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Search Engine Marketing - No Panacea for Startups

Startup Professionals Musings

Probably every one of you who has a business and a website have been approached through email or personal contact, and asked to spend money on Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Search engine marketing is simply buying advertising for your business from Google or another search engine company. Cost per action (CPA).

Search 225
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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc. The spread between your LTV and blended CPA determines either your profitability or your rate of growth, and a high valuation depends on balancing these two factors.

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Startups Stick with Organic vs Paid Search Results

Startup Professionals Musings

Probably every one of you who has a business and a website have been approached through email or personal contact, and asked to spend money on paid search results (appear on the first page of search results, right hand column, despite low SEO rank). This is NOT the same as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Cost per action (CPA).

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Recruiting: 12 Questions For Uncomfortably Hands-On SEO Interviews

searchengineland.com

Search Week Newsletter. Search Month Newsletter. B2B Search Marketing. Enterprise SEM. In House Search Marketing. Local Search. Mobile Search. Multinational Search. Paid Search. Search & Analytics. Search & Analytics. Search & Conversion. SEM Columns.

SEO 54
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Advertising Wants to be Measurable – An Investment Thesis

Both Sides of the Table

By now we all know that the largest part of the online spend has been SEM (search engine marketing) where people buy CPC (cost per click) links to display alongside the “organic&# search results in the search engine. This form of advertising is know at CPA (cost per action).

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Lack Management Support or Buy-in? Embarrass Them!

Occam's Razor

Use your customers and competitors to help you move the ball forward (buy a new tool, hire another analyst, kill hideous home pages, spend right amounts on SEM and SEO, publish rich media on your site, implement feedburner , or whatever else you want). When I say embarrass your senior management that's what I mean. Bunch of traffic too.