For all the cash that Google makes off Adwords, they certainly aren’t putting a lot of it back into educating people on how to create a successful PPC campaign. While some industries are very advanced, whenever I wander into something a little off the beaten path, as I have this last month with small niche attorneys, I’m shocked how much money people are wasting with a terrible landing page and PPC campaign. By no means am I a landing page expert, but seeing how bad some of the sites out there are, you needn’t be to provide 9 solid landing page and PPC campaign tips.

1. Mismatched URL and Site Topic to User Inquiry

   Many individuals try to create a one-stop shop landing page for a group of leads so they can build links and try to rank one spot naturally. That is fine as long as the topics are narrow enough in focus to where a visitor from either site feels at home. But when you have visitors coming in from related but not identical fields, it is important to consider that you may be losing more PPC conversions than you’re gaining in natural search by having a mismatched URL and landing page focus as compared to the terms you’re targeting.

2. Below the Fold Call To Action

   The call to action is the whole point of a landing page, so why hide it well below the fold where you’re automatically going to lose 30% of visitors.

3. Collecting Unnecessary Data

   Every piece of data you collect in your landing page means fewer submissions. While there is certain information you absolutely must have, collecting unnecessary or redundant data is just throwing money away. In some cases the landing page is asking for the submitters specific address. When it comes to high-dollar time-sensitive lead that you are going to pursue over the phone, there is absolutely no need to collect the specific address. Sending out a piece of snail mail is useless, and so if you’re just trying to figure out which of your subscribers to send the lead to, zip code is plenty. (For that matter you can get rid of the ‘State’ entry as well).

4. No Testimonial

   Testimonials dramatically increase landing page conversions because they indicate to the user that the form is legitimate and completes the promise it makes. It’s obvious that a testimonial can be faked, but a casual internet user doesn’t think quite so cynically and will regard testimonials as a quality assurance indicator.

5. Too Many Calls to Action

   There should be one or a maximum of two calls to action on your landing page. While you might be inclined to think that offering users the opportunity to sign up for your newspaper, give you a call, send you a fax, sign up for your RSS feed are all good things, they create confusion and a paradox of choice for the visitor.

6. PPC Not Directed to Landing Page

   This is about the dumbest mistake possible, yet I see it all the time. You’re bleeding money through a PPC campaign, you’ve created a landing page, but your campaign doesn’t drop the user directly on the page. Instead people often have their highly converting page one or even two clicks away. If you're investing money to convert via a landing page, don't make the visitor work to find it.

7. Call to Action Not Distinguished or Obvious

   Think of your entire landing page and PPC campaign as an elaborate plan to get people to complete one single action. Now that you’re in the right mentality, how dumb is it to leave the call to action button a muted color or otherwise not distinguished. Instead, use an arrow or incorporate a different design element that immediately draws the readers eye to the call to action.

8. Using Flash, Video, or Other 'plug-in required' design elements

   People clicking on a PPC campaign link typically aren’t the most sophisticated internet users. So running a landing page which requires a plug-in is a surefire way to dramatically cut your conversions. Rule of thumb: If your grandma connecting through a dial-up on her Pentium I 586 can't quickly see and complete your call to action, its too complex.

9. Being too cheap with your PPC campaign to target top terms

   Nobody is saying that you need to spend $12.00 a click like some of those mesothelioma attorneys are doing, or even $0.25 cents a click to capture long tail industry terms like texas trucking accident. But often people want to limp into a PPC campaign with only a few hundred dollars and end up bidding ridiculously cheap keywords that do them no good. Spending a few extra cents per visitor is often the best way to ensure a decent return from your campaign.

   No matter whether your goal is to buy a mansion or just to drive some additional leads to your business, a decent landing page and PPC campaign is an essential component of that success. While I want to emphasize that the 9 tips in this article are by no means advanced, they will help someone inexperienced with the art and science of landing pages to get started.

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Lately I've seen a bunch of articles in which the author explains his favorite few tools and why. Rather than duplicate what has already been done well, I thought I'd cover an area that has been my biggest small business hassle as of late, getting a hold of finances and money.

It seems like banking and financial services are either designed for individuals or giant corporations, with very few options for those small business owners in between. Thankfully there are a few good new and old tools and tricks that work especially for the small business owner. I rely pretty heavily on these 10.

1. Mint.com

   Mint is an extremely new online program that quickly integrates your bank accounts and breaks them down in order to show you where you’re spending your money. I’ve only been using this for a couple of weeks and already found myself relying on it heavily to plan out my personal and business savings. As an aside, this service is ridiculously easy to setup, so even if you don’t have a lot of extra time, this one may be worthwhile.

2. The Perfect Calculators

   I’m in love with the CCH Calculators. They’re the small businessman’s version of an actuary. I use them to plan out the feasibility of taking on a new loan, the long-term expected ROI on a short term project, or just to play around with things like my retirement plan. Literally everyone I’ve shared my enthusiasm for these things hasn’t felt the same, so I don’t blame you if you disagree. But I would encourage you to go ahead and spend a few hours with these calculators just because putting hard and fast numbers to your ideas is a good way to weed out the really crummy ones.

3. Quickbooks OE

   This is the mother of all small business finance tools. The online edition is frequently updated and will pull in all of your various business accounts (with the notable exception of PayPal). I use this tool to constantly have great documentation of all our company’s activities and it saves me a lot in year end accounting fees, b/c everything is done for me.

4. Wells Fargo Payroll Services

   Not so much an online tool as an online service, Wells Fargo payroll service is the cheapest on the market (at least among the 5 different services I quoted). Having checks made out and sent through them is not only a lot more professional than signing your own checks, it also saves a ton in end of the year accounting fees because they keep track of all of your withholdings and prepare your quarterly tax returns for you.

5. Continental's Frequent Flyer Program

   I live and work out of Houston (which is Continental Airlines hub) so that program works really well for me, but you can basically find an airline rewards program for whatever company is biggest in your city. I only fly about twice a month, but since I always do it with the same airline that’s enough to get me free first class upgrades almost every time I fly, and I get to bring a free guest on some of my flights. I know that a airline rewards plan isn’t specifically a finance tool, but it is a means that I rely pretty heavily on to make my business’ travel dollars go a lot farther.

6. Basecamp

   I realize that its trite to rely on Basecamp, and I sort of hate the fact that I give them $20 something dollars a month to use their software, but using Basecamp has literally saved our business thousands by keeping us organized. I’d suggest that you setup a number of different projects and different to-do lists for each site rather than trying, as most users do, to utilize just a single to-do list.

7. Freshbooks

   Again, it isn’t original, but it is vital. I used to rely heavily on freshbooks for invoicing and time tracking. While I use the service less now that the company has grown, it remains one of the only tools designed for small business owners that actually works the way its supposed to.

8. Google Docs & Spreadsheets

   Why are you still using MS Word and Excel. If you’re a small business, especially an online business, there’s usually tons of collaboration taking place between people in different offices. I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets on a daily basis to collaborate when researching new domains or website niches, as well as to collectively draw up specs on a new project.

9. My Small Business AMEX Card

   I originally thought that only millionaires had AMEX platinum business cards. Not true. Basically if you have good credit you can get one no matter how small your company is. The benefits are a lot better than any other comparable card in terms of the travel rewards as well as the fact that you get into the executive lounges in all major airports for free (many have free liquor BTW). From a finance perspective, AMEX also prepares a complete end-of-year rundown for you for free which provides you with a good foundation if you plan on doing your own taxes.

10. Top Blogs

    There are a number of really bad small business finance blogs on the internet. Thankfully there are also a few really good ones.

Obviously there are different tools that work for different people and different companies. So take the 10 recommendations I've made with a grain of salt. They've worked for me, but all I can really say is that you should consider giving these a try because I can attest that they're proven techniques for getting a handle on your small business finances.

If you’re an SEO and haven't been hiding in a cave you’ve likely been reading for the past few months about all the benefits of a marriage between SEO and domaining. Despite all the rhetoric, however, nobody has been real forthcoming with practical information about how to actually profitably combine the two fields. So without further adieu I’m going to explain what I believe to be the single most important and practical domaining technique for SEO’s. There will be no theory here, just a plain and simple explanation of how to implement domaining for SEOs.

Exact Match

The “exact match” domain is not a new concept. In fact, it’s the foundation of what domainers have been doing for years. An ‘exact match’ domain simply means that the URL is letter for letter the same as the keyword it is targeting.

So for “Hurricane Insurance” you purchase the URL www.HurricaneInsurance.com (sorry, I already own it).

The reason domainers love exact match domains, is that there are still millions of people out there surfing the interweb who haven’t grown accustomed to using Google or Yahoo! to search for things. These individuals often simply type the keyword into their URL bar (sometimes with or without the “www” or the “.com”. Because browsers fill in the blanks, there are dozens of people who land on www.hurricaneinsurance.com each month simply because it is an exact match domain. Domainers make their money by converting via landing pages on the domain.

So why does all of this matter for SEO-cum-domainers? Because of something called the ‘Google Exact Match Bump’.

The Google Exact Match Bump

SEO aren’t interested in buying up tens of thousands of domains and making a few pennies on each. Instead we specialize in buying a few domains and marching them up the search engines. That’s where exact match domains come in handy.

In addition to picking up a large number of links with keyword anchor text which is itself an exact match, Google treats the URL itself as a relevancy booster. Based on some testing, it is pretty clear that a major indicator of relevancy with search engines (particularly Google) are the words in a URL.

Simply stated, it is a whole lot easier to rank a site that has an exact match URL as compared to one that doesn’t.

Sub-Prime TLD’s

But if you’re considering going out and buying a bunch of high-traffic one and two word generic exact match .com’s in your niche, think again. For established online industries such as porn, dating, real estate, credit, insurance, web hosting, and investing you’re going to start at $100,000 and go well into the millions of dollars.

Thankfully, the Google exact match bump applies in a similar way to other tier one TLD’s. Buying an exact match .org or .net can go for anywhere from 1 to 20% of the value of the .com. While a .net or a .org does not get any type-in traffic, that only matters to domainers. For SEOs who are focused on marching their purchases up the search engine rankings, type-in traffic is so negligible that its almost not worth considering.

Putting it all together

Now that you know that the key to domaining for SEO’s is ‘one and two word generic exact match sub-prime TLD domains’ its time to put it all together. There are two primary ways you can put this information into action, enter proven industries or unproven industries.

Proven industries are like those mentioned above: "buying insurance online" is a proven model as is converting American Express business card leads. There is no question that having your exact match site rank for keywords in those niches is going to bring a big and certain return. Unfortunately, because the return is virtually guaranteed you will have to pay a premium for domains. A .net exact match domain in an industry as competitive as insurance or credit is going to go for the full 20% of the .com.

On the other hand, you can take this information and apply it to an unproven or semi-proven industry. This is an option if you have insider information and not a lot of capital to throw around. For example, if you have a friend in the wine business you can target obscure wine terms for your exact match purposes. Or, if you have a friend that is a lawyer you can ask him or her about obscure high-margin legal work. For example, I recently helped an attorney friend acquire domains related to Jones Act maritime law cases and trucking accident cases. Not only did I have no idea that those were lucrative leads, but it turns out not a lot of other SEOs and domainers did either, since some pretty decent exact match sub-prime TLD domains were available as freebies.

Conclusion

Whether you decide to utilize the one and two word generic exact match sub-prime TLD technique (Geez that’s a mouthful) to enter into established markets or unproven markets will depend upon your access to capital and aspirations.

Even after this, you’re going to need solid original design, top-notch content, and excellent on-page SEO. None of that is changed by the fact that you adopt this technique. The bottom line is that this technique is a practical and effective integration of the benefits of domaining with the traditional strengths of SEOs, and it’s an approach that I know flat-out works.

Whether you’re flying half way around the world to close a new big development contract or just driving a few hours to your local tropical resort, most of us in the blogging / webmastering / SEO world are increasingly mobile. As my frequent flyer miles have climbed over the past couple of years I’ve found that there are a few steps you can take to minimize the inconveniences of traveling and the costs it imposes on your business. Rather than write about the latest and greatest technologies and gadgets, the following tips are all things that I actually do and find beneficial on a daily basis, so I can feel confident in saying that they’d help you remain both connected and mobile as well.

1. Buy A Crackberry.

Yeah, I know its annoying to watch the a-hole in the car next to you trying to read his emails while driving, but a Blackberry (or Treo) really will revolutionize the way you’re able to do business. Rather than having to drop everything and open up the laptop to see if that important email has come in, you can just quickly check it on the blackberry. Its especially helpful if part of your team is on the other side of the world, because it gives you the freedom to go out and enjoy your evenings without worrying about holding your team up as they wait for your response.

2. Stick With One Airline

I’m usually skeptical of brand loyalty, after all Shell and Exxon both provide the same product so why pick one over the other? But in the case of airlines, if you repeatedly fly with the same airline your leverage increases dramatically. By no means to I fly every week, but just because I always fly the same airline, I never have to wait in security lines, get my baggage before other customers, and when something goes wrong I get shifted over to another flight while others get delayed. Regular customers often don’t realize that it only takes a few flights a year before these benefits start accruing, so when you can, pick an airline and stick with it.

3. Shift To Online Apps

Let’s face it, webware is still years away from being a full replacement to your laptop. But there are a lot of things that webware can do just as well as traditional software, while providing you the mobility to access the information from wherever. Try to move as much of your day to day operations to online webware, and you will be surprised how often you need to access something quickly and don’t have access to your laptop.

4. Get A Garmin

Webmasters can navigate the internet superhighway with ease, but when it comes to a regular highway we’re often lost. I used to think that Garmin’s were useless and unnecessary gadgets. Now that I have one, I can’t believe the amount of time it has saved me when running errands for our business or making appointments.

5. Get eFax

The fax is perhaps the worst technology ever invented. They never work right and are slow as hell. Unfortunately, not everyone has jumped on the scanning trend, so if you want to do business today you need a fax number. The best way to be able to send and receive faxes for your customers but retain your mobility is with a company like eFax. There are a number of these companies, eFax is just the one I’ve used before. But its remarkable how much better it is to be able to send and receive faxes through email rather than being tethered to your phone line.

Domaining and SEO have been around forever. But for whatever reason, they seem not to have found each other until this year. Combining the two offers the possibility of a lot bigger profits, but it also is going to require all of us (SEOs and Domainers alike) to change the way we approach the game.

The relative advantages that SEOs and Domainers each bring to the table are pretty obvious. As Brian Provost has already noted:

"...SEO’s completely house Domainers in low-scale development. Domainers completely house SEO’s on scalability, the lower level of resources required to scale, and upside on liquidity events."

From an SEOs perspective, the key to running a successful SEO/Domaining combo company is to maintain the quality of your SEO work and combining it with the dramatic scale of domaining operations. Put simply, you gotta get big without getting crappy. As I see it, the best way to accomplish both is to automate your site development process to a degree that most SEOs haven't in the past.

That means we SEOs need to take some, though certainly not all, of the personalization out of your development. Here's an initial list of components to focus on automating:

1. Design:

A lot of SEOs want to build a custom site every single time they decide to develop. To get some scalability, however, we all need to take a page from the playbook of Domainers who have mastered the art of throwing the same annoying landing page on literally thousands of sites. I'm not saying that we need cookie cutter sites, but working from a single template (there are tons of quality freebie templates available) and simply tweaking it rather than starting anew, changes your dev schedule from 1 month to 1 day.

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Google's rumored (and now confirmed) purchase of FeedBurner has gotten plenty of press, but for all the wrong reasons. While everyone is weighing in as to whether the purchase is more about mindshare or monetizing RSS feeds, there has been very little said about the implications of this move on the future of SEO in general and link building specifically.

Now that this deal has gone through, Google has gained access to millions of pieces of user-data which collectively is a very reliable separate indicator of user preferences. Coupled with their SE algorithm, these RSS subscriber figures will provide Google with a set of end-user preferences which is far more comprehensive and thus difficult for SEO's to game.

For example, if a site has a top-notch backlink footprint but less than a dozen feed subscribers it's a certain red flag to GOOG that the site might not be as trustworthy as its backlink profile suggests.

If Google is planning on incorporating feed subscription figures and Google Toolbar browsing data to go along with with a site's backlink footprint into SE rankings, we're going to be looking at an entirely new and far more complex game for SEO's and traditional "link builders".

While this change, if it occurs at all, is still six months out, now is the time to start considering the implications of this shift and how it will affect ranking strategies. I can think of a few things we're likely to see the day after this shift in the algo is made public:

+TLA Feeds - "Publishers rent out your RSS subscriptions"

+PayPerTraffic - "Rent regular traffic by users with active Google Toolbars"

+Accessibility becomes a more central component in SE rankings as having your site render properly in obscure browsers means more feed subscribers.

+Under the table RSS subscription rings replacing Social Media voting rings

+Every Webmaster switches their RSS feed to Feedburner

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but as I see it, those of us that make a living off of ranking well are about to have to step up our game.