How to Use Bing to Advertise

Bing Ads is an advertising platform used to display ads on the Bing network including bing.com, yahoo.com, and aol.com. Smaller affiliates like duckduckgo.com and slickdeals.net also fall under this umbrella.

Ads show up on Bing when a visitor searches just as they would on any other search engine. The top and sides of the page are premium real estate, and you want to be sure people notice you first by making your ads relevant.

How Bing Advertising Works

Bing shows ads relevant to a visitor’s search based on the terms used. Searching for “hardware store Kansas City” will return ads for hardware stores in Kansas City. Yes, that’s quite obvious. However, you may not know that whenever someone conducts a search, Bing gives ad placement to the highest bidder. Just because you have an ad on Bing, doesn’t mean people will see it.

Bing makes money off of the ads businesses place, so if you outbid your competition, your ad is more likely to appear. However, Bing only gets paid when someone clicks an ad. That’s because you only pay Bing when someone clicks on your ad.

This is why relevancy matters. If you operate a hardware store in Dallas, your ad will never appear using the search terms above no matter how much you bid, because no one would ever click on it. They need hardware stores in Kansas City, not Dallas. Showing irrelevant ads profits no one.

On your end of the ad, make sure when a visitor clicks your ad, it sends them where they expect to go. If your ad promotes drills, send the clicker to the drill page of your hardware store website, not the page with pipe fittings.

Advantages of Bing

Bing has a host of advantages that are similar to other search engines. Using proper keywords, you get your business in front of people when they need it, increasing your conversion rate. You only pay if your ad works, so you don’t spend money on useless advertising, and you’re less likely to exceed your budget by placing bids for the maximum you’re willing to pay.

You can also track your engagements on a dashboard, showing you how many people saw your ad, how many times they clicked, and how much you paid for each click, giving you the ability to segment your future ads based on what worked and what didn’t.

While Bing doesn’t have the same volume as Google, this proves to be beneficial. Fewer businesses advertise on Bing, meaning less competition for you, better ad positioning, lower cost per click, and higher quality conversions.

Cost of Bing

A pay per click model determines how much advertisers pay for ads. You only pay when someone clicks your ad, but how much you pay depends on how much you bid. You pay different amounts based on keywords. Niche keywords in small communities can cost less than $0.20 while popular keywords in big markets cost more than $20.

Bing’s keyword planner suggests bids for your ads, so you have an idea of how much you need to bid for your ad to appear in someone’s search terms. You choose how much you are willing to pay based on how much you stand to profit from acquiring conversions. $20 is worthwhile if a new customer means $500 or more to your business.

Factors to Consider

Switching to Bing from Google doesn’t mean you’ll lose your previous campaigns. When you sign up for a Bing account, you have the option to import these from Google AdWords. You can then use them to run similar campaigns and benchmark which service is better for your business.

Diligent keyword research tells you which terms have high volumes and low competition. Bid on keywords with purchasing intent. If someone searches for “best toilets to buy,” it’s likely they plan to buy one soon. If they search for “best toilet repair near me,” you don’t want your hardware store ad to appear. That is unless you also offer toilet repair services.

After selecting targeted keywords based on your product, service, or location, you can also choose your match type. This allows you to select how closely you want your keyword to match the user’s search when your ad appears. Broad matches will look for searches containing synonyms of your keyword, whereas exact matches will only show up when someone searches for that exact keyword or phrase. Broad matches have the potential to appear on searches that aren’t relevant to your business, so you may have to narrow your match type over time after some careful study.

After several months, you should review and optimize your ad to improve future results. You have visibility to keyword impressions so you can refine and change as needed. Remember to remove negative keywords from your campaign.

Bing has a variety of targeting options you can use after you evaluate your initial campaign. You can run A/B tests, increase your visibility on weekends where you see more traffic, and bid higher on demographics like age or gender.

How Link Building Affects Your Marketing Strategy

I get it. You want to be discovered. And search engine optimization is part of that. But it’s easy to stuff keywords into your articles or blog posts anywhere to get visibility. There’s more to online marketing than that. There are specific techniques you can employ to get the best out of your marketing strategy without affecting the readability of your content.

You have to use keywords the right way, or you won’t get noticed like you thought you would. Google and other search engines are smart. They value quality over quantity and can identify keyword density and its effectiveness.

Techniques

Engaging online with people who already interact with you and your website promotes your website to relevant audiences. By showing an interest in your followers, you present yourself as genuine and sincere, and you can provide a more meaningful and customized experience for them. Use a blog to accomplish some of this. You can create sharable content by being unique and original. Linking to other blogs or external sources shows that you foster a community of sharing within the industry and value the opinions of other industry experts.

Case studies highlight individual clients and their success stories. It helps other potential clients feel like they have second-hand experience with what you do and makes you more trustworthy. Present these case studies in a visual format like a video showcasing a client interview, or ask your clients to write a quick testimonial you can post on your site.

Pump out news articles to your readers that are relevant to your industry. Keeping up-to-date on the current trends or industry struggles will always benefit you in ways other than direct marketing. Sounding knowledgeable when you speak with clients will get you farther than almost anything else will.

Online promotions or contests engage your social media followers, inspire friendly competition, and offer freebies that everyone likes. This is one of my favorite SEO marketing techniques because it gets the online community buzzing about your brand, no matter what sort of freebie you’re offering.

You should always use these marketing techniques safely and effectively. Ethical business practices and principles are at the core of everything you do. Using these techniques effectively can help you improve your marketing strategy performance and maintain integrity.

Link Building

Search engines are smart enough to recognize quality over quantity, so link building is an essential marketing tool that you shouldn’t overlook. Acquiring links from education websites and other trusted industry experts can drastically increase your rank on any search engine and make you easier to find.

I would even go so far as to say that it’s impossible to rank on Google or any other search engine without links. Here’s why:

• Links are Google’s #1 ranking factor
• Links define the entire internet
• Links point to other great content that deserves to rank as well
• Links transfer power and trust, hopefully back to you
• Links help people discover your site

As I mentioned above, blogging is a great way to start link building. Linking to relevant external sources in your blog helps to build credibility with other experts in your industry. By sharing blogs on social media sites, you begin to develop inbound links as well.

Linking to other blogs on your site sometimes generates a ‘return the favor’ sort of attitude within the community, and simply linking to other people’s work can build a good linking foundation. You can also create organic inbound links by guest blogging on someone else’s site.

Researching the links your competitors use is a useful tool for knowledge building. You can learn a lot from the way your competitors link to other content. You gain valuable insight into their strategy, the keywords they are using, and what they feel is important. Using this information, you can build better links to outrank them.

Calls to action with internal links keep people on your site and help them to discover more about you. Writing content that links back to yourself does many things. It creates a backlink, and it promotes other products or services you offer. You can use these tactics to upsell as well.

Providing your users with genuine, useful content comes in many forms. It is critical that you understand how to use keywords effectively because keyword density impacts the readability of your content. Link building techniques provide structure and understanding to what you publish. Check out my done-for-you system for more ideas.

Five Best Opera Extensions for Marketing

Browsers are a highly personal choice. Everyone has a reason for using the browser they use, and often it’s not based on performance or features, but on habit. Switching browsers just feels weird.

With Chrome gaining sixty percent of the market share as of October 2017, the majority of extensions are available for Chrome only. Some are available for Safari, but Opera has been left in the dark for a long time. However, the Norwegian company is pumping out some new features, and users might be pleasantly surprised with the options.

Built-in Extensions

Opera recently introduced their newest version with a built-in ad blocker and VPN service. Ads significantly slow down website performance, so the addition of a built-in ad blocker increases battery life and strain on the processor.

Opera also has a power saving mode that reduces the activity of tabs that aren’t active, decreasing the energy your computer uses. Compared to other browsers, this can extend battery life up to fifty percent. It’s great when you need to power through essential tasks or have a lot of references open at once for writing a blog or scheduling multiple social media posts.

MailTrack.io

It’s important for digital marketers to track email opens, clicks, and generate daily reports. MailTrack used to be available only for digital marketers, but they’ve made it easy now for everyone to use it. One green check indicates that a message was tracked correctly, and two checks mean it was opened. All of this is at a glance and easy to see.

LastPass

The number of accounts you have between email addresses, client portals, and social media accounts makes your head spin. Keeping a document full of your usernames and passwords is highly volatile, using the same username and password for everything compromises every account in the event of a data breach, and writing them all down on a piece of paper is cumbersome.

LastPass is versatile, allowing you to store usernames and passwords, as well as credit card information, shopping profiles, and URLs. You can safely store all of the data you have in one place while maintaining security.

Evernote Web Clipper

If you regularly save articles to reference later or take screenshots, Evernote helps to organize these things, so you don’t lose track of them. You can keep your bookmarks and tabs under control, while never forgetting where that article was that you wanted to read. Evernote automatically syncs with all devices so that you can access your saved pages from your smartphone or tablet as well.

Download Chrome Extension

Just because your favorite extension is only for Chrome doesn’t mean you can’t use it. A lot of people who love Chrome only love it for the extensions and are reluctant to switch to a new browser because they don’t want to lose productivity.

However, if there’s an extension not available at the Opera Store, just use Download Chrome Extension to add it to the Opera browser. It’s easy and keeps you moving with great marketing apps only available for Chrome with the increased performance of Opera.

Opera is one of the best browsers for reduced processor load and faster web browsing because of all of the built-in extensions. Opera continues to increase its offering by offering a power saving mode on all future versions which recognizes when your computer isn’t plugged in and reduces the activity in background tabs, wakes the CPU less often, pauses unused plugins, and much more.

Whether you’ve been with Opera for a long time and are a dedicated user or are looking for a browser to increase your performance and help your laptop run more optimally, Opera has a wealth of plugin options to keep you moving. Check out my done-for-you system for more ideas.