Being seen as a blogging authority in your industry takes time and a steadfast focus on creating lots of extremely valuable content. For many this latter part starts out well, but then quickly becomes a daily/weekly or monthly struggle and unfortunately oftentimes gets left in the ‘too hard basket’. A common question that clients often ask when starting out with blogging is: ‘What Should I Blog About?’ While you are no doubt an expert on your subject matter, it can be...

I’m not sure what it is? Is it the deeply ingrained 'kiwi ingenuity' in our psyche or the 'she'll be right mate' attitude? Maybe it is simply ignorance. Would you start trading on the foreign exchange markets without first learning the basics? The same goes with Adwords. Time and time again business owners in New Zealand attempt to run Google Adwords campaigns themselves, with ZERO knowledge of how pay per click advertising actually works. I blame Google for dumbing it...

Earlier this month Google announced an important change to the keyword matching rules for Phrase and Exact match types. Their official word on the change states that "Starting in mid-May, phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations. Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.” Typically I’m quite excited by the launch of new AdWords features (the unveiling of ‘modified broad...

Recently I was looking at this particular website’s blog and I couldn’t help but notice that they were missing some standard blog features. One of the first things I noticed when viewing this site’s blog was that none of their posts had dates, so I had no idea how actively they were blogging or how recent the last blog post was. Additionally, their blog had no categories, just ‘Page 1 of 12’, so I was unsure of the topics covered by...

"It's always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile." ~ Garry Marshall Alternatively, you can learn from others. Continuing from my previous post on common Google Adwords mistakes beginners often make - today you will learn about three more errors you want to avoid if you are new to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. 1. Failing to Setup Conversion Tracking You cannot improve what you do not measure. While tracking clicks, cost, CTR etc. is important...

A successful business blog requires website owners to be committed to creating valuable content that people actually want to read. It is important to firstly understand that blogging takes time, but with consistency comes results. Secondly, you should always plan ahead and have a long-term content creation strategy in place to help prevent your business blog from becoming stagnant. If you can commit to taking these two points on board you’ll go a long way to achieving the following 3 business...

How well is your Google Adwords campaign running? Good? Bad? Could be better? Absolutely no idea? When learning a new discipline, it is not uncommon to make mistakes starting out. However, if you are new to Google AdWords and running your own campaigns, beginner mistakes can be costly (or at worst just a downright waste of time and money altogether). I've seen clients make the same mistakes time and time again. Most of time they had no idea - they...

New Zealanders’ adoption of smartphone technology continues to gather pace, with smartphones now making up somewhere in the region of 30% of all handsets in use in NZ1. What’s more, with NZ’s mobile providers now offering more realistic pricing options for smartphone handsets and monthly plans, browsing the web via mobile phone is rapidly becoming the norm for many New Zealanders. Given the increase in mobile phone browsing in NZ it's time NZ business owners seriously consider how mobile is going...

Last year was an exciting year in the online marketing industry - Google certainly kept search marketers busy with multiple of major algorithm changes. With January over already, now is an excellent time to reassess and realign your online goals. So where should you focus your marketing energy and efforts this year? Here are six online marketing strategies worthy of your attention in 2012: 1. Mobile Search Approximately 3 million New Zealanders own a mobile phone or have a Smartphone...

It's no secret that over recent years consumers have grown increasingly immune to traditional advertising methods. The advent of MySky has meant many New Zealanders are no longer forced to watch TV commercials, meanwhile magazine and newspaper readers have long ago learned to ignore the print ads that add clutter to the stories we're really interested in reading about. As consumers we're getting better and better at shutting out the world of traditional marketing and are instead turning to friends, family,...