Well the last week I threw up some new campaigns and wanted to play around with Camtasia Studio so I decided to make a little "proof" video of the work I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks.  I did this intentionally to show a couple of my family members the possibilities of internet marketing in a "cool" fashion, but my buddy talked me into throwing it up on the blog for everyone to see instead….oh well.  Here you go!

 By the way, I know this isn’t the best video solution…I’m working on something.  For now though, if you can’t see the video, you can click the little full size icon right next to the audio in the lower right hand part of the player.  This will maximize it to full screen so that you can make everything out.

Well that was a loaded question haha.  The last few days I have been talking with someone who had a campaign and thought he was out of traffic.  Now I will admit he definitely had everything optimized extremely well and had really taken advantage of adwords.  However…adwords isn’t everything!

Just talking PPC alone here, I had him expand to Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Adcenter, Miva, and Looksmart.  Now I won’t tell you which one didn’t make money but every source we tested except for yes…ONE…added profit on to the campaign.  He is now making almost triple what he was making with that exact same campaign as he was less than a week ago.

Now this post is short, but its short for a reason.  Sometimes the BEST tips, are the absolute simplest things we take for granted.  You know how to market, now go find the audience (traffic source) that is perfect for you.  Don’t get so one minded thinking you have to do everything in adwords.  This is something I see happening all the time.

Until next time, spread your campaigns out among some new traffic sources and start earning some more BLING BLING!

I have for a long time now used Keyword Discovery’s free search tool for most of my keyword research.  I took a decent break there for awhile and hadn’t thrown up any campaigns for awhile.  The other day though when I went to search for some certain keyword phrases I found the tool displaying this on many of the terms I was searching for: Search error: This search function requires a KeywordDiscovery subscription.

I didn’t really dig in depth to find out what all triggered that message instead of search results to be displayed, but I did find that if you search for anything .com it will display it.  I have started looking around for my new #1 free keyword research tool.  I know there are tons out there but so many are just junk that are more inaccurate than accurate.

If anyone has any suggestions on what to use please pass along your expertise.  Who knows maybe I will have to belly up for Keyword Discovery’s $70 a month charges to test out their actual pay service.  If its worth it and will help me increase my revenue, I will gladly pay that monthly fee.

Here is a simple little tip that will probably come in handy for a lot of you.

Not to long ago I posted about how Yahoo had disabled the use of question marks in their ads.  I had tested using the question marks in FireFox and in Internet explorer and the same thing happened in both browsers, the question mark simply disappears right after you enter it.

Welllll after discussing this with a good friend of mine we discovered that you actually CAN still use question marks in your ad, but ONLY if you import your campaigns.  I believe to have the import feature in your YSM account you have to spend over $300 a month for 3 consecutive months.  I also heard that this $300 amount may have risen to $500 more recently. 

This may be a problem for anyone just starting out.

I do know of a "loophole" to this if you are really desperate to get the import feature on your yahoo account.  If you sign up to Affiliate Radar they have worked out a deal with Yahoo to enable the import feature of your account, since it is needed to use Affiliate Radar properly.

I don’t know what it costs a month probably at least $50 bucks, but maybe you could signup, get the import feature from Yahoo, then either use your account if you like it, or just cancel it if it really doesn’t suit your needs.

There are actually many ways to answer that question, but the best answer would be to use Google’s Ad Preview Tool.

By using this you can view the sponsored ads results from any location in the world!

I am working with some ad campaigns out of Canada and the UK and was having troubles using other methods of viewing international ads.  I remembered I had used Google’s ad preview tool before so after a few google searches I found it again.

This tool has saved me a few times and just thought I would pass it on to you guys!

So awhile back I posted about my $0.02 clicks in AdWords because I wanted to prove to people that it is still VERY possible to obtain cheap CPC prices in adwords as long as you are going about things in a responsible manner.

After I made that post showing the cheap clicks, I thought to myself a couple days later…Yeah they are cheap clicks…but most people get slapped a week later and the bid prices go sky high, unable to obtain a profit anymore, the campaign is shut down.  Your now once profitable campaign has dogged out a week later and isn’t making you a penny…

Welllllll I went back to check the CPC of that campaign a bit ago to make a post here showing that I don’t get Google slapped and realized that my bid prices HAVE DROPPED TO $0.01!!!  Yes that is one penny per click!

This campaign has been running for quite some time now and the clicks only got cheaper.  This is the cheapest they can possibly go.  So if you doubt the methods I go over here, this should be PROOF that they work and do what I say they do .

So everyone is coming to me complaining about getting google slapped and high bid prices allllll the time.

I have never really had any problems at all so I started playing around with methods and strategies that could maybe help the normal marketer be able to get lower AND KEEP low bid prices.

This is simple so I will keep it simple.

First, start by creating your campaign with the related keywords in the campaign name.  Next create your ad group again with the keywords your going to be bidding on as the name.

Second, add your keywords as EXACT MATCH ONLY!  Do not add phrase or broad match yet.  Let these keywords run for a coulpe of days and keep a super high CTR, next add your phrase matched keywords into the ad group for a few days and continue to monitor, tweaking as needed.

I would highly recomend almost never using broad match keywords, but sometimes its just needed.  If this is the case, then add these keywords last, monitoring them like the rest.

This simple little trick of adding your keywords in this 3 step process will keep your CTR extremely high, while keeping your bid prices low.  I have found that as long as I keep my CTR high I have no problems at all with any google slaps.

While working within the PPC engines, you most likely will go over thousands if not millions of keywords over your career.  What you DON’T know is that there are many times that perfect opportunity to profit from AdSense are actually falling into your lap, and you don’t even know it!

Here you go…

When working within these engines, anytime you are bidding on keywords in the search engine and content network both, you can compare the CPC between the two sources and analyze this data.  What I have found is that anytime the CPC on the content network is 70% or higher than the CPC on the search network, this opens up a perfect opportunity to create some sort of a mini site, blog, or content based site.  Now you can monetize these sites with AdSense and you are almost guaranteed to get high click price.  If you have any knowledge of SEO this should be a pretty simple for you to do.

If you really want to take advantage of this (or don’t know anything about SEO), you could than go to any smaller PPC networks such as looksmart, enhance, miva or 7search and drive traffic to your page with the adsense on it. 

This can be a perfect opportunity to take your research from your PPC campaigns, analyze it, then profit from it, all in a days work!

At 8:44 PM tonight I received this email from CJ Wire, CJ.com’s e-mail service, informing me of a recent Yahoo update (which actually occurred awhile back as I will show you)…

Yahoo! Search Marketing Becomes More Publisher Friendly

After more than six months in the making and much customer feedback and testing, we are pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) has recently updated its editorial policies and will now allow U.S. publishers to direct link to their advertisers. In the past, YSM’s editorial policy prevented publishers from linking directly to their advertiser partners and required that traffic be sent first to the publisher’s Web site. The new policy eliminates this restriction and opens a much broader search marketing opportunity for publishers.

So, if you’re running search marketing campaigns but have left YSM out of your marketing mix, now is a great time to expand your efforts.

Now Here is an email I actually received on February 7th from a smaller CPA network who informed me of this change…

Take note of the interesting terms they use….search arbitrage?….just sounds blackhat to me.

Anyways…

Hi Trevor – I wanted to let you know that Yahoo claims they have adjusted their affiliate marketing restrictions so that affiliates NO longer need to create an interstitial page to do search advertising on Yahoo.  They can buy key terms and promote them directly to 3rd party websites. 

Search arbitrage is on!  This change was made Feb 1st without any public announcement.

 Now thanks to gmail archiving all of my mail, I went back and found the actual date of the email I received from Yahoo notifying me of the upcoming changes they were going to be making to their terms of service…

Here is the email which was from December 4th, 2007:

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Yahoo! Search Marketing
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Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

Giving a specific answer of who is "the best" in this category would be nearly impossible.  However, I have played around with traffic from nearly every PPC engine out there and would definitely say these 1st tier engines are the only place that most of you will want to play.  Most of the PPC engines outside of the 1st tier tend to have much poorer quality traffic, which is never fun to get.

So what IS the difference between these 3 big dogs? (soon to be 2 possibly)…

Yahoo! Marketing Solutions

Yahoo doesn’t get nearly the amount of traffic that Google contains, but I have noticed that most of the traffic I receive from yahoo converts better than my traffic at google.  I have never had any problems with Yahoo and they have been improving their PPC system dramatically over the last year.

One drawback of Yahoo that I, and other marketers, have noticed, is that many times keywords that have been approved and running fine…will all of a sudden become disabled, or declined, or simply disappear.

When this first started happening to me, I was worried…called Yahoo, and got some BS excuse like always.  After asking around…this happens to almost everyone I know who uses yahoo and keeps tabs on their accounts to notice it happening.

Other than this small drawback I would say Yahoo is probably the best PPC engine for any PPC beginner to start out at since the traffic is generally cheaper than adwords and the clicks usually convert better.

MSN Adcenter

It took me awhile to get used to MSN.  I get quite a few campaigns in MSN that convert pretty well also, however it seems to be much more hit or miss than Yahoo.  Bid prices at MSN are comparable to Yahoo, maybe a bit lower.  However the traffic seems to flow even less than Yahoo.

Another downfall I feel is that MSN’s interface is really hard and confusing to work with.  I have been quite surprised to not see MSN make any decent changes like Yahoo and Google have.

I think MSN will continue to slowly grow in this area, however with the recent news that they may be purchasing Yahoo, that would help them tremendously.

MSN is also a good engine for beginners to dabble with since their is less traffic, cheaper prices, and it still converts pretty well.

Google Adwords

Here is the REAL big dog.  Google has the largest mass of traffic compared to the other engines.  Google’s traffic can convert really well or poor depending on how you run your campaign.  One thing is for sure, if you are a newbie, you need to be extremely careful when setting up your campaigns.  Make sure to use negative keywords, only exact and phrase match for your keyword types, and run everything through a tracking program to make sure you aren’t paying out loads of money on traffic that isn’t converting.

Unlike Yahoo and MSN, Googly’s adwords has sort of revolutionalized the way PPC works.  They continually are working with things and changing their algorithms to produce the best user experience.

Because of this, I recommend not to use adwords unless you know what you are doing.  Take your time testing and learning using Yahoo or MSN and then after you get some experience under your belt, then come back to Google and start pounding at its door.

Let me know what your favorite PPC engines are.  I know there are a few 2nd tier PPC engines out there that are pretty decent, leave a comment and let me know what you have found in your experiences.