Dear {FIRST_NAME|Valued Customer},

October was a fun month at NetSearch Direct. With no shortage of news in the search engine marketing world, our team was hard at work crunching numbers, following trends, and adapting campaign strategies for the turn of the season. Luckily, it being Halloween and all, our Office Manager had buckets of candy stashed around the office to boost our sugar levels to dizzying heights. We’re not saying how many times those buckets were refilled, but there sure are a lot of sweet teeth at NetSearch Direct.

A hearty congratulations is in order for all of you lucky winners who signed up to receive your free website grader report! Stay tuned to future newsletters for more great offers, discounts on service, and freebies from NetSearch Direct.

This month we also bade a happy retirement to one our most popular seminar, PPC 101. If you missed this year’s last hurrah hosted by Jason Moreau, please contact us and we’ll see about getting you some notes. We’ll be announcing next month’s seminar topic soon and taking reservations at that time as well, so keep an eye on your inbox. Remember, if you ever have any topics that you would like to see presented simply give us a shout. See you in 2010, PPC 101. You had a good run, baby!

And remember, our first 15 responders get a FREE Search Engine Opportunity Analysis! This comprehensive report will give you a thorough understanding of what opportunities exist for your business on the search engines. It includes the number of searches per month for your industry, a SEO ranking report for your website, a PPC budget analysis, local search opportunities and more. Capture the attention of your target audience effectively by knowing just how to position yourself and market your company - make the Internet work for you! Simply reply to this email and we’ll let you know whether or not your response was one of the lucky qualifiers. Deadlines for responses are Friday, November 13, 2009. Get your email in today!

Bidding on Your Image: PPC and PR

If you attended our recently retired PPC 101 seminar, you already know the most important fundamentals and can rattle off a good five or more reasons why a business needs a solid pay-per-click marketing campaign. If you missed the seminar, we’re pretty sure you’ve read enough of our newsletter articles to be able to do the same thing. But have you ever considered adopting new PPC strategies for public relations and brand management?

Typically, we believe that PPC campaigns are best used for promoting our goods and services. While this is always true, not considering PPC for some quality PR and brand management means missing out on a solid investment of advertising dollars that stands to yield excellent returns on investment. Consider the following:

Case Study: Experimental Success
Our client recently authored a book that was warmly received in his local community by way of newspaper articles featuring him and the business that prompted the book. The article was blogged about and we wanted to capture the attention while it was a hot topic. NetSearch Direct turned this opportunity into even more selling power for the client by turning our attention towards his current PPC strategies. By creating a new campaign focusing on keyword combinations such as “book title”, “the book title + author”,” the book title + client’s company name”, to name a few, we were able to increase his visibility and boost those profits even more. We used PPC as a fast-acting PR tool to post highly-visible ad space on the SERP, and capture the attention on interested buyers riding on the wave of the book’s popularity.

Each month NetSearch Direct receives a lot of valid questions regarding search engine optimization. We love the lively chats we have with our current and prospective clients, and best of all it allows us to flex our creative brains in new ways. Born from these chats, we’re listing a few rules to live by when venturing into any SEO situation.

1) Thou Shalt Be Consistent.
There’s nothing more confusing to a potential customer than a landing page with a modern feel that accompanies a decidedly old, and outdated site. The message here is clear: you were either talked into creating this new landing page, or you aren’t willing to invest the time (or money) to update your old site. Either way, mismatched pages look unprofessional, and when you’re vying for attention among your toughest competitors, image is everything. From an SEO standpoint, you want to be sure that, besides design, your landing page and website are mirroring the same core keywords. Sure, a few pages will be different, but the two should be able to be viewed independent of one another and still draw the same conclusion.

2) Thou Shalt Not Ignore the Homepage.
Sure, you’ve got great content on your featured pages, the About Us page, and all of your landing pages are singing in perfect harmony. But what about your homepage? Is it a hodgepodge of images and links to other portions of your site? Does your company’s core message come through? When viewed on its own, what does your homepage say about your business? Think of your homepage as the front door to your website. How should images and text be arranged? Is the most important information placed above the page fold? Is your contact information placed in a way that is obvious to the reader?

National Statistics

Creative Marketing for Holiday 2009: Fast-Acting Strategies You Can Use Now

With the holiday season coming around the corner now is crunch time for businesses looking to make serious last quarter profits and move inventory out the door before 2010. Considering the rocky economy, business owners are looking for creative ways to set themselves apart from their competition for some real value add. NetSearch Direct team members can spot an advertising opportunity a mile away, so when our clients come to us looking for inspiring new ideas we’re always happy to share. Here are a few of our top picks:

Top Pick 1: Reunited and it feels so good.
It makes sense to keep SEO and PPC campaigns running to attract new customers, but turning your focus inwards will allow you to the chance to reconnect with current and past customers and reignite the spark that brought you together in the first place. Special offers for loyal customers and discounts for those they refer are excellent marketing techniques that will capitalize on your existing database. With everyone looking for a deal you can take this opportunity to bring the deal to your customers first – don’t even give them the chance to go looking elsewhere. One warning: email marketing can be tricky and there are definite rules to follow; be sure your team is savvy.