Telephone and email support will be unavailable on Monday 28 January 2008 as our office will be closed for the Australia Day public holiday. We will resume our normal operating hours of 8.30am to 6pm AEDT, Monday to Friday from Tuesday 29 January 2008.

Many people don’t protect their website name. If you don’t, what can go wrong? People might search for your business but misspell the name, use a close competitor name by mistake, or type e.g. www.hotgoana.com into a Google search bar instead of in the address bar at the top of their browser. Therefore, it is VITAL that you get those clients who KNOW YOUR NAME, to your website quickly and efficiently. The last thing you want is to not to be easily contacted by someone who has heard about you.

Over the past year, we have been running our own ads on various mixes of Hot Goanna. Hotgoanna, hotgoana, hot goana, www.hotgoana etc. These ads have cost us between 28c to 34 c for top position on page one. In that time we have received over 200, yes, 200 click throughs to our site. Also, before we trademarked Hot Goanna, we made sure that we had top spot on our own name, just to keep the competition at bay. It works. If you are loosing 200 clients who are looking for you each year, why would you not choose to bid on your name? It should be a part of every AdWords campaign for businesses.

Like to double your business overnight? You can! No, this is not a get rich quick scheme, its pure math.

Do me a favour, go to your business web site and find out the number of unique visitors that you received in 2007. A couple of tricks with this: you don’t want to look at “hits”, these are just file and image requests from visitors viewing pages on your site. Find the list of UNIQUE IP or IP Addresses. If you can only view these statistics monthly, then you need to add them all up.

Then, find your own IP address, it is probably the one with the most visits each month, as every time you or your staff view you web site, it counts as a visitor. Take this number away from the totals and you get a real idea of how many people came to your site last year.

Now, lets use some figures from a website as a reference for you to double your business this year. Last year this web site, less visits by staff, generated some 12,000 real visitors. These visitors came from the following means:

• Radio Advertising
• Newspaper Advertising
• Magazine Advertising
• Trade Show stands
• Algorithmic listings

As you can see, there was no PPC traffic, as this site did not use Google. So, we can see that all of these forms of advertising spend generated 2,400 visitors per month. The web site, in this case, generated 50% of the sales that this business enjoyed last year.

Our scenario, is to find another 12,000 visitors to the web site, over and above what they are achieving now. If we do that, then, ergo sum, we should see a mirror doubling of their sales directly from the web site.

If you look at our AdWords™ Calculator on the Hot Goanna web site, you will see that if we budget $1 for each click, then we can see that it will cost $12,000 for this firm to double their visitors for a year. If the web site continues to perform at its historical levels, and if the quality of the visitors from Google AdWords is the same as their traditional marketing responses, then this business will double their sales this year.

Can you do it? Yes you can (apologies to Bob the Builder, I borrowed that line)

So, your new years resolution is simple. Count your visitors from last year, tally up your sales from website visitors, then use Google AdWords to double your visitors. All the indications are that search and online commerce will grow in Australia by more than 20% this year. Are you ready to cash in? If not, then you will see your market shrink as more of your competitors take up Google AdWords™ with Hot Goanna™, Australia’s Authorised Google AdWords Reseller.

by Mark Tull, Hot Goanna