Howdy readers!! This time we got the opportunity to interview a renowned personality of PPC world; yes we are talking about Larry Kim.
Larry Kim is a founder and Chief Technological officer of one of the best PPC software, WordStream. Apart from WordStream, he is a frequent blogger for Search Engine Land, Moz, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch and dozens of other internet marketing publications.
Read Also: An Interview with SEO Superstar- Rand Fiskin
In this interview he talked about his company WordStream, PPC, content marketing, Social Media Marketing and more.
Read out this amazing interview to know more about him:
Varun: Who is Larry Kim, apart from a PPC and Internet marketing expert?
Larry: Believe it or not, the whole PPC / Internet marketing thing is a relatively recent thing for me over the last 5 years. Before that I was doing software development and product management in a completely different industry, creating software developer tools and servers. Outside of work, I’m into drones, raising my 2 year old kid, and entrepreneurship/start-up stuff.
Varun: You have founded WordStream, one of the best PPC software, Can you please tell us how WordStream works and is there any new feature you have added in it recently?
Larry: WordStream analyzes your PPC accounts and suggests what you should do to make things better. We also offer landing page hosting, call tracking, and we recently added support for Facebook Advertising. You can learn more about it here: http://www.wordstream.com/wordstream-for-social-ads
Varun: You are a frequent blogger for the top marketing blogs like Search Engine Land, Moz, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch etc, how you manage to write for all these and on which you devote more time?
Larry: Well it helps to have so much stuff to blog about. We have over ten thousand customers and billions of dollars of spend, which means there’s tons of interesting data and experiments to leverage. Beyond that, as with anything else in life, the more you practice something, the better you get at doing it.
Varun: Your content generates millions of page views per month, please share some tips regarding content creation and content marketing with our readers.
Larry: Sure, here are 3 ideas to consider if you’re trying to build a blogging empire:
• Usually when screening for content ideas, if the conclusion of the piece is ambiguous (e.g.: “it depends”), I’d rather just delete the piece rather than publish it. Instead, take a bold stance on issues, and try to back up your unusual positions with data and examples.
• Don’t randomly pick topics. Come up with one over-arching theme for your content, and have the various pieces talk about different aspects of your big story. This helps make your content be more memorable.
• Most blog content is ridiculously boring. Make it entertaining. I spend as much time adding unicorn jokes as I do researching a piece.
• Usually when screening for content ideas, if the conclusion of the piece is ambiguous (e.g.: “it depends”), I’d rather just delete the piece rather than publish it. Instead, take a bold stance on issues, and try to back up your unusual positions with data and examples.
• Don’t randomly pick topics. Come up with one over-arching theme for your content, and have the various pieces talk about different aspects of your big story. This helps make your content be more memorable.
• Most blog content is ridiculously boring. Make it entertaining. I spend as much time adding unicorn jokes as I do researching a piece.
Varun: You wrote 4 Award-Winning Books on Software Development, have you ever thought of writing a book on PPC or are you in process of writing any?
Larry: I don’t think it makes much sense for me to write a book. If you consider that my columns on my blog, Medium, Inc Magazine (etc.) get millions of views every month, why would I spend 4 months to write something that sells perhaps at most 100k copies. It would be like doing more work for less exposure. Instead I’d rather focus where there’s way more leverage, like blogging and social media.
Varun: Google eliminated right side ads, does it affected low cost PPC market and local business? Is there anything a website can do to keep the cost of clicks down?
Larry: It’s a bit of a trade-off. CPCs were up very slightly, and search inventory down a bit, but in exchange advertisers get much more prominent ad space which is much more likely to be clicked on. The best way to reduce CPCs is to use RLSA and raise your CTRs.
Varun: Most of people try PPC campaign but very few of them are successful.
a) What factors you think they are lacking behind?
b) According to you “What makes a great PPC campaign to attract more ROI?
a) What factors you think they are lacking behind?
b) According to you “What makes a great PPC campaign to attract more ROI?
Larry: a) Usually the problem is that the ads and targeting is terrible.
b) Honestly a lot of the success of PPC campaigns have to do with the greatness of the product or service being sold. The more interesting and differentiated the offer, the better it does in PPC.
b) Honestly a lot of the success of PPC campaigns have to do with the greatness of the product or service being sold. The more interesting and differentiated the offer, the better it does in PPC.
Varun: Recently there was a Possum update from Google. Have you seen a massive impact of this update on local search results in Google?
Larry: I know nothing about Local Search, unfortunately. Ha ha.
Varun: As social media marketing is trending these days, which social media channel you preferred for advertisement? Why?
Larry: We’re spending boatloads of money on Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads. Also, just say no to LinkedIn Ads.
Varun: Last but not the least, How we can combine PPC and SEO for more profit as well as improved ranking? What’s your vision for PPC and SEO in the next five years?
Larry:
• PPC requires having remarkable, organic content to promote/amplify through paid channels, which can be converted to leads/sales via remarketing.
• Organic rankings and featured snippets are increasingly based on engagement metrics like CTR and bounce rate. Since people tend to click on the brands they’ve heard of before, your PPC advertising (which increases brand affinity and awareness) indirectly improves your organic rankings.
• In 5 years, I hope people view PPC and SEO more as simply “marketing”. For example, in the 90’s, “Web Marketing” was a big deal, but now the term is no longer used because marketing is assumed to include the Web. My hope is that PPC and SEO just become integrated parts of normal marketing operations.
• PPC requires having remarkable, organic content to promote/amplify through paid channels, which can be converted to leads/sales via remarketing.
• Organic rankings and featured snippets are increasingly based on engagement metrics like CTR and bounce rate. Since people tend to click on the brands they’ve heard of before, your PPC advertising (which increases brand affinity and awareness) indirectly improves your organic rankings.
• In 5 years, I hope people view PPC and SEO more as simply “marketing”. For example, in the 90’s, “Web Marketing” was a big deal, but now the term is no longer used because marketing is assumed to include the Web. My hope is that PPC and SEO just become integrated parts of normal marketing operations.
You can also read: An Interview with Digital Marketing Expert- Neil Patel
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We really thank Larry Kim for sparing some time from his busy schedule for this interview session.
We hope you all liked this interview and the tips shared by Larry Kim will surely help you to grow your business successfully.
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