Marketing and Writing for an Online World.

The work I did last week was a bit unfocused.

I started the week off deciding to make use of my time in an efficient, prioritized fashion. In essence, this is suppose to be an attempt at rating and then ranking tasks in their relation to ROI for the website. I figured, I am after more views on my money pages. With this in mind, I set off to find some methods to get this done.

First on the list was Google Adwords. I had already signed up and just had to make a few ads and create a campaign for them. I set a low daily limit and let it run from Wednesday to this past Saturday. My feelings about the results were mixed. While there was a significant jump in page views, there was almost no increase in conversions. What the hell? I thought my ads were appearing on pages that had matching subjects or keywords or something. Okay, time to do some research. Skip to an hour later and I find that my assumptions on the workings of Google Adwords was correct. Still puzzled, I started checking through the ads I had made to find my goof. I had only made links in the ads to the main page; no links to the money page existed in the ads. I promptly fixed that grievous error and made a mental note in my ‘How to SEO’ folder: Linking to the money page is important.

Overall, I was satisfied with the results from my trial campaign. It doubled the amount of views of the home page for the days it was active on Google Adwords. This is definitely something that will have to officially be included in the marketing budget.

Moving to a separate topic: directory listings suck. I spent too many hours last week adding the website to business directories and the blogs related to the site to blog directories. My eyes bleed from filling out forms. There is one question I have for the SEO gurus out there:

Is paying for top directory listings essential to marketing your website?

Some of the prices I came across, for the paid directories, seemed- well, pricey. If getting listed in these directories is not of dire importance, then I would prefer not to waste the money.

The third direction my optimizing (I love saying that) took me last week was to the underhanded, lecherous task of back linking. Until I nail down 80% of the ranked back links of my competitors, I don’t think I will even bother with searching out other linking partners. I mean, why not start with the places that have a proven track record for ‘developing strategic partnerships with businesses in my industry’. Whew, that’s a mouthful.