Some people achieve it more by luck than judgement but once they achieve it they certainly enjoy the results!

However, you don’t have to trust to luck. There are some clear guidelines that you can follow that will help ensure your [...]]]> Writing Ads in Google Adwords that are highly clickable is one of the keys to success.

Some people achieve it more by luck than judgement but once they achieve it they certainly enjoy the results!

However, you don’t have to trust to luck. There are some clear guidelines that you can follow that will help ensure your Ad gets a high click through rate.

In this recent broadcast, I explain these guidelines and show you how to write Ads that gets clicks.

Pless play to listen.

Just like last month it was well attended and the questions were great.

I recorded the webinar for those that couldn’t make it.

The scope was again broad with some of the keypoints covering topics such as:

Once again we hosted a Q&A session on Website Promotion.

Just like last month it was well attended and the questions were great.

I recorded the webinar for those that couldn’t make it.

The scope was again broad with some of the keypoints covering topics such as:

• SEO
• Adwords Click Fraud
• Facebook Fan Pages for Business
• Chat Boxes in Emails

If you have any questions or feedback on todays call please post a comment below.

They have a service based business and they wondered whether Adwords was more geared towards businesses that sold commodities rather than services.

You can hear my answer in the video below:

The questions you raised about website promotion were great and I hope I was able to answer them all for you.

I recorded the webinar and so I thought those that missed it might like to hear what we talked about!

The questions covered everything from SEO through to Adwords [...]]]> Thank you to everyone who attended today’s webinar.

The questions you raised about website promotion were great and I hope I was able to answer them all for you.

I recorded the webinar and so I thought those that missed it might like to hear what we talked about!

The questions covered everything from SEO through to Adwords and we even touched on topics like web development. Quite a broad spectrum of issues to address!

If there is enough interest, I’ll do this again soon.

I can pour over web stats for hours whilst I try to work out what my web traffic is doing!

You can get some fascinating insights into your website by looking at how people find you and what they do once they arrive.

If you are [...]]]> I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a junkie for web statistics.

I can pour over web stats for hours whilst I try to work out what my web traffic is doing!

You can get some fascinating insights into your website by looking at how people find you and what they do once they arrive.

If you are serious about your website, then getting good at web stats is a given. Luckily it doesn’t have to involve lots of dry reading of “how to manuals”. There is an alternative.

Enter Web Analytics TV from Google.

Hosted on Youtube (where else would Google host it!), this channel features Google’s resident Analytics experts answering your questions.

Actually, that’s one of the real powers of these videos. It’s the fact that they are answering real questions.

In the video below you will hear experts Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski answer questions such as :

1. How can you track the traffic from Social Media websites
2. Why is it that the number of clicks and the number of visits can vary for Adwords data? Surely one click equals one visit?
3. Can you improve your website SEO ranking by using Google Analytics data sharing options!

It’s certainly worth a look.

If you want to ask your own questions, then follow this link: http://sn.im/nmwa

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just type in the country where you are, the amount you want to spend, the service you want and then sit back whilst someone finds all the people that fit your needs.

Guess what. You can!

Whilst it is still [...]]]> So where do you find Google Adwords certified professionals and companies?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just type in the country where you are, the amount you want to spend, the service you want and then sit back whilst someone finds all the people that fit your needs.

Guess what. You can!

Whilst it is still in beta version, Google have launched their Google Professionals Search.

It does exactly what it says on the tin. It finds professionals based on the criteria that you give it.

At the time I am writing this, the results are limited to the US only but I’m sure they will roll it out to the rest of the world as the beta is tested.

One of the extra features is that once you’ve performed a search you can then further refine the search using a list of additional services that the agencies might offer.

So if for example, you would like your Adwords Professional to also offer you Web Design services then you can select web design as an additional service and the results are filtered to only agencies who also offer this service.

What isn’t clear to me yet is how the companies listed are ranked.

Obviously you would want to be in the first few results if you were going to have any chance of landing a client. However how you get there is at the moment a mystery.

In fact, how you register to be in results at all is not clear to me as it hasn’t rolled out to the UK yet.

Certainly worth watching though – both for people looking for Adwords Professionals and Adwords Professionals themselves!

Final Word of Caution

Just be careful when selecting an Adwords Qualified Company. It doesn’t always mean that the person you get managing your account has got the Google Adwords certification. You can find out more in my earlier article, Adwords Qualified Companies – Are they really Qualified?

At KKSmarts it’s probably been one of our best years which is very encouraging considering the economic climate that the media would have us believe exists.

If I were to list some of the [...]]]> Well, 2009 is almost over so as I’m sure we all do, I’m just reflecting over the year and on what’s been achieved.

At KKSmarts it’s probably been one of our best years which is very encouraging considering the economic climate that the media would have us believe exists.

If I were to list some of the major items they would probably be these.

Twitter

As many of you will know I started to dabble in Twitter at the start of this year. I was very skeptical about all the claims of massive free traffic to your website and I think I was proved right. It is all hype!

However there is considerable value in being part of the Twitter community. I’ve certainly made some excellent contacts and found excellent blogs that I may have otherwise missed.

My posts on Twittering (or is that Tweeting!) can be found here:

Should I use Twitter for Business

Twitter as a serious Business Tool

Twitter Spam!

The New Google Adwords Interface

Well Google finally released their new interface in 2009. In fact I think it’s fair to say they are still releasing it because they continue to releases updates. However the main changes went live earlier this year.

Has it been a success?

Well I suppose that depends on what their goals were!

The interface is better in many ways but they still have to work on the performance. It’s painfully slow sometimes.

I’d really like to see more support giving the Adwords Editor so that more of us could work offline. It would also help Google free up bandwidth. Well that’s just my theory.

As you know I thought the recent upgrade to Adwords Editor was a job half done. Although back in May they did add some nice features to the Adwords Editor.

Chris Cardell Entrepreneur Summit

This was the first year I attended. It was certainly worth the money. It’s really important sometimes to just take time out to work ON your business rather than FOR your business.

If you missed my post about this year’s summit, then here it is:

Chris Cardell 2009 Entrepreneur Summit

And in 2010?

So what have we got planned in 2010? I can’t tell you yet but I’m VERY excited about something we are planning to launch very soon. We’ve been working on it almost solidly for 3 months. More soon.

I hope your 2010 proves to be a pivotal year.

The poster was trying to remove the date from his blog posts. Why?

I don’t know about you but I find it really annoying when I’m reading any blog post (and articles as well) that don’t have a date they were written.

Certainly [...]]]> I recently followed a post over at the Wordpress.com forum that had me somewhat bemused.

The poster was trying to remove the date from his blog posts. Why?

I don’t know about you but I find it really annoying when I’m reading any blog post (and articles as well) that don’t have a date they were written.

Certainly in my field of Website Marketing the information changes very rapidly. Anything written even just a few months ago could be old news and possibly inaccurate now.

I frequently check the date something has been written when it’s suggesting a new development in my field and I’m sure other people must do as well.

So I’m really can’t understand why anyone would want to hide the date that their blog post was written.

Anyone know why someone would want to do this?

Answers below

Industry standards suggest that most of us take less than 8 seconds to decide if we are going to stay on a new website or hit the back button and try a different link.

Those [...]]]> If there is one thing about your site that is bound to put your potential customers off it is a slow site.

Industry standards suggest that most of us take less than 8 seconds to decide if we are going to stay on a new website or hit the back button and try a different link.

Those 8 seconds includes the time it takes your webpage to load!

So keeping that load time down to the minimum has to be one of your priorities for your webpages. Even the best web copy isn’t going to save you if the page doesn’t load fast enough for your visitor to even start to read it.

So, how do you know if your site is slow or fast? How do you find out if you have any slow problem pages?

AND once you know you have a slow page, how do you speed it up!!

Introducing Webmaster’s new Site Performance Tool.

Google just launched their new Site Performance tool. (Here’s the link to the official announcement).

This new feature is on the Labs item of your Webmaster Dashboard. See the image below

Once you click on it, you will get something that looks like this:

The new page tells you how your site is performing overall against other websites and it lists the pages that it feels need attention.

It even suggests what changes you can make to improve the performance problems on your webpages.

What’s interesting though is that I just ran it on the KKSmarts website and the main item it complained about was Google Analytics!

Either their Site Performance tool needs further tuning or Google Analytics needs some work. Either way, it’s a slightly embarrassing result for Google

Try it today and post a comment below with your results. It would be very interesting to compare results and to also see if it also complains about Analytics on your site.

For those who are [...]]]> Google released an upgrade to their Adwords Editor recently and whilst some of the changes are welcomed I can’t help thinking that the job has been left unfinished. It suggests to me that the Editor has a limited life now and that they hope we will all use their new interface instead.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Editor, it is free software from Google that you install onto your PC. With it you can download your campaigns, make changes and upload again.

It has been a blessing to Adwords Professionals like me because it allowed you to make lots of changes faster.
Google’s aim with their new interface was to make life easier for people and speed up the process of making changes to your account. I suspect they expected that the Adwords Editor would become redundant and maybe that’s why it has been overlooked for a while now.

However, they have now released a new version and they have addressed some of the issues that needed to be address.

For example, you can now set up location targeting in the editor. Albeit somewhat basic it is certainly better than the old method of creating a campaign in the Editor, uploading it and then making sure you remembered to add the location targeting elements through the online interface.

What I find frustrating though is the opportunity missed.

You see a lot of the fields in the Editor have different names for the setting than they do in the new Interface. For example: in the new interface they now use the word Eligible for the Status field. The Editor still uses the status of Active.

You might think I’m being picky but to me it clearly points to a lack of care (or maybe interest) in the product. Even in their release notes they state that they have updated some of the field to make them consistent with the new interface. That shows that they deliberately decided not to update all the fields. Why?

OK. Rant over. I’ll just go back to mentally translating what each field means in the Editor. I’m a long way from giving that software up and moving completely online. The new interface may have some wonderful features but it is still TOO SLOW!