Monitoring

The key considerations for the monitoring phase are as follows:
• Understanding business and service-level requirements is vital if the infrastructure is to be optimized.
• A system architecture cannot be designed correctly unless there is a good understanding of the business aims
and the impact caused by downtime or poor performance.
• IT goals and technology need to be tightly integrated with the business objectives and systems put in place.
• The IT infrastructure must be capable of supporting sustained growth, and be flexible enough to react to
changes in organization needs.
• Optimizing the system environment using virtualization approaches delivers a responsive infrastructure
capable of meeting business demands.
• Reports from monitoring tools should be compared with business and IT objectives on a regular basis.
“Monitoring is a key on-going process that should be integrated into
day-to-day IT management activities.”
Before considering Data Center consolidation options, it is important to have a good understanding of the existing
IT infrastructure, which can be enabled by discovery mechanisms and management tools that continually monitor
the IT environment, populate a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and provide dashboard views of
the relationships with services. Watching the infrastructure for new servers, clients, network devices, along with
deletions, changes, and additions, is essential to determine which elements to monitor and what events are
important to monitor on the respective devices. These automated discovery mechanisms are an integral part of
the SDO solution, as is the creation of a services model to provide scope for the monitoring.

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The Big 5 That Make A White Paper

It has been quite some time since I started writing White papers. Based on extensive research, I am putting down a synopsis of my understanding of white papers. An attempt to make the esoteric, simple!

Interestingly, all the requisites for writing white papers can be put into 5 important subheads each having 5 features, inspiring me to give the title The Big 5 That

Make A White Paper.

Writing White Papers

White papers are written primarily to educate the reader while subtly selling our own product/technology. Considered to be one of the most powerful educative marketing tools, White Papers are used to

• Introduce a new product/technology in the market
• Generate business leads
• Reinforce the superiority of the product/technology in the minds of prospective customers.

If targeted appropriately, whitepapers can make an impression on every reader who puts a hand on them.

The ‘Big 5s’ Of White Papers

Every business writer has his own take on writing white papers. However, there are a few ‘must haves’ or what I call the Big 5s, which need to be kept in mind while writing a white paper. These are

The 5Cs-Pillars of strength

• Content: A white paper without relevant and well researched content is of no use and only brings negative publicity to the company.
• Credibility: The white paper should be persuasive as well as believable. Fictitious data fails to make an impression with audience and generates doubt about the brand.
• Consistency: The white paper needs to be consistent in flow .Jumping from one topic to another makes the reader disinterested.
• Conciseness: Contrary to the general perception, verbose whitepapers are a complete turn-off for the readers. Ideal length of a white paper is 6-12 sheets
• Constitution: The framework of the white paper should be in order and should expand on the title. An oft seen whitepaper shortcoming is that while the title addresses a specific audience, the content talks to generic audience and offers a generic solution, missing the target completely

These 5Cs give the desired strength and foundation to the white paper

However, a well written white paper does not end at 5Cs. Infact, they are omnipresent in a white paper. Next in the plan of action is another set of 5s, the 5Is

The 5 Is-Blueprint of White Paper

1. Identification of the topic
2. Identification of the audience-its demographics/knowledge scope
3. Identification of the objective of the white paper. Is it being written to
   • Educate the audience about the technology/ product or
   • Reinstate ourselves as the best solution provider
4. Information assimilation & education about the product
5. Integration of above knowledge and drawing of skeletal framework – it is your roadmap to success

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Earlier we showed you how to find and segment groups of keywords for your Google AdWords advertising campaign. Now in part 2 we are going to teach you how to write the actual content of your ads. Even if you don’t speak perfect English or have poor grammar, just follow my step-by-step blueprint below and you can’t lose.

Start With The Headline

The headline of your ad is critical to the click through rate (CTR) that it receives. For Google AdWords ads you will ALWAYS receive more clicks if the headline matches the text that the user is searching for. Google has a special feature called dynamic keyword insertion that you can use to make sure the searchers exact keywords show in the headline of your ad.

Ads with “Keyword” will only capitalize the first letter of the first word in the headline

If the users search text is too long then this text will be displayed instead. What should you use for your backup headline? Generally it should be the most popular search term that you found after reading part 1 of this series

Writing the Body of Your Ad

OK, now that’s we’ve got the headline out of the way let’s create the body copy of the ad. You get two lines of text, 35 characters per line. The first line of your ad should be a strong benefit the person can expect to receive after using your product/service. The second line should contain one or more features of your product/service.

Successful copywriters have one thing in common: they can differentiate between the benefits and features of a product. A benefit will appeal to the emotions of a person, such as “Lose 30 pounds in 4 weeks”, or “Reduce the time it takes to close a sale”. Most people buy for benefits.

The “Beat Your Own Ad” Theory

Using the information in this article you should create just two ads for your campaign. Make the ads identical but give them a different benefit or feature. After receiving about 30 clicks for each ad, use SplitTester.com to workout which ad performed better then delete the other ad.

Create a new ad and this time change the benefit AND the way you display the URL. Keep repeating this until you can get your CTR up to at least 5%. It may take a few weeks but it will be worth it.

Things You Must Test

As well as constantly tweaking the text in your ads, tiny changes can result in massive increases in your CTR. Try changing the things listed below if you want a 0.5%-1% increase in the click thru rate of your best ad (after completing the “beat your own ad” theory above):

• Finish each line with a full stop or remove the full stop from each line
• Separate features with a comma or a full stop
• Use an apostrophe where needed or remove an existing apostrophe
• Use a dash where needed or remove an existing dash
• Capitalize the first letter of every word in your ad
• Use a normal headline, such as “Windows Vista Reviews” instead of using dynamic keyword insertion
• Register a few different domain names and use them as the URL in your ad. Sometimes this can increase your CTR by 3%-5%.

Conclusion

You should now be able to confidently create your own Google AdWords ad’s.. If you’re running an existing AdWords campaign we guarantee that if you implement the steps in this article you’ll at least double your click thru rate.

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Google AdWords is the most popular advertising platform in the world, making Google billions of dollars in avertising revenue each year. When used correctly, Google AdWords is one of the most affordable ways to promote your products or services.

In this article We are going to explain exactly how you can setup your own profitable Google AdWords campaign from beginning to end. I will only assume you know the basics of Google AdWords. We will teach you:

1. How to perform effective keyword research, including looking at your competitors ad’s and web sites
   
2. How to write headlines and copy for your Google ad’s that will dramatically increase your click through rate and why you must test even the tiniest changes to your ad’s
   
3. Why and how you can create multiple ad campaigns for the one product to increase your conversion rate
   
4. How to reduce the chance you’ll get “Google slapped” - reducing how much you pay for your Google adWords ad’s in the process
   
5. How to write effective landing pages, ensuring you have a “message to market match” and you’re speaking the same “language” as the people who click your ad’s
   
6. How and why you should filter your sales process so you can perform follow up pre-sales (via email) to people who click on your adWords ad’s

Our goal with this article on AdWords is to teach you not only what we’ve learnt, but to teach you how we use it to drive significant sales of our software every day.

Sound good? Great. Let’s get started

Keyword Research and Segmenting Based On Context

Before you even start a Google AdWords campaign you need to workout which search keywords you want to show your ad’s for. Not all keywords are created the same, and one of the most important things you need before you get started is an effective, relevant list of keywords.

There are 3 ways to find your keywords and they are listed below. Use these techniques to find the 10 most popular keywords relating to your product/service only. We will only use 10 keywords because we’re going to pay close attention to the performance of our ad’s and we will be creating ad’s specifically for just a few targeted keywords. This probably goes against what you’re used to doing or seeing - creating 1-3 ad’s for hundreds or even thousands of keywords - you just accept the keywords Google suggests when creating your adWords campaign, right? Wrong. Don’t do that.

Here’s how to find just ten keywords to get started:

1. Grab a pen and paper and just start writing all the keywords and phrases that come to your mind when you think about your product/service. Just ask yourself: “if I were in my customer’s shoes, which words would I use to find my product/service on Google?”. List as many as you can.
   
2. Go to a few of your competitors web sites and look at the text on their pages including title tag text, meta tags and text between H1 and H2 tags. Write down the words that you think people might use to search for your competitor’s products from those you see on their site.
   
3. Use Overture’s search suggestion tool to find maybe 10-20 keywords/phrases related to your products/services. For example, if you’re selling funny T-shirts online, enter “funny tshirts” in the search suggestion field and click the blue button. You’ll see a list of keywords along with the number of times that keyword has been searched for on Overture in the last month. Because Google has a much larger reach than Overture, multiply each number by about 10 times - that’s how many times that exact same keyword is searched for on Google each month (approximately):Don’t forget long tail search phrases which are search phrases that contain 4 or more words, such as “buy funny tshirts in new york” or “funny simpsons cartoon tshirts”. Most big advertisers ignore long tail keywords and if they are overlooked your ad will automatically show up in first place when people search using these long tail search phrases.
   
4. You’ll now have a list of anywhere from 10 to a few hundred keywords or phrases. You now need to rank them in order from most popular to least popular. You should be able to tell which ones are the most popular by using Overture’s keyword tool above and by searching for them on Google. For each search make a note of how many adWords ad’s appear down the right side of Google.If there’s more than one page of adWords ad’s then competition is extremely tough for that keyword so you might want to instead turn it from a normal search phrase into a long tail search phrase, such as “funny beer drinking tshirts” instead of just “funny tshirts”.
   
5. Once you’ve narrowed down the list, choose the 10 keywords at the top of your list. We will use these on your first AdWords campaign. We’re going to split your 10 keywords into at least 2 groups, based on context. For example, look at the list of keywords below for “windows vista”:windows vista
   windows vista screenshots
   buy windows vista
   download windows vista
   purchase windows vista
   windows vista cd
   windows vista vs windows xp
   windows vista demo
   windows vista reviews
   should i upgrade to windows vista?By putting the keywords into context I can clearly create 2 separate groups: keywords searched for by people just researching Windows Vista and keywords searched for by people who are ready to buy Windows Vista, i.e. they have already researched Vista, want to install it and are ready to enter the buying phase.Here’s how I’d separate the keywords above:People researching Windows Vista
   
   windows vista
   windows vista screenshots
   windows vista vs windows xp
   windows vista reviews
   should i upgrade to windows vista?

   People ready to buy Windows Vista

   buy windows vista
   download windows vista
   purchase windows vista
   windows vista cd
   windows vista demo

   By working out the context in which people are searching for Windows Vista we can easily separate our keywords into 2 groups, which will allow us to create 2 different adWords campaigns: one to target people researching Windows Vista and one for those ready to buy.

   For people just researching, we’ll link them to relevant articles and reviews on our site. For those looking to buy we’d send them to a page on our site where they can order Windows Vista. Don’t worry too much about where to send them yet though

Conclusion

In this article on creating high performing Google AdWords ad’s we’ve shown you how to perform effective keyword search and segmentation based on the context in which people are searching for your products/services - in our example we used Windows Vista.

Complete the steps in this article for what you’re trying to sell and in the next article we’ll teach you how to write headlines and copy for your Google ad’s that will generate click through rates well above the average of 1%-2%.

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