Kitchen Remodeling ROI – Return On Investment
November 26, 2009
The cost for your kitchen remodeling project should be based on the value of your home. Investing too much could lead to a poor return on investment or a home valued outside the local market expectations. 15% of home value is a good rule of thumb for a kitchen remodeling budget. Following 15% of home value, it is not inconceivable to get 80% to 90% or more return on investment.
Usually you can expect a lower return on investment for more major remodeling projects due to the increased cost involved in a major remodeling project. If a kitchen has been neglected or is dilapidated you can expect a lower return on investment because much of the cost is consumed by bringing the kitchen to a livable standard rather than actual improvements.
A 100% return on investment is possible. But rather than working designing towards that figure, consider livability as a major component in your kitchen remodeling project budget. Especially if you plan on living at the home for some time to come. You might even love your new kitchen so much that you forget about any notion of selling and moving out.
New kitchen appliances can often be all that is needed in a kitchen remodel project, and can be relatively inexpensive since there is no labor involved other than delivery and installation. Plus, since new, good quality appliances are pleasing to prospective buyers, they can have a favorable return on investment.
Your homes size and your neighborhood should be considered too. If your improvement or remodeling project are extensive compared to the rest of the neighborhood or size of the home, then a high expectation of return on investment may be unrealistic.
You can also consult a local real estate agent to get a good idea of how extensive of a kitchen remodeling project to fund. A good real estate agent with knowledge of your neighborhood should be able to give a good indication of your remodeling project ideas effect on the value of your home. Even if your remodel project is for your own satisfaction, and you have no intent on selling and moving, a real estate agent will usually have a good idea of how much previous clients spent on their kitchen remodels, and the resulting increase in home value. Consider offering the agent a flat fee for their opinion if you have no intent on selling.
To summarize, a kitchen remodeling project can greatly increase the value of your home, and make it sell faster. Return on investment may, or may not be important to you depending on if the project is for your own satisfaction or for selling the home. But do be carefull that your project does not price your home out of the neighborhood.
Scott Hares
http://www.articlesbase.com/advertising-articles/kitchen-remodeling-roi-return-on-investment-60009.html
How to Achieve a Success in Runet? Invest in Search Engine Marketing!
November 26, 2009
Many people say that search engines are the future of the business. If your company is not present on search engine ranking pages, most probably this will have a major influence on the profits, awareness and competitiveness. We search for business partners, suppliers and services in different ways and languages all over the world. These who are interested in the Eastern Europe market should have necessary pieces of information how to effectively reach through Internet their potential customers e.g. in Russia.
This article presents a summary of how the Russian (the fastest growing population of internauts all over the world according to comScore World Metrix, Jan 2007) look for information. It also explains the advantages of a good exposure in search engine listings in the Russian search engines.
Searching activity in the Russian Internet (known also as Runet) is concentrated in 4 major search engines. These are:
- Yandex.ru – with 48,4% of market share;
- Google – 28,6%;
- Rambler.ru – 15,9%;
- Mail.ru – 4,7%;
The other players (Yahoo, MSN, Aport, Meta Bot, Alta Vista and others) take the rest of the market, according to SpyLOG Feb / Mar 2007 stats – http://gs.spylog.ru/r/?reportId=7&categoryId=1.
Business promotes itself in Russia
As a result of intense development of Runet, not only the local SMBs spend money on PPC campaigns but also both international companies of the same size as well as big multinational businesses like General Motors, Nissan, Peugeot, Honda and Sony. In case of these companies, yearly advertising budget is between $1.5 mln – $3.5 mln with up to 50% of it being spent on search engine advertising in Yandex.ru.
Search Engine Marketing on the top
Due to the great interest among advertisers, 2006 expenses on search engine promotion in the Russian Internet grew by 150% comparing to year 2005 and reached $110 million. Thus, search engine advertising has beaten banner advertising (with $100 million spendings) first time ever. This should be a very important signal for all the companies which promote themselves online, that SEM activity (a mix of technology and words which allows to reach now more than 90% of internet users) is an optimum way of the promotion (Lenta.ru – http://lenta.ru/news/2007/02/12/advert/).
Optimum costs of promotion
The minimum price for a single click (CPC) in Yandex.ru varies from (depending on the industry) $0.50 (“stickers”) to $5.00 (“refridgerators”). In Begun.ru one can pay $4.00 (“cash terminals”), $5.70 (“sight correction”), $5.90 (“companies registration”) and even $6.20 for “company closure”. The highest prices ($9.99) are paid for targeted campaigns which take into account very precise parameters, geolocation and time restrictions. You can compare this to $1550 – $5000 prices of one week banner campaign on popular Russian portals (according to http://www.context.1ps.ru).
Investing money in paid listings should be then cheaper and undoubtedly more efficient. When talking about banners, one pays for impressions, not users’ interest measured by clicks and actions taken on the advertiser’s website. The opposite payment model is assigned to sponsored links – payment is made only for users interested in products and services who click and visit the website.
Competition among advertisers
The highest prices in Yandex.Direct (http://www.direct.yandex.ru) are related to B2B activity, where just one transaction (no matter if it is selling a drilling rig or Boeing) per year make a single click with CPC of $48.00 affordable. Apart from above-mentioned B2B examples, the most competitive areas of interest are flats’ sale in the modern block of flats, airplane rentals, Forex stock exchange and building industry services.
Why Yandex?
Coming back to the most important search engine in Russia… Yandex – not very well organized in late ‘90s, now is the leader of search engines in Runet. The company put an emphasis on contextual advertising and doubled its revenues last year, becoming even stronger player at the market. The management estimates that this year’ income from search-related advertising should be close to $100 million. At present, 25 million people use Yandex with 5 million of unique users every day. On the contrary, tens of thousands of companies conduct their promotional activity through this search engine. The constantly growing audience of Yandex makes more advertisers interested in both search engine optimization (being well exposed in organic listings) and PPC marketing (paid listings). They seem to make the right decision as the results come very quickly because of modern character of Yandex. Since 2005 it has had two advertising systems, comparable to Google AdWords and AdSense (according to Yandex official blog – http://company.yandex.ru/blog/).
Cheap listing better than expensive banner impression
Lew Glejzer, the director of AdWatsh advertising agency predicts that expenses on search engine marketing in 2007 will go over $200 million in total. All innovative companies that think about future take seriously into account paid listings – adds Dmitrij Wasiljew, Link.ru director. The banners are becoming more expensive and will probably be exclusively used by large companies while search engine marketing is affordable for SMBs as well.
“Key” keywords
In order to be completely successful one need to use precisely defined keywords – the ones which are both relevant to company business profile and are frequently used by people in queries made in search engines. The most popular queries between Dec 2006 and Feb 2007 were: papers (proceedings), desktop wallpapers, horoscope, postcards, weather, games, news, mp3, proverbs, dates, mobile phones, recipes, friendships, music, anecdotes, jobs, cars, predictions, sex, erotics, map of Moscow, chat, samsung d500, kamasutra, flats, photos, nokia, football, russian radio, lyrics, motorization, porno, pregnancy, Aeroflot (according to SpyLOG stats – http://gs.spylog.ru/r/?reportId=8&categoryId=1). Maybe this will be an inspiration for somebody when planning a ppc campaign on, let’s say, Yandex…
Who can see the advertisement?
Most of them are the Russian people – 44.4%, but the advertisement can be also presented to the Americans (14.5%), Ukrainians (4.7%) and Germans (3.5%) not to mention others. That is why search engine marketing in Russia gives the opportunities to reach people from different parts of the world. When talking about the Russian cities, there is one strong leader – the capital (Moscow) with 44% and other cities like Sankt-Petersburg (10.1%) or Jekaterynburg (2.6%), according to SpyLOG stats (http://gs.spylog.ru/rsu/?categoryId=1).
What are the benefits of search engine marketing?
Search engines are responsible for a significant traffic share on Russian websites. This is the result of good exposure in organic listings as well as paid listings activity conducted by Russian companies. The examples below present some traffic statistics on different sectors in the Runet in Nov 2006 (SpyLog stats http://gs.spylog.ru/tcu/5/preView/274.html).
Finance
- Users monthly: 1 200 000
- Traffic share:
- 57% – direct visits
- 32% – search engines
- 11% – other sources
- credits, banks, mortgage, consumer credits, car credits, credit calculator, credit card
Computers
- Users monthly: 1 801 000
- Traffic share:
- 64% – direct visits
- 29% – search engines
- 7% – other sources
- notebooks, computers, driver, computer sale, notebook sale, notebook review, Asus, laptop installment, Dell inspiron 1300, Dell inspiron 6400
Mobile phones
- Users monthly: 1 115 500
- Traffic share:
- 47% – search engines
- 46% – direct visits
- 7% – other sources
- mobile phones, cellphones, nokia, mobile phones catalogue, sony ericsson, nokia 8800, mobile phones online sellers, mobile phone sale, nokia n72
Cars
- Users monthly: 1 923 000
- Traffic share:
- 44% – search engines
- 38% – direct visits
- 18%- other sources
- Mazda, Ford, Nissan, Citroen, Honda, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Renault, Ford Focus
Travel
- Users monthly: 2 484 900
- Traffic share:
- 58% – direct visits
- 33% – search engines
- 9% – other sources
- Turkey, warm countries trips, hotels in Turkey, Egypt, holidays in Turkey, holidays in Egypt, hotels in Egypt, New Year trips, Greece, Tunis, Creta.
Runet + SEM = SUCCESS
By spending money on search engine marketing in Runet one can create new opportunities, particularly in the commerce area. The advertising activity in Russian search engines gives the possibility for all companies focused on the international trade (both exporters and importers) to be present on this big market in order to make new business contacts, agreements and increase the revenues. As usually, the first ones will be the winners – that is why we strongly recommend taking into consideration SEM activity in Russia as it may bring significant profits for almost every company.
Maciej Galecki
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/how-to-achieve-a-success-in-runet-invest-in-search-engine-marketing-131602.html
Ppc Advertising
November 26, 2009
ppc stands for Pay Per Click – a popular advertising technique on the Internet. Found on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines, PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These are usually placed close to search results, where an advertiser pays a particular amount to visitors who click on these links or banners and land on the advertiser’s web page.
In essence, PPC advertising is all about bidding for the top or leading position on search engine results and listings. Advertisers do this by buying or bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to their products or services – the higher the bid, the higher the spot on the search results, the more the people will find the ad (and click on it) to go to their websites (this is why some people call it “keyword auctioning”). Advertisers would then pay the bidding price every time a visitor clicks through the website.
PPC advertising is also known under the following names/variations:
·Pay per placement
·Pay per performance
·Pay per ranking
·Pay per position
·Cost per click (CPC)
PPC advertising is usually done with the following standard procedures:
1. Setting up an account and/or deposit funds.
2. Creating a keyword list.
3. Choosing (and setting up) an account with a PPC search engine.
4. Bidding on the ad placement, including the search result words or phrases.
5. Writing out an ad copy.
6. Setting up the ‘landing pages’ for your ads.
7. Placing the advertisement in the search engine.
There are many benefits to Pay Per Click advertising, making it an effective way of promoting a business ‘online’. Some of them are listed below:
·Get launched immediately. PPC advertisements are implemented very quickly – they can go ‘online’ within an hour after winning the bid and paying for it.
·Obtain specific, pre-qualified, and quality traffic. PPC provides you with a quality or a well-targeted traffic. Visitors are narrowed down into ‘qualified’ people who are actually looking for specific products and/or services that you offer – those who are more likely to become a ‘lead’ (a convert) and complete a transaction (either by buying your product or subscribing to the service that you are offering.
·Widen your reach. PPC advertising provides additional traffic to your site, aside from the natural or “organic” search engines.
·Track your investment. PPC advertising makes use of a tracking system that will determine exactly who comes to the website and what they do once they arrive – the length of their stay on the site and the number of pages (including the actual pages) that they view. These are valuable tools in determining statistics such as return on investment (ROI), acquisition cost-per-visitor, and conversion rates (the percentage of visitors who are converted into customers or leads).
Below are some important things to consider when planning on a pay per click campaign:
1. Know your product. Take an inventory of the product and/or services that you have to offer (before anything else).
2. Stay within the budget. Determine your daily or monthly budget; and stay with it. This means keeping your budget in mind, avoiding bidding wars if possible.
3. Bid just right. Know how to bid right – a bid that is too high can exhaust all of your money, while a bid that is too low can make you lose that spot.
4. Watch the bottom line. Measure your profit margin against your spending or expenses. Know when to stop and terminate your PPC program – if you spend more on advertising but have little or no sales at all.
5. Find the right keywords. Decide which keyword phrases to opt and bid for. Do some keyword research, either by actually looking at existing search terms or with the use of online keyword suggestion tools, to know which terms are mostly used when searching for items that are related to your business. Focus on specific keywords, not on general ones.
6. Write effective ads. A good PPC ad is that which can persuade and move a searcher. There are several approaches to this:
·Discount offers
·Testimonials
·Celebrity/famous endorsers
·Money-back guarantees
·Free trials or sample offers
·Freebies
·Reverse psychology
·Major benefits (“Lose weight”)
·Direct instructions (“Click here”)
7. Maintain a professional-looking site. Your web content should be regularly updated and checked for spelling and grammatical errors. There should be no broken links or images. The website should be simple – designed in such a way that it will be easy for visitors to navigate and load. Include contact details to create a good impression among potential customers.
Done properly, PPC advertising can be an effective marketing tool that will maximize the return on your investment.
John Ugoshowa
http://www.articlesbase.com/ecommerce-articles/ppc-advertising-74160.html
Understanding The Affiliate Marketing Language
November 26, 2009
You are about to encounter a language that you have never heard before: the language of Internet Marketing, as it relates to Affiliate Marketing. It is important that you understand what it all means, to ensure that you are signing up for programs that are worth your time.
As you will learn, it is important to read the terms and conditions for affiliates. Sometimes, you will be presented with those terms before you sign up, and sometimes you will be presented with them after you sign up. But it is important that you read them, and it is important that you understand what is being said.
It is also important that you understand what the following terms or abbreviations mean:
CPC: Cost per click. This relates to how much it costs for each click an ad or link receives when advertising on a CPC basis. In other words, instead of paying a flat rate for the advertisement, you would pay a certain amount of money for each click the ad receives.
ppc: Pay Per Click. This relates to CPC, where you pay for each click that your ad or link receives. Google AdWords is an example of pay per click advertising.
CPA: Cost per action, or cost per acquisition. Basically, this means that you will pay each time an action is taken. The action may be a click, a sign up, or a sale. In fact, many affiliate programs also pay on a CPA basis, meaning that each time someone clicks on your link, or signs up to receive information through your link, you earn a little money. Google AdSense is an example of this.
CTR: Click Through Rate. This number is usually represented as a percentage, and it refers to the number of times your ad was clicked on, in relation to how often the ad was viewed.
CPM: Cost per thousand. The amount of money you pay for every one thousand ad impressions.
URL: Uniform Relay Link, otherwise known as a link, or a website address.
Affiliate Link: A URL or link that is assigned to you by the affiliate program. This is the link that you will promote, as it is used to track your clicks and sales.
Contextual Link or Text Link: A contextual link is a link that looks like content, because it is all text. It may be several words long.
Charge Back: This will be an important term to you. This refers to when customers cancel their orders, or have their credit card companies reverse the charges. It basically means that you lose a sale. Some affiliate programs will hold money back each pay period to cover potential charge backs/refunds, and release that money to you after a specified period.
SPAM: Unsolicited Commercial Email. This term also refers to commercial posts on forums and blogs. Most affiliate programs will have strict anti-spam regulations that you must follow.
Revenue Sharing Program: This is the same thing as an affiliate program.
Co-Branding: Some affiliate programs offer co-branding options, where your company name or logo is placed on a reseller’s website, or on the product itself.
Referral Link: The same as an affiliate link.
Tracking: The method or software used to record sales, clicks, leads, and other information that has to do with your affiliate link.
HTML or HTML Code: HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. This is the programming language used to build webpages. HTML code generally refers to a small portion of HTML code, such as that needed to place affiliate links or banners on your webpages.
Partner Program: This is the same thing as an affiliate program.
If you come across other terms or abbreviations that you aren’t sure of the meaning of, make sure that you stop and go find out what it means before agreeing to anything or before doing anything. Not knowing can cause problems later on.
Kurt Naulaerts
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-opportunities-articles/understanding-the-affiliate-marketing-language-52956.html
Inspire it India is One of the Dynamic and Fastest Growing SEO Company in India
November 26, 2009
Inspire IT India is one of the dynamic and fastest growing SEO company in India with the SEO experience of 3+ years, in this period we have completed 16 projects successfully with very good results with in the short period of time. For that we will follow the full fledged sequential process of internet marketing to optimize your website with in short term periods at lowest prices, when compared to other SEO organizations in India . The maximum time period for any website is 6 months, after that services are provided at free of cost, if the proper results are not shown for that website.
In the process of Search Engine Optimization our team will take care on each and every step as to bring out the qualitative output for the website. In the practice of that our team will provide Search Engine Maketing Services like Link Popularity Services, Pay Per Click Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing at high priority level, where they play a predominant role in improving our websites in various search engines.
Other than these services we provide Website Designing and Programming in PHP Environment, we promise you that you will get good optimization services from our organization at lowest cost and with in short term periods. These promises are made from words which is said by many of our clients, for whom we have worked previously.
inspire
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/inspire-it-india-is-one-of-the-dynamic-and-fastest-growing-seo-company-in-india-156317.html