Business Blogging

Pay Per Click Advertising is the fastest way to get new traffic to your website, but it requires lots of forethought in the ad creation.

Understanding the Limitations

Besides the punctuation limitations found in the Google Adwords help section, here are field size restrictions you must take into account when building your ad.

Headline:  25 characters Description line 1:  35 characters Description line 2:  35 characters Display URL :  35 characters (must be a valid looking address) Destination URL:  Any length necessary

Before getting starting, keep the following thoughts in mind as you create your first ad.

1. Don’t Rush!
   1. Rushing leads to unplanned action and unplanned action has no measurement system by which improvements can be made.
   2. Rushing also leads to poor keyword selection.  The goal is NOT maximum clicks, it is getting the maximum value for each click.  Less is more, fewer, more qualified leads will out pace thousands of unqualified leads
2. Plan Each Word
   1. You don’t have a lot of space.  Reader will be skimming, so abbreviations are acceptable, but they must be obvious.
   2. Focus on your target audience.  Don’t shoot for everyone, because you will be paying for clicks that will immediately bounce away.
3. Create multiple (competing) ads
   1. Your great slogan may be a legend in your own mind!  Run multiple ad versions for the same (limited) keyword set so you can see which ads work best.

Use Google’s Keyword tool to help you find the best keyword options for your desired ad.  Don’t write your ad to random keywords; find the right keywords for your perfect ad.

Using the Google Keyword tool to try and create your ad will lead to an expensive failure.  Decide what you are selling, write copy using the character restrictions above, and then find the best keywords to support the ad copy you created.

Websites are mission critical in today’s business because 88% of all American Internet users “Use a search engine to find information.” (Pew Internet – April 2009)  WordPress based sites are search engine friendly and can be setup to automatically fill in the necessary meta data fields.  Plus WordPress uses a ping feature to alert the search engines on new or updated information on your website.

The most important reason to switch to WordPress

You can add, change or remove information with out having to hire a web programmer.  You also don’t need any expensive software, you need only your web browser and an internet connection.

WordPress is not limited to a certain number of pages or posts.  You can write a separate page for each of your products and services.  Individual pages or posts for your services improve your search engine visibility because there is more information on a single topic on your page or post.  Since search engines read your content and evaluate the page value for their searchers, have a single topic per page means your content will be scored higher.  A higher content score translates into a higher search engine position.

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are thousands of people all over the world working on it.  Writing new code, improving the technology and making new tools that help your visitors find you easier.  The best part, is WordPress is FREE.

Click here to read more about WordPress.

The visual editor provides a semi-WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) content editor that allows you to easily create, edit and format your blog content in a view similar to that of a word processor.

This is the default editing mode of WordPress.com, but if it does not appear to be enabled, you can select the Visual tab in the top right corner of the editor area, as depicted below.

There are two (2) rows of editing icons contained within the visual editor. You can find out what any icon means or does by hovering over it with your mouse – a small tooltip will appear describing the icon and its purpose.

When initially opened, the visual editor will display a single row of icons:

1. Bold
2. Italic
3. Strike-through
4. Unordered list (bullet points):
   • Item 1
   • Item 2
5. Ordered list
   • Item 1
   • Item 2
6. Blockquote (a way of displaying quoted text; each theme will style this differently.)

   Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

7. Align Left
8. Align Center
9. Align Right
10. Insert/edit link
11. Unlink
12. Insert More tag
13. Toggle spellchecker (only English at the moment, sorry!)
14. Toggle fullscreen mode
15. Show/Hide Kitchen sink (enables the second row of editing icons:

To display the second row of icons, select the kitchen sink icon

1. Style – various formatting styles defined by your theme
2. Underline
3. Align full
4. Select text color – change the text color
5. Paste as Plain Text
6. Paste from Word
7. Remove formatting
8. Insert custom character
9. Outdent – move text further left
10. Indent – move text further right
11. Undo – undo your last action
12. Redo – redo your last action
13. Help – display some information about using the editor, as well as keyboard shortcuts.

Both text and images can be aligned using the appropriate icons:

Note that full alignment can only be applied to text and will align both sides of the text.

The style drop-down menu allows you to change the formatting of any selected text. This includes various headings and other pre-defined styles built into your theme . Note that all styles are defined within your theme’s stylesheet; this means that their modification would require the Custom CSS Upgrade (and appropriate knowledge of CSS).

To change text color you must first highlight a section of text:

Selecting a color will apply that color to the selected text and make it the default color for the color button.

Clicking on the text color button itself will apply the last default color.

If you copy and paste text from somewhere else you may discover that it does not always appear exactly as you would expect. If you use the Paste as text button then a special cleanup process will run to remove any special formatting and HTML tags that may otherwise change your text.

Once clicked a window appears where you can enter your text:

Checking the keep linebreaks box will preserve all HTML <br /> tags. Unchecking this option will remove them

The remove formatting button, as you would expect, removes all formatting (bold, italic, colors etc) from a highlighted section of text. First select your text:

When the button is clicked all the formatting will be removed:

As well as the normal letters available directly from your keyboard you can also insert special characters. Position your cursor to where you want to insert a character and click on the insert custom character button. A popup window will appear:

Click any character and it will be inserted at your cursor position.

The indent button will move text in by one level, and the outdent button will take away one level.