PPC management, for the uninitiated, is a service offered by many SEO companies, and it’s the quickest way to achieve a first page placement. PPC management, somewhat tautologically, involves the management of PPC — or Pay Per Click marketing.

Pay Per Click Marketing is a service offered by major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. In PPC, you create an advertisement and select a set of keyword phrases to attach to each advertisement. Whenever someone searches for one of those keyword phrases, your ad pops up in the “sponsored links” section of the results. If a searcher clicks on the advertisement, you pay the search engine a small amount of money and that searcher gets directed to the landing page of your choice.

PPC marketing is amazingly effective for companies that don’t have organic SEO rankings yet; it’s the only way to get on the first page of search results on day one of your new website’s existence. But for all of that, there are serious pitfalls for the unwise. Choosing the wrong keywords can result in overpaying for clicks, or worse yet paying for clicks from people that are looking to learn (as opposed to buy). These ‘off-market’ keywords can suck money out of your wallet at an astonishing rate for virtually zero RoI.

PPC Management essentially means “you pay some PPC experts to manage your PPC campaigns for you.” The SEO company chooses keywords that convert at a good money-per-click rate, and they advertisements that catch the eye of surfers nicely. Furthermore and most importantly, they track everything about your PPC campaign, so if circumstances change and a keyword becomes more expensive or converts less often, they can drop it from the campaign in order to keep things tight and effective.

Without a talented PPC manager, pay-per-click marketing is like a pitcher plant — once you start to slide into the vortex, it doesn’t ever get any better. PPC management that works, however, does a wonderful job of getting your website visitors quickly and often. All you have to do is be able to turn those visitors into enough sales that it pays for the PPC campaign and the extra cost of the PPC management firm.

A lot of SEO clients are willing to do quite a bit to develop their company’s online presence, but a startling number of them shy away from one of the basic elements of online reputation mangement: the press release service. Press releases are a great way to communicate the essence of your company’s key offers to a wide audience, and all told they’re a relatively easy part of a standard organic SEO content spread.

Here is a quick seven-step breakdown to creating a solid press release.

1) Headline
Your headline needs to succinctly (and, if possibly, cleverly) encapsulate the main point of your press release. If your release is about your company’s new powerful anti-flu tea, something like “You Can’t Spell Therapy Without ‘Tea’” is a good starting point. Generally the best headlines are driven by sheer hard work: write one hundred possible headlines, and choose the best.

The Hook
You should think of every element of the press release as an opportunity for the reader to quit and go look up My Little Pony instead, which means that every part of the press release has to be focused on keeping the reader’s attention. The first paragraph, in particular, is ‘the hook’ that makes the reader want to finish the rest of the release. Short, factual sentences that summarize the point of the release in a captivating way are the name of the game here.

The Body
The next few paragraphs should restate the hook and add interesting and relevant details. Expect most people to skim over these, but also expect that if they’re genuinely boring, no one will reach the bottom of the article. This section should communicate the Who/What/When/Where/Why/How of the story.

Information You Want Them to Have
Just before you close up the release, you want to give them all of the information they need about the company in question. If you’re writing about a website, that might be just a simple URL; if it’s a brick and mortar business, you’ll want details like the address, hours of operation, primary business, and so forth. The contact information where you want them to inquire into your existence is arguably the most important part of the entire press release — make sure you get everyone’s names right

There are a lot of backlink building techniques in the arsenal of your typical SEO company. A lot of gurus will tell you that every technique has it’s place and time, and that none should be discarded out of hand. At one point, that may have been true, but is it still?

First, let’s make it clear what we’re talking about here. By forum posting, we’re talking about going onto a forum, joining conversations, becoming a valued member, and then laying out some subtle links to your landing pages. By blog posting, we’re not talking about your own blog — we’re talking about going onto other people’s blogs and commenting on them in a way that results in a backlink to your website.

Why Forum Posting Takes Too Much Time
Forum posting involves a lot of community involvement. It’s like social media, only without all of the pretty ‘+1′ buttons — and also without the extraordinary volume of people participating. When you start posting on a forum, you’re investing time and energy into something that might not pan out.

If you start laying your links out only to have the community reject you for marketing on their message board, you’re completely SOL. On the other hand, the forums that have a policy of allowing marketing tend to be frequented almost entirely by marketers — or people who are so inured to marketing techniques that you’ll never get a click from the boards in the first place.

Why Commenting on Blog Posts Takes Too Much Time
There are two similar problems with posting blog comments. First, you have to find a blog that has a decent PageRank, is relevant, and will allow you to comment in the first place — and then on top of that it has to have an administrator that won’t can your comment for being a backlink. Usually you can get around that last point by making your comment cogent and interesting, but that takes time in and of itself.

But the real problem with commenting on a blog is anchor text. Most blogs won’t let you put hyperlinks in the meat of your blog, which means that if you want the right anchor text for your link, you’re going to have to claim that your name is “ninja throwing stars” or whatever your site’s keyword is. That’s a giant red flag to the blog admin, and will almost certainly get your comment canned.

In short, these two forms of backlink building are dead and best left that way. Don’t waste your time.

Targeted email marketing — the art of building a list of subscribers that receive your emails on a regular basis and then sending those people offers that you profit from their acceptance of — has become a mainstay of internet marketing in the past decade. So much so that it’s no longer the exclusive domain of ‘hardcore’ internet marketers; even many web-oriented small business owners engage in targeted email marketing on a pretty regular basis.

The Basics
You set up a website, SEO it to the point that it gets some decent traffic, and you add a ‘squeeze’ to it: some encouragement for surfers to sign up to an opt-in mailing list. Usually it’s an informational packet, but it can also be a web course or even a discount for a valued service. Once someone has signed up, they receive emails that you’ve prearranged via an autoresponder service and any additional ‘blast’ emails that you create and send out on the spot.

Maximizing The Squeeze
There are two basic techniques for getting as many email addresses as possible. The first is to create a ‘squeeze page’: a page that literally has nothing except a squeeze offer on it. With nothing else to do on the page, the surfer either signs up or hits the X — and when there’s no risk involved in signing up, most do.

The other trick is to make signing onto a squeeze a prerequisite for receiving a product they just purchased. This is a strong tactic because it assures you that everyone on your list are spenders — after all, they just bought something from you. Proven spenders have a tendency to be repeat buyers, so this method gets you a list that will convert better than the first.

The Next Offer
The next step is to make the emailed offers convert well. There are two stages to this: first, you have to convince them to open the email. Then, you have to convince them to click on the link to the offer. At that point, it’s out of your hands.

Getting them to open the email is almost always a matter of coming up with a headline that will catch their attention. How To X your YZ and OMG I Can’t Believe This-type headlines are excellent starting places. Getting them to click the link is usually a matter of keeping the email ludicrously simple. People don’t want to be sold, they want to know exactly what’s going on. A simple “I saw this product, tried it, and loved it so much I wanted to share it with you” is a great marketing email.