The best way to optimize a display url for a great quality score is to have the keyword in the domain.

Which means that if you are serious about optimizing your ppc campaigns you’re buying domain names.

I’m going to share a place to get cheap domains that work well for landing pages. I would never use these domains for getting organic rankings since I like to stick with com/net/org for that but for paid traffic, these are diamonds.

Diamonds for Dimes.

co.cc

They are giving away 2 free co.cc domains which is not very exciting.  Where it does get interesting is when you donate $10 (or more) you can get 100 domains per account.

Ten dollars gets you 100 co.cc domains that are perfect for display urls for your campaigns.

How many things can boost your quality score at that price?

Make the most of the 29 characters left with a .co.cc landing page and get a better quality score with a relevant domain name.

What are your biggest stumbling blocks in getting a return on your ad spend?

This week, I was running some market research for a small business in the MMA (mixed martial arts) niche using the same strategies of finding profitable easy to dominate keywords that can rank quickly. This time, I recorded the information to make it easy to pass on to the business owner and on this blog.

Finding Keywords In Your Niche:

Market Research to Gauge Organic Marketing Competition

Get a Process for Documenting Your Split Tests

Josh Baker wrote a detailed post on how he documents the processes and results of split testing with a spreadsheet. He wrote out every step he takes for documenting his split tests. To give those visual readers a better idea of what documenting a split test looks like, I created this mind map for you and with his permission I’m sharing this for you to create better processes in documenting the results of your split testing. Download the Documenting A/B Testing in Excel Mindmap as a PDF

When you’re looking for ways to make the most out of your website the first place you go is not to your designer. It’s your marketing arm who can tell you in detail about your buyers and client profiles. It’s the go to person is the person in your company or the part of you that can paint the picture of your best customers and what makes them tick. That’s where you start when you want your website to be a way to seriously grow your business. If you don’t know that much about your typical or ideal customer, answer these questions and you’re on your way.

The buyer profiles are made up of the answers to questions like:

1. What are your buyers looking for?
2. What do they do, what responsibilities do they face every day?
3. How do they find and process information and value that fit their needs?
4. What are their concerns and worries?
5. How do they like to be engaged and reached?

The reason why a buyer profile or buyer persona is the starting point for having a business website that matters is that a plan to make everyone happy makes no one happy. Into business terms, it means that if your website is meant to make bigger business improvements in sales, new clients, visibility and beat out competitors and you don’t have a strategy that breaks up that success into paths and roles, you won’t be successful.

Move Away From A One Size Fits All and Into the Divide and Conquer Business Website

A great example of a company that turned around their website into a business growth channel is RightNow Technologies. David Meerman Scott posted a great write up on what they did to create buyer personas, build their website and marketing around those and the results that came pouring in quickly. Results like quadrupled conversions inside three months.

5 Ways People Come Together to Form a Community

1. Proximity: users share a physical location. Ex, Craigslist by city
2. Purpose: users share a common task. Ex, eBay as community builder for market reputation
3. Passion: users gather to share a common interest. Ex, Specialty forums on model airplanes
4. Practice: users share a common industry or craft. Ex, Professional user groups and trade groups
5. Providence: users discover connections with others. Ex, Facebook and the status updates

Now that we have listed the different kinds of communities, let’s take a look at ways you as a small business or you as a start up can benefit from getting involved with and make a positive impact on the members of the communities.

Proximity: Location driven communities

This is for users that give attention based on a specific location.  Location based communities, for instance Craigslist, utilize its specification to location. Small business owners can use this to their advantage by spread the word on any events, promotions or hiring notices within a physical community.

Purpose Driven Communities and Your Business

These are the communities where people contribute to the overall value. Communities like eBay have meaning because buyers and sellers keep each other honest by means of public feedback. Amazon has a loyal following of users who review books, movies and music that add to the overall level of trust of their online store.

What a small business can do to leverage those who are looking for purpose?

• Give your market, potential customers and current customers a way to leave feedback on your products and services.
• Let your market speak out on what they like or dislike about how your company treated them.
• Let your website or online community be a place where your market can help each other by sharing their personal experiences, offering strategies and exchanging information where they are on a current project. This level of interaction and trust between your market and your clients boosts your level of credibility because you openly let those who are filling a purpose to help others like them.
• Have a member’s only or client only forum or wiki so that your customers can help others like themselves.
• Have interactive features on your website, rating of posts, open commenting, a public forum where those who you want to serve can get to know each other.

Passionate Communities

This is where most small business need to have a very focused view of what the most active enthusiasts of your niche are doing. When passionate users are in a community they devote time to the very thing that your business is about.

If you are not building a community around the passion of your users be aware and participate in the places that they go for that attention and news.

Since every niche has a community to belong to, the question is are you watching and adding value in that very same place?

Practice Centered Communities

These are communities that are formed around a trade or a job in a shared space.

Etienne Wenger defined the community as this:

They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

For more on communities of practice visit Etienne Wenger.

How can a small business make use of the practice centered community?

Become involved and add value to your market in ways that help them become better at what they do. This is more so for professional practice focused businesses. This could be a nursing forum or it could be a LinkedIn group, that reaches out by asking questions, commenting on new work or offering to reuse your existing assets to a peer.

Providence and Your Business

Communities of providence is about seeking to make connections. These communities are where people are looking to belong to someplace, or something. An example of this is Facebook’s networks and groups that users can join.

How does the connection seeking community help business?

The value in the Facebook community comes from the connection and display of actions, thoughts and links within a trusted network. The most valuable feature to a business that Facebook offers is the Status Update page. On this page everyone that you have ‘friended’ gives off an activity alert. These alerts have a level of trust that advertising can’t offer. When someone in Facebook mentions your service or links to your website they are also sending their credibility to everyone else in their network, furthering their networks trust in your business.

Marketing Your Business with Web Communities

These five broad community types give an overview of what communities represent and what it can mean for your business and for every market, or niche. People are always drawn together around a common purpose or goal, online or in person. A business should have a presence within the communities where their market is and add value to its members.

How will your business enrich your market’s web community?

Twitter for Business:

A 60 minute presentation by Sarah Milstein from Oreilly

Solutions Stars Video has some great video clips about the value of being online. Guy Kawasaki adds that any business who’d like clients in more than a 5 mile radius from your store should have a blog. Or at least a site.

Web Presence Can Tip the Balance of Market Access to Progressive Companies

Having a web presence can show what you’re about to your market is the great flattener of reaching out to your ideal market. No longer is it large companies that have the resources to stand out and grab the attention of their market but small companies can speak equally as loud and draw in customers from their market by showing what they stand for and what they are passionate about.

Here’s our general strategy. Lets just be real and authentic and show customers our personality.

We tell our employees: use your best judgement and be yourself. –Tony Hsieh

Maybe your small business should just have a blog, maybe as a business owner you should be on Twitter. Really, there’s no way to tell if that’s the right web presence for you but the barrier to entry has been demolished by these kinds of web tools. The bigger question is if resources are not limiting you from showing what you’re really about to your market by having a web presence, what excuse will you let yourself believe?

Have a Uniform Site Wide Navigation?

When a visitor comes to your website the navigation should do two things: show them where they are and show them where they can go. The navigation should be the same throughout your site because it gives your visitor an anchor while browsing your site. Lose the anchor of a standardized site wide navigation and frustrated visitors will sail away.

Can You Spot The Links at a Glance?

Links are a foundation of a website.They should always stick out from the regular non-hyperlinked text on your site. Traditionally, links are underlined and blue while the rest of text is black and not underlined. You don’t have to keep it the same, blue and underlined but you do have to make sure that it is in contrast to your regular text.

Does Your Visitor Need to Register Before Seeing Content?

The answer should be no. If a visitor landed on your site by search or by recommendation, give them the information they were looking for without any roadblocks. A user will leave a site if you place a barrier to your content. They’ll go to the next option on the search result and not think twice about your site.

Too Much Detail on Registration Forms?

Detailed registration forms are a huge reason why people abandon sign ups for something they’ve shown an interest in. When making a registration form ask only what will directly be needed to get them to the other side and submit the form. Sometimes just looking at a long form will turn a visitor off. If you’d like to have additional information, ask for it once they have already signed up and are willing to give you more details.

Are You Paginating Long Articles?

Writing for the web is different than for other media. When a visitor comes to an interesting article and scrolls down to see a page 1 of 5 at the bottom, a user gets scared away. You’re asking them to commit five clicks to finish reading your content without offering them any reward for doing so. Breaking up your content also hurts your search engine optimization because it is harder for the search engine spiders to understand the full context of the article if its not all on the same page.

Is Your Copy Brief and Easily Skimmed?

When writing for the web, keep in mind that the attention span of visitors is very short. To draw them in give them an interesting hook that they can then scan the page and see if they are interested in reading the entire article. While you may be passionate about your content, give your readers visual breaks and quotes that can pull their attention should they get bored with reading long chunks of text.

Can They Contact You From Your Website?

Have contact information easily available throughout your website. You may have done a great job of delivering value to your visitors but sometimes they need to reach out and contact you directly. Make sure you let your visitors know that you’re easy to reach by having a phone number listed, an email address to send queries or an on page contact form they can submit.