Marketing Blog

Hello. My name is Bob Goricki+ and an online marketing manager at Skoda Minotti Strategic Marketing. I hope that you find these strategic online marketing insights useful as you build your brand's presence online.

In case you missed part 1 (Setting online marketing goals and objectives) part 2 (Making a website search engine friendly), or part 3 (Navigation) check out those past articles before you start part 4 below.

A sitemap is essential to any well-organized web design process. A sitemap outlines your site’s main content “buckets” and the pages that will live underneath them. This helps you get a 20,000 foot overview of how your site will be organized and where each piece of content belongs.

You can...

In case you missed part 2 (Making a website search engine friendly) or part 1 (Setting online marketing goals and objectives), check out those past articles before you start part 3 below.

In this installment, we’ll be covering some things to consider when you are looking to create a navigation structure for your new website. A great place to start is on your current website. Using a program like Google Analytics, you can determine which pages should be the “stars” of your new website:

• Which pages...

Google AdWords can be a valuable tool for many companies looking to attract targeted, qualified prospects to their website.  Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as choosing a few broad keywords that describe your industry, churning out a few quick lines of copy for your ads and pointing all of you links to your home page.

That approach may get you plenty of traffic, but it’s unlikely to result in measurable success for your business. Even worse, it’ll

After reading this e-book, you'll also learn...

Once you’ve decided on your website’s goals and objectives, it’s time to make sure that people can find your site in the vast expanse known as the World Wide Web. Search engine optimization should be one of your top website priorities because there’s no sense in spending a fortune on a new website only to later find out that no one can find it on Google or other search engines.

How do you go about making a site search engine friendly? Well, a great start would be by downloading our e-book – “How ...

Our website redesign blog series is going to focus on what you should consider when undergoing a redesign of your company’s existing website.

Any website redesign process needs to start with the question: “What are our online marketing goals and objectives?” Answering this question will help guide the rest of your redesign process.

To help you along the way, here are some examples of answers to that question and how these answers could affect your website redesign process.

I want to establish a web...

Don’t forget to check out part one (keyword selection), part two (keyword traffic estimation), part three (ad creation), part four (ad testing), part five (bidding strategy) and part six (ad budgeting and targeting).

Now that you have your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign optimized and ready to go, there’s one more crucial element to PPC advertising that you must setup before starting your campaign – measurement.

The great thing about a PPC campaign is that it’s very easy to determine the ROI of...

Don’t forget to check out part one (keyword selection), part two (keyword traffic estimation), part three (ad creation), part four (ad testing) and part five (bidding strategy).

Google offers several options for customizing your budget as well as your target audience through its AdWords interface. Using these tools can help ensure that you are making the best use of the funds you have allocated to your AdWords program. 

To access any of the options described below, access the Settings tab of...

Don’t forget to check out part one (keyword selection), part two (keyword traffic estimation), part three (ad creation) and part four (ad testing).

The AdWords keyword bidding strategy you choose to implement will depend on what goal you have set for your PPC program.  Higher bids are likely to result in higher rankings and more impressions for your ads, but your cost-per-click will increase. Low bids will result in lower rankings and less impressions but your lower cost-per-click will lead...

Don’t forget to check out part one (keyword selection), part two (keyword traffic estimation) and part three (ad creation). 

Now that you’ve created your first ad, you’re not quite finished with your ad group. Google AdWords gives you the capability to test out multiple versions of your ad and see which version performs the best. Slight changes to the wording of you ad can make a big difference, so do not hesitate to try several different versions.

Here’s a sample ad group report and some...

Don’t forget to check out part one (keyword selection) and part two (keyword traffic estimation). 

Now that you’ve selected targeted keywords for your AdWords campaign, it’s time to start creating your ads. Google has a specific set of character limits that you must follow in each of your ads –

Title (Blue underlined text): 25 characters

Ad Text: 70 characters

Display URL (Green text): 35 characters

There are also a set of parameters around your ad content including:

• User experience
• Accuracy
• Legal...

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Tips #2: Keyword Traffic Estimation

Don’t forget to check out part one of this series, Pay-Per-Click Advertising Keyword Selection.

Now that you have selected your pay-per-click keywords, you need to get an idea of how many clicks you can plan on receiving to help set your pay-per-click (PPC) budget on a typical day.

For example, let’s say that by using the Google Keyword Tool, you chose the following five keywords (hooded sweatshirts, zip hooded sweatshirts, hooded...

Over the next several weeks and months, we’ll be running a series of pay-per-click advertising tips to help you get your first pay-per-click campaign up and running or make modifications to improve an existing campaign.

After getting your pay-per-click advertising account setup, the first step to a successful campaign is proper keyword selection. So, how can you find information on the keywords that are going to be the focus of your advertising campaign? Google, of course!

Google provides a...

With all of us experiencing the harsh new economic realities, how do you plan to market your brand in the coming year? One thing is for sure, if you want to be successful, the same old strategies will not work as well as they once did.

Marketing Web has compiled a list of 10 marketing and branding trends that you’ll want to keep in mind for 2010. For more detail on each trend, click here to view the full article.

1) Value is the new black

2) Brands increasingly a surrogate for "value"

3) Brand...

Some of these opportunities may apply regardless of whether your business is conducted as a sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability company, S corporation, or regular corporation. Other opportunities may apply only to a particular type of business organization. This Tax Letter is organized into sections discussing year-end, and year-round, tax-saving opportunities for:

1.      All businesses

2.      Partnerships, limited liability companies, and S corporations

3.      Regular (C)...

Chances are, your business can’t afford to have a celebrity like LeBron James or Peyton Manning extolling the virtues of your product on national television, but have you considered a celebrity endorsement via the social networking site Twitter? It may be more realistic than you might think.

There are now many companies specializing in “sponsored tweeting.” These companies pair advertisers with relevant Twitterers, for a fee, of course.

Looking to reach an audience interested in home...

Just in case some companies missed the memo that paying bloggers for reviews of their products usually comes back to bite you – exhibit A and exhibit B – the FTC has stepped in to put an end to this practice.

According to the New York Times article, “The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers.”

So what does...

Security technology company, McAfee, Inc released its list of most dangerous celebrity search terms. Topping the list this year was Jessica Biel. According to McAfee, searches for Biel have a one in five chance of landing on a malicious web site.

Coming in second place for most dangerous search term this year was Beyonce, followed by Jennifer Aniston, Tom Brady and Jessica Simpson. Brad Pitt topped last year’s list.  

Looking for a way to protect your network from dangerous searches? filterITis...

For an Ohio small business looking for additional funding to grow its employment force, the Small Business Linked Deposit Program may be an enticing option.

The program, which is run through the Ohio Treasurer, provides reduced rate loans to businesses that use the funds to create new, full-time jobs. One full-time equivalent job must be created or saved for every $50,000 requested. A maximum of $400,000 may be requested.

The loan is a two-year loan with a possible two-year renewal if all...

Sports Sponsorships – Inside the Lines

With the economic downturn hitting the sports world just as hard as any other business – just ask the hometown Cleveland Indians – teams are looking to squeeze out any extra bit of possible revenue.

Walk into any professional sports stadium today and you’ll immediately be bombarded by advertising in a variety of different formats. In fact, it might seem that you see ads everywhere except for on the field. That is, unless you attend certain NFL training...