SEO vs. AdWords: The winner is not that obvious.

We’ve heard it on numerous occasions; we know it well: a space on the first page of a popular Google search is the Christmas gift of choice for 99.8% of corporate websites. The other 0.2% already happily appears among the top ten, and is not very willing to move down. If you are the owner of a website that wants to be in the top ten for its keywords, your options come down to search engine optimization and AdWords. While both of them have the potential to let your web page reach its goal search engine position, there are distinct differences between them that lead some people to be “SEOers” and others to be “AdWorders.”

To many, the benefits of SEO are rather obvious. However, investment in search engine optimization is yet to become wide-spread:

• Better brand credibility. While SEO makes it possible for the website owner to deliberately get on the first search page, customers still perceive “natural” page promotion as more trustworthy than sponsored links.
• Offline services. It is slightly more importat to avoid pay-per-click in the first place if your customer will at one point or another interact with your firm outside of the Internet, be it a straightforward phone conversation or a full-fledged visit to your office.
• Long-run cost effectiveness. Once SEO gets your page onto the top, maintenance costs are practically absent. In the long term, investing in SEO brings enormous return on investment and thus makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand, some say that AdWords contradicts the nature of search engine marketing. They thus ignore pay-per-click as an option in the first place, to which I say that AdWords are not all that straightforward:

• Instant results. With a paid advertisement, you can generate immediate traffic to your webpage. AdWords is a relatively simple technology, the biggest prerequisite of which is your willingness to pay per visitor’s click.
• Ease. Showing up among the first ten for competitive keywords is a lot easier with a pay-per-click campaign than through search engine optimization. Again, one should only be willing to make a monetary investment into the program.
• No search algorithm changes. With pay-per-click, the need to spend time keeping up with changes in Google’s search algorithm evaporates because Google administers AdWords itself.
• Online services. Promoted searched are generally more appropriate for online services that do not require the customer to interact with your company anywhere outside the net.
• Only monetary investment. Finally, unlike SEO, AdWords does not require you to hire a specialist or study any literature. Like I mentioned, its technology is rather simple and anyone familiar with the Internet should be able to conquer it. Furthermore, by choosing to learn SEO, you give up the time that would have otherwise gone into improving the quality of your firm’s offerings, or making follow-up calls. Opportunity costs are looming.

It’s up to you whether you choose the one, the other, or both. Your choice should largely depend on the nature of your business. However, internet marketing is also a matter of personal choice that reflects your professional personality.

Check back for a fresh update on Thursday. Comment, subscribe, and have a remarkable week.

The results are in!

We are very proud to announce that the first NVSBS Weekend Business Challenge is officially over! Give yourselves some applause, because everybody who participated (even if they didn’t send in anything) should be proud. We thank you for being with us to witness the Weekend Business Challenge’s first step.

This week’s topic was the Pareto principle, or the idea that an average endeavor gets eighty percent of its results from only one-fifth of the time and money investment that it receives. This 80-20 rule concept is fairly simple. However, we asked you to think of additional applications for it, and think you did.

Advertising channels: the long but necessary list

Today, we have a fun list of the different channels that you may want to consider when brainstorming for your marketing campaign. The honest truth about idea generation is that, despite your elaborate knowledge of all your choices, your proficiency may evaporate under pressure. Consequently, we encourage you to come back to this list whenever you experience marketers’ block.

1. Magazines
2. Educational webinars
3. Newspapers
4. Direct mail
5. Brochures and flyers
6. Company website
7. Directories
8. Philanthropic activities
9. Newsletters
10. Community service programs

What is the 80/20 rule? The Weekend Business Challenge.

The Pareto principle, also called the eighty-twenty rule, is a movement of management thought that has been in development since the 1900s. The gist of the principle is simply that, in general, 80% of your sales income comes from 20% of your clients. This idea can be further expanded into the notion of a general effort-result distribution. That means that no matter how much one works, only about one-fifth of one's efforts go into generating the most of the results he sees. The rest of the energy, unfortunately, goes into less productive endeavors.

The principle has been widely applied to sales management as well as marketing, but that doesn't mean that you cannot get creative and see use of it anywhere else. After all, as an entrepreneur, your task is to find new applications for existing resources. So go ahead; think about 80/20; we are rooting for you. All the while, today's post is going to be fairly short. Instead of giving away all the secrets at once, we are giving extra credit to all of you who participate. Do some research, ask your coworkers, or just think about the information that we have given you already.

Leave a comment with your thoughts about the implications of the Pareto principle and how it applies to your professional life. Do you think it works? Which part of your workday do you think is affected by this rule? Then we will recap the challenge and write down our own thoughts about the 80/20 rule on Thursday, October 21, 2010.The best responses that we get from the participants will be featured in the post on that Thursday.

Keep in mind: your input doesn't have to be a Nobel-prize winning work. All we want is help you start applying theory to the work that you (yes; you!) are striving to accomplish these days. Here are some resources to get yourself started:

• Basic Pareto's Principle on About.com lays down some theory
• An intriguing explanation uses animation as a graphic example for the rule.

We are looking forward to your participation! Even though this challenge will run for a week, we will still run on schedule, so check back for a new article this Sunday. We believe in you!

The evening after: gain your customers' respect when they least expect it

If you have just found yourself a client and have gone through a successful deal with him, accept our congratulations. You have gone through the hard part of it all and made the deal happen. Now, all that is left is the easiest part of it all - and yet somehow the majority of ventures do not reach their full potential simply because they did not have an effective follow-up system. Psychological studies have shown that out of the four customer's experience combinations that are possible after the customer has done business with you twice, the best possible outcome for the customer relationship is when, initially, the customer is not completely satisfied, and, afterwards, his concerns get addressed to turn his second experience into a remarkable one. This is only made possible through thorough and effective follow-up system. Easily done, but somehow so often forgotten.

Looking out for rivals

Unless you are the Egyptian Pyramids, your business has rivals. While they can make our lives more painful than it is often necessary, they are not always such a bad thing. Opponents are a great tool for motivation and improvement. If your customers have no substitute for your service, why would you bother to improve? Additionally, rivals can become your assets even more literally, that is, when you work with them on the same goals that you otherwise be working to achieve on the opposite sides of the same river. Now, in order to help you get to the place of your dreams, your rivals need a small assessment.

Mitigate your weaknesses

Experienced entrepreneurs know: Their role is to organize incoherent resources into usable, marketable substances. Seeing opportunities and being able to pursue them before they slip away is the ultimate skill that a businessperson should know. On the other hand, the knowledge of production, accounting, finance, advertising, logistics, or any other science with which you may or may not be familiar could sometimes be useful, but by no means absolutely necessary for a profitable venture. In fact, and I am reiterating an earlier thought in this article, as an entrepreneur, you are to find and capture the needed resources, not attempt to be the sole human resource in your company. Building a team of experts in a collection of fields is a major task that you have to go through. However, once you get the hang of recruitment, human resources will be your biggest asset that will complement your other expertise and tools.