Let’s face it. Paid search campaigns are not the easiest thing in the world to manage. Some companies hire an overpriced agency hoping for a magic PPC bullet that will cure their website’s terrible performance. Others follow the misguided advice of their well-intentioned marketing manager who wants to save costs and keep it in-house—only to realize after the fact that they’ve wasted thousands of dollars trying to manage something they don’t understand.

Have you ever thought about doing paid search advertising campaigns but you're not sure where to start? Or maybe you currently have someone running them for your company but you don't feel like you're getting as much out of them as you'd like? Hopefully these tips will help you get started or improve your current efforts!

Online advertising campaigns play a leading role in reaching your target market, but how do you know the right people are getting your message? How do you know that your hard-earned advertising budget is being spent in the right place and that you're actually getting a reasonable rate of return? 

By Grace M. Frank and @JackieClews

Why use social advertising?

One good reason is because you want to accelerate your efforts, whether those goals are to grow your followers (aka prospects) or engagement (aka brand awareness). 

Are you wondering why someone might take the time to write a blog or pay to have one professionally written and managed by someone else for their business's website?

Because it works.

Blogs have evolved a lot in the past 10 or so years when they were first people rambling their thoughts in their basement for the world to read. Now, they're a serious source of business.

By now, you have likely heard of Google+. You might have even taken a peek at it, but are less than convinced that you need to be using it.

Every dentist, doctor or specialist with an office vying for patients would do well to look again.

Google+ is part of Google, the search engine behemoth that today largely defines search engine ranking, which in turn largely decides the success of your practice’s online marketing efforts. Opening a platform with the Google name is like entering real estate from a family named Trump or politics from one named Bush. You draw attention because of who or what stands behind you.

There are many options for integrating ads into Wordpress, the solutions for which will vary depending upon your particular needs, but for most scenarios there are a few key points you will want to hit:

1. Dynamic ads that will change between each page load so you don't see the same ad in the same place all the time.
2. Easily editable ads. You want to be able to swap ads in and out at a moment's notice.
3. Support for plain images and links, as well as code snippets like the kind generated by Google AdSense.

Have you tweeted today?

As few as eight years ago, that question would have been as puzzling to teenagers as to their parents. But that was then, and this is now. The fact is, social media is one of the most powerful, effective—and cost-effective—tools available today for promoting your business, reaching out to new clients and keeping current clients interested, engaged and informed.

In short, social media does everything traditional advertising used to do, only better. It has the potential for precision-tailored marketing that's both personable and brand-specific, coupled with an immediacy and relevancy that appeals to today's tech-savvy clientele.

By @JackieClews

Are you a content marketer looking to show results for all of your content marketing campaigns and collaborate easily but not quite ready to take on a more sophisticated project management software?

Whether you’re marketing an e-commerce or a service-based business to consumers or businesses, an easy trick to try is adding the most important stats to your editorial calendar so you can plan in advance and turn your calendar into a detailed analytics report, as well.

Two great tools to use are Microsoft Excel (as long as you can share it and edit in real time on the cloud) or Google Spreadsheets, which can be viewed and edited by all collaborators in real time.