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Re: phillymike post# 50579

Tuesday, 10/16/2012 2:18:47 PM

Tuesday, October 16, 2012 2:18:47 PM

Post# of 68397
Every business should use professional search engine marketing services to make sure they are coming up in the top 10 search results for all relevant keywords. SEO or natural search involves making sure all the pages of your website are optimized to be picked up by Google's algorithms and then indexing as many pages as possible with Google.

SEO is the low hanging fruit, but paid search marketing (pay per click) can also be effective. This is where you buy the sponsored links at the top of the search results. Customers tend to trust natural search results more than sponsors, but that doesn't mean you can't make PPC work for you.

With any online marketing you have to test, optimize and retest to make sure your cost for acquiring a new customers is less than the potential profit you will make for that account. Let's say your average customer stays for one year (just making up hypothetical figures here) and spends an average of $8 per month you calculate the value of a customer at $96. That means your cost to acquire that customer must be well below that. It's up to Acredihost to determine what gross margin they need. So if you pay $5,000 on an advertising program and you consistently acquire 100 customers for this spend this is a good and productive channel for you.

Joining a text link program is also helpful - the more back links you can get to your site and especially to different pages of your site, the better you show up in Google search results. There are companies who have networks of thousands of websites and you can pay a flat monthly fee to get a targeted subset of them backlinking to your own webpages. These don't usually cost that much and they can enhance all the other online marketing you are doing.

I also recommend targeted advertising on Linkedin (just to be clear - I have no relationship with Linkedin) where it's possible to target businesses that fit your customer profile. I heard that Linkedin was considering selling advertising on a cost per acquisition basis (pay only for response), but I don't know if that has happened yet. But even if you have to pay a flat fee or CPC to reach LinkedIn users they are as targeted as you can get. LinkedIn is the leading B2B social network and there's a high proportion of potential domain hosting clients on it. As long as you know your target cost per acquisition you can test different ads and targeting till you find the combination that yields the right cost to acquire customers. Once you hit that vein you keep buying traffic there for as long as it is still effective.

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