Research from WebVisible shows that small business spending on search advertising has risen. This is primarily due to the effectiveness of this medium.

Average spending by small-business search advertisers was up 91% year over year and 93% quarter over quarter in Q3. The average number of keywords purchased was also up.

Worth noting is that Microsoft’s new search engine Bing also resulted in the highest click through of the top search engines. If you are not yet listed in Bing as a local business take a look at our earlier post on setting up a Bing Local Business Listing
Other research in the small business space also indicates that in addition to email marketing, search engine advertising will be increasing into 2010.

Key findings related to Search Engine ads and visitor actions include:

93.1% – Click through to a website
49.2% -Submit an email
49.0% – Print Landing Page

If you are new to search engine advertising then we would suggest you consider testing it out. Even if you have a small budget you can still run some ads and see what your results look like. In fact most companies take a small budget to try out new keywords to see what words perform the best, before they spend a lot of money on a longer term campaign.

Source: eMarketer

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• Defining Advertising Objectives for Small Business
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• Brainstorming using the Google Wonder Wheel
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Ok, the first time I heard about the Google Wonder Wheel, my initial reaction was the “Wonder what?”. But then I had one of those “Aha!” moments and realized how powerful it could be to use for brainstorming.  I will walk you through how to use the Google wonder wheel. So lets start with an example close to home, I recently needed ideas for what to add to this blog that were relevant to our readers. So my first step was to log in to our web analytics system and find out what keywords our visitors were using to find our website content.

The keyword phrase that stuck out the most was “i need help marketing” which is perfect for our website content because our web address (domain name) is NeedHelpMarketing.com. So naturally it is a perfect keyword phrase to focus on, but the real question I wanted to find out is what you, our readers, want help marketing about. Please do leave comments for marketing questions and future topic ideas.

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Now that we know what keywords people use to find our website on the Google search engine. We can then find out more about what related topics they are interested in. I encourage you to try this out for yourself as we go along.

• First Step: Go to Google and enter your search phrase

• Second Step: Click the “Show Options” option on the top left side of the results

• Third Step: Next click on the “Wonder Wheel” option on the left hand column

You should now see the search results represented in a diagram similar to this:

Google Wonder Wheel Example

In looking at the above example you can see more refined and more specific topics centered around our initial search phrase “i need help marketing” and by clicking any of these links you can see further results and drill into these topics for more information.

Key topics for future topics should concentrate on:

• Internet Marketing Help
• SEO Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Marketing Graphic Design
• Marketing Help Coaches

Google Wonder Wheel – Related Topic Results

By taking this a step further and clicking on one of the results you can see more specific related topics of interest (shown above). The power of the wonder wheel is that it is such a natural way to brainstorm and very much mimics using pen and paper or a white board. Think about when you are brainstorming in a team and are making groups of ideas and drawing lines linking similar topics. In a very visual fashion Google is helping you to brainstorm using their vast knowledge of years of analyzing what people search for and how topics are connected together. From a brainstorming and market research perspective that knowledge is priceless.

Very specific related topics and ideas for future website content:

• Marketing with Postcards
• Marketing with Meaning
• Marketing with Color
• Marketing with Facebook
• Marketing with Twitter
• Marketing with Care
• Marketing with Flair

For another technique that is just as powerful take a look at Idea Generation using Word Clouds

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