In this short article, I’m going to give you some information you can use to decide if you want to hire someone to manage your pay-per-click campaigns in Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter, or if you want to do it yourself.

The bottom line is that it depends on YOU - I am just making you aware of what to watch out for in PPC managment. Hopefully I can save you some time and money too!

If you’re considering managing your own PPC campaigns, here are a several things you should to take into consideration:

Time –> How much free business time do you have? How much are you willing to give up to manage this? Managing a PPC campaign can be VERY time-consuming!

Experience –> How much do you already know about the PPC industry? Most of the bigger companies have someone with at least four years of PPC experience. If you do not have much experience, there are a few ways to get it.

One way is to spend lots of time reading the PPC marketing forums (this way is free). Secondly, just go ahead and open your own PPC accounts and get started, and get your hands dirty (this is what I did, and it was very expensive). Nevertheless, both are good ways to gain experience, and both can put you on track to make a profit.

Competitiveness –> How many other bidders are there? How much are the bids going for spots on the first page of results for a specific keyword?

Keywords –> How many keywords will you be managing? Keep in mind that if you are in a competitive industry, you will probably be going up against other advertisers who are using expensive bid management software.

Ad Copy –> Do you know if you can write good PPC descriptions? I’m not talking about normal ad descriptions, but relevant PPC descriptions. The difference can be the deciding factor between your site making a profit or a loss - a lesson I learned first-hand.

Budget –> How much do you have to spend? If you are new to PPC and plan on spending more then $500 per month, I recommend you start off hiring someone to manage your PPC ads or to act as a consultant. It will be well worth the money if you shop around for the right person or company to help.

Learning new techniques and strategies - The PPC market is constantly changing and evolving. You have to stay up-to-date with everything, because you can be certain your competition is. Staying up-to-date involves reading newsletters and forums regularly, consistently, and carefully.

If you are going to hire someone to manage your PPC campaign, here are a few things you should take into consideration:

1) Experience & Knowledge:

What type of experience do they have? Do their current clients recommend them unconditionally? Are their current clients getting good results?

2) Cost:

Shop around - you can always find a good deal on the internet. Just watch out for the ones that are TOO good. Remember the saying that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Talk to at least three different companies and compare them carefully before making your choice.

3) Bid monitoring and ROI:

How many times per week do they check your bid positioning?

4) Service:

You are going to be communicating (via email or phone) a lot with the person running your PPC ads. You should like talking with them and find them easy to talk to.

5) Response time:

How quickly will your calls or emails be returned?

6) Support:

Do they offer phone support or only email?

7) ROI tracking:

Is it offered? It is not necessary to have ROI tracking, but in today’s market, it drastically increases your chances of having a profitable PPC ad.

All in all, for most people, hiring a professional and knowledgeable person to manage your ppc accounts is the way to go! Unless you have the time, patience and money to burn on getting past the learning curve can be pretty painful. Hire someone to help you get going today, and you won’t ever regret it!

Posted: May 6th, 2008 under Marketing.
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I have created quite a large number of websites, and if, like me, you have spent hours building yours, then it can be a thankless task when it comes to waiting for customers to hit your virtual door. Like any overnight success, it can take weeks or even months for your website to start to gain popularity unless you have the benefit of advertising in other areas, such as banner adverts, posters, flyers and so on. For the average site builder, the date of publication can come and go as though all your hard work has made no difference to the value of the internet.

After some time you will, almost certainly, start to welcome a few visitors to your site, and maybe a few of them will spend their hard earned money there as well. But you’ll probably find that you get terribly excited if you have a few visitors, and a little dejected when you start to work out how much the current rate of visitors will earn you, and dreams of the Mediterranean cruise next month might have to be put on hold. If this sounds familiar, ask yourself what you have actually done to ensure that your site does become a success? Other than a slick design, nice graphics and a catchy address, what practical measures have you employed to ensure success?

One thing that you may have done is to browse through the internet and find information on how to promote your site, or tips on ‘optimizing’ it. You are almost certainly aware of the fact that to be successful on the internet you really need the search engines on your side. Having your site listed by Google, MSN and Yahoo for example is going to make a big difference to your site. But, what will make a far bigger difference is the overall rank of your website.

The rank of your site refers to how far up the list of results your website is when someone searches the internet. If your website sells left handed calculators for example, then you will expect and hope that if someone enters the keywords ‘left handed calculator’ in a search engine that your website is near the top. If it is at the top, that is fantastic, but you really need to be in the top ten, on that first page, to be a success. Unbelievably, only 3% of people who search online ever look past the first page of results that a search engine brings up. That means that if they search for ‘left handed calculators’, which brings up almost 400,000 results in Google, you need your website to be high up the first page to stand any chance of someone finding it. Even being in 11th place out of those 400,000 will mean that you’re missing out on 97% of visitors.

Possibly you might have heard of tips or companies that can rocket your website skywards and make sure your site is listed right near the top. Perhaps you’ve tried a few of these tips, and wondered why your site didn’t suddenly become the hottest place on the net? Maybe you even forked out a small fortune on a company that promised you the world and delivered you maybe a few places higher, rocketing you all the way from 164,378th place to 153,735th? Yes, 10,000 places higher, but the only difference is that number. Remember, unless you’re on the first page of results, it makes almost no difference where you are, so even if they had rocketed you to 1000th place, it still isn’t go to make much difference to your business. The thing is, that there is no single way of achieving this, and any company that takes your money on the premise that there is, is one to avoid. There are a whole range of factors, many of which are easily achievable yourself in a few hours, or even minutes. The other thing to remember is that this progress in rank doesn’t happen overnight. For many reasons, search engines don’t respond to changes immediately, and it can takes many months to achieve a high rank.

Be very wary of those sites that suggest that the best way of getting your site noticed is to use keywords. Although this is certainly true, search engines now take the number of keywords as only a minor factor in judging a site’s rank. Search engines got wise to the fact that many website owners were simply cramming great blocks of keywords into the code of a page just to get attention. They get attention now all right - and the result it that they lose their rank position very quickly. There are many other ways now which the search engines use to judge how good a site is, one of which is its popularity. This is measured in several ways, but the most significant is how many other websites are linking to yours. The more links, the more popular, and this in turn implies more relevant and useful.

Because as web designers we can sometimes become a little too close to our designs, and sometimes don’t just need to step back away from our glitzy masterpiece, we need someone else to take a good hard look and give us some feedback. Invariably these people like to be paid, but I have come across a nifty little site that offers a free assessment of your site. Although it’s free, it’s carried out by hand, and their advice is pretty thorough. They don’t just focus on keywords, but look at a whole range of ways in which your site could be made friendlier towards the search engines, and get ranked higher. If you haven’t tried them already, I’d recommend getting a review of your site for free. Even if your site has been around for a long time, or if it’s brand new, they’ll tell you all the things you could do to help improve your rank position.

Once you understand what can be changed about your site to help improve its position, it’s obviously up to you what you do. Picking and choosing at features that you can easily apply will certainly help. Over time, you can start to implement more of these suggestions, and little by little you should see a difference. I’ve done this myself - I used to be a keyword freak and just include as many as I could think of, but it started to make no difference. I’m trying things now such as amount of text per page, position of text on the page, number of links I include and so on, and I can see the increase in rank each day. My advice to any website developer is to keep a tight grip on your wallet and don’t pay companies to fob you off about magic solutions. Try a valuable free assessment today, it will pay dividends in the end.

Posted: May 6th, 2008 under Web Design.
Comments: none

In this article I am going to give you a detailed plan on how to promote Clickbank products and make massive profits almost instantly, from selling other peoples products. I’m going to start by talking to you about Clickbank and affiliate programs, then continue on to show you some amazing techniques that you can use.

I’m confident if you follow the steps I lay out for you, that you too will be a ‘Clickbank Super Affiliate’ very, very soon!

Let’s get started with the basics. So who is Clickbank?

Clickbank is a middle station between affiliates and product sellers, they are an affiliate network. They generally deal with information products and membership sites. No physical products are sold through Clickbank.

As stated on the Clickbank site they have over 100,000 affiliates which is a massive amount. This makes them the largest seller of information products in the world! You can check all of the products that Clickbank sells in the Clickbank marketplace.

Clickbank super affiliates like you and me. Well, I mean… you will be, right? We go to Clickbank because it is like going to Bass Pro shop if you’re a fisherman. Products are everywhere and some pay out 75% of the sale of the book. Can you say ‘goldmine’?

What is a clickbank super affiliate? Who falls in that category? One definition is when you are the top ten affiliates of a product on clickbank. Now don’t get me wrong. This comes with some skills that you need to more and we always do more than the average Joe.

(Hint: Becoming a clickbank super affiliate means doing more than the average internet marketer. But once you have a formula. Voila!

Instead we hit it in a lot of different angles.

We establish a friendship with the clients… And the sale comes second. Building trust is one of the most important things you can do to become a clickbank super affiliate.

A super affiliate will drive traffic to his site knowing that he can get the sale. Why? He is sending targeted traffic and targeted traffic is the foundation. Beat the competition always comes with a price. But it is so sweet when it happens.

How To Find Hot Products

Ride the wave. Find out what is hot on Clickbank and what is already selling well. Don’t try to find the one that will be the champ… At least not in the beginning. Look at the sales page. Would you buy?

People don’t buy junk!

**There’s ways to work around their sales page that we’ll get into later.

First of all you need to select the niche that you are going to promote. Try and choose something you are interested in or know a lot about as this will make things much easier once you start promoting the product.

If you didn’t check out Clickbank Marketplace, now is the time. That way I can walk you through it.

You should write your niche as the keyword and sort by ‘High Gravity’. This will show related products, the ones that convert highest first, the lowest last. You need to find a good product that converts high if you want to make a profit from the traffic you send to the affiliate’s site.

All the details about the product are on the Clickbank website. There is a lot of information here and you really need to know what it all means. This comes next

$Earned/Sale - This is what you get paid. The bigger the number… the more you earn. Sweet.

Future $ - This is how much will be made in the future; this is usually for membership sites or re-bills.

Total $ - This is the average earnings from the initial sales as well as re-bills.

%Earned/Sale - Percentage of the sale price you will earn. This is always between 1% and 75%.

%Referred - This is the percentage of sales that are made by affiliates.

Gravity - This basically shows how popular the product has been recently. Usually the higher this number is the better.

Ok, so you know which products you want to go after. Now you need to make some money with them. First of all, checkout the sales copy of the website. Would you buy it? Why? Write the reasons down.

Do they have an affiliate page? These are great. The good ones will include articles, banners, and even websites that you can use. The more… the less you have to do.

One of the biggest mistakes I see newbies do is just to pick a product because it seems to sell well. Wrong. Go to Google and search the name of the product. How many ads do you see on the right.

It’s incredibly hard to find a good product to promote. For example, many of the products in the make money niche are already well promoted therefore it will be hard to promote these.

It’s so much easier to go after a smaller niche, like horse training or parott training.

Take a day or two to do your research. Research in the beginning makes the learning curve so much shorter. Again… Do not spend a single dime on advertising until you do the research.

Posted: May 6th, 2008 under Affiliate Programs.
Comments: none