Category Archives: business

marketing

Google’s Product Listing Ads

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marketing

Google PLAs – End of the Free Lunch

I just finished reading an article on Google PLAs (product listing ads) from WebPro News.  You may know that the free Google product listing ads are going away on October 1.  Apparently, this is causing a lot of concern among internet marketers.

History of Google PLAs

Google introduced the free version of Google shopping about 10 years ago, and many of us have used it to generate some additional income.  I have used these ads in blog sidebar widgets in the past, but mostly dropped them for three reasons:

  1. They often showed products that competed with those I was promoting
  2. I received no income from them
  3. Sometimes WordPress mangled the ad and showed HTML snippets.

If you had more success, let me know how you did it.  It may not help with Google shopping, but the ideas might be useful elsewhere!

About three years ago, Google introduced product ads.  These are the paid version of Google shopping.  Being reluctant to pay for anything when there is a free alternative, I did not try them.

What’s Happening Now

For those who used both the free and the paid Google PLAs, the appearance of both on the same page could be confusing (according to Google).  Consequently, Google decided to withdraw one of them.  Not surprisingly, they chose to terminate the free service.

What Will You Do?

If you are relying on Google PLAs as part of your marketing strategy, there are some right things and some wrong things to be doing now.  For me, the answer is simple:  I plan to check through all my sites and remove the Google PLAs that still remain.  If, however, you are using, or intend to use, the paid service, I recommend you read the article at WebPro News and act accordingly.

Your Internet Advertising Experience

Either way, internet advertising needs to be a part of an overall strategy, not just entered into haphazardly.  I confess to being one of the “haphazard” group, and intend to give more thought to whether I want to invest the time and money to use advertising correctly.  I would appreciate some guidance if you have experience you can share – good or bad!

  • How much time per week do you spend on advertising?
  • What percentage of your budget do you allocate to advertising?
  • What is your CPA and ROI from advertising?
  • What are your plans?
cloning

WordPress: Backing Up and Cloning

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Backups are essential to secure your WordPress website. This article tells how to back up your website and clone it to create new websites. Continue reading →

Facebook Tabs

Tabs for your Facebook Pages

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Facebook pages are the only way Facebook allows you directly to promote your business. As you know, promoting your business on your personal Facebook page can lead to accusations of spamming and may cause you to be shut down. Tabs for your Facebook pages give you the opportunity to creat sales pages, lead capture pages and most of the other things you can do on a regular website.

What Are Facebook Tabs?

 

Facebook Tabs

Facebook pages (previously called “Fan Pages”) enable you to promote your business separately for your Personal page.  Tabs are a means of leading to other pages associated with your main “Timeline” Facebook (fan) page.  Facebook gets confusing because they change their terminology every now and then!

 

Why You Need Help

The problem with adding tabs to your Facebook pages is that it is such a convoluted process. You need to become a Facebook developer, create an app and go through the complex process of adding the app to your Facebook page. Then you need to create the content for the app: generally by this time I find that Facebook has changed something and I give it up!

However, I have found a program that makes the process really simple. There is a paid version that offers more, but I am using the free version at present, and have found that it makes the whole business quick and easy. I can create the tab and activate it in five minutes or less, leaving me time to build and edit the content.

Facebook tabs

Painless Facebook Tabs

So, if you’re sitting comfortably there in [imwb_cgt_cityName], [imwb_cgt_regionName] let me tell you about it. (If you’re wondering how I know where you are, leave me a question through the comments and I’ll tell you about another plugin I use.)

Before I give you the secret to painless Facebook tabs, though, let me show you some of the simple pages I created yesterday. Since I’m really only trying out some ideas, without any strategy behind it, they don’t show everything you can do, but they might give you an idea of how easy it can be to build your own tabs. 

The sales page at  http://a.pgtb.me/df00 took me just a few minutes to create. Most of the time was spent playing with the templates included in the program and changing colors in the text. Some time was spent editing the text, which I had created previously – please use the “Like” and “Share” buttons. You can also invite your friends from the link near the bottom.

The page at http://a.pgtb.me/dfcn was my first effort. I just took an existing lead capture page and plugged it straight into the program. The only other work I had to do was finding a picture for the tab and giving the tab a name! The bad news about this one is that it needs to be scrolled, because the original was too large for the Facebook iframe.

 By now, if you have been paying attention, you will have seen the name of the secret program I used, since the free version places its own ad on the tab page. And yes, they do have a referral program, so please use my referral link http://zfer.us/PUVlp to contact them. Who knows, I may get some commission one day!