URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/gettingtraffic/onlineadvertising/article172136.html

Search engine marketing is a lot like speed dating: You only get a few seconds to show off your best features before the other party moves on to a more attractive prospect. If your pay-per-click campaign is looking for an audience, it needs to be positioned within the higher echelons of the search results pages. Fortunately for you, it’s probably going to be a lot easier to succeed in search marketing than it is in the dating arena.

Learn to lavish a little care and affection on your 2007 online advertising activities with our run down of these must-make resolutions:

Resolution Number 1: Improve Campaign Maintenance
Pay-per-click campaigns need a lot of tender, loving care. You've got to use them or lose them. It does takes discipline and planning to keep a campaign relevant, but revising keywords and writing eye-catching new ads at regular intervals are good habits to get into. Simple tasks which get overlooked throughout the year, either through complacency or lack of time, can dilute the overall effectiveness of your campaign. If your ads point to broken links or products lines that are no longer stocked, your positions on the search networks will rapidly become downwardly mobile.

Resolution Number 2: Organization is Key
This is a really an extension of resolution No. 1. By keeping a campaign organized, it'll run more efficiently, so you’ll need to be on the ball and group relevant keywords into their own ad groups. Don’t have hordes of general terms in one group--be ruthless and split them into smaller offerings. By doing this, your ads will be more relevant to users, earning easy brownie points from the search engines. A higher quality score equals a lower cost per click.

Resolution Number 3: Get Creative With Your Copyrighting
If you Google your competitors, you’re sure to come across a slew of almost identical ads. Stepping away from the crowd takes imagination, but it can bear rich rewards. Don’t stick with tried-and-true formulas to woo your client base. Instead, be imaginative with language, and your ads will immediately become more eye-catching. It’ll also show your company as a market leader that's able to differentiate itself from the competition.

Try thinking of your favorite newspaper headlines. Were they witty? Or hard hitting? Funny or short and sweet? Use the ad rotation features to test more creative offerings while still showing established ads that have worked for you in the past.

Resolution Number 4: Get Mobile
Did you know that as of April 2006 there were an estimated 208 million cell phone users in the United States? Connecting users to your business with a Google AdWords mobile ad takes a matter of minutes. You don’t even need to have a mobile website to run a mobile pay-per-click ad; instead, you can connect the browser directly to your business's phone number.

Resolution Number 5: Look Into Video
Pay-per-click advertising has developed enormously in the past twelve months, and mobile advertising is just one of the new faces of the pay-per-click phenomenon. Google has trail-blazed a path to technical superiority with the advent of pay-per-view video advertising. Of course, you need to create a video ad before you can introduce it to your search marketing campaign, but this can be as simple or as complicated as you like. Video ad production is going to be one of the industry buzzwords in 2007, so get in early and start planning your directorial debut now.

Resolution Number 6: Break New Ground
They say a change of scenery can do you the world of good, so break out of your comfort zone and try pay-per-click on a new search engine. MSN launched its adCenter platform in September and is already winning over big-name clients.

Yahoo! has long been a challenger to Google and offers a host of affiliate sites, which can increase your pay-per-click ad visibility. You can import keywords from existing campaigns on other search engines to compare and contrast performance and cost per click.

Resolution Number 7: Become a Convert
Implement conversion tracking to measure the profitability and usefulness of your ad campaigns. With Google AdWords, you can class a conversion as a click, filling in an online form or a purchase. Whatever you class as a conversion on your pay-per-click investment, tracking software can help you create more targeted and more well-thought-out campaigns. It shows you exactly what works and what doesn’t, removing the need for guesswork.

Resolution Number 8: Target Your Ads
You can target your pay-per-click campaigns in a number of ways. Make it your new year's resolution to learn at least two concrete methods of reaching your target search users. Basic targeting is done at the ad group level and involves carefully selecting only the most relevant keywords and ads that accurately describe your products and services.

More sophisticated targeting involves using AdWords' advanced features such as language targeting, regional and country targeting, or time zone settings. If you can only deliver within a certain radius of your business address, implement the relevant city targeting so clicks aren't wasted on users outside your business reach. If you're a B2B supplier, learn how to set time scheduling to turn your ad on during business hours and off at all other times. This means it'll only be visible during the hours your potential clients are likely to be searching the net.

For MSN advertisers, advanced demographic targeting features could inject your pay-per-click campaign with a new lease on life. Elect to show your ads to particular age groups or target by gender.

Resolution Number 9: Think Seasonally
Strict editorial policies on the search portals carefully protect the integrity of the virtual goldmine of online shoppers from false claims by pay-per-click advertisers. While your ad should accurately reflect the nature of your business, it’s also worth considering creating ads with special offers and gestures of seasonal goodwill. Holiday sales, early summer discounts and buy-one-get-one-free offers are a nice touch if they're mixed in with everyday great deals and quality products.

Resolution Number 10: Understand That Bigger Isn’t Always Better
There are a few things people always lie about, age being one and height being another. Lucky for you, bigger isn’t always better in pay-per-click terms. Don’t be put off from taking your marketing online just because you don’t have vast reserves of cash to throw at a pay-per-click campaign. Results from a small budget are possible--they just might require more creative thinking and pre-planning, but a respectable search position and a flurry of hot leads are not unrealistic goals if your campaign is well thought-out and you employ a disciplined approach to keywords.

Daniel Jupp is the founder and managing director of pay-per-click consulting firm Top Position, a Google-certified company that manages Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter accounts for more than 200 clients across the United States and Europe.