More business from Web Traffic

Do you work on your business as well as working in it? Vernon and I do!

We find it’s vital to take time out, to network with other Entrepreneurs, learn from successful business leaders. This use so we can develop ideas for a better business.

An excellent way to gather these ideas is to network with other Entrepreneurs. It’s also a great to listen to the very successful business leaders and learn from their experiences.

When you get the opportunity to put both of these together then it’s an opportunity not to be missed.

And so it was that we found ourselves at Chris Cardell’s Entrepreneurs Summit for the second year running.

For three days, we were immersed in some stunningly great presentations from some of the worlds leading entrepreneurs. The topics covered numerous strategies for growing your business and immunising it against the recession. The buzz from the room and in the coffee breaks was extraordinary.

Chris has been a mentor of both Vernon and I ever since our first fledgling business was established. We hooked up with him on his Ultimate Marketing course many years ago and have never looked back. Along the way he has introduced us to many influential marketing geniuses such as Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer and Perry Marshall.

This year’s summit did not disappoint. The speakers included Doug Richards (Dragon’s Den), the aforementioned Bill Glazer, Sahar Hashemi (Coffee Republic), Ari Galper (the King of Online Conversation) and Barry Shamis.

The speakers were excellent as were all the entrepreneurs we met throughout the weekend.

It’s so easy in the current economic climate to get worn down by the constant negative messages from our media.

However meeting and talking with so many fellow Entrepreneurs was a real shot in the arm.

It’s the Entrepreneur’s that will guide us out of this recession despite the best efforts of our political leaders to tie us down!

I look forward to seeing them all again in 2010!

When you’re setting up a major adwords account even the new version of adwords editor can be a bit frustrating.

Why doesn’t the editor provide options to control what happens when you import data?

Currently the editor just adds the data to the stuff that’s already there. Obviously one could delete all the old content before importing but this seems a bit unnecessary. A replace option would be a great option - particularly if it were intelligent and you could set rules like only replacing a phrase when the new phrase contained a phrase that was already present; or add a single keyword onto the end of all the selected keyphrases. This would make it much easier to adding a suffix to a set of keywords that’s already in an adgroup is a relatively common operation.

What do you think ?

I was reviewing some of our older webpages today and generally freshening up some of the content when I came across some excellent pages on SEO that I’d forgotten we had! So I thought I’d give them a quick mention on a brief blog post.

Read more on SEO Bits and Bobs!

Today if you logged into your Adwords Editor you were probably prompted to upgrade to their latest version.

This new version has some nice new features that really help improve the Editor significantly.

Read more on Adwords Editor Enhancements

Oh thank your Google.

Finally the people over at Adwords have done something about that really annoying Search Query Report.

Until recently it was a real tease. It “almost” told you something really useful but not quite. That was until now.

Read more on Search Query Report gets a much needed Face Lift!

Spent some time recently looking at Colour Psychology after talking to some marketing professionals.

For those who haven’t come across it the principle is that certain colours prompt certain reactions. You’ll have come across many in everyday life. For instance

• Yellow –warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness
• Red –excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed, danger.
• Blue –(listed as the most popular color) trust, reliability, belonging, coolness.
• Orange — playfulness, warmth, vibrant
• Green — nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance
• Pink — soft, sweet, nurture, security
• Purple –royal, spirituality, dignity
• White –pure, virginal, clean, youthful, mild.
• Black –sophistication, elegant, seductive, mystery
• Gold — prestige, expensive
• Silver — prestige, cold, scientific

I don’t know whether it’s cause or effect but lots of bridal wear is White. Most of the cards for Valentine’s day have Red in them. Many companies use Blue hoping that they will be seen as dependable, confident etc.

If you want to read more go here….http://www.precisionintermedia.com/use-color.html

However some try to extend into shades of particular colours : going so far as to try and suggest that light brown means something different from dark brown..

Whilst I’m prepared to agree that a good deal of the basic stuff is reasonable and can be seen in every day life - its difficult to avoid the conclusion that some of this is nearer to a crude marketing attempt to create a spurious expertise and differentiation based on pseudo science..Good psychologists will avoid describing anything as as fact that can’t be proven!

People just ain’t that stupid… you can create a visual effect and hope to suggest something - but most people will look for supporting evidence…especially before spending money.

Back in January I blogged about my early experiences of using Twitter and whether I thought it was worth using Twitter for business.

The post received a lot of comments and clearly a lot of people had an opinion they wanted to share!

Now some months on I am still using Twitter and I have developed a technique that is working very well for the KKSmarts business.

Read more on Twitter as a Serious Business Tool

In a recent blog post Seth Godin makes the important point that “expanding the market” and “grabbing an increased share of the market” are different, and have different costs. Expanding the market Seth says is much more expensive…than grabbing market share.

However this would seem to be based on the potential fallacy that once someone has a need then their perception of the way to satisfy that need is aligned with the market segmentation that the industry suggests. Market segmentation is only a snapshot and one of many ways to divide up the needs and wants we all have..

Isn’t the customer always right and everything a shade of grey ?

Increasing sales by either method is great - you just have to test which is easier.

One of the easiest ways to make your Adwords campaigns more profitable is to simply cut out the wastage.

Every account has keywords that are simply not bringing in the business and they are dragging your campaigns down.

It’s easy to find these keywords using Read more on Cutting the Wastage

I had an interesting question recently from one of the visitors to the KKSmarts website.

“Mike, you have lots of tips for Adwords throughout the KKSmarts website. What would you say are the best ones to read?”

Now that’s a question and a half. So it got me thinking and I decided the answer was Read more on Best Adwords Advice