My First Provo Labs Seminar
October 11th, 2006Paul Allen taught us today about PPC Marketing. I already had a decent understanding of how PPC campaigns function. I went in hoping to gain a better understanding of how PPC marketing fits into the overall Internet Marketing picture. In other words, how should my focus be distributed amongst PPC, SEO, affiliate, and other types of marketing?
Most of the meeting was more directed toward teaching what PPC is, and how to start a campaign; but at the end, Paul took a few minutes to give a recommendation on when to implement it:
- Create Your Strategy.
- Refine your landing pages. It’s not smart to spend money, sending traffic to pages that are not focused on the keywords and the ad.
- Put some sort of analytics on your website. There is no point in driving untraceable traffic to your site.
- Now you have done your homework and prepared your website, you are ready to drive traffic to it. PPC is a great starting point. You get immediate traffic and immediate data on how specific keywords and ads are performing. This data will be very useful as you start to apply the principles of SEO and other types of internet marketing. Always cross-test your ads and keywords. Run comparable ads so you can track and compare the progress of each.
- Start applying other kinds of internet marketing (I will post on other types as I learn about them).
Paul used a couple of different powerpoint presentations. Both were very well done and extremely helpful. Jeff Harmon posted them on his blog. If you are learning about pay-per-click, they are worth looking at.
Provo Labs has a comfortable atmosphere. I didn’t feel intimidated to ask questions and participate in the discussion. I can already tell that the group learning and collaborating will be very helpful. I’m excited to continue learning.
I’m even more excited to apply the principle I’m learning to FamilyLearn’s websites.
What wasn’t so nice:
I don’t remember exactly when, but I think it has about one year since I first saw that construction had begun on the ProvoLabs office building on 900 E. in Provo. I’m in awe that it has taken so long. It’s now in use and it isn’t even complete. Last week’s opening social was held on the first floor amongst a bunch of cubicles. I came in late, so I wasn’t even able to get close enough to Paul to hear what he was saying. Fortunately, I was able to catch him afterwards. He spent a few minutes with me individually which I really appreciated.
Today’s seminar was held on the mostly completed second floor, which at least has a conference room. The smell of fresh paint was quite strong—I had a bit of a headache by the end. The room doesn’t have a projector or projector screen, so the start of the meeting was delayed while chairs were stacked as a resting place for Paul’s projector. Instead of desks we had chairs—not a huge deal, but it’s nice to have a place to set your laptop.
