This is the second in a three-article series on business basics and digital advertising. In this article, we will apply principles learned from our sales experience before and after launching our agency more than 15 years ago. We will include examples to explain the points raised. Just because a discount can be done does not...Read More

This is the first article in a three-part series on business basics, and how the apply to digital advertising. When we began our agency in 2005, some of the best advice we received was this: the first goal of business is to stay in business. And, to stay in business: have a plan, and avoid...Read More

This post is about a geeky — but important and often overlooked — tactical aspect of PPC management. Rarely do advertisers have unlimited ad budgets, even if they get a very high return on their ad spend, or great cash flow. Rather, most businesses have a fixed, planned maximum budget. And even if their business...Read More

Recently we rebuilt and launched a PPC account for an Austin client that had over 3,000 negative keywords. In our 5+ years of search marketing, this was a record at TopSide. The research and collaboration with our client on negative keywords was very productive, and took about as many days as all the other components...Read More

Marketing on the web, in some ways, is still like the Wild West. It has frontiers and exciting opportunities for profit, labor saving tools, and reliable experts. We also see well-intended but inept operators and a growing number of scammers and business perils. There are enough moving parts to overwhelm anyone who is not actively...Read More

Many business owners are surprised to learn that a website can look good, contain many pages of original content, and still not be found by the search engines. Or even when it gets traffic, the same site may not be effective at converting visitors from natural or pay per click traffic to customers. Depending on...Read More

Since pay per click (also known as PPC) ads on the top and side of a search engine results page appear simultaneously with natural or organic results in the center of the page, there is a lot of misunderstanding about them. The processes behind the two are very different, but both complex. The fact list...Read More

I first got into search engine marketing and advertising as an employee for a corporate team building consulting company. There, we observed a predictable pattern on which teams were more successful in team building scenarios and back at their jobs. Teams that take time to make a plan before taking action consistently perform better than...Read More