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Get an Invitation to Google AdWords Experiment and Try Before You Go Live

Everyone wants to try the new tools when Google rolls them out and here’s one for you to try that is by invitation only right now. It is called AdWords Experiment and I think it looks like a terrific new tool for serious users of Google AdWords.

There is very little doubt that Google AdWords is among the most effective forms of Internet marketing available in terms of both effectiveness and cost.  With immediate visibility and completely customizable content, AdWords allows users to quickly and efficiently target the people who would be most interested in the product or service that they provide at a price they can afford. 

With the ability to now run simultaneous programs side by side in your account, you can do AB testing like never before. Previously if you tried to test on your own, AdWords would only service the keywords with the best CTR making it nearly impossible to test similar keyword lists. This is critical when your keywords are broad matched.

In order to offer their customers the best possible results from using Google AdWords, the company has just launched the Google AdWords Experiment, or ACE, which allows AdWords users to measure exactly how effective their changes would be, prior to making them officially.  The test is accurate because you would be comparing your proposed changes side by side with your current campaign at the very same time – so no extraneous situations which may or may not cause changes in web traffic would have any bearing on the results.

If you like what you see from your changes in keywords and placement – you make the changes.  If your original campaign performed head and shoulders above the one you were considering than you can consider yourself lucky for not having missed any opportunities while you tested out new possibilities.

If you want to consistently make the most of your marketing efforts without ever having to risk making a change that you’ll regret, grab your invitation to the Google AdWords Experiment here and get started managing your campaign to achieve optimal results. This new tool is in Beta testing and only available by invitation so grab your invitation and be one of the first to reap the rewards of improved AdWords performance. If you like this tool, you may want to check out other cool tools that Google is working on in beta testing by visiting the Google Labs page.

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The Social Networking Phenomenon – Now a Must Have for Your Marketing Arsenal

If you aren’t advertising your business via social networking, you are really missing out a terrific way to sell your services and products to new customers. There are still a number of people, who are skeptical about the power of Twitter and Facebook. Some feel that these platforms are not viable for lead and sale generation. But I recommend that you take another closer look!

Facebook just recently beat Google’s number for visits per day and Twitter announced it’s popularity numbers recently. Twitter has over 105,779,710 users with 300,000 added each day. The reach and power of social networking sites can simply not be ignored and should not be a part of any Internet marketing program.

The growth pattern for Twitter has not just been consistently strong; the number of Tweeters has literally been astronomical. As of May this social networking megastar was topping out at two billion hits per month – the breakdown on that is more than two and a half million tweets per hour. That is a whole lot of opportunity to have your products and services exposed to potential new customers.

Though Facebook may not have the rapid fire succession of short communication that Twitter has reached, this social networking powerhouse actually managed to oust Google Search from the number one spot on the list of most visited websites in May. If this doesn’t speak volumes about the capabilities of social networking sites, nothing will.

The world of effective advertising as we know it has changed quite a bit over the course of the last few years, and with the emergence of social networking it will continue to change with each new day that passes. The old adage of spending money to make money may still hold true, but in terms of advertising it may no longer be the dollars you spend but the amount of time you spend Tweeting or posting status updates to your firm’s Facebook Fan Page that will make the difference for your future business growth.

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Facebook Says Email is Dying – It’s True!

Just ask any 20 something young adult or try to correspond with them and you’ll see that it is true email is dying and in fact so are phone calls with this demographic group. For any parent of a young adult in college or one just getting out on their own, we know that we reach our kids through text messages to their mobile phones and send messages to their Facebook profiles. Send an email message and you’ll probably never even receive a response.

Sheryl Sandberg the COO of Facebook recently spoke on this topic. You can check out the video and more information on her chat on this topic through Web Pro News. Although Web Pro News, in this article, clearly does not agree that email is dying, as I read the article, I rapidly have grasped that the writer has missed the meaning of Ms. Sandberg’s comments.

I do agree that in a few years email as we know it today will have morphed into something different. I feel that social networking sites have brought about such big changes in how we interact online that in the not too distant future their advent may be considered as big as the development of the Internet.

Yes for now, you do need an email to set up social network accounts and most business communication is by email, but if we closely watch our young people and how they use technology to communicate, we see that we are in for some very big changes in the not too distant future with most of the big changes being tied to popular social networking platforms like Facebook.

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Google Voice – Why You Must Have It

Google Voice is my new tool that I can now not live without. In fact, I have found it so helpful that I may replace my landline phone number posted on my website with my Google Voice phone number. This last trip, I found my Google Voice account to be an indispensable asset for any business traveler.

There is nothing worse than feeling tethered to your computer when you are a small business owner and there is no faster way to make your family mad at you when you are on vacation and you are stuck doing business on “their” special time. I found that Google Voice put me in the “driver’s seat” when it came to managing my phone calls while on travel.

In the Google Voice settings, I was able to set up groups for my business contacts and then set attributes on who would have immediate access to me by phone. Clients were asked to say their names on dialing, and then Google Voice phoned me and asked if I wanted to answer the call or have it send them directly to my voice mail.

With an additional setting I was able to have all my Google Voice messages transcribed and emailed to my mobile phone. This way I could decide who to call and when. Additionally, when I returned to my office I now had a full archive of all phone calls and transcribed messages. With one click I could listen to the actual phone call to figure out if the transcription was accurate with names. (The transcription was not perfect, but pretty good.)

If you are a business owner on the go, I would highly recommend Google Voice to you for your next trip. For now Google Voice is still by invitation only, but you can sign up to get access when it is opened up for public use from this link.

P.S. Google is not paying me for this post, I just feel they have a great new product and wanted to share it with you.