Residual Victory Blog

Pay-per-Click Search Engines are useful to gain ranking in web search results.  If after developing a quality website you still find yourself far from the top, pay-per-click search engines may be the answer for you.  With this form of advertising, you pay a search engine sight to place your website with the top search results.  Pay-per-click (PPC) is the fastest growing segment of advertising according to the January 2006 issue of Wired. 

How much you pay is determined by a bidding process.  You bid on how much you are willing to pay for each click on your site.  The winning bidder gets higher rankings.  The bids include a bidding war on keywords.  These keywords are the ones that the search-engine user types into the search engine.  This search request from the user will have results showing your website on top.  This is where relevancy and planning comes in.  In order to have a successful pay-per-click campaign you must consider the keywords you choose.  If the keywords are too general, they may be costly and your advertising wouldn not result in financial gain.  If your advertisement is focused on specific keywords, your ad may not come up as frequently, but you might pay less per click and it will target the specific customers you are trying to reach, thereby resulting in a healthier gain. 

Monitoring the ranking and action of your website once it has been submitted for pay-per-click services is crucial to your income.  Rankings change, bids change, keywords change.  If a keyphrase isn’t working, try another one.  Keep track of visitor habits and click-through rates so you can tailor your campaign to reach your customer’s habits.  Tracking your data is also useful identifying click fraud.  An unethical competitor could continuously click on your PPC site and wipe out your advertising budget.  A study which was cited on MarketingExperiments.com stated fraud occurred in  “as much as 29.5%” in three experimental pay-per-click search engine campaigns on Google.  Estimations on fraud vary widely, but there is no doubt that it does exist.  Fraud protection programs exist and are worth looking into.  Your records for your PPC campaign should be monitored as often as your financial records.  Most pay-per-click search engines have budget tools so you can limit your monthly amount.
 
All of the major search engines offer pay-per-click advertising and there are hundreds of others.  Keep in mind that the major search engines pull results from smaller search engines.  There are pros and cons to each of them and it is important to become familiar with their demographics before putting your link out for clicks.  Start with one search engine until you are comfortable with your budget and conversion rates.  It might also be wise to develop a special “landing page” for your URL that is specifically related to the search term.  Determine whether you want a short-term campaign for brand recognition or a long-term campaign focused on return on investment. Pay-per-click search engine advertising can be a worthwhile compliment to your overall marketing strategy.  After all, it rarely hurts to be number one!

In order to have a successful advertising campaign, the top ten psychological desires you insert into your ads should bind the social, psychological and economic benefits of your product or service to the consumer.  This is best done through a well-planned branding strategy that is targeted to provide economic benefits to a specific market. 

Information is a driving force in Internet popularity.  People have a desire to learn.  Research the areas of interest that your targeted market group is interested in.  Create quality content with answers.  Provide a search bar.  Make sure your information is unique and not plastered all over the web.  You will start to brand yourself as knowledgeable and give them reason to come back.
 
Speed is inherent is the need to accomplish.  Speed drives the sales of cars, communication and Internet.  A study by Accenture found that buyers were more interested in speed over price.  People will pay for time.  Focus your ad on how you will save the consumer time.  Be easily accessible with fast-loading web pages.  Avoid long forms.  Deliver in a timely matter.

Trust is a desire everyone seeks, and hardest to prove.  Provide references.  Stay clear from spam.  Connect with charitable organizations.  Offer guarantees.  Deliver what your promise.  Once you lose trust, it’s impossible to gain back.

The freedom to make decisions is another psychological trait that can be applied to your advertising campaign.  Give your customer choices: choices in pricing, selection, resources, delivery times and guarantees.  Letting the customer decide what they want helps you to understand want they want and plan your business strategies accordingly.

The freedom to walk away.  There is nothing worse then being held hostage. Make your web pages easy to leave so they feel comfortable visiting your site later.  It’s the old cliché, if you love something set it free, if it comes back, it’s yours.

Everyone has the desire to have a pleasurable experience.  Make your ad appealing.  Tactfully infuse humor by a funny quote or a link to an offbeat site.  Add opportunities for personal enjoyment to your site that are related to your business.  Sell a good product and a good service.  Make sure they leave feeling happy.  

People have the desire to communicate.  Make sure you advertisement conveniently lists how to contact you with any questions.  Imbed in your ad an opportunity or link for people to communicate with others.
 
Everyone needs hope.  Build on customer’s dreams and aspirations and show how you can help them meet them.

Let them be who they are.  Everyone desires self-expression.  Give people an opportunity to post their opinions.  Show how your product or services offer them the freedom to express themselves or identify themselves. 

Last, but most important is love.  Show how your product or services can help them love others, whether it’s their family, friends, or for advocacy work.  Get them to love your product by fulfilling all of their desires for themselves and others, because above all else is love.  Make them love you.

The Freedoms of Working on the Internet are abundant.  Whether you are at home or in the office, the Internet offers flexibility.  And Flexibility is Freedom.  Of course, the freedoms are extreme when you’re working from home, but even being able to work on the Internet at the office has some liberating effects.

If you don’t have an addictive personality like the majority of the web surfers, the Internet has great potential to free up your time.  The problem is, the more free time you have, the more ways you look to fill it.  Now you fill it sitting on your butt looking at pictures of the Fiji Islands or playing solitaire instead of saving the world.  However, the potential is still there. 

The Internet gives you the freedom to be smart.  You can research anything in an instant.  No more trips to the library to look up your competitor’s business statistics.  No more flipping through cookbooks looking for a recipe for dinner.  Something’s wrong with your car?  Save yourself a trip to the mechanic and look it up online.  Homework help is at your fingertips - and so are the answers.

The Internet also gives you freedom to be stupid.  Not only are there spell checkers, that you use so frequently you forget how to spell; but there are math calculators, currency calculators, recipe calculators, birthday calculators, JavaScript calculators, graphing calculators and calorie calculators.  (I try not to use the last one.)  With the Internet, you have the freedom to never do another calculation in your head again.

You have the freedom to travel quickly.  Directories and maps are available in an instant.  No more looking for out-of-state or outdated phone books.  No more rummaging through faded maps and scribbled directions.  Just search and print.  You also have the freedom to avoid a trip to the post office.  Bill payments can be made online, gifts can be purchased and mailed, and postal services offer click and ship services.  No need to stop at the bank because you can do all of your bank transactions online for your home and your business.

You have the freedom to outsource.  You can get help from anywhere in the world, at any time.  You have the freedom to make international friends that would have never been possible before.  You have the freedom to cry or complain and nobody will know who you are.  You have the freedom to think about what you’re going to say before you’re going to say it.  You have the freedom to “talk” 24/7 without waking anybody up.  You have the freedom to hit “send” or “cancel.”  You have the freedom to hit “delete.” 

You can hear the latest news from hundreds of sources.  You have the freedom to easily keep in touch with politics and law and courts and hearings.  The Internet gives you the freedom to hear the opinions from millions of others and give yours back.  The Internet gives thousands of hearts and homes the freedom to share, without ever once worrying if the toilet is clean.  The Internet has made us flexible and it keeps us free.
 

Residual Income is power.  Or, is that “Money is Power”?  I was always one to believe that information is power.  Without information, there is no money.  Without money, there is no residual income.  Information is Power.  The Journal of Accounting and Economics, in their Empirical Assessment of the Residual Information Model agrees with me.  I’ll try not to argue over who thought of it first.

The definition of residual income has taken a beating.  Simply put, residual is a remainder.  Income is financial gain.  Translation: Extra Money. Investopedia, affiliated with Forbes, uses the common definition of residual income as “the amount of income that an individual has after all personal debts, including the mortgage, have been paid.  This calculation is usually made on a monthly basis, after the monthly bills and debts are paid.  Also, when a mortgage has been paid off in its entirety, the income that individual had been putting toward the mortgage becomes residual income.”  Residual Income is more commonly known as “Value Added” income or equated with “Economic Value” income in the financial world.  As defined by MIT: “Residual Income for Equity Holders is the Net Income minus the Capital Charge.”  Alternatively, it can be defined as: “Operating Income minus an Imputed Interest Charge for Investment.”  Another term for Residual Income, according to MIT, is “abnormal earnings.”  I prefer to call it “the stuff left over.”

On the web, residual income is equated networking, MLM, affiliate programs, work at home programs, tiered commission based referrals, and a multitude of other options for anyone seeking to earn some extra money.  This often refers to residual income from multiple divisions or multiple people and is similar to dividend cash flow.

The power of residual income is that it is yours. You create it, and you make it. The power of information can help you decide what to do with your income and how to do it. It is important to use the power of information to evaluate the risks/return relationship, the economy, the costs, and the time and investment involved, as well as the level of personal sacrifices you are willing to make.  As with any investment, it is important to plan and determine your business goals and objectives before diving in. 

If money is the power you’re looking for, then invest your residual income to make more residual income.  Investments are best tailored to your individual strengths and weaknesses.  If you’re a financial whiz and like to take a chance, you can invest in the stock market.  If you’re a pro at sales and enjoy teaching, you might be interested in network marketing.  If your residual income is substantial; the real estate market is always a source for investment.  Develop an Internet site about your own little niche.  Sell those 57 Chevy parts on the web. Like some of the great philosophers say, “do what you love and the rest will follow naturally.”  Hopefully the “rest” includes residual income.
 

Unique Content is a powerful tool for establishing your website within the dominions of search engine rankings.  Unique content turns your website from being one in a million to being the one and only.  Instead of a customer clicking through millions of sites just to find you, you are brought to them.  That’s the power of unique content.  Unique content is value over rankings. Your unique content is created by knowing your customer, your niche, your products and services, and presenting a carefully crafted presentation worthy of a split second click.  That split second click has the potential to bring with it a lifelong dedicated customer. 

Spend the time and effort analyzing your business against the competition.  What makes you unique?  Who is your target market?  What are they looking for?  Do you have it?  Let’s say you sell wine.  Many stores sell wine.  If you type wine into Google you will not only first get a link to wine.com (not a surprise), but you will get Wine magazines, software programs named Wine, guides to wineries and articles on wine.  One person searching for wine may be looking for the history of wine or an antique wine bottle, not buying a bottle of wine.  Another person has a dinner for eight to prepare.  She knows what she wants.  She types in “good red wine” or  “Cabernet Sauvignon.”  If your strategy is based on unique content, and you have carefully constructed your phrases and pages to indicate your specialties and your competitors have not, you will be at that woman’s front door with several bottles of wine.  This gives you the opportunity to introduce other products and services you offer that might be of interest to her.  Then it is up to you to follow your customer fulfillment strategy to make sure the customer goes directly to your website the next time she needs wine instead of hitting up the search engines. 

The editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, developed a concept called the “Long Tail” theory that is applied to analyzing keywords for content.  This theory is comprised of the philosophy that Internet searches are advancing from mainstream searches to niche searches, and unique content will be paramount to website success.  Instead of seeing many hits for a few words at the top of keyword charts, the primary keywords will decrease in hits, and the “tail” of the keyword charts will grow with more “niche” related keywords.  Niche searches bring the right customer to the right business.

Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but the trend has already started.  The School of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University in an article by Bernard J. Jansen and Amanda Spink entitled  “How are we searching the World Wide Web?  A Comparison of Nine Search Engine Transaction Logs” cites a study that showed “the researchers report that 38% of all queries contained only one term and that most queries are unique.”  That study was completed in 2003.  Unique content is going to have a weightier effect in the future on search engine rankings.  Spend the time analyzing your website for optimal ranking in search engines now.

Using Facebook to Promote your Website is an easy way to get a high page rank backlink and promote yourself to a new community of people.  Facebook, similar to Myspace, is a social networking community with a high page rank, where users create their own profiles and communicate with other Facebook users.  Facebook has over 27 million members and 40 billion pages view a month.  The demographic base is generally made up of 20-somethings.  Used wisely as a promotional tool, this social-networking site can provide you with valuable free exposure, even if you sell geriatric pills.

Facebook has an easy joining process.  The name you enter when registering will be the one that is used on the site.  You might have to tweak it so it’s accepted if you’re using a company name. You will have to activate the account through email confirmation.  When you return to Facebook, click on “Contact” and you will see an area to post your website.  Posting this gives your website a high page rank backlink.

You will also see the “Applications” heading in the left-hand column.  Underneath the Applications heading are the standard Photo, Groups, Events, and Marketplace links.  Clicking on the Applications link gives you a directory of applications that can be used on the site.  There’s a variety of media applications that can be used to promote your website.  Facebook has just recently opened their platform to programmers, and most of these applications are very new. Develop your promotion by adding photos, joining groups, entering business events, and utilizing relevant media applications.  Facebook has a “newsfeed” that works similar to an RSS feed, but it posts Facebook news, which could be news about your website.  There is also a “My Notes” feature for you to promote events, news and blogs.

Once you’ve maximized your site carefully with information and media, you can search for friends and join a regional network to give your site exposure.  You can create a group based on a topic relevant to your promotional material.  It will help if you know someone on Facebook to get that first connection from.  There are other business and non-profit organizations on Facebook that are valuable for networking. 

Facebook is about social networking.  In order to get the most out of your Facebook promotion, be creative in your blogs, groups and newsletters.  Stimulate discussions that could be opinionated or are relevant to this age group and get your website noticed.  If you sell geriatric pills, aim your discussions toward socially conscious advocates for the elderly, or find members who live with their grandparents.  Look at other profiles, blogs, newsletters and groups and see if there’s a trend in topics you could expand on.  Forcing your website on others will only create negative impact.  To develop relationships, show you have a sincere interest in their issues.  Network and be social, and Facebook can be a profitable addition to your promotional campaign. 
 

Working at Home versus Working for a Boss is a no brainer.  At least for me.  But, everyone is different and everyone has different working styles and preferences.  When you work at home either you are your own boss, or your customers are your boss.  There will always be somebody who is a boss.  If it’s not your boss or you or your customers, then it’s your kids - and I’m sure the dogs are standing in line.  If you are debating whether to work at home for yourself or work for a boss, there are a few factors to consider. 

1.  Do you want to work at home?  Seriously, if you don’t want to work at home it will be even harder to motivate yourself.  If you hate your house, or perhaps you’re sick of looking at the neon orange shag rug, and you enjoy the camaraderie of the workplace more than being at home, postpone your decision.  It’s easier to keep a job and quit later than it is to quit your job and ask for it back.  Get rid of the rug first.

2.  Noise.  Is your home noisy?  Is your workplace you share with your boss noisy?  Does noise bother you?  It bothers some people.  Maybe the kids are gone and home will be too quiet for you.  Maybe the kids are home and the home will be too noisy for you.  It depends on what environments you are used to working in and what type of work you do. 

3.  Kids.  See number two above.  Kids are and should be the biggest factor in deciding whether to work at home.  If you want to work at home to be with your children, then that factor weighs far greater than any other factor.  If you can’t get any work done because the kids are around, you may decide to work outside the home or arrange for childcare for the children while you are working at home.  Kids also destroy things.  I have six of them.  Trust me.  I know.  They spill things.  They don’t mean to.  They will probably spill something on that 500-page $100,000 proposal you were almost finished with.  If you decide to take the risk and work at home, get your ground rules in first and fast and stick to them.  I never did and I have the stickiest computer around.

4.  Flexibility.  How much flexibility does your boss give you?  How much do you need?  Can you take off for school plays, sports, medical appointments, or when a child is sick?  Can you take off when you are sick?  Can you be late?  Can you leave early?  If you are single and healthy and have relatively few demands, working for a boss can give you a great deal of security.

The important thing is to be happy with your decision.  Work is a large part of everyone’s life.  Happiness equals productivity.  If you’re happy, your boss is happy, your kids are happy, and the dogs probably are too.