MK Digital Media Marketing & Design

Hour 16 and now I'm getting IE7 compatibility issues

For the love of all things holy people! Please upgrade your browsers to Internet Explorer 8!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/default.aspx

Finally, Microsoft is supporting web standards like every other browser and just about 60% of visitors using Internet Explorer across the sites that I maintain are still using older versions.

95% of my problems in designing stem from browser versions IE6 & IE7. The cost of design would go waaaaaaay down if everyone upgraded their browser.

I'm going to give a shout out here to all of the designers and developers of web applications that are awake right now doing the same thing I am...figuring out why my websites are working in every other browser but Internet Explorer.

It's a hard knock life for us! ha!

You may wonder why I'm wasting time writing a blog post at 1am. It's because this is something I know will look good when I press "publish this post."

Pay Per Click ad Insanity

I’m having a love/hate relationship right now with Google adwords and other programs that have the Pay Per Click ads.

There are other ones: Microsoft AdCenter, Facebook and Yahoo! are ones that come to mind.

The reason why I don’t like them is because once you set up your ad, budget and the keywords that you want to use, some will up the “cost per click” minimum based on the popularity of a particular keyword. So your original budget of $1/click can quickly turn into $5/click. You have to approve of this first, of course.

The reason why I love them is because they send a huge amount of traffic to your site. I have noticed this increases the crawl rate and/or search engine ranks of your site. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, most of the traffic does not turn into a profit unless you market a very specific thing like a product, event, class or special discount.

So these are my suggestions! I copied and pasted this list directly from an email I sent to one of my clients, Dorit Brauer, who teaches meditation classes in Pittsburgh and also provides reflexology services. She's awesome, by the way...you always leave with more energy and clarity than when you came. Here's her website: www.DoritBrauer.com

Anywho!

1. Start with a modest budget :: $50/month or $10/week…something manageable

2. Have a very specific ad :: Ex. create a campaign for an upcoming class 2-4 weeks before the class starts or run a special discount on reflexology services.

3. Choose very specific keywords :: Ex. “Meditation classes in Pittsburgh” not “meditation, pittsburgh” or “reflexology in Pittsburgh” not “reflexology”

4. Be prepared to check your campaign everyday/twice a day to make sure your keywords are still active. Google will make your keywords inactive automatically until you up the budget.

5. After a few days you will be able to tell which keywords are working. I have found that even keywords that show up a lot (high number of impressions) but are not clicked will increase your traffic anyway. I think this is because people will go directly to your site and not click on the ad. So I always keep the high impression keywords active.

6. Geo target your keywords to within a radius of your zip code. Obviously, this is so you aren’t marketing your meditation classes or reflexology services to people that can’t use them!

You might have a free google, facebook or Microsoft adwords credit from when you purchased your website hosting. I’ll check to see if that is the case and if they are not expired.

Here are the links to each program:

Google Adwords: http://adwords.google.com
Microsoft Adcenter: https://adcenter.microsoft.com/
Yahoo! Small Business ads: http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/

If all of this is overwhelming or you would rather outsource this, shoot me an email! I have tons of experience micro-managing pay per click ads.