SEO

In most cases you will want to outsource SEO, make a decision on SEM, and insource most of your social media interaction. SEO is the hardest of the three to insource. SEO is not just a skill set it is a collection of tools. Much like your doctor is a guy, and he can do a lot when he is in your home to treat small things, it is unlikely that he will diagnose your cancer at your bedside.

A good SEO brings tools like a Google Search Engine Appliance for assessing page quality scores; analytics software for tracking not only your site but your competitors; relationships with hundreds if not thousands of sites; account reps at search engines to expedite questions problems and complaints; and monitoring tools to give early detection to problems with rank, reputation or uptime. A good SEO is also benefitting from working with multiple sites so they can see trends across sites.

These are difficult to insource. A Google Search Appliance approaches $100,000 the first year, competitive analytics software is expensive to build and require constant tweaks to maintain accuracy. Working with a smaller set of sites changes in search engine behavior may be detected too late to make changes to prevent lower rankings. SEO has almost no insourcing advantages. The few that you have are that by having an onsite SEO you can include them in more decisions and embed SEO in the corporate culture. Even this can be done with an outsourced SEO who benefits from the tools of their company.

SEM

SEM can go either way with equal success and is often more a function of who is going to have more buying power and how many hours a week do you need. SEMs success or failure is most dependent on the copy used, the landing pages created, and the cost of the ads. Insourced or outsource the first two will likely be the same if you hire the right person. The cost of the ads through Google and Microsoft are likely going to be the same unless your ad budget exceeds $500k a year. If your SEM brings buying power to the table, either through bulk, or through relationships with websites where your ads could run, then outsourcing makes sense. If you hire the right person who can bring those relationships, then insourcing makes sense.

Social Media Marketing

NEVER Trust interacting with your customers to a contractor. For this reason you should insource at least that portion of your social media. Event planning, site building, social network infrastructure planning, and seeding, however you can in or outsource. Likely there will be portions of this that you need help with from time to time which makes it worthwhile to partially outsource this. Even as a consultant I routinely subcontract to event planners for many of the logistics of my social events. Building a FaceBook Apps, integrating with twitter, are all social media marketing tasks, that are likely not aligned with your core business, and make a lot of sense to outsource.

While many of the details are false, the program wasn’t set up by Google, and Google doesn’t have a “Google Adwork” program, but Google doesn’t seem to be doing much to stop the scam either.  Normally Google is amazingly tenacious about the use of their trademark, I know several Gadget related sites that got some fairly harsh cease and desists sent to them for the use of the word gadget in ways that Google thought was too close to GoogleGadgets.  But after several of our sites were plagued with ads reading “Work from home SEO” and “Earn money with Search Engine Ads” we attempted to get a hold of Google to notify them that scam ads were plaguing our sites.

No response.  We have our suspicions why.  While Google may enforce their brand pretty heavily they look the other way when something is good for the bottom line.  The work from home scams are buying 100’s of thousands of keyword phrases through a lot of accounts and buying all of the penny click ad inventory.  This drives the ad price up on all of the legitimate ads. 

Our Client’s’ Adwords spends that were also capitalizing on cheap penny clicks are getting undercut, which many of our clients were willing to up from a penny to two cents.  While this sounds like an insignificant amount of money, if you are buying 100k ads a day at 1 cent per click and you change to 2 cents you doubled your spend.  Google does hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on these ads at less than 5 cents a click and so much like penny trader stocks small increases can be big money for them.

Blocking too many advertisers in your Adsense account that Google doesn’t think are competitors to your content can get you kicked out of the Adsense program.  Putting verbiage on your site not to click work from home ads can also get you kicked out of the program. Since Google provides no method to report ads which are inappropriate, fraudulent, or violate their trademarks on their landing page as a publisher you are “stuck” with them.

Google is currently plagued with ads which hurt publishers, but Google looks the other way on because they’d rather have the money.  Some of the most famous being for Evony, an online game which runs ads from multiple domains featuring a barely clad woman with a knife at her throat, which is entirely unrelated to the game, and not likely appropriate in most workplace environments.

evony.com
evonygame.com
evonyhome.com
evonyminiclip.com
evonyonline.com
evonyy8.com
playevony.com
evonyfreeonlinegames.com
evony-game.com
evonymyspace.com
evony-game.com
evonygamezer.com
sweetgameonline.com
playnowmelord.com
comeplaymylord.com
evony.net

BlackWater Clients have seen anti-competitive practices happening via adsense as well.  A competitor creates an image ad which is very unlikely to get clicked, something ugly with poor syntax and grammar selling something unrelated to the keywords it is bought against.  These ads drive the target sites income way down, but also makes the quality of the site look low, as the lack of quality ads implies a lower quality of content.  Again all a site can do is block the ads, but we were running in to 2-3 new domains being used a day making it a task clients had to perform 2-3 times a day, and because the sites would use Geo filtering often the bay area would not be included in the ad targets nor would the home state of the target site, making them all but impossible to track down.

And again with no means to report this behavior.  We came to a conclusion, Microsoft PubCenter.  Our headaches are far less and we can get someone on the phone in minutes to answer our questions, complain about an ad, or get something explained, or even get answers to questions like, why does your code not show any ads to this guy on the other side of the Bay, but does for me.  The best part, the earnings are competitive, running neck and neck with Google on Google’s good days, but the ads look nicer, and the reports are more detailed.  The only “down side” Microsoft has a higher standard for the quality of site they will accept so a few of our online stores don’t meet that thresh hold.  One might say even that was a win for Microsoft.

This is a screen shot from my adwords campaing.  Notice the $2.00 Minimum first page bid for Bing Search?  And Microsoft has the Top of the page position rather than the side bar which ups the price.  Based on 85k searches on the 28th for “Bing” and “Bing Search” at 1% click thru, Microsoft could easily have spent $1,700 with Google that day.  And I expect the 29th to be bigger, and June 3rd when it launches to be the biggest yet.

Will Microsoft get its money out of this?

Possibly.  TwitNit is seeing about $15 cpms far from what I’d like to see considering I’m buying traffic at $50 CPM, but Microsoft should be able to get twice what I do, which would be $30 CPM, on $2,000 CPM buys that seems like a bad deal, but when you look at the life of a user if you convert them.. That is easy to recoup.

Tech Crunch asked how much of the $80M would be spent with Google.  Very little.  Spending $100k a month would buy all the traffic there is on the related terms.  Even if they bought all the ads for Ask.com, Yahoo, and others it is unlikely they could spend a Million dollars a year with Google.

Everyone trying to make a quick buck wants to claim they know SEO, but the truth is if you are worth your salt at SEO you can make plenty at home in your PJ’s on Affiliate programs, Search Traffic, (and all the other things I have been doing for the last year).

So how do you know what to spend?  And where to spend it?

People forget that Advertising should not be a fixed cost, it should be factored in to the price of everything you sell.  So if each customer, sale, or subscription is worth $2 just plan to put 50 cents in to the ad pool.  Until you have 100% market share you want to spend as much on SEO, SEM, and lead generation as you can and still maintain the margins you are looking for.

A Good domain name is worth its weight in gold if you are just getting started, so don’t cheap out.  The $9 domains are good if you get lucky and no one bought what you are looking for, but don’t be afraid to pay that High School Kid who bought the domain you want the $10k he is asking.

I do believe what I tell people that you can rank well no matter what your domain, but it is hard to be taken seriously by your customers and clients if your operating your business out of some strange “web 2.0” URL no one can spell.  Roger’s Auto Repair just doesn’t work as RogrsOto.com  no matter how hard you want it to.  Xavier at Notebooks.com ranks well for almost every model of notebook computer he has ever reviewed.  Google puts a lot of weight on the words in your Domain, so if you are as targeted as Xavier is, you can’t beat having synonyms for topic in your domain name.  If you are more about brand, then you want to make sure your domain is easy to remember and will rank well for people searching your name.

BlackWaterOps.com was not cheap, but you should see the look on people’s face when I tell them my Url. 

I typically get a percentage of my clients AdWords budget, ( 20% in volume ) this may seem expensive but I can typically lower your CPC 40% and it is not uncommon for me to lower your CPC’s by 85%.  But what I can really drive is your conversion rate, which makes your ad budget go a lot farther.