“You get a commission on each subscription, and you save money or time, or both, on routine service issues.”

Comodo livePCsupport is an on line remote support service.  With Comodo livePCsupport, small- and medium-sized end-user businesses connect to online specialists.  The specialists can diagnose and instantly repair many common problems on line, without need for an on-site visit. Integrators and resellers who offer this service to their new and existing customers can delegate many technical issues to the service, while collecting a commission on each subscription.  This frees up reseller time for critical desk-side visits for technically complicated issues.

livePCsupport services include network setup, security and configuration; enterprise-level firewall, antivirus and backup; security software management, including user access rights; software installation; and PC tune-ups.  “Comodo’s livePCsupport infrastructure is in place,” said Abdulhayoglu. “Resellers and integrators who want to extend their lines can sign up and offer these services tomorrow, no back-end necessary.”

About Comodo

Comodo is a leading brand in Internet security, covering an extensive range of security software and services, including digital certificates, PCI scanning, desktop security, online faxing, and computer technical support services.

Business and consumers worldwide recognize Comodo as standing for security and trust. Comodo products secure and authentic online transactions for over 200,000 business and have more than 18,000,000 installations of Comodo desktop security software, including an award-winning firewall and antivirus software offered at no charge.

The Comodo family of companies is committed to continual innovation, core competencies in PKI, authentication, and malware detection and prevention.
As a catalyst in eliminating online crime, the companies’ mission is to establish a Trusted Internet.

With US headquarters overlooking Manhattan on New Jersey’s waterfront and global resources in United Kingdom, China, India, Ukraine, and Romania, Comodo products offer intelligent security, authentication, and assurance.

Comodo — Creating Trust OnlineR. For more information, visit Comodo’s website.

For more information, reporters and analysts may contact:
Comodo Group, Inc
Newport Tower
525 Washington Blvd., Suite 1400
Jersey City, NJ 07310
Email: media-relations@comodo.com
+1 (201) 963 0004 x4073

IBM has invested substantial resource in sales, marketing and business development in the IT SMB industry and Karstin graciously provides the keys to success from long term strategies as well as the tactics that are proving most effective today the most successful IT VAR’s and systems integrators.

Listen in now as Karstin shares…

• What should you be MOST focused on
• What’s the most effective way to market your business today
• How to make “SEO” work for you quickly and cost-effectively
• What incredible opportunity has the current economy created for you right now that you should you be taking advantage of IMMEDIATELY.   This has nothing to do with IBM products!

If you’re looking for the most cost effective ways to quickly add bottom line profits to your IT business, listen in now.

In this interview Marc reveals:

• What separates highly successful IT VAR’s from the rest?
• What “1″ marketing tactic should you be implementing and why?
• What’s the most important strategy for improving sales?
• More…

In this video I’ll show you:

1. Simple techniques to make your marketing more effective
2. How to draw prospects in to what you want to say AND compel them to take action
3. How to quickly know if your print ads, mailers, etc… will work BEFORE you spend a ton of money
4. How to potentially triple your revenue without spending anything extra (well… maybe $40 bucks)
5. The most cost-effective way to grow your business exponentially
6. I think there’s some other stuff in there too…

By now you’ve probably heard of PPC as a means of driving traffic to your website. You might even have tried it with great success or possibly with poor to mediocre results.

PPC is an absolute must for VAR’s due to its incredible targeting flexibility, tracking / analysis capabilities, and tight control over advertising budget and spending.

I could spend months discussing how to effectively implement PPC advertising into your business and still just scratch the surface.

This post is more of a tutorial and will provide a condensed overview on how to set up a good optimized campaign.

I’ll cover:

• Optimal account structure set up
• Keyword Research
• How to target your local/regional market with laser precision
• Copywriting tips to create effective ads that get clicked
• How to have Google give you high performing ads for your campaign
• 2 tools you can use to spy on your competitors and “steal” (ethically) their winning ad campaigns and keywords
• How to avoid wasting money on non-targeted prospects
• How to make sure you landing page is optimized for sales and discounted ad rates from Google
• How to annihilate your competition
• How to get highest placement at lowest cost
• More…

If you’re already experienced with PPC I encourage you to read every word in this post anyway.  I hope to have covered at least 1 nugget that could help you improve your peformance.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term I’ll start from the beginning.

PPC is an auction type process of advertising and stands for Pay Per Click.  You create a keyword focused ad and then bid a desired amount to spend each time that ad is clicked.

The PPC service will display your ad according to your bid amount.  The more you bid the higher your ad will be displayed over competing advertisers… generally speaking.

If your ads are effective you can actually be rewarded by your PPC service, depending on the service so that you can gain higher position in the search engine at costs much lower than what your competitors have to pay for even lower positions.

IE… your ad could hold position 1 at a cost of only $.20 while your competitor with less effective ads has to pay $1.32 just for position 2.

The image to the left shows an overview of a Google search result page on the phrase “IT Consultant, New York”.

The content boxed in red is sponsored content fueled by PPC advertising.

The content in blue is content is Google’s local business ad section, which is also fueled from your adwords PPC account and I’ll cover that in this tutorial as well.

The area in green consists of “organic” listings that Google has determined to be relevant to the search phrase “IT Consultant, New York”.

The way to get listed in the organic listings is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  SEO is covered in other posts on this site.

The good news for VAR’s is that you can pretty well control your presense on page 1 of Google through paid advertising at very affordable costs.  Looking at the image to the left almost the entire top half of page 1 on this search is paid advertising.

To be perfectly honest, the top half of page 1 is just about the only real estate that counts on a search engine result page (SERP).

98% of all searches conducted don’t go past page 1 and most activity is in the top half.

So if you spend any time/money on SEM (Search Engine Marketing, including PPC, and other activities NOT addressed in this post) or SEO you’d better be on page 1.

Otherwise you’re investing valuable time and money to compete for only 2 percent of the potential traffic, which ain’t worth it.

The major PPC engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) offer pretty refined geographical targeting now, which makes PPC a “must have” tool in the VAR’s overall marketing tool belt.

In the earlier days geo targeting was underdeveloped or not available at all, depending on the engine, rendering it useless for most VAR’s who target a specific location.

If you haven’t yet implemented PPC in your marketing strategy you should start NOW and this post will give you everything necessary to hit the ground running.

But… while PPC absolutely deserves a place in your marketing mix, for most of you it should only consume about 10% of your marketing budget and focus.  I’ll discuss why later in this post.

Step 1: Go to google and click Advertising Programs.

Step 2: Select the adwords program.

 Step 3: As a VAR, with multiple products/services, you’ll need to select the standard edition.

Step 4: Create Google Account

Google will ask if you have an existing account using any of their products such as analytics, etc…  If you do, you can sign in with that ID and your adwords account will be automatically associated with that account.  This can be very helpful if managing mutiple Google products. 

Its ESSENTIAL if you’re already using Google analytics.  You definitely want your adwords and analytics accounts integrated for more accurate, streamlined analysis and reporting.

In this case I’m signing up a fresh account so I’ll select “I do not have…” and go through the motions.

Step 5: Select Currency

You can change this later but I’m going to select Canadian dollars here as this
tutorial will be for a Canadian account.

Step 6: Confirm Account

You know the drill!  Google will sent a confirmation email.  Click the link!

Step 7: Create Campaign

Once you’ve confirmed your account you’ll be taken to the campaign wizard.

Click the big, fat “Create your first campaign” button. 

Step 8: Targeting!

Google allows you to target by:

1. Language (English will most likely be selected by default)
2. Geography

Google will allow you to target your ads by country, state, zip… lots of control. By default US will likely be selected.

As a VAR, most likely targeting a local or regional geography, you’ll want to click “change targeting” to further refine your campaign’s geographical focus.

You don’t want to advertise all over the US unless you can close nationwide deals to monetize that traffic.

Step 9:  Enter your targeting criterion

Again, you can enter state, city name, zip codes… 

In this example I want to target the Calgary, AB metro area so I’ll simply enter “Calgary” in the text field.

Step 6: Refine targeting

Google will return options based on your entry for you to further hone in on your targeted geography.

In this case I’ve checked the “Calgary city” option.

Once selected, “Calgary” will be displayed in the “Selected Locations” box below.  I could then add more cities, zips etc… to expand the footprint.

I could also enter postal codes within Calgary and
select “Do NOT show ads here” if I wanted to get real picky about the turf in Calgary but I’ll leave it “as is” and move on.

Once you click “Done”, you’ll be returned to the targeting page and see that your geographical target has been updated.

Click “Continue”.

**Note: Since I’m targeting Calgary I could also add “French” as a language choice but that would make for a screwy tutorial since I can’t speak French

More importantly… if you’re targeting more than one language or geographical regions simultaneously it would be best to set up separate campaigns.   This will make it easier to control your campaigns and improve overall quality, which is VERY important.  Will discuss quality scores and their value to you later.

Step 7:  Create your first ad

As you can see Google doesn’t offer a lot of space for you to create your ad.  Your ad copywriting skills will need to be VERY sharp to maximize your ROI with Adwords or any type of PPC.  The nice thing is Google has flexible ad delivery and tracking features built in that will allow you to split test ads so you can eliminate poor performers and improve your money making ads.

The fields in Google’s ad wizard are pretty self explanatory.  I do want to point out the “Display URL” and the “Destination URL”.

Google will allow you to enter a display url that has slightly different syntax than the actual url.  The display url will still need to point to the same domain but you can modify the directory/page names to improve click through.

Ex. If you’re creating an ad for “data storage” you can make the display url: www.YourDomain.com/Data-Storage even if the actual url is www.YourDomain.com/83f8dz/?products.

The cleaner domain with keyword very prominent in url will likely improve your click through rate.

Also… it tends to improve CTR if you capitalize the first letter of every word in your url.  This is a guideline.  Results will vary so be sure to split test with different syntax in the url to see what generates the highest click throughs.

I’ll cover copywriting in other posts but for now I want to show you a quick trick to get started faster.

For this example I’ll create an ad on “data storage”.

In order to write effective ad copy I’d need to wrack my brain over the different approaches to get attention, stimulate desire, etc… but for now I’m going to cheat a little and let Google give me a head start on creating an effective ad.

You see… Google is fanatical about high quality ads that get people to click.  Adwords is Google’s main revenue driver so they want people to click your ads.  BUT… Google also demands that your ads are high quality so that “Googlers” find what their looking for as easily as possible.

Otherwise they’d stop using Google.

So Google’s algorithms are constantly monitoring the ads on their system to ensure highest quality and click through rates (CTR’s).   Ads that get higher CTR’s and lead visitors to highly relevant pages are rewarded with lower costs and higher placement. 

This ensures Google users find what they’re looking for and Google drives maximum revenue by displaying effective ads that get clicked, costing us money and padding Google’s bank account.

So here’s how we use this to our advantage…

I want to create an effective ad for “data storage” without spending a lot of time thinking of benefits, scare tactics, etc…

I’ll open up a new tab in my not-as-hip-as-FireFox-browser and and do a Google search for “data storage” BUT I’ll append gibberish to the end of my search phrase so that the end search phrase is “data storage blahncic”.

Since no advertiser will have entered a bid on this phrase Google will do its best to serve a relevant ad by picking what it
considers the most relevant ad based on CTR for “data storage”.

In this case Google gives me 5 ads with apparent high CTR to pick from.  Only 1 is useful as the others are too specific to a particular brand or include pricing details that I won’t offer.

This technique is just a quick way to get ideas for high performing ads that you can tweak.

A better strategy would be to use a service like SpyFu.com or KeyWordSpy.com.  These are powerful tools that literally let you spy on adword competitors.  You can see the keywords they’re bidding as well as the ads they’re running.

When creating your ads you could use either of the 2 services above to see all the other ads that are running for your targeted keywords.  You can also see the history and ad variations for each competitor.

If you know which competitors have been running their ads the longest AND the ad variations they run you can quickly determine who’s being intelligent in their ad campaigns.  The ads they’ve been running the longest OR the most recent ads are most likely their most profitable ads. 

You can simply use their winning ad copy to start creating your own.

You don’t want to plagiarize their copy.  Just use the elements of their winning ads to gain a head start in creating your own.

 So here’s the ad I created from the “swiped” ad
Google provided.

Remember… this is just a quick starting point.  We’ll need to create more variations to start split testing and improve results.

Click continue…

 Step 8:  Keyword selection

In this step you’ll enter your list of keywords in the text area on the right.   I’m only going to enter the main keyword “data storage” here for now.  I’ll come back and add more targeted phrases once the campaign has been created.

The list on the right provides suggestions from Google based on the content of your page.  In the last step we told Google where this ad would take visitors when we entered the “destination url” in the ad form.

Google crawled the page to see determine how relevant the page was to our ad and returned a list of keywords based on that crawl.

IMPORTANT! If the list returned by Google isn’t highly relevant to the keyword target of your ad consider pausing, setting up a new page on your site and put the targeted keyword in the meta tags of your new page as well as a quick paragraph about your targeted keyword.  THEN resume creation of your campaign.

The greatest factor contributing to your success with adwords is the quality of your ads, which will eventually transfer to your ad groups, campaigns and account.

If you have a high quality score Google will reward you by charging less to maintain higher position.  Your competitors could be spending a lot more to receive inferior placement.

Google is very covert about its methodologies and algorythms.  No body knows for sure how frequently Google will check the relevancy of your landing page during the course of your campaign but we do know they check during ad creation.

So make sure the page is relevant from the start!  Otherwise it could cost you quality points and you may not get a chance to fix it later.

In this case the list is not relevant at all… because the page in my destination url doesn’t even exist.  I just entered
it for the sake of this tutorial.

If it the suggestions returned by Google were targeted for this ad I could simply click “Add” and that word would be added to my list.

Step 9: Campaign Settings

Here you’ll enter some general settings for the campaign. 

We’ll need to come back and edit this later but for now I’ve entered values for:

Daily Budget: $20

This is the max I’m willing to be charged per day on this campaign.  This ability to set a daily budget is one of the things that makes Google Adwords such a “must have”.  It’s easy to control your costs.

Maximum CPC bids: $1.00

This is the amount I’m willing to pay each time this ad is clicked.

Generally the higher you bid the higher you’ll rank but, as mentioned above, Google will adjust the amount you have to pay for a position based on your overall quality score.

CPC Content bid: $0

This is another way to leverage Google as an advertising tool but I’ll set up a separate campaign for that.  You’ll get different performance from the content network than Google’s search pages so I use different campaigns to run content ads in order to better optimize the campaigns, ensure ROI and maintain a good quality score.

Again… we’ll can edit this later so let’s just get the campaign set up for now.

Step 10: Confirm Campaign

On this page you’ll simply verify everything so far and click continue.

The next step from here will be to set up billing.  Google will charge $5 to your CC in order to give your account an initial balance to start running ads.

I’m going to click “I’ll set up billing later” on the bottom right to continue with campaign set up.

Step 11: Login

Once you complete billing or elect to skip it you’ll likely have another confirmation process.  Click the confirmation link in your email and you’ll eventually wind up logged in to your campaign summary page.

Click the “Campaign Summary” link.

Step 12:  

On the next page click the link to enter your first campaign.

Step 13: Edit Campaign Settings

At the top of this page you’ll probably notice the “Advertise on Google Maps” box.  Ignore this for now.  I’ll cover it in more detail later.

For now click the “Edit campaign settings” link.

Change the name to something meaningful to track your campaign performance.  In this case I’m going to name it “Data Storage Search” because the campaign will focus specifically on “data storage” and will only have ads displayed on Google’s search pages.

A later campaign might be called “Data Storage Content” where I’d have the same ads but let them run on Google’s content network.

Again, keeping these strategies in separate campaigns will allow you to maintain tighter control over your spending, ROI and overall quality.

1. Daily budget (set at $20 previously)

2. If this were a high trafficked keyword and I felt the daily budget of $20 would be used up before the day were through I could tell Google whether to display ads throughout the day or serve them as quickly as possible.  I’ll leave it on “serve slowly throughout the day.

3. Deselect search partners.  I only want this campaign to run on Google’s search results as mentioned above.

4. Turn off the content network.  Again…
   only serving ads on Google’s search pages in this campaign.

5. Whoops!  Forgot my ABC’s

6. You can now display ads on mobile devices but I’ll turn this off since my landing pages aren’t optimized to serve on a mobile device and capture leads using mobile devices.

7. Google let’s you try to specify a position for your ads to display in.  Generally, ads served in positions 3-5 get the best quality clicks but I’m not going to set up position preferences at this
   time.

8. If we were promoting general interest, commodity type products such as life insurance we’d probably want to use Google demographical targeting features to display ads for our most targeted
   prospects by gender, age, etc…  I don’t think we need it for “data storage” products.

9. Ad scheduling and serving

   1. Ad scheduling lets you determine whether you want your ads to run all day long or during certain hours.  Since the “qualified” prospects who might search for “data storage” will be work horses I won’t set up ad scheduling.  Prospects could be searching at pretty much any time.

   2. Ad serving pertains to rotation of ads that you set up for split testing.  If you want Google to determine which ad is performing better and run that more often then choose “Optimize”.  I don’t trust Google to determine the most powerful ad to my liking so I select “show ads more evenly.  That way any ad variations for split testing will be displayed equally and I can have more control over how I manage the winners and poor performers.

10. We set up the target audience in previous steps and I’m going to leave “as is”.

Step 14:

Now let’s click on the “Ad Group #1″ link to enter
and edit the ad group settings and ads.

Step 15:  Edit Keywords

Scroll about half way down the page to the keyword section and click the “edit
keywords” link.

Now click the “Keyword Tool” Link

Enter your main keyword phrase in the text area, make sure the “Use synonyms” block is checked and hit “Get keyword ideas”.

 Google will present a list of related phrases based searches conducted on Google’s network.  These phrases may be synonyms of the target phrase or related phrases a user may have searched for while searching for your target phrase.

Before you get to far along make sure that “Exact” is selected on the “match type”.

Without going into too much detail here Google allows you to set your ads up to target keywords on a Broad, Phrase or Exact match. 

For exact type matching a user would have to search for the exact phrase “data storage” to trigger your ad.

If you set your ad to broad type matching the user could trigger your ad by searching for “find data warehouse storage”.   The words “data” and “storage” are in the search syntax but the user is not looking for what we’re trying to sell.

With phrase match the user could trigger our ad searching for “storage data”.  The words are in the search syntax but are out of order.  This may or may not be a problem.

Because we want to set the bar high on our quality score as quickly as possible lets shoot for exact only matches on this ad group.  This will result in lower volume but the clicks will be much more targeted and likely produce a higher CTR.

Later we can set up another ad group strictly for “Broad” matching and then another for “Phrase” matching with negative match phrases that further refine the campaign and give us greater control.  I may cover that in a separate post.

When you see exact match phrases in Google’s keyword suggestions that are worth bidding on (read highly relevant and likely to produce a qualified prospect) click the “Add Exact” link.

As you click to add keywords you’ll see them appear in the list at far right.

Once finished click “Save to ad group”.

Step 16: Adjust Bids

The first thing we need to do now is delete the “data storage” entry that is NOT enclosed in [brackets].  This means that phrase is set to broad match which will produce more non-relevant clicks, wasting money and reducing our CTR.  Simply check the box next to that phrase and hit “Delete”.

Now we need to edit our keyword bids.  Select the “check all” box to select all keywords and then hit “Edit Keyword Settings”.

 This will launch a window allowing you to enter individual bids for each keyword.

There are many ways to manage an adwords campaign and I don’t always enter bids on a keyword specific basis but in this case I will. 

Why? 

Again… we want to get a high quality score as soon as possible to reduce our overall click costs and increase click volume.

To do this we’re going to bid extra high in the beginning to get top spot so we get lots of clicks ie. high CTR.

Most advertisers will approach this from the other direction, bidding the minimum amount and then increasing marginally to get higher position.  This works well to keep costs low when starting out but may hurt your quality score from the very beginning (because you’ll have a lower CTR at lower positions), which will ultimately cost you more because Google won’t give the high quality discounts.

So we’ll bid high enough to get first spot, possibly at a loss for a couple of weeks just to get the higher CTR and then back off gradually once Google recognizes us as a higher quality account holder and rewards us with higher placement at lower cost.

Since this is a localized campaign the expense of maintaining first spot should be very reasonable.

On this page you’ll see that Google offers a suggested price to get on first page results.  I don’t always trust Google’s estimates and suggestions but it’ll serve as a starting point.  Simply enter the desired bid next to each keyword and click “Save Changes”.

We can return as often as necessary to adjust.

You can see the new bids I’ve entered.

I know this may look expensive but remember, we’re going to decrease these bids later once Google perceives us a quality advertiser based on a. High CTR and b. targeted landing pages.

Also remember we’ve set a daily cap that will prevent us from spending more than we want.

Consider the extra spent up front to establish a high CTR as an investment in your long term success.  One of the main factors in being competitive is the ability to acquire more customers than your competitors.

If Google rewards you with higher placement - at lower cost for being a high quality advertiser you’ll be able to acquire more leads than you competitors at a lower cost.

Don’t forget the next step though… you still have to be more effective at converting leads into customers than your competitors… I digress.  That’s another topic.

Step 17: Annihilate Your Competition

The key to outperforming your competition on MANY levels is testing, tweaking and refining your sales, marketing, operations, support services… EVERYTHING.

Establish a baseline for standard performance and then experiment with different tactics, systems, etc… to try and beat the standard.

Google has equipped you with a very powerful platform to split test and track performance of your ad campaigns… and even resulting lead/sales conversions if you use Google analytics.

We created 1 ad during campaign set up but before we make this campaign live we want to create some variations of that ad to split test so we can weed out the weak performing ads and improve on the powerful
ones.

What to split test?

EVERYTHING!

Even little things like using a period or leaving it out can make a significant difference in your CTR.

But the bigger items to test first… that will likely have the most profound impact on your CTR might be:

Approach/Ad style

There are different ways to get your prospects’ attention and draw them in.  You could build your ads using:

• urgency/fear of loss

• benefit/promise of gain

• announcement of something new

• Etc…

The list goes on but this is a good start.  Generally… people are more motivated by loss or pain… or trying to avoid it than they are by promising something of value.

An IT manager might be very worried about losing his job if the network goes down and he can’t restore it quickly enough; especially if there’s loss of critical data.  You may gain “some” leverage by talking about automation, etc… which will make his job easier but it might be more powerful to address the possible consequences of a failed backup system that he was relying on to preserve his company’s critical data.

If you’re targeting an owner or C-level exec they might be less worried about losing their job (might) and more concerned about achieving company goals.  In this case your ad might be more effective promising strong benefits.

The solutions you’re promoting will also dictate to a great degree which approach would be best to take for initial
split testing.

Data storage, backup, recovery, network security, etc… are all solutions that really open the door for you to lead with urgency/fear of loss type ad copy.  Prospects are already operating defensively when they research these types of solution.

Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, etc… would probably be more powerfully presented by using announcement, newsy, benefit promising type ad copy.

You should test many different approaches to find out what works best for your prospects in your market.

The overall approach you take will affect many of the other elements in your ad but I’ll list a few other things
worth testing.

Headline

Next to the overall approach the headline will probably have the greatest impact on your ad’s performance. 
You should split test headlines with different words, benefits etc…

Call to action

The call to action is just what it sounds like… you’re enticing/commanding your prospect to take action.  In
this case “action” is clicking your ad to go to your landing page.

Don’t underestimate the power of a solid call to action.  This element in your ad and sales copy is one of the
greatest contributors to your overall lead and sales conversions.

Every page on your website should have some sort of call to action depending on the purpose of that page.  If
they don’t… sharpen your pencil and fix it.  Otherwise you’re leaving opportunity on the table.

With Google Adwords there’s so little space to work with your entire ad might be nothing more than a headline and a
call to action.. lf like most ads, it could be a headline with some informative ad copy and the url; which serves as an implied call to action but you should test giving a command to actually click the ad for some promised benefit or some means to avoid pain, etc…

Note:  Google’s editorial guidelines prohibit the more common direct “call to action” verbiage such as “click here”, etc… so you’ll need to be creative in how you elicit a response from prospects.

To create your new ad variations go to the bottom of your ad group page and in the “Ad Variations” section click “Text ad”… displayed on the tail-end of “Create new ad”.

Google assumes you’ll be making only slight variations to your previously created ads and will launch a form, pre-populated with your last created ad so you can simply make the slight changes and save the new ad variation.

Generally you DO only want to make slight changes to ad variations… one word OR one grammatical mark OR one…  generally just make ONE change between ad varations.  Otherwise you don’t know what change made the difference.

Initially though you might create up to 4 extremely different ads to split test so you can see which approach creates the best response.  Once you’ve identified the hardest hitting approach you can then hone in on that type of ad and split test minor tweaks to refine the ad further.

Here are the variations I came up with for initial testing.

1. The first uses a tried/true “news/innovation” approach to stimulate interest and then promises benefit.

2. The next arouses some of the concerns that will drive “some” prospects to research data storage solutions… though only a percentage will be concerned with legal compliance.

3. The next one goes a little deeper to scrape away at a more pressing concern and stimulate curiosity.

4. The last one is the touch up we did on what Google seemed to suggest was a high CTR ad.

Now we just let these run.  Since our campaign settings in Step 13, section J are set to let the ads run evenly we’ll be able to watch Google’s metrics to see which ad variations get the highest CTR’s.

Once we’ve established with general approach is most effective we can pause the others and create a few more variations to test different aspects of the winning ad to make it even better.

 Step 18:  Local, Map Ads

Google also allows you to create ads that will be displayed on Google’s map section.  This can be very powerful because Google’s map ads have prominent position in the 1st page “organic” search results when people use Google to search locally.

This means you could easily have a sponsored ad AND a local ad that appears in the organic, more trusted, listings.

To set up your local ads click “Local business ad” in the same line as the “Text ad” link you clicked to create new ad variations. 

You’ll be taken through a similar wizard to create these ads but Google will ask for your company information as well. 

You can also create variations of your local business ads for split testing.  My extended list showing all ads so far is to the right.

The top line of your local ad will be your company name so no good way to create good headlines.  The only real flexibility you’ll have is in the ad copy.  I’ve created 3.  The top one is a typical “home town” type ad, which could work well in this scenario and the other 2 are more direct response type ads.

I just need to test and see which pulls better response.

Remember that your local business ads can be set up specific to each ad group.  So you can get very targeted in your ad depending on the keywords.

My home town type ad at top addresses the ad groups target keyword “data storage” and then touches on other general IT services as well.

The bottom 2 focus strictly on data storage.

Be as targeted as you possibly can to improve your quality scores with Google and the resulting lead and sales conversions.

I’m going to conclude this “post” here.

We could go on for weeks discussing the ins and outs of Google’s advertising platform and we haven’t even touched on the other pieces of the “Big 3″… Yahoo and MSN which both have their own ppc type advertising platform.

You should try all 3 as you’ll get different segments of your market on each and will likely see different types of response on each as well.

I may cover the others as well as go deeper into Google in later posts.

A final caution…

Be careful when trying to improve your CTR.  You’ll need a high CTR to appease Google and keep your quality scores and placement high at minimal cost but you need to find a happy balance between CTR and resulting lead/sales conversion.

You could promote FREE data storage services and get an incredible CTR on your ads but you’re business won’t benefit unless you have an incredible backend sales process in place.

Now you’re up and running with an effective strategy for creating your adwords campaign. 

GET STARTED NOW!

There’s no faster way to drive traffic and no better way to control your costs and measure performance than PPC.  If you leave PPC out of your marketing mix you’re leaving relatively easy money on the table.

But, for most VAR’s, as essential as PPC is to your overall marketing strategy it should only occupy about 10% of your marketing mix.  The reason is that you have to wait for targeted prospects to come looking.  If you market to a large footprint like the entire U.S., Canada, etc… that’s ok.

But if you’re selling services such as network infrastructure, On site IT consulting, etc.. that is better supported with on site engineering and sales support you’re probably focused on a more localized geography.

PPC based leads will be slower to materialized in a local market for obvious reasons.

Get your PPC campaigns set up and keep an eye on them, constantly testing, tweaking and improving conversions and ROI.

But then get back to the basics with direct mail, telemarketing, events, etc…

The most effective way to for you to generate leads is to GO AFTER THEM; not wait for them to come to you.

Your prospects are trying to consolidate vendors and reduce service providers as quickly as your competitors are tyring to be the “one stop shop”.

If you competitor gets  a foot in the door with a unified communications project that prospect may never even search the net for a managed service provider, data storage or whatever because your competitor who got the UC deal will pitch them on those services too!

As good stewards we should be effective in managing ALL resources, especially time, but in the end you’re still only working with about 8-10 hours. Learning to manage that time efficiently can definitely go a long way but its only PART of the solution.

What if, after you’ve taken steps to organize your time, you were able to dramatically improve the OUTPUT your produce during the time available?

“Time is finite but energy can be expanded and regularly renewed. In physics, energy is simply the capacity to do work. More energy means more capacity.”

– Tony Schwartz The Energy Project and Author The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy; Not Time
Tony spent over 30 years studying energy management and during that time worked with Jim Loehr to co-develop (reconceptualize) a concept introduced by legendary business management guru Peter Drucker in the ‘60’s.

Loehr, a former tennis coach, became known for introducing two concepts into the lives of elite athletes in many different sports:
1. Positive ritual
2. 90-minute oscillation cycle: applying full-throttle intense effort for 90 minutes followed immediately by at least 30 minutes of rest and recovery.

We’re only looking at the 90-minute oscillation cycle in this article.

The 90-minute oscillation cycles were developed by Loehr after years of looking at the careers of athletes who lasted longer (and continued to produce excellent results) than other athletes who, although gifted and brilliant when very young, burned out very quickly.

He concluded that one of the most notable traits of the long-lasting champions was that they both worked harder and “played” harder.

In this sense, “play” was their rest and recovery time. When they were practicing and training they went harder and more intense than others, but they also took more breaks in between sessions.

This was an oscillating feedback cycle. Their greater amount of rest allowed them to put more intense effort into their workouts. Shorter workouts allowed them to recover better in between training sessions allowing them to sustain that intense effort again and again in the short run, which led to greater longevity and greater productivity for them in their careers.

The 90-minute oscillation cycles as applied to the workplace are analogous to these above-mentioned athletic and health principles. It has been found over and over again by business productivity and work psychology researchers such as Loehr, Schwartz, and others that people can function at 100% capacity and be more productive if they work intensely, with total immersion in their work, for about 90 (sometimes up to 120) minutes at a time, but after this immediately take a break of approximately 30 minutes where they do no work at all. This is repeated over and over until the work day is completed. (For our purposes, let’s assume there’s no “lunch break”, but that the worker is free to eat during any and all of the 30 minute break periods if he wants to.)

I know what you’re thinking…

If you slice an 8-10 hour work day into 90 minute chunks with 30 minute breaks in between it only leaves 4-6 hours of work time.

But this brings us back to the concept that time management is only marginally beneficial; what’s truly, deeply important is energy management… how much work is getting accomplished DURING the time spent.
The research so far shows that you can actually be MORE productive during your intense, focused 4-6 hours than if you’d worked the 8-10 hours straight with 30 minutes for lunch and maybe 2 - 15 minute breaks.

This concept was originally applied to athletic training but the principles and benefits transfer to business as well and might even offer MORE benefit in business application.

The benefit to athletes is a completely disengaged period of recovery, which enable them to perform again at peak intensity.

But the benefits for you are even greater:

• Focus: During your 90 minute work cycle you should avoid email, phone, any distraction that turns you into a multi-tasker
• Creativity: During your 30 minute rest cycle your brain can refresh. You’ve probably noticed that some of your best ideas hit you when your disengaged from work. This way you can schedule time for strategic , creative thinking to occur during the day
• Recovery: Just as an elite athlete, by taking time to rejuvenate you’ll be able to spend more time during the day at peak, intense performance levels.
  So, what should you do during your 30 minutes of rest?
• Eat something healthy
• Go for a walk
• If there is a facility in the office, go for a light physical workout or even take a nice shower
• Surf on the Internet (about things totally unrelated to work)
• Make personal phone calls
• Play video games
• Read a good book
• Listen to music

AVOID…
• Check for or send business e-mails
• Take or make business phone calls
• Do interviews or have employee meetings
You should “disengage” as completely as possible.

The rest and recovery period is crucial to success and health. It’s not just a break from the work being done in the 90-minute work session; it’s a break from work PERIOD. The subconscious mind is working on business solutions and ideas during this time, and the emotions and the body are recovering from their stress so the manager can be prepared to meet the next 90-minute work challenge.

Since you’ll likely experience “aha” moments during your downtime you might want to keep a notepad/pen nearby, voice memo device or some other method to capture those thoughts for later implementation.

ACTION STEPS:
It may seem impossible to fully carve your work day into 90 minute work chunks and 30 minute “off” cycles but you can always try walking before running. If you can’t fully implement a 90 minute oscillation schedule, try starting your day with just 1 or 2 - 90 minute cycles.

This is will also be very difficult to maintain when out of office or on the road but if you can at least implement the system it will be easier to get back on track when back in the office.

1. Pick 1 or 2 of the highest priority items from your task list that will have the highest impact on your business or personal life.

2. Block off the first chunks of your morning to apply the 90 minute on / 30 minute off cycle.

3. Go to the office

4. Ignore email, personal/administrative assistants, employees… any other distractions and get to work

By implementing this strategy first thing in the morning you’re guaranteed to end your day:
1. With significant progress on your high priority items
2. Actually “feeling” like you did something; rather than feeling like you were incredibly busy but have no idea what you did ; )