A common mistake business owners make when creating their profile on LinkedIn is to call themselves “Owner”.  This does not describe what you actually do, so it’s best, for the purposes of being found in a search, to use a description with industry keywords as your title.  For example, I am an Internet Marketing Specialist at Search Ad Marketing. A friend who owns a travel business is a ‘Travel Expert”.  These terms are more likely to be used as keywords in a search than “Owner”.

If you change your title, be mindful of any recommendations you have that were tied to the old title.  These may be moved to the unassigned state.  If this happens to you, please follow these steps:

• Go to the left-hand navigation menu. Click ‘Recommendations’ under the ‘Profile’ sub-menu.
• Scroll down to the ‘Unassigned recommendations’ part of the page. Click ‘Show ‘Recommendations’.
• You can now assign each recommendation to a specific experience listing.

Good luck with your search and find objectives!

I have a creative mind.  I am surrounded by others with creative minds.  I was touched by one of these minds today in a blog post written on 7/14 by Anirudha Kurulkar.  Here is the link to his post: PPC & SEO Compared to Human Life

His story relates the importance of using negative keywords in PPC campaigns to appear in exactly the kind of search for which you want to be found.  Briefly, you ask God for a child, God gives you a beautiful child but the child is blind.  Well, you didn’t tell God you wanted a child with sight.  You got lucky he gave you one with legs, but why leave your results to luck.  Give search engines enough information to give you exactly what you want.  Negative keywords are an underutilized important part of all campaigns.  Use them and use them wisely.

With Google dominating the search engine market, Microsoft has decided to try and best Google at it’s own game, with “Bing”. Bing is what Microsoft likes to call a “decision engine” rather that a search engine; This is because Bing claims to be the most accurate search engine on the net, advertised that it gives you the results you want with nothing unrelated. I decided that before I could fully trust this, I needed to test it out. After my short time with Bing, I found that it did have a number of helpful features to get what you’re looking for faster. For example, hovering your mouse over the site displayed a short blurb of information about the site, including a summary of it’s contents. Bing doesn’t seem to be anything revolutionary, but it is efficient. The only question now is if it can actually beat Google.

Microsoft’s Game Plan

Microsoft is putting a lot of money into promoting Bing in various forms of media. This means that more people will be aware of it’s existence than any other new niche search engine. Because it is a Microsoft product, any computer that has the default internet explorer homepage and search engine will be forwarded to Bing. Traditionally this has lead to an older and less savvy audience, however with the mix of new and unseen features and large media push it could attract a larger and broader demographic than the previous Live.com had.

What Does That Mean For Us?

In the end we should pay close attention to Bing. Not only does it have potential to capture a large market share from Google, it also will have much better deals and pricing for pay per click as the demand for Bing adverting has not reached that of Google. There may be very qualified traffic searching Bing and it is a relatively open market place for advertising. It would be worth dedicating some time and money to test out a Bing search engine marketing campaign. With the metrics and measurement we can use today it would not take long to get a clear picture of the return on investment possible through the Bing search engine.

Beyond natural and paid search marketing you may also want to pay close attention to what features they are adding to their search. Like Google it seems they are planning to have enhanced results that include a variety of media. This may be Video, flight listings, products, images, etc… all of these areas are an opportunity to start a search campaign.

While Google is extremely useful in listing ads relevant to a search query, LocalAdLink.com is exceptionally useful at getting relevant ads placed on it’s first page of results because of its geographic targeting capability.  Who on earth is LocalAdLink.com you ask?  Only the most aggressive Internet advertising platform to ever come along.

LocalAdLink.com is part of a trio of offerings from A Beyond Commerce Company who also holds BoomJ.com and i-Supply stores.  The theory behind what will make LocalAdLink.com successful is that the links from ads on BoomJ.com, i-Supply stores and the 200+ other search engines, web pages and social networking sites hosting LocalAdLink ads will drive an incredible volume of traffic to the site.

So far, so good!  Their growing popularity is pushing them up the internet rankings at breakneck speed. As of May 29, 2009 Alexa.com reports a traffic rank of 12,331 for LocalAdLink.com.  This is a jump of over 6500 from three months ago.  LocalAdLink on Alexa.  By the end of the year they anticipate being in the top 1000.  Not long after that they expect to reach the top 10.

Where did the idea of LocalAdLink.com originate?  In the mind of e-commerce poioneer Bob McNulty.  “…Bob McNulty founded HomeClub and the internet powerhouse www.Shopping.com. With thirty years of experience to draw upon, Mr. McNulty understands the needs of small businesses and the space they need to occupy in order to reach out to consumers.  Supported by a large and highly qualified team of professionals in multiple locations around the country, the combined efforts of BOOMj and LocalAdLink are about to revolutionize the way business is done online.” (taken from AboutTheCompany on www.LocalAdLink.com)

Let’s watch and see what happens!

Search Ad Marketing and LocalAdLink