If you own a small business in a city, you might find it hard to compete with more established organizations that offer the same product or service as you. If you want to compete with them, you need to find an effective marketing method that can level the playing field. One such marketing method is PPC advertising.
What is PPC advertising? PPC advertising stands for Pay per Click advertising where you advertise your business on search engines. You only pay when a searcher clicks on your ads and visits your website. With PPC advertising, you have the chance to get your ads on first page of search engines like Google, right along with the other more established organizations.
Nowadays, people research everything online. If they want to look for a local service, for example air-conditioning, they will do a search on search engines. So if you own a local air-conditioning company, you can use PPC advertising and place your ads on first page of search engine to get more exposure for your business.
PPC advertising also allows you to target the audience in the city that you are in. You can set your campaign to target a particular city or even within a certain mileage range of a city. Then when you place your ads on search engines, they would only appear when people do a local search. This makes your campaign very targeted which brings targeted leads for your business.
Why local businesses can benefit so much from PPC advertising is because of its geo-targeting capability. If you own a business in New York, you will not want to target everyone in America. By targeting your ads to a specific city or area, you prevent people from all across the world to click on your ads that will cost you money.
Local businesses like restaurants, air-conditioning companies and catering businesses can really benefit from PPC advertising. If you use the right keywords for your campaign, your ads will appear anytime someone searches for your product/service in your local area. Although larger organizations have more budgets to advertise, this does not necessary means success. This is because if you know how to optimize your PPC campaign, you will actually pay a lesser cost per click and obtain higher rankings than your competitors on search engines.
With PPC advertising, your company can save money and compete with larger organizations at the same time. So if you have not try out PPC advertising, you should create a campaign today.
source by:Author
Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing PPC Advertising services.
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PPC Advertising - Why Local Business Should Try PPC Advertising
Google Gmail outage compensation: $2.05 per user
If your business used Gmail and the service went out for two and a half hours, do you think you lost $2.05 per user in productivity?
That's the monetary equivalent of what Google offered to compensate Google Apps Premier Edition customers after Gmail was unavailable for about two and a half hours on Tuesday. And it was being generous: All it had to offer was the equivalent of 41 cents per user.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)
For customers who pay the $50 per user per year price for the Google Apps service, Google strives to keep it up and running 99.9 percent of the time each month. According to the Google Apps service level agreement (SLA), Google promises three extra days of service if availability slips down to the 99 to 99.9 percent range.
According to a Gmail outage blog posting by Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz, the outage lasted "approximately two and a half hours." By my math, assuming there were no other outages in February, that means uptime of 99.63 percent for the month.
However, Google decided to extend affected customers' service more than the 3 days the SLA required. "Given the extent of the outage and as a gesture of goodwill, we are extending their service for 15-days," spokesman Andrew Kovacs said in a statement. Ordinarily the service has to slip below 95 percent uptime to provide a 15-day extension.
So how does that math work out exactly? Well, at $50 a year, Google charges a rate of 0.57 cents per hour. So a three-day extension is the equivalent of 41 cents of revenue per user, and a 15-day extension is worth $2.05.
Before you judge, bear in mind some of the factors at play--how essential e-mail is to a company, how common Gmail outages actually are, the time of day of the outage, whether e-mail was available through other software such as Outlook even though Gmail's Web interface was down. And another relevant comparison is how reliable your own company's e-mail servers are. You're in effect valuing your employees' e-mail productivity lower than Google does if you have worse uptime than Gmail.
However, whenever Google is apologizing for outages, the company takes pains to mention it feels the pain acutely given how the company uses Gmail internally. My suspicion is that the company values its employees' time a bit more highly than what it grants Google Apps Premier customers.
Google also offered an explanation of what happened on another blog post.
"This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center," Cruz said. "Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control."
source:Stephen Shankland covers Google, Yahoo, search, online advertising, portals, digital photography, and related subjects. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered servers, supercomputing, open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen.
