Students have been dropping by the office more and more as the year moves along…they are looking for internships, jobs or simple career advice. Some of the best questions that have come up so far are: What can I do right now so that you or somebody like you would hire me? What do you look for in a job candidate? What can I read or where can I learn more?

Most of these students are absolute beginners when it comes to pay per click advertising and web marketing in general. I am a fan of learning directly from a blog post, but I think a beginner needs to go out and DO instead of just READ…so the following thoughts are action oriented (or I am lazy…) I want and expect people to leave this page to learn directly from a source.

Here are my thoughts on what a person should know and/or do as a beginner:

The lay of the land

Study the writing, the placement and the style of the ads you find in the search engines, on regular websites or on social media platforms.

Natural/Organic vs Sponsored/Paid

Investigate the search results at a variety of search engines. Learn how to spot the paid vs the organic results. Some of these aren’t obvious believe it or not! Dogpile comes to mind…do you think a normal user can tell the difference there? Yahoo has paid inclusions scattered throughout their ‘organic’ results too. Go check it out!

Content Networks, Image ads & Social Network Ads

Explore a variety of websites and pay attention to the banner ads, text ads and their locations in the website. The publishers (the people that own and operate the website) typically put ads in the most visible, highly trafficked areas on their websites. You can learn a lot from these placements…here are a few very popular places that host content ads, image ads and/or social network ads: Facebook (duh!), MySpace, Gizmodo, New York Times, Digg and MSN.

Know The Basic Acronyms and their Definitions

PPC = Pay per click. You pay when somebody clicks on your ad! Yes! Basically, every time your ad appears it is free. When somebody clicks to see your website, you pay. Simple, right?

SEO = Search engine optimization. The marketing behind a website’s natural organic/natural ranking ability. SEO is NOT PPC and PPC is NOT SEO. Please do not confuse the two.

SEM = Search engine marketing. Search engine marketing is any marketing on the search engines. It is not just PPC and not just SEO. It can be both…

CPC = Cost per click. The amount you pay for a single click. I listed this here because there are several iterations of this metric out there. You might see eCPC which means effective cost per click. eCPC simply divides your total cost for the run of the ad divided by the number of clicks you received. Example: You buy a flat fee ad on a local chamber of commerce website for $250. The ad was live for 30 days. You received 78 clicks from that ad; therefore, $250 divided by 78 clicks gives us your eCPC of $3.21.

CPM = Cost per thousand impressions. An impression is simply a single instance of your ad being displayed on a website. There are several banner ad networks out there that still charge based on impressions. Or you get the choice: you can buy based on impressions or clicks. The industry standard is to price or bid based on a per one thousand impressions basis. You may run into CPMM which is cost per thousand thousand impressions - or cost per 1 million impressions.

CPA = Cost per action. Advertisers pay a publisher or a company based on a desired outcome. This can be for a lead, a page view, a sale, etc. The most common CPA model is the affiliate marketing model. Google ‘affiliate marketing’, you’ll learn a lot.

Keywords

Research

Go search for good keyword research tools. I recommend Google’s keyword tool, Keyword Discovery has a free one - Wordtracker does too. Use them all, compare and contrast them and get familiar with them.

Intent

There are a lot of good articles on the intent of a search query. I think students and beginners that read this are smart enough to determine what the intent of a keyword is…is it transactional? Will it lead to a sale? Does the word lean more towards discovery and research? Is it a branded keyword? Think like your target. What will they search for when they’re ready to buy? What will they search for if they are just starting to discover the product or service you offer?

Writing

Sales copy

I require at least 3 writing samples from each prospective employee. Why? Because writing is essential to success in this industry. If you can’t get a thought across with few grammatical errors or spelling mistakes, then this is probably not the right place for you at this time.

Learn to write well, learn to communicate quickly and efficiently. You are working with severely limited space to convince somebody to visit a website. Attention spans are shorter than ever, so you need to learn to write powerfully, simply and effectively.

Get Experience

Experience is one of the biggest requirements that I am interested in when I am hiring somebody. If you have your own skin in the game, and you can prove it to me by showing me your account/your website/etc, you are much more likely to get hired. I will not accept anybody that hasn’t spent at least $100 advertising something - anything!

Use your own money

Using your own money proves that you are dedicated to learning the trade. You have your own skin in the game, that takes dedication and courage.

Use your own website

If you have a website already or a marketable skill, it is nice to see that you have taken the initiative to do it yourself - it means that you are further along the learning curve than almost every new applicant or student that I meet with.

Use your mother’s uncle’s best friend’s website and money

If you don’t have a website or your own money, at least start working in a relative’s account or a friend’s account with your own user ID so you can see and measure the changes you make on the account via change reports, etc. Being able to show me that you know your way around is better than anything - and the ability to show me the changes you have made is a good sign that you are willing to try things out.

Just do it for at least 30 days on your own and on a tiny budget

A beginner can learn soooo much by doing exactly what they want to learn. Just make sure that you are working on a daily budget, not monthly when you start. If you can afford $3 a day, then make sure everywhere you see ‘budget’ that it shows $3 per day. Don’t lose your shirt with this, just experiment with it.

Don’t get certified

Meaningless

Getting certified used to be cool. It’s not anymore. If you can show a business owner or a website owner what you have DONE, show them your work, then you are showing more competence than one who simply learns the material to take a certification test.

For me, seeing a certification on a resume is meaningless. I. don’t. care.

Reading

Start by reading all of the offical blogs and learning centers. Go google ‘AdWords Offical blog’, ‘Yahoo Search Marketing blog’, etc. Find the offical blogs and subscribe to them. Read through the official learning centers to get a basic background of best practices, search engine editorial guidelines and more. Here’s a freebie…I’d start with the Google AdWords learning center.

PPCHero is an excellent pay per click blog…you’ll accumulate more blogs to read as your knowledge grows. I don’t want a beginner to get paralyzed with too much reading.

This is about DOING. Formulate your own opinions - every piece of advice you read may or may not be true, so test it out yourself if you can.

Show me, don’t tell me

If you can’t tell, the bottom line is that I want beginners to show me what they have done and what they can do. Don’t tell me. Show me. Showing me is more convincing than telling me. The account doesn’t have to be clean or employ 100% of all the best practices out there. What’s important is that you simply know your way around a little bit and that you have the initiative to DO it.

Ok! Get out there and get ready to start at an internship level with PPC…it should take you 30 to 90 days minimum. Good luck!

• Why Blogging Is Great For Me
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semvironment has been going through a shiny new internal transformation lately…here’s the latest:

semvironment is now a one man show. I (James Zolman) realized that during this economic turmoil, it is easier to be flexible and strong as a service provider if the people that help me can maintain their sense of freedom to work for others while we have the strictest agreements of confidentiality and non-disclosure in place between our contractors and our clients. Every one of our contractors worked in-house for us at one time so they are trustworthy, smart and entrepreneurial people. Yes times have been difficult here, but every single one of my prior employees is doing great and not a single bridge has been burned because of these times. I am excited to press forward independently with the use of awesome ppc software, the best contractors and the best clients ever.

semvironment is focusing more on education and coaching. I am going to revive the blog a bit with at least a weekly blog post unless I am on vacation with my beautiful family. The blog will cover more SEM stuff while still emphasizing and maintaining a healthy dose of PPC management posts.

I am looking for small business owners, in-house teams, ppc management agencies, ppc software companies or individuals that want or need an external opportunity report. Basically, I would spend two or three days reviewing the account, the history and your analytics reports and write a report for you with ‘next steps’ for helping your team or you improve your ROI with paid search!

And a little plug about the latest for me (James Zolman) outside of semvironment:

You might have heard of Click Walrus a little bit in the previous blog post…I have been investing heavily in this attribution tool designed for small businesses, affiliates and bloggers. I’ll make an official announcement about it soon but sign up for updates early so you can be in on our alpha tests! w00t!

I am starting a personal blog at www.jameszol.com in the coming weeks. The blog will discuss a lot of different topics…family, business, computers, advertising…just a little bit of everything.

Looking forward to a bright and shiny future for everybody!

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I am entering a master’s program at the Columbia University School of Journalism this August, and I’m taking the rest of the summer off to surf and move to Manhattan. I’ll still be hanging around semvironment-ville every so often, but things at the company have been changing, and James himself is taking semvironment in a little bit of a different direction, as he will shortly be explaining. Additionally, I’m pursuing some of my own work with my web design company more heavily, including the promotion of my new social gadgets and products sharing website www.Scordit.com, and my new site where you create your own quizzes and earn prizes at www.Quizzem.com. Of course, I’m also helping James Zolman with Click Walrus, which is a revenue and click attribution web analytics tool that is WAY AWESOME.

So good things are happening all around, and I’m excited for what’s to come for me at Columbia and with Scordit et. al., and also for a new era at semvironment. I’m sure I’ll make an appearance at the occasional web conference here and there (or more likely at the occasional punk rock show in NYC), so maybe I’ll see you there. Until then, goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow!

[Note from James: I personally recommend Shane for his design skills, his website creation skills, his superior and engaging writing style and most of all his ability to educate and teach. If you ever attend a conference where Shane is presenting, you should attend his session and I kid you not, you will be blown away - he is literally the best presenter I have ever encountered...I have attended at least 50+ "big name"conference sessions. Shane's presentation and speaking skills blow all of that out of the water. Shane has been independent for quite a while - building up the projects he mentions above, building out his design portfolio a little more and wrapping up ambassador projects for semvironment. Shane is going to pursue his dreams - and I am honored to have played a tiny role in helping him along his way. We're going to miss him a lot!]

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Google AdWords for Mobile

If you’re ready to trudge out onto the PPC battleground, AdWords is a logical place to start. With mobile ads integrated into its regular search and content campaign management, AdWords can be a great place for mobile advertisers to begin as well. To enable ads on mobile devices, just indicate so in your campaign settings:

Our advice: Separate your mobile campaigns from your regular search campaigns, just like you should be separating your content network and search campaigns.

Lots of people use Google on their phones, so get a piece of the advertising action by trying AdWords for mobile search!

Yahoo! Mobile Advertising

Yahoo! also has mobile advertising, although it requires a separate application to enroll. (Sorry all you who already use Yahoo! Search Marketing).  The application is short and easy. This is another really great place to start your mobile ad campaigns, as Yahoo is a very large mobile search property.

Yahoo! Mobile Advertising also has a very cool demo, which you should check out:

Admob

One of Fast Company’s top 10 most innovative companies in advertising and marketing, Admob has been serving mobile ads since 2005. These guys specialize in iPhone and Android ads, and they’re really, really good. And, Admob has a pretty impressive mobile analytics beta out now:

Definitely check them out if you’re considering going mobile with your marketing.

MSN Mobile Advertising

Although their tagline indicates that its searchers are “affluent customers,” MSN Mobile is a very large mobile destination. Their ad platform serves banner ads next to their “premium content”, and also now serves ads on Windows Live Mobile search. At over 62 million page views a month from MSN Mobile users, this can be a pretty good place on which to throw your own ads.

Third Screen Media

Third Screen Media by Platform A is AOL’s mobile ad network. Not only do they have some mesmerizing javascript at the bottom of their website, but they also do ads for some large provides Verizon and Virgin Mobile, and partner with some big publishers like Mapquest, Traffic.com, and CBS Sportsline, not to mention AOL.com. Premium pubilshers aside, they have a pretty good sized publisher network, which is grouped handily by content channels for easy ad buying.

Nokia Interactive Advertising

Nokia calls mobile advertising a “medium advertisers can no longer afford to ignore.” Boasting 40% of the handset market, Nokia can really deliver your advertisements to a lot of people. While their program is geared toward huge sponsorships and banner campaigns (noteworthy clients include MTV and Hyundai) rather than PPC for search like some of the other platforms we’ve discussed, if you have a lot of mobile advertising to do, you should definitely contact Nokia Interactive Advertising. These guys acquired enpocket.com, a huge mobile ad player, somewhat recently.

Quattro

Quattro claims to be “North America’s Best Performing Mobile Ad Network,” which is, as they say, pretty awesome. From media planning to analytics to even SMS advertising, Quattro offers really extensive services for advertisers, and they are a powerful company to work with.

Millenial Media

Millenial Media is another huge player in the mobile advertising business. They boast some big publishers like Myspace Mobile, RottenTomatoes, and Fox. They have some huge reach, and are known for their MBrand and Decktrade networks.

Again, mobile advertising is growing at an almost alarming rate. Advertisers are seeing huge returns on their investment, partly because the medium is not as saturated as others. So jump in!

What other mobile ad networks are wicked hot?

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While setting up a mobile campaign last night I thought “Wouldn’t it be great to see the mobile search volume for these keywords? I bet Google has a tool…let me go to AdWords Help and see.”

Kablam! Here was the 1st result. Google’s search technology is pretty dang good.

And because I don’t think Google does this tool justice, I’m going to give you step by step instructions with screenshots! Woot!

1. Log into Google Adwords…set up an ad group with mobile ads - you can leave it paused if you’re not ready to start advertising on cell phones. The tool will still work.

2. Click on your keywords tab in the ad group.

3. Click on ‘Keyword Tool’. The ‘Keyword Tool’ link is above the ‘pause’ or ‘resume’ button and below the date range.

4. Start searching! Note that “Results are tailored to mobile searches”.

I found a TON of niches where I can bid around $1 per click OR MUCH LESS and sit at the number 1 mobile ad position…when I know for a fact that the regular avg cpc we see in regular search ranges from $2 to $65!

Anybody know what mobile conversions are like? Have you had success with mobile?

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We’re going to SMX West next week - and we’re speaking at a few awesome sessions!

Register to attend if you haven’t already, it’s going to be a blast!

The sessions we are speaking at:

Advanced Landing Page Strategies

Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy

Analyzing & Converting Paid Search Traffic

Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love to meet one and all!

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——————————————-

I just started noticing this tonight…how long has this been going on? What determines when a result will have 1 or 4 description lines? Thoughts? Please see this screen shot…it’s a big file/image - please click to see the big picture:

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Thank you loyal followers for sticking around - you will not be disappointed this year! Watch for some cool stuff coming up this month and throughout 2009.

Happy New Year to all of our readers and visitors!!

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• Happy New Year!
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You can expect to see more out of semvironment in the near future - we have been swamped with work and we have a whole bunch to share.

We’ll see you next year!

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As more advertisers are jumping on the paid search bandwagon every day, the ppc marketplace is becoming increasingly emulous. In competitive markets, more and more searches bring up pages full of nearly identical sponsored ads. Here’s an example of a Google search for house painting:

Does anyone else look at this and see the exact same ad over and over again? The only ad that remotely stands out is #4, because the local “Honolulu, HI” makes it take up a little more space.

Does your ad look like this? Well don’t resign yourself to mediocrity. If you think your website is great, but your ad stands out about as well as a single zombie amongst a pack of undead, then you need to keep reading!

(Photo from the movie, Shawn of the Dead, retrieved from Wired.com)

Because of a proliferation of PPC blogs, pay per click tip guides, and “get rich off of Adwords” websites, pretty much everybody has started using the same tricks: capitalization on every word, a call to action that ends in words like “now” and “today” with an exclamation point on the second description line, dynamic keyword insertion, and as many keywords crammed into the ad as possible.

Take another look at the ads for house painters above. Seven out of the eight ads have the word “Free” in them (another common trick), and two of the ads have the exact same call to action, “Get Free Painting Estimates Today!” It might seem counterintuitive, but by employing some of the most “proven” ad copy writing techniques, chances are - these days - that you are going to look exactly the same as everyone else, severely blunting the effectiveness of your ad.

So how can you differentiate your ad in such a competitive space? It seems that by simply writing something unique, an advertiser could seriously increase click-throughs based solely on curiosity or catching the user’s eye. But before you start trying out some wild CTR-increasing gimmick, you should consider your goals. In some cases, simply generating as much traffic as possible is the only goal; however, typically the goal of a paid search ad is to eventually get the click to convert into a sale, lead, or signup. Unique ad copy alone won’t help you in these departments.

Keeping in mind that our priority is probably going to be conversions, and therefore you can’t afford to pay for clicks that have no possibility of making you money, I would like to talk about 3 things that can transform your text ad clone into most attractive ad on the page.

1. Borrow ideas from unrelated, but highly competitive industries

Some industries are more cut-throat than others. Chances are, there are many industries that are more wildly and violently competitive than the one you are advertising in. Think of an industry where competition is fierce and take a look at some of the ads. Take note of the copywriting techniques they use, and use these as a springboard for your own ad copy ideas.

We recently had a client whose ad performance was simply not doing as well as we (and the client) thought it could be doing. A search showed that our client’s ads in certain campaigns were nothing but clones of a dozen other advertisers who had entered the PPC arena in the past several months. We had a brainstorming session to figure out how we could get this client’s ads to stand out. We knew once we got the traffic to the site, we could make the conversion, but we just weren’t seeing any kind of growth in click volume no matter what we did.

So we took a look at some ads in one of the web’s most competitive industries: online dating. Even though our client was in the construction leads industry, we thought online dating ads might give us some insight into techniques we could use in our situation. While these two verticals are highly unrelated, we figured that advertisers in online dating that hadn’t already been driven out of business are likely seeing good results from their ads. And in order to stick out the competition, they would also be forced to write very enticing ad copy in order to snatch clicks from their competitors.

Here are a couple ads that caught our attention right away:

First of all, the ® symbol in the Match.com ad immediately gives it credibility and allows it to stick out. They still use the keywords “online dating,” but they clearly draw attention to themselves. Another attractive thing about this ad is the claim to fame, the “World’s Leading Dating Site.” One of the editorial rules for Google and other major search engines is that all claims in ads have to be backed up on the landing page visitors are taken to. If your business doesn’t have some kind of credibility factor like this, take the time to court some endorsements or enter some competitions. Match.com could be the world’s leading dating site in terms of members, active members, page views, profit, or any number of things. This means that other dating sites could be the “world’s leading dating site” by another criteria. Which also means that your site could be the leader of something in some quadrant of the world. Pursuing something like this can definitely be worth it.

Although we gained some insights from the Match.com ad, we found another one that gave us some material we wanted to immediately work with:

This ad was especially appealing to us for the construction leads market. All of the ads for a search for “Home Remodeling” would show up with the title “Home Remodeling” and occasionally things like “Home Remodeling Quotes.”

So we tested a new ad, based on ideas we got from this one, against our old “zombie-clone” ad. We changed the headline “Home Remodel Bids” to “Top 3 Remodel Contractors,” and guess what?  On that change, our CTR shot up and our conversions consequently increased. Nobody else had a similar ad, and apparently people searching for home remodeling services liked the idea of getting bids from the top contractors (according to us) rather than just getting bids.

You don’t have to confine yourself to pay per click ads, either. Turn on your TV or log onto YouTube.com and watch some ads in another industry. Take note of the calls to action that the ads use. How do they grab people’s attention? What kind of language do they use? Of course, a commercial has a lot more words at its disposal than a paid search ad, but some of the best video ads can condense their pitch into one or two very short sentences.

While you’re at it, go to Barnes & Noble and bust out some magazines. What ads grab your attention? Of course, images can play a big part in attracting you to stop turning pages to look at an ad, but effective copy is essential to print advertising in almost every industry.

2. Write something clever rather than keyword-stuffed

What can cause two ads for the exact same product or service to be light years apart in terms of grabbing attention and invoking action? To stand out in this way, the ad needs to approach the customer from a different direction. A unique angle can give you more than just an edge on your competition. To avoid speaking in too many general terms, here are a few examples, using our same construction leads company:

Instead of:

Start Your Remodel Now
Get Quality Home Remodeling Bids
From Local Pre-Screened Contractors

We tried:

Start Your Remodel Now
Top Contractors So There’s No Delay
Shop Free Bids & Save Today!

What do you think the click through response to this ad was? Well, have you ever heard of the phrase, “through the roof?” Rhyme and cadence are a couple of things that can get your ad to stick in someone’s head. And people like the smooth feel of a rhyme. It may not work in every case, but it’s definitely worth testing.

Here’s another trick we’ve tried: alliteration.

Ready To Remodel?
Compare Custom Contractor Quotes
Click Quickly To Cut Your Costs!

How much friendlier and more clever is this than the generic ads everyone else has, like this one?

Remodeling Quotes
Find Remodeling Contractors
Get Remodel Price Quotes Today

Just a few things to think about. The point is, stop focusing on cramming keywords, and focus on making your ads appealing. Chances are, it’ll pay off.

3. Try something risky

By risky, I don’t mean stupid; I mean do something aggressive. And by aggressive, I don’t mean a call to action like “Order Right Now!” I mean write something that persuades people to click on your ad without looking desperate or the same as everyone else.

This is tricky to do. By studying competitive advertisers in other industries, as discussed in Tip #1, you might be able to find inspiration for ideas if your brainstorming hasn’t gotten you anywhere so far.

Take this example:

Cut The Crap
Expert Remodeling Contractors Are
Ready To Bid. Get A Free Quote Now!

Now there’s an ad that could get your attention. Of course, there are still editorial guidelines to be followed, and taste to be considered, but as the competitive game gets tougher, in order to outshine the rest of the text ad clones, good advertisers are going to have to test risky, aggressive ads.

And that’s the beauty of pay per click advertising. You can test everything, and nothing is permanent if you want to reverse it. If you no longer want to be one of the text ad clones, then start testing some new ads! If they don’t work, then test some other ones!

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