MarkBeljaars.com

Forget creating a throw away WEB2.0 site to help drive traffic or increase page rank. I am extending a unique free opportunity to all who wish to advertise on my site…

I will happily publish and appropriately accredit articles written by any author as long as they meet the following requirements:

• The article must be in good taste and contain useful information. To this end, I will vet all articles and only post those that I think will offer value to my readers.
• All articles must be on-topic. The main theme of this blog is SEO marketing, SEO tools, common or new SEO techniques and general website creation techniques and tips.
• All articles must be original.
• The article should be at least 200 words, however shorter articles may be accepted.
• Articles may include as many links to your site as you like, however the links must be relevant and appropriate.
• The article may include a header or footer containing your site’s ad copy, name, link or whatever else you like.

I believe this to be a great opportunity for both advertisers and readers alike. Within two months of the blogs creation, Google had accredited the site with an overall PR3, with some pages achieving PR5. Two months on, the number of quality backlinks has trebled, and as a result I believe the overall PR is now higher (although I will not know until Google releases the next PR update).

If interested, please post articles to imarket dot article at gmail dot com (replace dot with . and at with @)

Thank you,
Mark.

SEO is one of those games that you can spend a lot of time at for very little reward. It is all too common for new players to spend hundreds of hours promoting a website using backlink building techniques only to find that traffic does not equal conversion. Wouldn’t it be great if you could measure how well your site will convert before spending all those hours? Well, there is one method that is commonly used for this very purpose. With almost no effort at all you can drive several hundred visitors to your site within a couple of days. The catch…it costs money.

For those who are fortunate enough to have a spare hundred dollars or so, it is wise to spend that money up front to test your niche before spending precious hours on a dead end. The simplest way to do this is to create a Google Adwords campaign. The advantage of this method is that you can run the campaign to generate 500 or so visitors, then immediately end it. Statistically, 500 visitors will enable you to review the worth of your niche. Simply divide the number of sales by the number of visitors to obtain your conversion ratio. Through experience, I have found the following:

• Conversion Radio < 1% – forget it, you will be wasting your time pursuing this niche unless you replace your product, site copy or both.
• Conversion Ratio < 1.5% – your niche has potential. Generally we look for a minimum natural conversion ratio of around 1%. Adwords artificially inflates this result as people who click on ads normally do so to buy. Therefore, an Adwords conversion of 1.5% is marginal.
• Conversion Ratio > 1.5% – go for it. You have a good niche and your time will certainly be justified.

Creating an Adwords campaign is very easy and can be done in less than 10 minutes. If you are serious about SEO, you will have already performed your keyword research and will have a couple of 2-3 word target keywords and several long-tail keywords. These keywords should be used in your AdWords campaign. Be prepared to spend money though. I find that a limit of $60 per day and a cost per click high enough to propel your add into positions 3 to 5 works well. Create several ad copies and don’t be tempted to add loads of keywords. Use only the keywords you have chosen for your niche as these will be the keywords you will target naturally if your Adwords campaign proves yours niche valuable.

Run your campaign only until you generate 500 visitors. If you are targeting expensive keywords, 250 visitors will also provide an acceptable statistical guide. Be prepared to spend between $100 and $200 US. It is expensive, but if it saves you 100 hours of work, that is only $1 or $2 per hour.

In my next article I will discuss how to create an AdWords campaign and most importantly how to create a successful AdWords ad copy.