Just mention the term PPC (Pay per Click) advertising and you will see many people convulse. For them, PPC is a bad word and they believe SEO is the be all and end all. PPC is feared and seen as useless and avoidable expense, as the best traffic is the traffic that comes for free (read from organic listing).

Well, it is not at all useless, and avoidable or not depends upon the niche you work in and the seasonality of your product. I came to know this during one of the chat sessions I had with a group of smart people on SEO in London.

I learned a lot about PPC and SEO best practice for managing campaigns in UK, and how both get along quite easily. Just to let you know I did managed several adword campaigns in USA, but feel if you manage the same in UK you must hire a local consultant to improve your ROI. UK English is far different than US and it’s hard to identify the golden keyword, if you don’t have an idea on how they spell out a term.

The biggest learning was the knowledge of why PPC should be used, and when it is more effective than SEO. If you have a smart consultant, your investments in PPC e.g. Adwords, Yahoo Search marketing and others will show you improved ROI.

Why to use PPC advertising?

Reason 1: PPC advertising becomes more useful than SEO when you are running a time-sensitive promotion or when the product you are offering is seasonal by nature like Christmas gifts, New Year event, Rock concert, etc.

Reason 2: It comes handy when we require immediate search presence, as we all know that getting results from SEO takes at least 2-3 months.

Reason 3: PPC advertising can also help a website that has non-SEO friendly pages (flash content, AJAX, dynamic pages, etc.) get search traffic.

Reason 4: It is not uncommon to find that a website which deserves a presence on the first page of SERP (Search Engine result pages) is not getting a proper ranking, despite everything being right about it. In situations like this, PPC advertising comes handy.

Reason 5: PPC advertising becomes very helpful when you want to test the strength of your keywords, effectiveness of your marketing message, efficacy of the sales page, and design of your website, etc.

Conclusion

As we saw above, there are situations in which we have to use PPC advertising to get the traffic. And I believe that a judicious mix of PPC and SEO along with social media (twitter, digg, etc.), blogging, etc., is required to get required results from online marketing.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Laura Lippay, Speaker and SEO specialist, CNET Networks, presents this wonderful video on search engine optimization. How do you get your Web pages to rank high on search results? CNET’s Laura Lippay offers some guidelines for Search Engine Optimization, including how to structure your site, where to position content on your page, and how to increase traffic.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I like to present an interesting video on SEO, it’s about 2 year’s old but still relevant to have a look at, back to basics folks. Matt Cutts answers Google questions: -

Myth #1. sites on the same server,
Myth #2. IP, or including off-domain JavaScript – Launching sites with millions of pages: how should I do it best?

Popularity: 2% [?]

I bought a Dell notebook yesterday and found there are several configurations issues. I tried to contact Dell support in India, and to my utmost surprise, it took 7 minutes to reach a dell customer care representative. Once the customer service representative picked up the phone, she hang-up leaving me in helpless to call again and waste my time.

Called at 1-800-425-8045 on 3/09/09 at 12:25 PM,

I am asking a credit note from my supplier and moving on to Sony. Great deal Dell, you guys please take care of issues next time, buyers beware, get everything confirmed before buying a dell laptop.

Almost all companies don’t bother to provide quality support to consumers; it seems they are using a delay tactics to save their time and money. We call it hopeless support. Here are some links from web on how helpless consumers cry out on Customer Support glitces at Indian Call Centers:

• Indian Service Center Sucks!
• Dell’s Customization Sucks in India + Mysterious Microsoft Call
• Young Indians Ready to Hang Up on Call Center Jobs
• Indian Outsourcing Firms Hang Up The Phone
• Why does the customer Service suck in INDIA??
• Quality of service-support of Dell and HTC in New Delhi, India

Popularity: 5% [?]

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes — including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hick’s take on marketing [marketers] [Grrrr..] No offense Mr. Bill but marketing is not so funny stuff it’s really hard to plan and implement, takes ages to create, communicate, deliver value to the target market. This video is worth watching, Just another video of Hicks’ routine attacks on mainstream society, religion, politics and consumerism.

Popularity: 2% [?]

An Interview with Michael E. Porter, Professor, Harvard University. Porter’s five competitive forces is the basis for much of modern business strategy. Understand the framework and how to put it into practice.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The key to niche market research is finding the needs of your target market. Watch over my shoulder as I dive into market research for a niche. Need more ideas? Watch this video.

Popularity: 2% [?]

KPOWEB.com is looking for two experienced PHP web programmers with some Ajax knowledge for our central franchise center at Pitampura/ Rohini New Delhi. You Must be able to write detailed and accurate work logs and involved in developing applications in PHP/MySQL for a minimum of two years. Please apply with portfolio of applications you created or take part in creating.

Experience of creating web application such as shopping site, price comparison store, OSCommerce and similar applications will be valued very highly. An experience with CakePHP will be added advantage but it is not essential. You must have zeal to adopt to framework based development.

If you are interested in the position please use the comment form on this site or mail me at arun (at) kpoweb (dot) com.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Require Experienced Data Entry Operators for our new back office at Pitampura, New Delhi. (Our company is ISO 9001:2000 certified)

The person should have good typing speed, familiar with web based/ internet based form filling or content uploading and have good English writing skills. The job is very much easy and the candidate will need to fill specified nos. of forms per day.

Qualification Required: Graduates/Under Graduates with a good typing speed (Minimum 60 wpm) and minimum of 1 year experience in Data Entry Field.

Please apply at onlylinux@gmail.com with full details. If you want to set your career, we have the right openings for you. Please note that this is not a short term contract but we need people who are committed to work with us for longer period.

Popularity: 24% [?]