by Heather Lutze, CEO/Founder Lutze Consulting

I had the pleasure of interviewing a member of the Sedo.com Team in Boston at the PPC Summit (ppcsummit.com). Matthew Rosebrook, Domain Broker, sat down with me and spoke about what Sedo does and how this can be a big add-on to your current internet marketing efforts.

In the early years, everyone ran around with their heads cut off buying domains buy the dozens. I had web design friends who bought thousands of domains hoping to fund their retirement funds with one “lucky” domain name. They wished at night before they went to bed that a corporate fairy would grant them a large price buyout for that domain they had bought. Well years later, we have either chosen not to renew those domains or we are still hoping to a shred of hope that one of those domains will cash in.

A new way of thinking may be to consider buying domain names that match our top paid search terms. If over time you know what keywords in paid search are getting you the most conversions, then you also know you would like not to pay for those click forever. How can I push forward and keep my terms converting for my company and not pay top dollar for every click. Sedo would like us to think of buying your keywords in domain name fashion in TLD (top level domains) as a part of your internet marketing strategy. They argue that adding these domain to your keyword arsenal will enhance the search engines ability to associate your site with your converting terms in search engine results. So for example, if my number one search tern is “internet marketing denver” then I would try and buy www.InternetMarketingDenver.com as one of my own domains. I would permanently forward this domain to my main web site at www.lutzeconsulting.com.

i hear a lot of people say that “all the good one’s are gone”. That’s just not true. I have been amazed over and over the top level keywords for our clients that continue to available through standard domain registrars like godaddy.com etc. Well when you cannot get that “perfect domain” from a registrar, then you need to pull in the big guns to get you the keyword domain name that is most important to your company. From vodka.com to other highly prized domain names as well as a highly prized domain by just your company, Sedo can anonymously broker the domain name and get you the best possible price. So don’t despair if you cannot get the keyword domain you want, ask sedo for a bit of help.

Thank you Matthew for your time and explanation of your services and how we can keep thinking ahead of what to do next on our internet marketing efforts.

Company Information:

About Sedo - direct from www.sedo.com

With more than 500,000 members around the world trading domains in more than 21 languages, Sedo stands alone as the world’s only global domain marketplace. It may be close to impossible to directly register good domains anymore but the Sedo domain marketplace offers the world’s largest selection of premium domains with more than 9 million available for sale!

Sedo offers our users all the tools needed to buy and sell domains among a community of users stretching around the world, including domain appraisals, brokerage services, promotion and last, but not least, Sedo’s popular domain parking program. More than 3 million domains use Sedo’s parking programs to earn revenue while promoting its sale.

Recently celebrating our fifth anniversary, Sedo has experienced remarkable success establishing a global domain name marketplace and expanding into a wide selection of domain name services. Currently employing close to 160 employees from more than 25 countries at offices located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cologne, Germany, Sedo relies upon the diversity of our employees to continue extending the reach of our services to anyone who has an internet connection, regardless of language or location.

Numbers and facts (As of: 1st Feb 2007): Domain transaction volume per month: > $3 million Number of members: 500,000 Number of domains in our database: 9,000,000 Number of parked domains: 3,000,000 Number of domains sold per month: > 1,500

by Heather Lutze, CEO/Founder Lutze Consulting

 

 PPCPC 004 - Tools you use - SEM in A Box [37:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As Pay Per Click or PPC account managers the amount of services available to help us improve our account performance is tremendous and can be overwhelming. Chris Upkes was kind enough to sit down with me to talk about Adapt Technologies product called SEM In A Box at the PPC Summit in Los Angeles. This service provides account managers a wide variety of services to keep an close eye on paid search activities in Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Company Profile From Their Site
The corporate mission at Adapt Technologies, Inc. is to provide do-it-yourself marketers, SEM agencies, and consultants with complete self-service search engine campaign management software as an online service for a low, flat monthly fee. Founded in 2005, Adapt has deep roots in the search marketing and ecommerce industries. The management team, engineers, designers, and search engine marketing specialists at Adapt are highly experienced in developing marketer-focused solutions to internet marketing challenges, and come fromleading universities and Internet companies including Caltech, Google, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Amazon.com.

Managing paid search campaigns is complex, and becoming even more so as the marketplace grows. For the most part, marketers can bid on any keywords that they would like their company name to appear alongside next to in search results. These keywords need to be relevant to the product or service the marketer is promoting. Due to the precise nature of search engine marketing, marketers are encouraged to bid on any and all relevant keyword/phrase variations (even misspellings!) to ensure that their ad appears whenever a search for that specific keyword phrase is conducted. Marketers’ “keyword portfolios” can grow to the tens of thousands because of this keyword expansion phenomenon, especially for companies with many products and/or services.

The position of a given ad in the keyword search results is partly determined by the amount of a keyword bid. The higher the bid, the higher an ad is likely to be placed in results. Hundreds of thousands of marketers take advantage of the various engines’ PPC advertising programs, so competition on keywords can be fierce and keyword prices can become inflated.

Adapt SEM is a full-featured, self-service suite of paid search campaign management tools, available at http://www.adapt.com. The software is a web-based application which imports performance data from marketers’ Google and Yahoo! accounts and compares their actual performance against advertiser-defined goals. Adapt SEM uses this analysis to prepare key recommendations to improve performance.

Adapt has three programs:

• Small Business - $199.00/Month
  • Bid Optimization
  • Ad Testing & Optimization
  • Keyword Suggestions
  • Performance Reporting
  • Unlimited Email Support
• Professional - $299/Month
  • All Small Business Features, plus
  • Competitor Monitoring
  • Yahoo! Search Marketing Campaign Converter
  • Advanced Reporting, including Performance Explorer (beta)
  • Unlimited Email & Phone Support

• Agency - $199/Month Per Client
  • All Professional Features, plus
  • Simple Account Status Summary Dashboard
  • Customizable Client Portals with Campaign Stats & Reports
  • Unlimited Secure Employee & Client Logins
  • Unlimited Email & Phone Support
  • † $199 applies to Small Business accounts. $299 for Professional. Minimum 3 clients to qualify for Agency.

Chris, thank you again for your time. Best of luck with your great tools. They have opened a window of information for paid search advertisers and this is just one more tool we can use.

by Heather F. Lutze, Owner/Founder

In my quest to increase my internet marketing conference speaker experience, I would like to introduce myself, Heather Lutze, for your next event. As “The Click Diva” I can entertain and educate your attendees on the latest search engine marketing, paid search and search engine optimization presenter topics. As your internet marketing speaker, I would make sure your session was filled with humor, great “take away” information they can apply right away and a custom web site especially designed for your event. For more information on hiring Heather Lutze, Internet Marketing Speaker and Internet Marketing Presenter, please call 1-888-588-9326. You can also visit our Speaker’s Kit page at Looking forward to speaking at your next event.

Heather Lutze Presenting at PPC Summit in Chicago 2007.

Visit Heather’s podcast for the latest in Paid Search Advertiser and Service provider interviews and information. Stop paying for click and start paying for buyers!.

by Heather Lutze, CEO/Founder Lutze Consulting

 

 PPCPC003 Landing Pages Redux [37:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the world of Pay Per Click marketing, so many terms are thrown around in reference to strategy like ROI, CPA and Landing Page. I often get the question, “What is a landing page? Is this not my home page of my site?”. The answer to these questions are YES. You can use your home page as your “landing page” but is that the most targeted experience you can give a user from a paid click. Often times the homepage is not built for conversion purposes. It may give the visitor all the breadth of your offering, all your navigation elements and some basic text on your company but is this giving a specific, relevant result from a paid click? At this point you are asking paid click visitors to make a decision on “What do I do now?”. This may cost you valuable seconds of an already very short decision making process. The easier and quicker a searcher can get the information they are looking for, the more satisfied the searcher will be overall. As an advertiser, you get a better chance of a bookmark or a conversion from that click you just invested.

A landing page can be any page within your web site or an orphaned page or separate page from your primary navigation that gives users a directed and conversion oriented experience to take action. Ahh, . . . here is the great debate. Do I offer navigation on these special pages or do I try to get them to convert on that page. The answer is YES again. Try testing both strategies and seeing which one is more compelling to the searcher. We have found that the more complicated of a service offering you have, the more you will have to educate them before they buy. This may require you to include navigation on your landing page. If you have a simple single purchase item to sell, driving them to a no navigation page and giving them everything they need to know is possibly the best user experience.

Do I need landing pages? Ask yourself some basic questions first:

1. Do I have a complex or long sales cycle or a simple one off retail item(s)?
2. Do I have an “internet only” incentive I can test on my landing pages?
3. What action do I want them to take when they get to my landing page?
   • Email signup, white paper download, bookmark on page? Know your intent.
   • Tell them what and how you want them to take action? ” Sign Up for Newsletter for 10% Off”.
4. Do I have the resources to build these landing pages? In-house or outsource.
5. Can I host these landing pages on my current server?
6. Do I need a third party landing page solution to help me with landing page variations? i.e. Marketo, Vertser, Offermatica etc.
7. And many more. Listen to this podcast for further clarification.

This podcast is an interview with landing page expert Mary Kingsley Huffman, Executive Vice President of Ionic Media. Mary works with clients to build specific landing page strategies and testing methods for greater conversion from their paid search investments. We sat down for an interview in Los Angeles, CA at the PPC Summit event  to talk about ”What a landing page really means?” and how to get started utilizing this methodology as part of your paid search programs. I wanted to specifically keep the interview at a basic Landing Page 101 level. We will continue to build upon this introduction in coming podcasts with Mary Kingsley Huffman.

Mary Kingsley Huffman is a founding Partner at Ionic Media, and heads our Usability & Conversion Improvement & Online Marketing Practices. She speaks regularly on the topics of landing page development and testing, B2C marketing and lead generation campaigns. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Overture Services. While at Overture, she was responsible for the acquisition marketing and communication departments, leading all advertiser acquisition efforts and customer communications.

Prior to Overture, Mary was an Engagement Manager in the London office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in marketing solutions. Mary also led marketing efforts for student loans at Wells Fargo Bank, expanding the Bank’s market into 9 states. Mary has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from UCLA.

Thank you again Mary for your time and expert advise on this subject. Mary Huffman can be reached at mhuffman@ionicmedia.com.

by Heather Lutze, CEO/Founder Lutze Consulting

 

 What Is Up with the Ants? [3:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ok, I will explain. If you have visited my web site http://www.lutzeconsuting.com, you will see I have many graphics utilizing the symbols of jelly beans and ants. Why would I use this concept to explain internet marketing? Well, in short, I saw an ad a long time ago for a traditional marketing agency utilizing candy and the laws of attraction. So I started playing with concepts like “candy to babies” and “shoppers coming to Wal-Mart at the Holidays” as well as “ants to candy”. I wanted to give a visual description of what Search Engine Marketing looks like and how to “attract” the right customers. Ants are highly intelligent colonies that work as a group. They hunt, tend family, have workers, security and many more highly intelligent organizational ways in which they run their colonies. Then I put together “search and ants”. This might work. I then hired a conceptual artist David Tejada to put my concept into reality. So thus was the birth of our concept for our web site and our blog graphic design. Later, I came across this amazing podcast recently by RadioLab-There is No Lord Of The (Fire) Flies. This podcast reinforces my concept of attraction of customers. In this segment, they speak to groups and group behavior. They also talk about Google and search behavior on the internet.

Photos From RadioLab Show Notes:

Home Sweet Home: A view from the ‘nest area of Deborah Gordon’s laboratory ant colony.

How does the colony get the right number of foragers to your picnic? Ants working for the colony as foragers, combing over an apple in the laboratory ant colony.

Photo credit: Shia Levitt

Great reading tip on this subject:

• Steven’s Johnson’s Book: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

• Deborah Gordon’s Book: Ants At Work: How An Insect Society Is Organized

• Steven Strogatz’s Book: Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order

I am always looking for new “attraction” analogies that I can use on my web site and blog. I am hoping to change them out by seasons. For example, “Valentines, candy and lovers” or “St. Patrick’s Day and Beer”. Ok, I know it’s like Google’s logo, but I promise to be original in my own way. You know the cute logo’s with graphics they publish on the front of Google.com. Anyway, please send me your thoughts to hlutze@lutzeconsulting.com. I would welcome any suggestions on this theme.

By Heather Lutze, Owner/Founder - Lutze Consulting LLC

It has been my great privilege to be a featured speaker at PPC Summit events across the US in 2007. After our first two successful events in Chicago and New York, PPC Summit is going strong with two more events in Los Angeles on September 24 and 25 and our final event of 2007 in November in San Francisco. Most of the podcast interviews you are listening to are recorded live a these Pay Per Click Workshop events. This purely education event is unique event in that is gives PPC advertisers an venue to sharpen their paid search skills as well as network with other PPC advertisers. As a lead trainer, I teach the “Tools You Can Use” workshop, “Introduction to Paid Search Marketing” workshop and the “Meet the Engines: Yahoo! Search Marketing” workshop and moderate a Business to Business Panel discussion group.

An interesting forum post I found recently spoke of the differences between SES and PPC Summit. Let’s just say SES (Search Engine Strategies Conference) leads you to a buffet when you are hungry, but only let’s you smell the feast. PPC Summit gives you the food and tells you how to eat it, one course at a time. SES is well known for posing interesting topics and philosophical internet marketing concepts and “oh here is my card, give me a call if you want to know more” strategy. They want you to get excited about what you are hearing and then call the speaker to hire them for their services. PPC Summit events offer the attendees real educational workshops that you can take back to your office for immediate implementation. All the speakers at the PPC Summit events are working in the PPC space and work with clients everyday to tackle PPC challenges. These presenters are given specific instruction to NOT self-promote, they are asked to “train” not “sell”. This is the very fundamental difference in these two events.

PPC Summits are designed as How To workshops that teach you how to better manage your PPC campaigns. The focus is solidly on advertiser education: how to spend less money, more effectively, with better results.

Summit Description

In these interactive, two day summits, you will be introduced to strategies and skills that are the foundation of successful pay per click marketing.

PPC Summits are designed to help you and the people at your firm become the savvy search engine advertisers you know you must be in order to maximize your pay per click opportunities, out perform your competitors, and build your business.

These Summits are designed for people who are active learners and want to know EVERYTHING about pay per click marketing

Who Should Attend Webmasters, Website Owners, Web Marketers, Search Engine Marketers, Internet Consultants and Strategists, CEOs, CMOs, Marketing Execs, Brand Managers, Ad Execs, AMs and AEs, Media Directors, Buyers, Planners, Product Managers, Solution Providers, Creative Directors, Etailers, Retailers, Manufacturers, Lead Generators, Affiliates etc.

Our next event is coming up in Los Angeles, CA on September 24th and 25th, 2007.

 

Held at the elegant Omni Los Angeles Hotel at California Plaza!

Register For PPC Summit Events

If you are planning on attending a PPC Summit event, email at hlutze@lutzeconsutling.com and we can meet in person!

 

What happens AFTER someone clicks on your paid search ads? This data can often be the make or break of your paid search campaigns. You can gain great insight into your visitor behavior and other vital information from your hosting information analysis often provided from your site hosting provider. However, this information is often lacking substance and meaning in if not connected with your paid search accounts. The information that is provided to you with your web site hosting account are not all created equal and do not often give you the data you can take back to improve your paid search campaigns.

Google Analytics is currently FREE to advertisers and can be found at http://analytics.google.com. This invaluable tool, configured correctly, can help you bridge the gab between a paid search click and what happens after the click. Great reporting, geo-graphic tracking, search engine traffic and much more. Taking the time to configure Google Analytics correctly and getting is brining in real-time data from your web site will help you successfully leverage your paid search campaigns to greater success.

Timothy Seward, CEO of ROI Revolution, was kind enough to offer his time to be interviewed on the topic of Google Analytics. His company helps businesses to properly configure Google analytics to give them the data they need and find vital to keeping track of marketing expenses on and offline. His company offers weekly webinars at http://www.roirevolution.com on Google Analytics and other advance Analytics training courses. The webinar is called “How to Kick Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising Into Overdrive in 3 Months with Google Analytics”. He is also a well known speaker at many paid search events including the Pay Per Click Summit events in 2007.

The take away I want you to get from this interview is that if you go to the effort of configuring Google Analytics, it is so important that you put into action the lessons and habits you are learning from your customers. Make sure to set your calendar or Outlook to the 1st and 15th to check your analytics data. This data will change every month depending on the seasonality of your services and product demand. When I was training for Yahoo! Search Marketing, we would often show an example of the keyword “cooking”. In December, you would see cooking terms for “Cooking Standing Rib Roast” or “Cooking Roast Turkey”. Then in January you will see search terms “Low Fat Cooking” or “Atkins Cooking”. This is a great example of why you need to pay attention to your terms and keep changing them. Another great way to get new terms is to put a search box on your web site. This is a great window into what your visitors expect to find on your web site. You can also take these terms they enter and add them to your paid search campaigns.

Please feel free to contact Timothy Seward for additional Google Analytic questions at timothy@ROIrevolution.com or 919-832-3233.

John Miller, VP of Marketing for Marketo was my first guest for the Pay Per Click Podcast. For the first interview, we went right to a very important and often overlooked topic of landing pages in paid search. Advertisers often make the mistake of driving all the paid search traffic to their home page. Typically the worst page you can drive traffic to on your site because it lacks a clear purpose and a good call to action for the visitor. Web site home pages often have full navigation and very nice graphic interface, but do not offer a great user experience from a keyword search. A landing page that is custom and created for a keyword theme or category is an overall better user experience. The more targeted and keyword driven your landing pages are, the higher your conversions rates will be from a paid search click. You are paying for every click to your site, why not make every click count with quality, targeted landing pages that get your potential customer to take action now. Fill out a form, buy a product or download a white paper or any action you desire. Multiple targeted landing pages can be a huge help on reaching your conversion goals for your paid search accounts.

Please visit the Search Marketing Components page for more information on Landing Pages. Markto offers a software solution to easily manage and build your landing pages with the easy of building a power point presentation. Listen to my interview with Jon Miller to get the full explanation of their services and how they can benefit the pay per click advertiser.

Here is a brief description of Marketo’s service offering:
“A New Kind of Marketing Automation Company: Marketo provides affordable, easy-to-use marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive more revenue and improve marketing accountability. Our solutions automate lead generation and lead nurturing processes over multiple channels, beginning with pay-per-click search marketing and landing page optimization. Our analytics bring accountability and respect to the CMO by providing forecasts and metrics that matter to CEOs and CFOs, and help turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue-generating part of the company. Marketo’s products are easy to use and easy to buy from existing budgets because they don’t require annual contracts or upfront fees. Because Marketo is delivered using on-demand Software-as-a-Service, you can be running Marketo in less than 5 minutes, with no IT support. Marketo was founded in January 2006 by former Epiphany executives Phil Fernandez (former president and COO), David Morandi (former chief technology officer), and Jon Miller (former vice president of marketing applications).”

Jon Miller, VP of Marketing for Marketo can be reached at 650-655-4837 or jon@marketo.com. Thank you Jon for your time and great advice on landing page management and Marketo.

Welcome to our first podcast. Let me introduce myself. My name is Heather Lutze and I am the owner / founder of Lutze Consulting LLC for the past eight years. It has been my pleasure to have worked with Pay Per Click and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) clients to help them gain greater exposure on the internet through search engines. With this ever changing medium, it has been my great challenge to keep up with all the Paid Search and SEO techniques so that clients and visitors to my web site can stay abreast of the current issues in the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) space.

Through this blog and the associated podcasts, I hope to interview both advertisers currently marketing in the Pay Per Click and SEO space as well as the service providers who give us the tools to do our jobs most effectively. By understanding the daily challenges that advertisers face everyday is essential for me as an SEM consultant. I hope to profile these issues in the PPC / SEO space and give visitors useful tools and best practices to win.

After training for Yahoo! Search Marketing to over 1500 advertisers in 2006 and being a lead trainer at the PPC Summits (ppcsummit.com) events in 2007, I have heard so many problems, issues and successes advertisers have had in the Paid Search arena. My objective with this blog and the podcasts is to give other advertisers and business owners a resource by which they can reference and grow their paid search expertise.

Thank you again to all of you who have supported my consulting business, to my employees who work so hard to gain success for our advertisers and all the amazing attendees at the training events I have had the pleasure of meeting. This has inspired me to start on my podcasting journey. Enjoy!