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You spend the time to develop the right keyword list and write very targeted ads to help increase your traffic, click through rate and ultimately quality score. But that is only one piece of the equation – where are you sending those visitors once they click? Your landing page is the first visual introduction to your brand and it should bring a positive experience to the user. To help make sure you are getting the most out of your landing pages, I have put together a list of best practices.

Before optimizing your page, it is important to understand how users see your page. People read a landing page similar to how they would a book or magazine – they scan from left to right, then diagonally across and down the page and then finally back up to the top. That means you need to put your message across the top and the next most important piece on the right. Keeping this basic pattern in mind will help while you take a look at your copy, images and conversion form to help improve your landing page performance.

While these are a list of best practices, there isn’t a sure fire formula that works for everyone. As with all things in PPC, it is important to test variations until you find the right combination that works for you. The Google Website Optimizer tool is a great way to test different pages to see which elements perform best and are contributing to a higher conversion rate.

Make sure your headline is visible and relevant. Headlines should be relevant to the user, convey your key benefit and be located at the top where the user is going to look first. Try to work in your keyword into the headline to help a visitor confirm they clicked on the correct ad and improve your PPC quality score. Ask yourself if the headline reinstates the users potential problem or gives a brief definition of the service/product offering. If yes, then you are on the right track.

People don’t actually read landing pages, they scan. Think about it, when was the last time you read an entire landing page top to bottom? Keep your copy short, sweet and to the point. Give the important facts and experiment with using paragraph form versus a bulleted list of short statements. You might find that a bulleted list performs much better.

Design a clean, simple and visually appealing landing page. A few images can help bring a page to life, but keep images to a minimum. A landing page should lend itself to a quick and simple recognition of the ‘key message’ and should not be confusing. Too many images, callouts or messages create clutter and confuse a user. Keep in mind that visitors have likely been searching through several ads and landing pages before getting to yours, if they don’t quickly see what they are looking for, they are gone. You have 3-6 seconds to get your message across, make sure your visitors doesn’t spend that time trying to focus their eyes.

Strategically position your conversion form on the right. Going back to how people read landing pages, after scanning the headline, a visitor’s eyes are going to move to the right. If you have a conversion form, place it on the right-hand side to follow the behavior. If you have a shopping cart button instead, follow the same logic. Make sure any required fields are marked with an asterisk or similar notation. If you have a phone number field that won’t accept dashes or dots between numbers, explain this and provide an example so people aren’t discouraged if it doesn’t work correctly. They will not try to submit multiple times, so make sure it is as straightforward as possible.

Simplify your conversion form. Cut down the conversion or contact form to as few fields as possible to help minimize the visitor’s perceived risk of submitting information. Do you ever use the telephone number to follow up with customers? If not, don’t make it a required field as you may be funneling out valuable leads by requiring the information. Users consider what information is being requested and how long is it going to take to fill out the form before deciding which action to take next. If users feel you are asking too much based on what they are getting in return, they are gone. Sometimes it is better to get more conversions with less information than to get very few conversions but a complete history and profile on a person. Make sure you weigh what is important for your business strategy and adjust accordingly.

Keep the important stuff above the fold. Headlines, forms, and call to action should all be on the top third of the page in order to help guarantee a visitor sees it. Make sure you prioritize the elements on your page along with your content – if you don’t prioritize it for your user, they will on their own and may take away the wrong message or action.

Tell people what they are getting, in plain English. No one wants to submit personal information unless they are sure they know what they are getting. No matter what you are offering, whether it is a PDF whitepaper download, catalog in the mail or simply a request for a follow-up call, make sure you spell out everything a user is getting prior to them filling out the form. They want to know what the reward is before they hand over their contact info.

Keep quality score in mind along with user experience. Make sure you include keywords on your page to help improve your PPC quality score but also consider load time. Page load time is also a factor in quality score, and you have roughly 3 seconds – any longer and your quality score is likely being impacted. Avoid using flash animation, which can increase your load time and result in usability issues for some users.

Allow people another place to go from there. Include a logo that links to your homepage or other deep links within your site. A visitor may not be ready to commit yet but are still interested – give them an option to learn more about your products or company.

Try different messages, images, layouts and colors to find a combination that gives you the highest conversion rate. You may be surprised what a few simple adjustments can do for the performance of your PPC campaign.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Derek McClain asked on Facebook: If you are a business that does online marketing, would you rather have someone’s email address or have that same person as a Facebook Fan aka Person that “Likes” your page? Think about this one before you answer.

It’s a great question. I’m not a fan of “or” with online marketing. I believe a multi-channel marketing approach increases overall response throughout your marketing. Facebook seems like a social media marketing mogul, but in reality Facebook is a huge email service provider. Think about how many actual messages you get within email as well as how many messages you get within Facebook. Email is a huge channel in Facebook’s overall success!

That said, there’s a very big difference between the two. Email is intrusive. It’s actually a benefit of email, the marketer gets to interrupt the consumer. It’s also risky… email is a lifeline to between the subscriber and the client but if it’s abused, you’re one click from an unsubscribe – or worse – a click to the junk filter. Marketers need to be careful with utilizing email, though, as susbcribers are becoming more sensitive.

An email address is a fantastic, high-value relationship to have with a consumer because you can leverage the address when you need the demand.

Facebook is a bit less intrusive (for now). Over time, as more and more businesses begin to utilize Facebook for marketing, the sensitivity of the consumer will begin to increase. However, Facebook is still fairly non-intrusive. It’s not much of an interruption for a company to post an update to my wall once or twice a day. It’s easy to glance at and consume without being too pushy.

A Facebook follower is a fantastic, long-term relationship to have with a consumer because they are passively observing your brand and obviously care about your company.

So – my answer is “it depends”… and “both”. Each channel across online marketing technologies has behavior associated with it. Even each channel within the social media space has different expectations from the users. Use each wisely, observe the users’ behavior as you interact with them.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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Anyone who has been working on a PPC account for a while- whether it be your own or a client’s- probably reaches a point of inspiration deficiency. A new PPC account can be like a new toy (if you’re not as nerdy as us, as I’m assuming you are, and this does not hold true for you I apologize); it’s fun setting it up and seeing what it does and how the world responds. But after a while, you have other new accounts to play with. Or you don’t, and this is the one account you’ll be handling forevermore. Either way, boredom can lead to neglect, and neglect will eventually damage your account’s profitability. So what to do? Get a little creative and find new ways to improve your accounts:

• Use your colleagues! It really doesn’t matter if they do PPC as well (though that helps)- anyone with familiarity with your product or service can give a new perspective, which can be very helpful when your ad texts all start to look the same and you can’t think of one more benefit for your landing pages. If you do work with other internet marketers, you can take this one step further and ask them to review your accounts for anything you may be overlooking, and for new ideas. This works beautifully and I think you should try it. Aside from actually having coworkers review your accounts, if you have access to theirs, you can also get ideas for settings or account structure changes by looking at what works for them and then applying relevant findings to your own clients.

• Remember there’s a world outside of your PPC account. It’s not all keywords and ad texts- don’t overlook landing page testing! Clients, even if wary of website redesigns, often will allocate budget for one-page design projects if you can adequately justify the increase in conversion rates they’re likely to see as a result.

• Think outside the PPC box- luckily, at Hanapin we have both PPC and SEO clients, so we have a bit of an advantage in this area, but if you don’t, you can still look at your website from a non-PPC perspective. Improvements to your site’s structure, updated content or products, and social media integration can all translate into new PPC opportunities. Updated content can give you ideas for new ad texts and landing page messaging. New products translate to keyword targeting opportunities. Understanding who your customer is and what they want from you via social media can help your messaging become more targeted as well. Meeting your visitors’ needs and expectations is paramount to success in all areas of internet marketing, and exploring how you’re doing that outside of PPC can open your eyes to a lot of possibility.

• You can ask search engine reps for help and ideas, particularly if you work at an agency and have dedicated reps for this kind of thing. I’ll just say a) they are extremely helpful, and sometimes have great ideas and b) you should always take their ideas with a grain of salt, because ultimately their first job is to increase their employer’s profit…not yours. If you choose growth avenues wisely, you can find a balance that does both simultaneously: lovely!

One last note: don’t let your desire to try something new win out over your ROI’s best interest…some ideas are more likely to have a substantial impact than others, and you know your account well enough to understand logically what’s most likely to be useful and what is just a pointless waste of time and money. Trust yourself, do your research, and get inspired. Everyone will be better off for it.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

It only has a benefit when blog participants educate themselves before commenting. The problem with blogging is that it doesn’t matter how stupid you are, you can put in your $0.02.

Yes you can definately make money from blogging.
Here is how to get started. Decide what topic you are going to write about – don’t necessary think about typical ‘money making’ topics but what you write about has to provide some benefit to your reader.
Next step is getting traffic (since traffic = more money) so each time you make a post, ping it and/or submit it to social networks like StumbleUpon.
Once you have the traffic now you can think about monetizing it. You can do this by either adding Adsense or promoting affiliate products. Keep the promotions directly linked to what your blog is about and then you can start to see the money come in!

When I got home Thursday, I had a package waiting. It was from Andy Sernovitz, the Word-Of-Mouth guru. Andy has invited me to speak at a one day event he’s putting on in Chicago Dec. 16 called, “Word of Mouth Supergeniuses.” You can learn more on the event website, but keep reading first.

The package contained a yellow T-shirt. I unfolded it and read the front. It’s a shirt customized for me, saying I’m speaking at the event and giving out my event discount code, “JASONISMYHERO,” which gets you $101 off the price of admission. This is an outstanding example of why you should consider coming to the event. Andy knows how to make people talk about a product or service. He’s called upon other experts in various categories, including several major brands, to teach similar techniques.

I’m probably not going to wear this shirt anywhere but around the house. But that’s not the point. Andy knows the people he sends the shirts to will think they’re clever, take pictures of them and post them online for people to see. They also give the recipient a feel-good benefit by letting their audiences know how to save some money on the event by using the discount code.

There’s no way I was going to ignore this little nudge to talk about Supergeniuses. Andy is brilliant. You can learn from him, me and several others, including by former boss, Todd Spencer of Doe-Anderson, who will be telling the Maker’s Mark Ambassador’s story. Other speakers include Paul Gillin, Olivier Blanchard, Rick Murray, Spike Jones, Saul Colt and more.

Register for Word-of-Mouth Supergeniuses online and be sure to use the “JASONISMYHERO” discount code. See you in Chicago on Dec. 16!

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A good way to approach this is to look at it from a cost/benefit perspective. There is no monetary setup cost to writing a blog as services such as Blogger and Typepad are free (unless you want to upgrade to better features but even then the costs are minimal) so the only main barrier to entry is your time.
In terms of benefits, there are both direct and indirect benefits. Direct benefits can come in the form of Google ads or if you decide to sell anything through the blog. Indirect benefits can arise in terms of building a reputation as an expert in a particular topic which could then result in job offers, speaking engagements, and/or consulting gigs. I believe columnists Andrew Sullivan and Matt Drudge started off as bloggers.
I started a blog for a charity I volunteer for called Second Harvest ( http://www.secondharvest1.blogspot.com ) whose contributions come from other volunteers. The benefits we hope to gain from that is that more people become aware of the organization and what we do and that volunteers become more engaged with the charity.

Please state if you are a male/female. Also tell me if you think there is any disadvantage of blogging. Thanks.

My last article focused on separating your keyword match types into different campaigns. Today, I would like to discuss details on implementing this strategy, as well as clarify the benefits of separating match types into separate ad groups (not campaigns).

As I mentioned previously, for robust accounts with optimized campaign structures, separating your match types for your mission critical, high-traffic keywords into individual ad groups can be beneficial. However, the accounts we have recently restructured had implemented this tactic poorly.

First, I’d like to describe the accounts we have been inheriting and why their methodology for match type segregation was not well executed. The campaign structure for each account was driven almost solely by match type. Each match type, including broad, phrase and exact, had its own campaign – not its own ad group within a campaign.

For example, with this structure in place, my keyword for tennis shoes was in three different campaigns – not three different ad groups within the same campaign.

The campaigns for each match type also had poorly structured ad groups. Each ad group contained too many keywords without much thought given to ad text relevancy and Quality Score. Here is a quick list of why this doesn’t work:

• The ad groups were too broad, and too general. The previous manager thought that since they had lumped large groups of keywords together, and separated their campaigns out by match type, that their work was done.
• The ad texts for each campaign and ad group were the same. As we discussed in the comments from my last article, separating out your match types can help you write more targeted ads. But this was not the case here.
• Even though the match types were in their own campaigns, they all still had the same bids. Each match type for a specific keyword can have its own individual bid.
• There was only one landing page for the entire account. Another benefit of well structured campaigns is to have targeted landing pages. And this account did not.
• With this campaign structure in place, management and reporting was unnecessarily complicated.

There are benefits to properly separating your high-traffic keywords by match type, but these accounts were not receiving any of them. Such as:

• For your high-traffic, mission critical keywords you can segment your match types to write very targeted ad texts.
• Separating your match types for these keywords can help you determine which variations work best, and where you should adjust your bids.
• You may need different negative keywords for different match types and breaking your match types out into separate ad groups can help with targeting.
• Creating granular ad groups can improve your keyword/landing page relevancy, therefore increasing your conversion rate and your AdWords Quality Score.

This was the difference I wanted to explore further: segregating match types out into separate campaigns vs. separate ad groups. Also, these accounts had the entire account separated by match type, when they should really implement this tactic for their most important keywords at a more granular level.

I certainly think that there are benefits to creating granular ad groups down to the match type for your high-traffic keywords, but I think it just needs to be done correctly. Otherwise, you don’t receive the positive effects this can generate, you only make more work for your self.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I’ve heard you can make money off of advertisers. Is it really a significant enough amount to make it worth it? Or does the real benefit in blogging come from the exposure you get? I’m a bellydancer and I dance at private parties and events. How could I use a blog to get more business? I’ve heard about people who have products to sell using blogs, but I don’t have a “product”, just me!