Dear Valued Customer,

The end of summer may be approaching, and NetSearch Direct is taking full advantage of the long days by burning the candle at both ends a bit. It’s been a great month for client success and we’ve been talking to a lot of you to find out what you’ve learned about your business since you’ve been advertising with NetSearch Direct. In this month’s newsletter you’ll find some serious life lessons from real customers who have turned the mirror around and saw something new.

We’re also excited to mention some recent press bits. Our own Jason Moreau was quoted in Virginia Business regarding social media and we also partnered with Zuula Consulting and hosted a writing seminar for business owners. If you missed the highlights, we’ll have video shorts posted on our website soon, so be sure to check. And we geared up for the Retail Marketing Expo where we hope you stopped by to have your website’s search engine rank guessed by our resident “Rank Master”. If you didn’t, we have plenty of fun highlights and photos.

It seems we weren’t the only ones generating some press; you may have heard a bit about Microsoft and Yahoo! joining forces. The news sent a pretty big shock wave over the search community, but you may be wondering just what it means for you. We’ve got a few key points about the merger, and a link where you can do some more reading in our Spotlight portion.

Summer may be on the way out, but we’re keeping the momentum going in search engine marketing.

Three Things I Learned About my Business from PPC

Successful business owners can always pinpoint what they feel pushed them to achieve goals and reach the heights where they stand today. Some cite expensive education and hard-earned degrees, while some business owners give credibility to working their way up through the industry. Of course, along the way, there are always more than a few unforgettable mentors who said just the right thing to influence a major decision – people we’re grateful for. We think these are fundamental to business success, but we’d like to open your eyes to life lessons your PPC campaign is trying to teach you

Life Lesson 1: Know Your Customer
Many business owners have failure stories from self-managed PPC campaigns that quickly tanked and ate up valuable advertising dollars. We hate to hear about those instances, but ten minutes in talking with our PPC Specialists can usually identify at least three areas where advertising strategies went wrong and targeting the right audience is usually first. Advertising on the Internet exposes your business to a variety of customers that traditional print advertising may have never reached. While it’s important to capture those eyes (and ring in those sales!), don’t spend your money chasing those unicorns. Your PPC campaign has invaluable demographic data and hard-hitting analytics that, when combined, will give you a no-fail glimpse at your core customer. When you know who wants your products or services, you can funnel money in the right advertising strategy and establish those fuzzy lifelong customer relationships everyone loves to brag about.

Probably one of the first things you’ll hear a business owner tell you about their SEO experience is that “it doesn’t happen overnight”. Truer words were never spoken by an impatient business owner who is scared of the cash investment he/she just made. If you stayed long enough to hear what this wise person had to say, you’d probably hear “you better get someone good” next. We couldn’t agree more. Being on the business end with our clients after a crash and burn experience from a black hat SEM agency out to make killer profits at the expense of hard-earned customer cash leaves a jaded feeling that’s hard to shake. The bright side to all of this is that through hard times comes the payoff: lessons learned. We’ve got three of them for you:

Life Lesson 1: Network Your Website
We don’t mean that you should make up business cards and attend meetings with like-minded folks around your community. The life lesson here is about link building strategies. Around the late 90’s new websites were going live on the Internet at alarming rates. Because SEO had already been born, it became apparent to search engines that they were going to have to figure out a way to establish authority and website presence. Through this, link algorithms were born as a way to filter out the quality sites and reward them with high SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings. And getting links is not unlike attending a business networking event. The key to making it work is to incorporate links into your search marketing strategy, rather than to leave them as an afterthought or use rogue “link buying” methods. Links say a lot about you and give your business reach, and an authoritative voice, in the online marketplace. The message is the same today: your website is only as strong as its weakest link.

National Statistics

Industry Buzz: Green is the New Black & The Social Media Mamba: Should Your Business Join In?

Green is the New Black
We all know to do our part to be a little more eco-friendly, and you might be wondering what a “green” article is doing in your marketing newsletter. Word around the industry is that customers want to see a business’ dedication to the environment play out online. If you use recycled materials in your products, or recycle all waste – tell your customers about it. If your products don’t leach any ozone toxins – be sure to convey that message on your website. But beware, although this trend has been generating industry buzz it doesn’t mean that it’s become a staple in all SEM strategies...

The Social Media Mamba: Should Your Business Join In?
You’re hearing all about Twitter, you may even have signed up or sent out a tweet or two. You probably have a Facebook page or a LinkedIn profile. But you may be unsure how to leverage social media for your business, or even if you should. Although this isn’t the end all be all of determining whether or not you should do the social media dance, consider these factors before jumping in...