paid search

“There are no shortcuts” When It Comes to Acquiring Traffic & Other Lessons from a Startup

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This the first installment of our new Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses. I’ve always believed that it’s a big mistake to not at least listen to those who have worn the same shoes that we are putting on every day. I hope these interviews prove to be as informative to you as they have been for me.

Our first guest is Ryan Thompson, co-Founder of FileLater. I recently had a chance to sit down with Ryan. He had some great insights on starting a business, traffic, and the importance of listening to customers.

B5: Briefly, tell me a little about what FileLater is all about.
RT: FileLater was developed to help the 15 million people who file tax extensions every year.  There are a lot of misconceptions around tax extensions, and until FileLater, there wasn’t an easy way to get more time to do your taxes. So, we created one leveraging our expertises on the internet and taxes.

B5: How long has FileLater been in business?
RT: FileLater is 3 years old, although we spent about half of that time researching, building the product, and working with the IRS to become and authorized IRS e-file provider.

Read more“There are no shortcuts” When It Comes to Acquiring Traffic & Other Lessons from a Startup

It’s Ten O’Clock, Do You Know Who Is Managing Your Paid Search Campaign?

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You’d be surprised at how many potential clients we meet with that have had an awful paid search experience for one major reason – they failed to manage their campaign and lost a ton of money and their faith in search engine marketing. That common occurrence is the focus for our most recent Free SEO Resource section.

I realize it might be hard to believe that companies will essentially make donations to Google by starting an Adwords campaign and then leave it running. But it happens all the time. Business owners get busy running their business and simply de-prioritize daily management of their campaigns. Worst of all, they forget to at least pause their campaign until they have more time.

In a lot of ways, this latest article is related to an earlier riff about why I don’t believe it’s a good idea for most business owners to run a company and manage a paid search campaign. While it’s certainly not impossible to do-it-yourself, it’s just not a great situation.

What’s Better, Traffic or Leads?

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Check out our newest Free SEO Tip. This one is about the most common mistake we see when we meet with business owners who manage their own paid search campaigns. Inevitably, they are wasting dollars on keywords that are way too broad for their business. They get sucked in by the allure of increasing their traffic and forget that the whole point of paid search is to get business!

The secondary lesson here is that proper keyword research is critical to any successful paid search campaign.

As always, I look forward to any questions or feedback you have.