jon, Author at Outsource Force

Your Best Outsourcing Choice – the Philippines

Posted on July 02, 2012 by jon

With the right outsourcing partner, the benefits your company may derive from outsourcing are substantial. If done for the right business process and activity, outsourcing will help your business grow while saving money. Aside from these, outsourcing is designed to give the following advantages:

Efforts directed to core business

Because that part of your business (example, SEO, web design, online advertising) is taken off your load, you can now direct all manpower resources towards improving or enhancing the core business.

Cost savings and remarkable service efficiency

Back-office functions or activities may sometimes eat up your manpower resources and still not able to cope with the demands of the job. In this case, the best option is to outsource to a company specializing in that particular back-office function. You save money and you are able to get the services done efficiently.

Reduced operating expense

The need to maintain employees with increasing benefits is eliminated. The outsourcing company will handle that. Money saved on that will be used for other business activities like expansion or research and development.

Control in operations

There are parts of your business which bring more expenses than required as a result of poor management. These should be pushed for outsourcing. The outsourcing companies are better equipped with management skills and trained individuals to address such problem areas.

Continuity and risk management

Outsourcing will provide continuity in the performance of the business processes delegated to the outsourcing company. High turnover rate of employee is disruptive to the business operations. With an outsourcing partner doing that back-office function, for instance, will reduce the risk of a substandard level of service.

With this line-up of benefits and advantages one will get from outsourcing, it is not surprising that many businesses have opted to take this route. Moreover, many businesses have kept their choices for a good outsourcing partner limited between India and the Philippines, with the latter having some obvious edge. Outsourcing partners from the Philippines have been tested for successful roll-outs due to the following:

Proficiency in the English language, both written and spoken.

A great majority of the working sector of the Filipinos are well-versed in the English language, giving them the advantage over other English-speaking countries with distinct accent. They are more westernized in many ways and therefore understand the needs of the western partner.

Highly qualified professionals

The pool of outsourcing talents in the Philippines abound. IT professionals, nurses, teachers, software engineers, graphic designers, etc. are some of the qualified pool of manpower resources the country has trained for different specializations in the outsourcing world.

Reliable, hardworking and multi-faceted outsourcing people

The people from the Philippines are known for their dedication to work, sticking to jobs for years, allowing mastery of the skills, and continuity of services. Compared to other nations, the Philippines’ workforce are resilient amidst many challenges that go with the job.

Flexible

Outsourcing companies from the Philippines have a certain flexibility to adapt to the client’s requirements without compromising quality of service. The business environment is constantly changing and the BPOs from the Philippines are prepared for these changes.

All of these and more have made the Philippines a preferred choice as the outsourcing partners of global businesses from the United States, Europe and other big business players.

Being Friendly with Negative Keywords

Posted on July 02, 2012 by jon

Most online advertisers would be extremely familiar with the term ‘negative keywords’, because these are the words they are on the watch to help them filter out unwanted traffic to their site. This especially holds true for advertisers running PPC or pay per click ads.
Negative keywords are keyword or keyword phrases that are deemed by search engines to be associated or related with your ads but which are not. By keeping a list of negative keywords, you can keep your ad from showing up in unrelated searches which has no value in terms of traffic. With the negative keyword list, you are able to specify to search engines on what words are not related or associated with your ads and therefore should not activate your site if those words are generated by a search query.

PPC advertisers should use negative keywords if :

There are zero and expensive conversions

There is a limited advertising budget allocation

There is an experience on bad brand association

The PPC costs are to be lowered

The traffic to the ad is sought to improve

A good illustration would be an advertiser selling high-end perfume for women. Without the negative keywords, your ad may show up when a search query on ‘cheap perfume’ or ‘imitation perfume’ is generated by the search engine. By adding the keywords ‘cheap’ and ‘imitation’ as negative keywords, you are not allowing your ad to be included in any search result related to those negative keywords.

The Importance of Building Your Negative Keywords

Building your own negative keyword list will prove beneficial in all your advertising campaigns. An effective use of negative keyword will result to:

Improved click-through rate or CTR

This is the percentage of searchers who viewed and click your ads. Essentially, with a high CTR, your ad will have increased bounce rate, conversion and relevancy rates.

Improved conversion rate

This is the percentage of searchers who clicked your ad and converted. With a high conversion rate, your ads will have increased qualified leads and profit. The cost per conversion is reduced.

Improved quality score

This is the quality rating which affects the amount you pay for the ads. A high quality score will give your ads an increase in ad position and a lower maximum cost per click or CPC.

There are many ways one can develop or build a negative keyword list. There are keyword tools with built-in negative keyword tool. There are website analytic tools which can be checked against keywords used to find your site. PPC campaign reports will also be able to help with the words or keywords that triggered the ads.

A search query report from AdWord and AdCenter will be a good way to start with your negative keyword list. Reports of actually searched queries will be generated by both AdWord and AdCenter. The list will give you an idea on performance metrics for the keywords such as CTR, CPC and conversion rates. Pulling search query reports like these on a monthly, or maybe more frequently than that, will keep you updated of the keywords that should be added to your negative keyword list.

Keep in mind though that over-use of negative keywords may also work the other way, that is, it might cause your ads to reach fewer destinations. Hence, it is important that careful analysis of the negative keywords on how they will impact the ads, be made before adding them to the final negative keyword list.

Maximizing the Efficiency and Productivity of your SEO Efforts

Posted on June 28, 2012 by jon

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is that practice employed by business strategists to improve and promote a website in order to have more visitors as directed by search engines. Here are the must-know tips in maximizing your SEO as an effective marketing tool for your business:

Keyword Research and Resources

Typing the words in the search box is where it all begins. Keyword research is one of the most critical activities for the search engines. Ranking for the ‘right’ keywords matters the most for your website in terms of achieving the target goals. Some of the resources available where you can get the information about the keyword demand include: Google Adwords, Google Insights for Search, Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction, Microsoft Advertising Intelligence and Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand.

Right Analytic Tools

In search optimization, measurement is critical to success. If you can measure it, then it can be improved. Several analytic tools are available to track data about links, referrals, rankings and more to create the road map to success. Most used analytic tool is Google Analytics, mainly because of its feature to cross-integrate with other Google products like Webmaster Tools, Adsense and Adword. Other analytic tools include Omniture, Fireclick, Yahoo Web Analytics, Clicktale, Coremetrics, Clicky Web Analytics, Mint, Woopra Website Tracking, AWStats, Sawmill Analytics and Piwik Open Source Analysis. There is one that will be right for your site.

Link Building Tools

An essential element of web site marketing and SEO programs to increase traffic and online sales is quality inbound link. The more relevant and authoritative links there are to a website, the greater the potential for higher search ranking. Some of the available tools include Majestic SEO, Buzzstream Link Building, SEOmoz Linkscape, Raven SEO Tools, SoloSEO Link Building Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Page Link Analyzer, plugin SEO Beta Linking Tools, Sheer SEO Backlinks Watchdog and HubSpot Website Grader.

Website Rank Checkers

Google and other search engines use a variety of methods and tools to determine which pages are displayed first when the search engine is activated for a specific query. Some of the more popular website ranking tools or checkers include Alexa Traffic Rank Checker, Compete Ranking Checker, Compete Statistics Checker, Fake Rank Checker, PageHeat Checker, PageRank Checker and Site Rank Checker.

Social Media

Social media is used everywhere by everyone. As the number of social networking sites increase, so does the number of services to measure track and monitor the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Some of the available social media tools include EditFlow, TweetReach, Argyle Social, HootSuite for iPad, TweetLevel, ReFollow, TwitterSearch, Traackr, SocMetrics and Social Scope.

In the world of SEO, maximizing the efficiency and productivity of a website is very important and one that cannot be dismissed altogether. By utilizing the available tools to help determine where your site would land in a search query, you will be able to identify the site’s weaknesses for further improvement. Any SEO effort will prove an exercise in futility if it is not measured for strength, weakness, effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. It will not achieve its goals of increasing the traffic to your site because the search engines do not understand what your site wants or where it wants to be.

4 Ways To Ensure Quality Work in an Outsourced Setting

Posted on June 24, 2012 by jon

Outsourcing is a globally-accepted business option for many businesses that divert energies into focusing on core competencies of the business and allowing an outsourcing partner to take care and handle non-strategic business activities. Cost savings is usually the prime consideration when deciding on getting an outsourcing partner. This financial consideration is often times evaluated against the results of such option in terms of customer satisfaction rating, customer commitment and efficiency of service.

Evaluation tools to check on these parameters are necessary to make a sound justification on the outsourcing decision over in-house arrangements.

Work with the Right People

This is one parameter most businesses have some difficulty in keeping and maintaining. Human resources are constantly changing for many different reasons. It is important then, for any business to focus on getting the right people, with the right mindset and long-term career goals and objectives, to be part of their workforce.

Taking on people to work for your business is an investment in itself. Once you have selected the right team, the next task is putting an extra effort in keeping them grounded to their work – by knowing and fulfilling their needs financially and career growth.

Continuous Learning Process and Opportunity

Having a pool of personnel equipped with the right skill, technical know-how, critical decision-making capabilities will definitely reap good results for your business. To do this, you should give them the proper training and continuous learning opportunities which will not only benefit them (your staff) but your business as well because the training skills and knowledge gained by the employees will translate to improved business activity and service efficiency. These are critical in keeping your business ahead.

Measure Performance with tested Evaluation Tools

This is very important for every business. The business processes and activities should be evaluated based on prevailing business practices in order to gauge if it is beneficial for the business in its entirety. These may be done on a weekly, monthly or even daily progress monitoring depending on the type of your business. These evaluation tools are designed to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the processes in place and at the same time assess the employee’s response to those processes. These will also facilitate faster action for problem-prone areas.

Open Communication

No business will ever survive without open communication lines between the management and the employees. Bosses need to be heard and followed. Employees need to listen and be heard. You may be surprised with the innovative ideas or concepts some or most of them may have which will contribute to the efficiency of the business operations. They may be not foolproof ideas but you may enhance to make them work for your business. If both parties are able to communicate with ease and certain level of comfort, the better for your business.

With an open communication line, your employees will recognize that you value their opinion and ideas and that you listen to their voices as well. This is a big boost to their morale which will have a direct impact on the performance of their designated tasks.

Outsourcing is a strategic business approach. Human resource management is rather difficult to handle and requires a lot of resources to be effective. This is possibly the reason why outsourcing has been generally accepted as a good alternative with cost saving benefits for the business. The matter of ensuring smooth-flowing non-strategic business activities is better left to the outsourcing partner. They take care of the people and you take care of creating more business opportunities.

8 Ways for Start-ups to Get New Customers – Now!

Posted on June 21, 2012 by jon

A question that is usually thrown by new business entrepreneurs to business resource speakers runs something like, “How can a small business on a tight budget get new customers?”

A most likely answer would be, “By being innovative and inventive among many other things or businesses.”

Each business has a unique requirement to fulfill in terms of luring customers into the business front door. What worked for others may or may not work for your own. So the key is to carefully study your business and the real market or customer base you need for your business to grow. Once you have determined your market base, it will be easy to draw up techniques and strategies aimed at successfully getting new customers for your business.

The following are eight tested and time-proven ways to get new customers for your business.

1. Stay away from old habits. Old and outdated marketing techniques may no longer work especially in the fast-changing business environment. It’s time to try new marketing techniques. This way you are extending your reach to more people, which may have been excluded when you used the old marketing technique, and where new people are tapped, the likelihood of turning them into new potential customers is high.

Do some research on effective marketing ideas which may be applicable for your business like, distributing flyers, coupons or having a sale or promotional tie-ups with other businesses, etc. Choose the one that will most likely give you fast results.

2. Re-invent a service or a product. Customers are always on the lookout for new products or services. Consider new market base when you launch a new product or service. They will be an exciting addition to your existing client base.

3. Go online. There’s nothing that can beat the efficiency and usefulness of going online 24/7. Be it a having a well-designed website or a blog or a simple in-set advertisement, when more people get to view it, more people will get curious and therefore, more people may be potential customers. Offering the product or service online, where customers may make direct purchase will be the quickest way to filling in your cash register.

There are many ways to direct traffic to your site. Putting ads on Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter is a good way to start.

4. Time for PR campaign. While advertising has its own advantages, it tends to be one-sided. The trend these days is collaborating with another party to do the PR campaign for your business. Get writers to do write-ups or articles about your business, products and services.

Create media hype by launching some promotional schemes which can be announced through TV, radio and newspaper or magazines. Testimonials from satisfied customers can also do wonders for your business.

5. Give incentives for referrals. Most people rely on referrals because they trust the person doing the referral. For that reason alone, you should reward the referrers with incentives like discounts or rebates or loyalty points.

People have different reasons for referring your business to other people – satisfaction with your products and services, trust in your company and yes, they would love to get incentives for doing that. It’s a great way to say thank you for helping your business.

6. Ring them. Customers abound and they are just waiting to be tapped. Sometimes a call is all they need to get into your business. Find out new prospects by doing some online research. Like you, there may be other new business you might have a potential partnership with to make the business grow. When turned down, don’t take it personally. There are more waiting on the line. Keep calling.

7. Redesign your Web site. People need to see changes even in your web page. If they see the same thing over and over, they will stop visiting your site. Imagine the traffic lost if this happens, and just because you failed to update and keep your website as dynamic as possible.

8. Maximize the power of social networking. It’s the ‘in’ thing nowadays. Everything is disclosed in social networking sites. Use this to your advantage and keep the business alive by encouraging discussion among social network friends and affiliates.

Statistics and surveys showed that most people rely on message boards before making a final decision on a product or service. Customers do take time to give out feedback, positive or negative, on certain products or services availed. You have to ensure that your products or services will reap more positive than negative feedback to influence more customers to check your business out.

You may be able to come up with fresh and more innovative ways to create new customers. Bottom line is you don’t stick with the old ones. New techniques will create new customers one way or another.

Designing Ad Structure & Writing Best Ad Copy – Google Adwords Basic

Posted on June 17, 2012 by jon

Designing ads structure and writing compelling ads are very important in an AdWords campaign. Well-designed ads can help you to attract quality visitors, lower your average CPC, eventually increasing your adwords quality score, and generate higher revenues in the long term.

Rules – Read Adwords’ punctuation guideline carefully and obey all the rules so you can get the maximum results from your campaigns.

Focus – Make sure that each ad represents your specific product or service that you’re trying to promote. Make your ad tidy and attractive to achieve higher CTR.

Capital Letters – Capitalize the first letter of each main or important words to make your ads stand out. But avoid excessive all caps as it will violate the rules.

Display Price to Filter Clicks – If your product or service is in the price sensitive zone, then you may have to include the price of your product or service in your advert. This strategy is to discourage bargain hunters from clicking your advert. Displaying the price of your product or service will not only filter clicks, but it makes your campaigns cost-effective.

Call-to-Action – Make sure that you add a call-to-action in your advert to drive potential visitors to visit your website. “Sign up now..”, “Check our deals…”, “See others’ testimonials…”etc.

Display URL – Many reports have shown that short and interesting URLs have better conversion than standard URLs. To get a better conversion rate, you have to customize your display URL into something like this “yourdomain/Halloween-Deals.”

Do Trial and Error – Create at least 2 ads for each ad group, then evaluate the performance of each ad frequently. In this way, you know which ad works well and which ad that has low conversion. This is also referred as split testing. Keep writing new ads, and pause the non performing ads.

Dynamic Keywords Insertion – Visit the Adwords help section to get more information about dynamic keywords. Although it is a bit complex, proper use of dynamic keywords can lead to more clicks.

Apply all these tips and you’ll get great results from your campaigns. However, Google Adwords constantly updates their system and changing rules. Best to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest news from the adwords team itself by following adwords.blogspot.com.

Understanding Quality Score – Google Adwords Basic

Posted on June 16, 2012 by jon

Google uses two aspects to determine how much you have to pay per click and the position of your advert. The first aspect is the quality score of your targeted keywords and the second aspect is the maximum CPC that you’re willing to pay for your targeted keywords. The rule is simple; you can get a higher success with your targeted keywords if you get a higher quality score.

Components that Determine Google Adwords Quality Score:

Quality of Landing Page – Adwords team will review your landing page before displaying your ads. They will review your landing page’s navigation, usability, relevancy and optimization. So optimize your landing page for the user to get higher quality score.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – Focused ads and ad groups will not only increase your CTR, but they can increase quality score. The higher your quality score is, the lower your cost-per-click will be. This is how Google rewards their advertisers.

Display URL History – Know that you can also test your display URL and this is 1 factor affecting click-through-rate. This is sometimes overlooked by many advertisers.

Keyword Relevance – Make sure that your ads are highly relevant with your targeted keywords up to your landing page. This means you have to give what exactly the user is searching for. Otherwise, most likely you will receive a very low quality score and your ads will be rarely shown, or worst if it’s not shown at all.

Geographic Performance – If you achieved a success in your targeted areas locally, it can help you get higher quality score.

Account History – This is determined by looking at your overall CTR of all your ads and keywords in the account. So if you’re a new advertiser, this is your chance to start your campaign right in the beginning and build a good account history.

Quality score is calculated every time someone searches for one of your keywords. It will then be used in various ways that will affect your Ad Auction Eligibility, your Keyword’s First Page Bid Estimate, your Keyword’s Actual Cost-Per-Click, and your Ad Positions.

In conclusion, if your quality score is high, your costs is lower, and you have a better ad positions.

Whether you are a customer, publisher, or advertiser, Google Adwords system works best for everyone. If Google (the publisher) show’s an Ad (from the advertiser) that is relevant to the search (from the customer) – then everybody’s happy. Always remember – Relevancy is the key.

Setting Up of Campaigns and Ad Groups – Google Adwords Basic

Posted on June 15, 2012 by jon

There are two hierarchy levels in Google AdWords: Campaign Level and Ad Group Level. Here’s an explanation about each level.

1. Campaign Level

Geographic Targeting – This option enables you to choose the geographical location where your ads would show up. With this option, you can choose very specific locations such as a city or several specific cities. If you only target one city, then just include the name of the city to your keywords. The more narrow your target market is, the better. The drawback, however, is you might not get enough impressions and clicks.

Network & Device Targeting – The network option will allow you to choose whether you wanna show your ads on the search network (that uses keywords), or display network (that uses contextual or placement targeting). Be careful in using display network with the “broad reach” as it will lower your click-through-rate, thus lowering your quality score as well.

As for the device targeting option, choose wisely and analyze where what type of device your target customers would be using such as desktop, laptop, tablets, or mobile devices.

Budget & Bidding – If you run multiple campaigns, then you can set a budget for each campaign. Set the amount you are willing to allocate to spend daily. Be mindful on your bid. Google would recommend you to use automatic bidding which will most likely cost you a lot of money. Take control of your spending and set your bids to manual.

2. Ad Group Level

Average cost per click (CPC) – In ad group level, you can decide the default cost-per-click. You can also edit the CPC for each targeted keyword. Make sure to set the default bid to minimum. If you will receive a warning saying “below first page bid” then you may set the bid manually on that specific keyword.

Ad Copy – You have to create the actual ads for each of your ad group. It is highly recommended to create at least 2 ads for each ad group to test which one works better or gets the highest click-through-rate. Adwords will display them all, but the frequency of each ads shown depending on the option you chose in the main settings. Be sure to rotate the ads evenly for a more effective split testing.

Keywords – Add your keywords. Group your keywords tightly according to type of product or service, or by geographic location. Do not forget to block the unwanted words by adding them as negative keywords.

Landing page – Your landing page must provide product or service or information needed by your visitors. Do not use a landing page that has nothing to do with your keywords, because that can drive your visitors away. Relevancy is the key to achieve success on google adwords advertising.

Choosing The Right Keywords – Google Adwords Basic

Posted on June 14, 2012 by jon

Targeted Keywords

One of the ways to set up your adwords campaign correctly in the beginning is knowing how to choose your targetted keywords. Here are two simple aspects that you have to pay attention when choosing the right keywords.

Your Product or Service

Your targeted keywords must be very relevant with your product or service. It will be worthless to target the word “internet marketing” if in your ad group or ad copy you are targeting the service “search engine optimization”. There are several reasons why you have to follow this guideline; firstly broader keywords are very competitive and they cost very expensive, secondly you will get more quality visitors if you target more specific keywords because those visitors are in need of your service and most likely are ready to pay, when typing the targeted keywords.

Include your Targeted Location

Incorporating targeted location to your targeted keywords is very important. Geo-targeting can lead to more targeted visitors. For example, if you provide service to the entire USA then you have to add either “usa”, “us”, “america”, or “united states of america” to your keywords.

Use these two aspects to find the right keywords for your product or service. Remember, the right choice of keywords can yield greater revenues for your business.

If you want to conduct a deeper analysis to find more relevant keyword matches, you may use the Adwords Keyword Tool and other Keyword tools available online. It can be more complicated but it can avoid keyword matching that is too general.

Negative Keywords

When you have determined your targeted keywords, Adwords system usually provides you with several additional keywords that the system considers as related keywords to your targeted keywords. For example, if you offer a web design service in New York and you target “web design service in New York,” the Adwords system usually provides you with additional keywords like “web design in Washington.” These additional keywords are completely useless if your target is only New York. Therefore, “Washington” will be your negative.

You have to filter the additional keywords from the Adwords system carefully because some keywords may be related with your targeted keywords. If the additional keywords from the Adwords system have nothing to do with your specific target service/product, you can mark them as negative keywords. It is highly recommended that you also spend a little time to list negative keywords and blacklist them from your campaigns. Blacklisting negative keywords can help you to avoid wasting your budget.

Google Adwords Basics – 5 Things You Must Know To Do It Right The First Time

Posted on June 10, 2012 by jon

Google AdWords has helped thousands of businesses to increase their profits in a relatively short time. If you are going to use AdWords for your PPC advertising, understanding the basics of PPC is very important to the success of your campaign. If you are a small to mid-sized business marketer, the following are five areas that you have to understand thoroughly so you can get the most advantage of AdWords PPC campaign.

1. Identify your campaign’s economic fundamentals
Before you start your pay-per-click campaign, there are several fundamental things that you need to figure out first, such as:

– What is your conversion goal?
– How do you measure the conversion?
– Does the conversion have a good impact to your business?
– If yes then how much are you willing to pay for it?
– Have you set up the conversion tracking correctly?

In reality, most advertisers who spend a large sum of money on PPC do not set up tracking tool properly. Answering the above questions is very important because the answers can help you to manage your AdWords campaign and make correct decisions.

2. Learn the right campaign settings
Different situations need different campaign settings. However, it does not mean that you have to split your ads groups into separate mobile and desktop/laptop campaigns right from the beginning. What you need to do is to learn all the available levels when creating your campaigns. Without learning the right campaign settings, you’ll end up in a messy campaign structure that is hard to manage later on.

3. Start with small campaign, perform, and expand
It is very important to effectively manage and track the progress of your campaigns and you must be prepared with a management cost when you run a large campaign. It is highly recommended to start small by choosing one group of products that you sell, choosing several locations to become your target markets, and determining the terms for the campaign. Repeat these trials and use the findings from these trials to become the foundation for a new, more established campaign.

4. Be mindful to campaign basics
The main idea here is to start small and targeted, and enhanced over time. The followings are five areas where you need to spend most of your time and optimization efforts:

Search Query Monitoring – Look closely at search queries and placements and be assertive with negative search queries.

Account Structure – Group your keywords tightly. Keep them targeted and relevant within an ad group. It’s important that you must know the difference between display ad groups and search ad groups.

Ad Copy – Create strong ads and try several different ads variations. Keep testing for better conversion.

Landing Pages – Create interesting landing pages. Make sure you optimize your website for users. Split test and make sure it converts visitors and achieve your goal.

Bid Management – use bid management to helps you track whether or not you are spending your money properly.

5. Consider the ways on how your campaigns may grow

After knowing the right campaign settings, making a good account structure, and creating effective display ads, you also have to think about the right ways to expand your campaigns later on. If you start small campaigns that focus on a certain region then it is advisable that you consider geographical driven account structure. When you are ready to expand your campaigns to target wider areas then you have to think the right account structure that best suits the target of your campaigns.

By understanding the fundamentals and figuring out the best ways to leverage your campaign, you will be able to achieve success with your campaign and start using other features, settings and tools within AdWords. In this way, you can create more effective campaigns over already profitable campaigns and avoid wasting money on PPC.