-intentioned, it unfortunately overlooked the importance of great landing pages. To be honest, Google doesn’t do the best job of educating its users on the importance of landing pages either, so it’s not surprising that their importance hasn’t been given it’s due in other conversations about search marketing. Before you go beating your head against a wall and wind up paying for help with Adwords, let’s explore how to effectively use landing pages to make your pay-per-click marketing more cost-effective and better in general.

Google Adwords pay-per-click advertising (or PPC advertising as you may see it called) is the most widely used search by both advertisers and consumers, so to make it work for you it’s really important to get what makes Google Adwords tick. Adwords’ goal is to show its users the most relevant ads possible. The idea is that if they do this, the most clicks will take place and Google will make the most money. Your goal is to convince the Google robots that your page is relevant to the keywords you want to have people search to find you. When you manage to do this, Google Adwords rewards you by offering you a cheaper pay-per-click price than your competitors and a better placement for your ads.

So how exactly do you go about convincing the robots to love you and getting these cheap clicks? By writing landing pages that make use of the keywords you want used. Here’s a step-by-step to creating the best landing pages for your campaigns.

1. Do your homework
Let’s say I wanted run an Adwords campaign to get people to read this post. My first step would actually be to do a little research with Google’s keyword tool. I’d want to know how people were searching Google to learn about using Adwords effectively. I’d identify keywords such as “adwords advertising” and “internet marketing” and “pay per click”.

2. Write keyword-rich copy
Once I’d made a list of words people commonly search to get the information in my article, I’d start writing. (Google’s keyword tool will tell you how often people search for the keywords you’re interested in. It will also tell you how sought-after the words are by other advertisers.) As I write, I need to keep my list of keywords in mind and be sure to make liberal use of them in my copy. When the Adwords robots scan my page they’ll be checking to see if the keywords I put in my campaign are on my landing page and if so, how often they appear. The better job I do of using my targeted keywords, the more likely I am to be offered a lower cost-per-click price and better ad placement.

3. Set up the landing page
Adwords likes URLs that are related to your keywords. If I wanted to use this blog post as a landing page I’d make a URL for it that went something like http://brandtorrent.com/adwords_secrets/.

4. Create smart ad campaign copy
At this point a lot of the hard stuff is done. Keywords have been selected and a juicy landing page has been written and created. The only challenge left is writing ad copy that makes people want to click. So think about the people you want clicking on your ad. What is it that you have to offer that will interest them the most? Can you boast about low prices, free shipping, and/or unique selection? Whatever you’ve got to excite your audience, that’s what goes into the ad campaign copy. You’re actually better off developing a couple of versions of your ad copy so you can do what’s called A/B testing. What this means is Adwords will run both ads for you and you’ll see which version is getting a better click-through-rate. This enables you to really maximize the success of your campaign.

5. Monitor and Adjust
Search engine marketing is a tricky science, so no matter how smartly you’ve crafted your landing page and your ad copy, you’ll need to keep an eye on performance and make adjustments as you go along.

I realize some marketers might think sharing this type of information with the small business owner is counterproductive. Why not keep ‘em in the dark and lead them down a semi-sabotaging path so they’ve got to turn to a pro for help? I am not saying hiring a search engine marketing professional doesn’t have its time and place. Developing a great Adwords campaign requires writing skills and time and effort. If you haven’t got the time or writing resources for DIY marketing, by all means, hire help. Search marketers not only understand these tricks of the trade, they’ve got loads of experience working with them. My goal here is to empower the little guy to make a go of this on his or her own. Because let’s face it, no matter how great pro marketers are, they’re just not always in the budget.

P.S. For extra credit, check out “Eight Keyword Research Mistakes That Are Costing You Money” from Search Engine land and “Pay Per Click Mistakes Newbies Make” from Pay Per Click Journal.

Ever notice how when you shop on a site like Amazon and you express interest in one book, Amazon suggests you buy a similar book along with it and offers you a price break for doing so? This “better together” type of promotion can be leveraged by two or more companies selling complementary products.

How it works:

1. Find a cross-promotion partner you want to work with. If you sell bicycles, partner up with a company that sells helmets or cycling jerseys. If you sell footwear, maybe you’d want to work with a company that sells handbags.

2. Provide your cross-promotion partner a coupon code for your business and have your partner provide one to you.

3. When your customers check out, offer them a coupon for your partner’s business and have your partner do the same for their customers.

As always, we recommend that you use a unique coupon code for each cross-promotion campaign so that you can track the success of your efforts. Even if you don’t see an immediate boost in sales from your cross-promotion efforts, this type of marketing still gets your company name in front of potential customers who may come to you in the future, coupon in hand or not.

Print advertising can be both expensive and tough to track. Earlier this week I wrote about how to track the success of a marketing campaign so this leads nicely into exploring print advertising as a means to market your brand. I’m most in favor or print ads for brick and mortar businesses but whether you want to advertise in print for your online or brick and mortar business, advertising with partners is a great way to save some cash.

One group I admire for their print-based cross-promotion activities is Indie Finds. This group of independent artisans and designers buys print advertisements in national publications. For each advertisement, several of the designers chip in to cover the cost and all the participants get a product from their shop featured in the advertisement. Although this group focuses on independent designers, there’s no reason other types of companies couldn’t form a coalition to advertise in a local publication or another type of special interest publication.

Indie Finds’ placements in magazines have a stylish design but they probably wouldn’t be mistaken for content from the magazine. While their eye-catching design work is likely to attract eyeballs, another way to pull off the print-based cross-promotion would be to employ an advertorial format. If companies selling products for new moms wanted an ad in Fit Pregnancy, they might consider framing their placement as an “article” on top five must have items for new moms. Of course each of these must-haves would be picks from five companies splitting the cost of the placement.

However you frame your print marketing. Be sure to supply a unique URL, phone number or coupon code for the ad if possible so that you can measure the ad’s success. It’s also important to keep in mind that print placements usually become more effective over time. If you’re not prepared to invest in several placements to see a return you may want to reconsider investing in this marketing medium.

In the age of internet marketing it’s easy to overlook more traditional mediums like good old fashioned mail. For many types of business this might make sense but before you rule it out for your own business take a closer look at how to leverage a direct mail campaign and some benefits of doing so.

Direct mail campaigns allow you to create marketing materials beyond subject line and copy. You can design an entire 3 dimensional object to put in your target audience’s hands and the choices you make can have a huge impact. Your direct mail piece can be in an attention grabbing color, it can contain product samples or promotional items. In short, it affords you the opportunity to make a much larger impact than digital communication can offer.

Below are examples of a few cases where direct mail campaigns made a lot of sense:

1. A skincare company I’ve done marketing for in the past designed a campaign to promote a new line of roll-on fragrances. Since this sort of thing can’t be sampled through the internet, the company sent out perfume samples to every customer who purchased from them in the last 6 months. In the sample packages the company included a coupon for 10% off any purchase of the new roll-on fragrances. The benefits of the coupon were two-fold. To begin with, it gave customers a money saving incentive to purchase if they enjoyed the samples. The other advantage of the coupon is that it allowed for tracking the success of the campaign. The coupon code that went out in the direct mail piece was only given to those customers so when orders came in with that coupon code, the skincare company knew they were getting sales from the direct mail campaign.

2. An interior design firm that catered to home owners with properties worth over 1 million dollars designed a campaign to entice new home owners to use their services. The firm made a favorable introduction with new home buyers by mailing them a “housewarming” direct mail piece. The firm put together gift baskets containing pens with their web address and phone number, brochures of past jobs they’d done and fresh baked cookies from a local bakery. To offset the costs of this direct mail piece the firm also included a value-pak type coupon pack for local vendors such as restaurants and dry cleaners. Each vendor participating in the welcome pack contributed to the expense of printing the coupons and mailing the packages. (Note that this case includes not only a smart use of direct mail marketing, but also employs the power of cross-promotion to offset the cost of the direct mail campaign!)

The costs for direct mail can certainly add up quickly so it’s a strategy that you’ll want to use sparingly most of the time. That said, for a big impact campaign or the promotion of a product that needs to be sample, direct mail can be a powerful tool for attracting new customers or wooing existing ones.

Editor’s note: Thanks, ReviewPage.com, for telling your visitors about Brand Torrent.

The mailing list is an invaluable tool in your marketing arsenal. It’s an entire list of people who think your brand is interesting enough to let you email them your marketing pitches on a somewhat regular basis. You may be wondering how a company gets consumers or clients to agree to such a thing, and honestly, it’s not always easy. We’ve got a few tried and true tips for making your mailing list bigger and better and we’re going to explore them today.

Before we get started, you’ll need to decide if you’re doing an email or direct mail list. Email is obviously much less expensive, but a direct mail list sometimes makes more sense for certain kinds of businesses. If you’re going to run a direct mail list, I’m going to get back to you. Direct mail is a totally different animal than email that deserves a blog entry of its own, which I will get to before the week is out. For now, I’m going to talk about building and maintaining an email newsletter.

Before you even start to think about email marketing, you must promise to observe the following rules:

1. Email marketing is for opt-in recipients only. Do not send your newsletter to anyone who didn’t agree to sign up for it. If you do, it’s spamming and it can get you in trouble with the law, your web host, your internet service provider, and it generally reflects badly on your brand.

2. All email marketing transmissions must come with an easy-to-use unsubscribe link. Not allowing people to leave your newsletter will also make you a spammer, potentially landing you in hot water and definitely fostering animosity with customers.

3. Use your newsletter strategically and sparingly. Do not email your newsletter contacts constantly. For most businesses a monthly newsletter is reasonable. If you have very compelling content, you might be able to get away with a weekly or daily message, but if you’re going to make your messages more frequent, keep in mind that you may have a harder time keeping people subscribed and getting people signed up. It’s also a good idea to let subscribers know if they can expect frequent messages so they know what they’re signing up for. For most companies, a monthly newsletter promoting a new product or service or offering a special deal is the way to go. This allows you to remind your customers or clients to spend money with you, gives them impetus to do so and, most importantly, doesn’t get on their nerves.

So how do you get all these fans of your brand signed up to receive your emails? There are many ways to go about this, but the following are tried and true in my experience.

1. Give something away. People love free stuff. If you can do a monthly or weekly drawing from your newsletter list for a free gift, you’re likely to attract more subscribers. Be sure to let your customers or clients know they’re eligible to get a free gift by joining your newsletter.

2. Offer special deals and discounts. Everyone loves the idea of being in on a special offer. Send your contacts a special coupon code or deal along with your newsletter. Be sure to tell potential newsletter subscribers about the access to exclusive deals when they subscribe. This company offers site visitors an instant 15% discount for joining the newsletter. That’s an offer that just about guarantees every paying customer is going to join up, since they’ll want to save at check out.

3. Offer interesting content. If you’re a subject matter expert on a topic that interests your customers or clients, offer them free information with your newsletter. This professional and personal coaching consultant offers newsletter subscribers access to a free book when they sign up. A company selling dog leashes might offer a newsletter providing pet parenting tips. A company selling gourmet hot sauces might have a recipe newsletter.

Whatever hook you use to interest people in your newsletter, make it easy for people to sign up. This means you should have a sign up form on every page of your site. Not a link to a separate sign up page, a form that justs asks for an email address and has the user click “submit”. You want as few barriers as possible to getting onto your newsletter. Take it from big companies like Crate and Barrel and Overstock.com. A link to a newsletter sign up is not nearly as effective as an actual sign up on each and every page of your site.

Once you’ve built up your list, you can not only use it to market your own company, you can use your list as a cross-promotion tool. The bigger your list is, the better position you’re in to cross-promote with another company with a big list. When you send out those deals and discounts you can mention promotions for your partner and they’ll do the same for you. This can add up to thousands of free eyeballs for your brand without spending a penny.

You may not always be in the mood to write, but even if you don’t do it every day, your business needs a blog. Blogs are good for a number of things. Here are just a few:

1. They’re sticky. A sticky site is a site that keeps visitors coming back. If you’ve got frequently updated content, visitors will be back to check out what you’ve got. If you’re running a retail site you may only have new items seasonally or even less often, so you’re going to need another reason to keep your site on your customers’ minds and a blog is a great way to do it. While many business blogs focus entirely on what’s new with the business, your blog needn’t do this. Blogging about something related to your business that your customers are likely to find interesting is a great way to keep them glued to your site. If you sell pet grooming services you could do a photo blog of cute cats and dogs. If you sell clothing, a blog with fashion tips might be a good fit. If you sell a service like interior design you might want to start a blog about design trends or home decor if your clients are mostly residential.

2. They provide search engine optimization. Everyone wants the search engines to love their website, and search engines love content. If you want the search engines to show you some love, give ‘em what they want and start writing. Fresh, interesting content on your site will keep the search engines coming back and paying attention to you, which means it’ll be easier for customers to find your site when they’re doing a search. It’s like free advertising!

3. It provides a cross-promotion vehicle. We had to throw that one in there, right? Since we believe cross-promotion is a terrific way to market your brand, we’re all for having as many tools at your disposal as possible to do this. Agreeing to write a post about your marketing partner(s) in exchange for their promise to do the same gives you a no-cost means of trading marketing power with a partner. Posting about a partner doesn’t mean driving customers away from your own business. Choose a marketing partner with a product or service complementary to your own. For extra points, you and your cross-promotion partner might consider giving each other coupon codes to post along with the blog entries.

If you’re not sure how to get a blog onto your company website, there are a few options. My favorite is Wordpress. It’s a free, open-source program you can install on your own web server and you can customize it to look just like the rest of your website. (We actually use Wordpress to host this blog.) You will need PHP and MySQL to run Wordpress, but many web hosts offer those along with their hosting packages. If you don’t have PHP and MySQL, or you aren’t up to installing software yourself, trust me, it’s pretty easy to do. You might want to explore some of the free hosted blogs such as Blogger or Wordpress’s free hosted blog option.

Further Reading:
Hubspot says “How to Build World’s Most Valuable Brand? Don’t Advertise! Use Inbound Marketing“

If you’re new to the world of cross-promotion, you may be wondering where to start. How do I select a partner? How do I come up with a cross-promotion plan? What should I keep in mind when making these decisions? We’ll tackle the basics of these issues today, so you have a clearer understanding of how to get started.

Using the search tools on Brand Torrent, you’ll be able to look for companies that are interested in cross-promotion. The best partner for you is going to have a similar customer demographic, but not necessarily a similar product line. Think about your typical customer. How old are they? Are they men or women? What are their interests? What sort of household income and education are they likely to have? Once you’ve answered these questions about your own customers, you want to find a business with customers who fit a similar description. If you sell contemporary high-end jewelry and your average customer is female, style-conscious, 25-40 years old and middle to high-income, you want to connect with a partner whose customers also fit this description.

The next thing you’ll want to keep in mind when selecting a cross-promotion partner is a fair exchange. If you’re interested in trading promotional mail order inserts and you only ship 5 orders in an average day, you shouldn’t partner with a company that ships 50 orders in an average day. Make sure that you can match whatever exposure you’re hoping to get from your cross-promotion partner in return.

Once you’ve selected a cross-promotion partner, it’s a good idea to talk about what your cross-promotional activities will encompass. If you’re going to mention each other’s websites in your customer newsletters, agree to dates on which the newsletters will be going out. Discuss the actual copy that will appear in the newsletters. To keep a productive and positive working relationship with your cross-promotion partner, it’s important to chart a specific plan of action for your cross-promotion activities, and talk about your expectations.

The next thing to consider with your cross-promotion plans is tracking your success. You’ll want some way to measure the results you’re getting from this form of marketing. You may want to attach a coupon code to your cross-promotion efforts so that you’ll know which customers made purchases through your cross-promotion campaign. You may want to provide a special URL on your site for your cross-promotion audience so you’ll know how much traffic your campaign brought in. There are a variety of ways to track the success of your marketing efforts, so you’ll want to come up with something that works for your own situation.

The final thing to keep in mind about cross-promotion is that it’s like any other type of marketing; the goal is not just to get immediate conversions, it’s also to gain exposure for your brand. Just because you didn’t see an overnight jump in sales based on your cross-promotion efforts doesn’t mean the efforts were wasted. Getting your brand in front of your target audience is the way to begin building a relationship with your customer base. These relationship-building exercises will bring you more business in the long-run than any short-term oriented marketing campaign that focuses only on immediate increases in conversions.