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Archive for December, 2009

The Benefits of Article Marketing


Article marketing is advertising by writing short articles on specific areas that you wish to promote in your industry. Some content based articles are even released free to help attract clients and build credibility. Article marketing became popular with the advent of mass printing making article production affordable and easy to produce.

The rise of the internet and online world has promoted a huge expansion of article marketing. Today there are sites and directories devoted to publishing article for marketing purposes. These sites may contain information on a general scale or sites can be found for very special and specific interests. As long as you follow the sites’ guidelines and format then you can post an article.

Freelance article writing has become a feasible occupation with the expansion of article marketing. If you do not have the time to write or maintain your articles you hire a freelancer that specializes in article marketing and knows all of the tricks to writing a great content article.

The most effective and popular type of article tends to be about 400 to 600 words. This is short enough to hold the readers interest but also long enough to get your point across. The key to a successful article is a catchy title that grabs the reader’s attention, even if they are only scanning web pages or search engine results. Make sure that you are brief and concise. Wordiness can cause the reader to lose interest.

It is important to present the most important information up front and as close to the beginning of your article as you can. That way if your reader loses interest they will have at least read the most important part. You should keep your paragraphs and sentences short and use subheadings if appropriate.

Your contact information will be found in the resource box. It is important to make sure that this information is correct and clear. You may also add a line or two about your product or service. The resource box is also where you may provide a link to your website or to an area with further information.

You will need to include a short summary with your article. Think of it as an abstract or a teaser. The summary will be displayed with your title to provide some information on your article. The summary like the title should hook the reader and clearly state what the article is about. It is possible to write informative short articles and the most effective articles run between 400 to 600 words.

Once you have written your article you need to submit it to the appropriate directory. There are hundreds of article directories. Some of the more popular article directories are EzineArticles, GoArticles, and IdeaMarketers. There are also article directories for specific niches but finding them may take a bit of searching. You don’t need a lot of marketing or computer knowledge to be a successful article marketer. By spending a little bit of time each day writing and posting articles you can successfully provide information and promote your services.

Check out this Inexpensive Article Writing Service that have the cheapest rate of $0.0096/word to boost start your Online Business. Services include UAW Article Writing, Article Writing, Article Marketer Writing + Submission and many more…

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

The Process of Bidding on Keywords


When using Google AdWords as a part of your advertising campaign, it is essential that you know which keywords are going to make you the most profit. Choosing the right keywords for effective marketing is so important that there are marketers who have made it into an art form. These marketers research the keyword history of the search engines used most by the people most likely to use their products and come up with the keywords most likely to produce the desired result.

Keywords, unfortunately, are not the only deciding factor in the success or failure of a pay per click advertising campaign. The simple fact of the matter is that internet browsers do not have the patience that consumers who are seeing their ads on television or hearing them on the radio have (and that isn’t saying much). Each time that a search is entered into a search engine pages of results appear. Realistically speaking, which of these pages are going to be viewed before the surfer turns their attention elsewhere? The first five, maybe the first ten if they are determined.

Obviously the keywords are being chosen by several dozen, if not several hundred, advertisers. So how is the order of the display of ads decided by the search engines? Each advertiser who uses AdWords is paying a fee each time their ad pops up. While the fee is not a lot of money, the more companies who want these keywords, the more they are going to be willing to pay for them. So the company who is willing to pay the most for their keywords is the one that the search engine is going to have placed at the very top of the first page of any search that is conducted. Since the search engine is going to make their money whether the advertiser makes the sale or not, it only makes sense for them to want to place the ads they are going to make the most money from at the top of the list each time. After all, they are in the business of making money as well, and they want the ads which are going to make them the most money to be seen more.

There is a learning curve when it comes to striking the right balance of bids and keywords. While you are learning this lesson, you will have financial ups and downs. Do not expect a purchase with each click of your ad. The percentage of actual sales is, as a rule, less than ten percent of the people who choose your ad. Anticipating that that will be your sales percentage is an appropriate expectation. With this number in mind, compare that to the price of your product. When you look at this as a portion of your advertising budget, you can then decide what you are able to bid for the keyword.

Anthony Flores of www.attorneymarketingnow.com is an expert in http://www.attorneymarketingnetwork.com and Attorney Marketing Expert. Contact us with proven PPC and SEO results for attorney’s all across the country.

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

Pinging A Wordpress Blog Makes Good SEO Business Sense


If you want to consistently get your website pages spidered and indexed into all the major search engines you need to combine blogging and pinging. Whether you use a Wordpress or Blogger to blog you need to ping them for maximum SEO results.

Blogs also known as web logs are the hottest thing on the internet. With there being so many blogs out there in cyber world, how do you make yours known and get people to read it. How do you have the most often read blog on the market that you are promoting? Because there are so many people that are trying to all accomplish the same thing, how are you going to stand out from the rest?

There are several things that you can do to make your blog marketing a success, and we are going to cover pinging in this article. Many people are confused about what exactly pinging is in regards to weblogging. I’ll try to explain exactly what’s going on here. Sending out a ping is like raising the red flag on the mailbox to tell the mailman you have new mail to be sent. This will let all of the blog directories know that you have added something new to your blog. This also brings you in some more traffic.

Pinging your blog frequently is another good way to get your blog seen. Every time that you update it, use the ping tools to ping it.

Blog marketing is pretty much the same thing as website marketing. However, if you have never had a website, and are not familiar with marketing these pinging tips will help you get started. Be sure that you put new entries into your blog on a regular basis as well. This will help keep your blog up to date and current and also will keep your readers coming back for more updates.

You can ping your blogs manually by going to pinging sites. I prefer to use a software program like Instant Blog and Ping that completely automates the whole blog and ping process freeing you up lots of time spent pinging yourself.

Todd Schuyler wants you to be a internet marketing success. Go to this pinging site to get the best internet and ping software. You see dollar for dollar nothing comes close to being able to get your site pages crawled, indexed and ranked fast.

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

Is Windows 7 Really Better Than Vista?


This is really a loaded question. Windows Vista is probably the biggest failure in the history of Microsoft. From day one the operating system was plagued with numerous problems and angry users who suddenly missed their old XP or 2000 operating systems. It was almost impossible for Microsoft to release an operating system that was worse then Vista, or more hated, so if that were the case the reputation of Windows may have been irreparably harmed. That being said, Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system is far superior to not only Vista, but all of the Windows operating systems that came before it.

When Microsoft was preparing to launch Windows Vista, they conducted a test to see what users thought of the installation of the operating system, and the overall impression of how Vista worked after it was installed. This testing did not go well, and in the end neither did the eventual release of Vista to the public. Microsoft also did testing before the launch of Windows 7, again to see what users thought of the installation process, and their overall opinion of the operating system after it was installed. In order to ensure an adequate sampling of different types of users, Microsoft targeted testers who used their computer for personal/home use, testers who used their computers for business only, and testers who used their computers for both personal and business use.

The results of this testing were very good for Microsoft and Windows 7. Only a very small fraction of the testers has trouble with the installation of Windows 7, which is to be expected when you are installing any new operating system onto a PC. The one area of the installation which caused the most issues for the testers was compatibility with drivers and other software, which again is to be expected when installing a new operating system. A handful of the testers did end up having their computer crash during the installation process, however the percentage of users who encountered this was very small. This testing helped Microsoft prove that the installation of Windows 7 is significantly better than the Windows Vista installation, and the very small number of issues that arose during testing should not be a concern for consumers.

In general user experience has been beneficial with only about 5% of people reporting that they were not satisfied with the overall performance of the operating system itself. As compared to the test run for Windows Vista before it was released, this had about half the users complaining about it before it got out of the gates.

Microsoft’s promise of their best operating system ever may have finally come true with Windows 7. Microsoft learned many hard lessons from the Vista operating system, and took those lessons, along with significant feedback from the user community into consideration when developing Windows 7. That being said, there are of course some bugs and glitches in the Windows 7 operating system, but Microsoft is hard at work resolving those issues, and distributing patches and updates automatically to Windows 7 users. As long as Microsoft remains diligent in fixing Windows 7 issues as they arise, then their is no reason why any PC owner should not upgrade if they have the chance. This is especially true if you are still using Vista and it is making you miserable.

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Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 


Find Out How Many SEO Backlinks Are Associated With Your Website


If you have a website then you know the importance of knowing the interest you are attracting. SEO Backlinks are the incoming links that will go into a website or a web page. With search engine optimization, the number of back links that can be measured will give an indication of the popularity of your site. Another benefit of backlinks is that you can have insights into who is looking at your website and their interests.

A back link can be any link that is received by a directory, website or even a top-level domain coming from another similar area. There are many ways that back links are referred to as, such as inbound links, inward links or inlinks. Search engines determine a website’s search engine ranking by using one of the best factors, back links.

The owners of websites will often look for different techniques to get the number of back links aimed at their website to increase. Although some of these methods will be free for everyone’s use, some methods will require a great deal of marketing. An example of this is ‘link baiting. Breaking a new story would be ‘link baiting’ and some websites will link to that site to get some of the advantage of the ‘baiting’ website.

The larger search engines will utilize a mechanism that allows them to show the number of backlinks that are recorded for a website. By using ‘link.’ in front of any website name it will tell you what pages will point to that website. The same is true for Yahoo!’s Site Explorer that tends to show more of the results then Google. Also, websites can keep track with their own website software.

Some ways that people go about getting back links that are high quality to their website are submitting articles, commenting on blogs and even posting on some blogs. Some people think these ways are the best way to raise their standing on the search engines. Other people will submit their website to as many Internet directories they can find. This is a good way but one negative about it is that it can take quite a while to have a new website included.

Today the process of gaining backlinks to your website using Web 2.0 is the easier than ever. The owner will learn many things building their backlinks as well as meeting new people on the way and having fun. Try all of the strategies that you can find and your search engine ratings will soar.

Visit my website on link building service that builds high authority incoming links to improve your search engine ranking. You might also want to check out this free backlink checker.

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

Keyword Research and Your Pay Per Click Campaign


PPC advertising without proper keyword research is an absolute waste of money and resources. You can easily do this kind of research which will get you well on your way to forming an efficient method for marketing.

Why is it most important? Because you want to know what people are typing when they search. Then knowing those keywords, you can put those exact words into the Text Ad for your Pay Per Click Campaign. You want those words in the Headline, then in the body of the ad, and if you can even have them in the URL itself, all the better! Bottom line ” You want to have those keywords all over your ad, and it will increase the likelihood of someone clicking on it. But it is much more than just that.

So while the first element is to mirror what someone is typing in, the second element is to take that list and narrow it down to what keywords to bid on to effectively sell what you have. Now this list may grow, but once you start with a good core list of words, then you can do different variations of that core list. But we need a good starting point and proper keyword research and some common sense will help us build that list.

For example, say you are selling cars. You can go to Google Adwords and find out how many times cars or used cars or used cars for sale or used BMW for sale has been searched. You would truly want to start with a larger sample of words, but for this exercise we will use just these 4 keywords.

Monthly, 151 million people search for ‘cars.’ That’s a lot! It must be the perfect word choice! This is false. You’ll waste so much time and money bidding on the rights to put ‘cars’ in your PPC ad, despite its popularity. What happened? The term is way too general, and have many contexts for searching for it. It won’t help a used car business much.

Using that term will get you closer to the best keyword. Even that gets 550,000 searches a month. However it may not be exactly what you want. Again, you should be wondering why. If you only sell BMW cars, then you still need to be more specific. Do you understand what direction we are going now? You need to employ your common sense here. You need to find a list of keywords that is relevant to exactly what your are selling. In this case, ‘used bmw for sale,’ would be the best choice.

Append this keyword with any city you can sell a car to, or even model numbers for your cars, and you’ll get better keywords like ‘Used 325 BMW for Sale in Los Angeles,’ which will get a lot more customer that will be interested!

Anthony Flores of www.attorneymarketingnow.com is an expert in Adwords Management and Law Firm Web Design. Contact us with proven PPC and SEO results for attorney’s all across the country.

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

Article Marketing Still Is One Of The Best Online Marketing Strategies


Article marketing still is making money online for many businesses, why is this and what can I do to get my share of this money?

This is a powerful tool for making money and you don’t have to wait to learn about it in great depth before you can actually get started. It is a way of promoting your home internet business at low or virtually no cost and it increases your potential for success exponentially.

If you have already started a marketing campaign for your business article marketing is still able to work for you, and is one of the many tools you use in your overall strategy. Even if you don’t write these yourself, paying someone to ghost write them will be effective to get targeted traffic to your business. So how do you do this?

This form of marketing is not actually a secret, it has been used, every since newsprint became mass media. It is a form of leveraging the media’s ability to reach mass markets and it is extremely popular as a marketing tool.

Essentially the syndicated web site that your articles will be published on have mass readership. Much like a newspaper would in the old days before electronic media. You are allowed to post your article for free in most instances, as these syndications are looking for content, in return for your content, they also allow you to supply a contact details and a brief description of what you do, in a small resource box at the end of the article.

The people who read your article have entered search terms called a keywords to a search engine and have been directed to your article. This is specific information that they have requested and SEO is what has landed them here. They are your targeted traffic! They read your article and if it makes good sense they click on the link bait in your resource box. This takes them to your site, where they are a pre-qualified buyer, and there you have it, targeted traffic.

No online business can afford not to receive targeted traffic, and neither can you, article marketing is still able to make conversions to sale.

Want to find out more why article marketing still is great, then visit John Farcikan’s site on how to choose the best membership site for your needs.

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

Increase The Amount Of Traffic To Your Site With High Quality Backlinks


Finally, you’re taking the necessary steps towards building more traffic to your site. In a nutshell, back links from other quality sites to yours is essential to place higher in Google’s page rank. Now before I go on, understand that high quality backlinks from other sites, improve your sites page rank with search engines.

These types of backlinks improve page rank of your site with search engines. Never is there a need to have hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your site. It is more important that the site that links to you, is high quality and targets the information on your site. This kind of information is well known and tested among those who do Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Let me give you a bit of an idea of backlink are. Think of it like this: an externally located site, connect to your site from a link. Quite simply, your vote of popularity increases along with the number of quality backlinks from other sites to yours. That means you have higher placement with search engines. Despite what you may have heard, you only need a handful of high quality back links from other sites.

Now listen to this very carefully: use care if you decide to purchase backlinks. The bottom line is that you don’t always know where they are coming from. Further, you should know how the site links to you. Truthfully, creating your own backlinks is free and allows you to control where they come from. Here are some ways to build high quality backlinks:

Advertise: advertising is very important and helps you to gain an increase in traffic to your site and quality backlinks. You could use word of mouth, but its not that effective. Free classified ads, are effective, especially when you have accounts with various one’s therefore increasing your exposure.

When you post on forums with information relating to your site, it also increases your exposure. Fact is, forum postings are permanent links to your site. They are unlike classifieds, which tend to expire over time. Posting on higher ranking sites, increases the promotion of your site.

Participate in social networking sites as a way to gain a following for advertising and increasing page rank. Also post comments on other blogs that relate to your site. Participation in discussions will also help in creating more quality backlinks.

Submitting Articles: When you submit articles they are to sites that are trusted by search engines. Therefore, they have a higher placement rank with search engines and give you another high quality backlink to your site. Make sure however, that the articles that you submit are high quality and follow there guidelines so that they are accepted.

Over time and with the time that you invest, you are sure to create many high quality backlinks. You will notice traffic increase as well as revenue as a result. In no time, you will have a site with more traffic than you imagined.

Visit my website on link building service that builds high authority incoming links to improve your search engine ranking. You might also want to check out this free backlink checker.

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

AdWords – Has the Google God Become Too Powerful?


First, a quote.

“And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  –John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, KCVO, DL (10 January 1834 – 19 June 1902)

Over the years Google has progressively tightened its advertising guidelines, mostly for the best.  It used to be that anyone could competitively bid on keywords and place an ad on AdWords, even if the keywords they bid on were irrelevant to their ad.  Also, gone are the days when an advertiser could pay their way out of the $5 or $10 “Google slap” for a poor quality ad.

In 2009, one of the enhancements Google added to their overhauled AdWords interface was a numeric 10 point quality scoring system for each keyword in an ad group.  The higher the score, the more in-line the keyword is to the ad and landing page content.  But like all things Google, advertisers are still in the dark over what constitutes any particular score.  Google gives general guidelines on how to write a good ad and how it should relate to a landing page, but there is no checklist of items that guarantees a perfect 10.  How can an advertiser improve its quality scores without knowing what needs tweaking?

I’ve been using AdWords since 2003.  For about 1-1/2 years I was using it to exclusively promote a fitness product.  My entire site was related to a single vendor’s product.    

Coveted Ad Positioning and CPC

I did not bid on the vendor’s branded name because like many vendors, they prohibit it.  Rather, I bid on a handful of broad, yet closely related fitness terms.  I maintained excellent positioning in the “sweet spot”, hovering around the 4th position on the first page, with ad costs at only pennies per click.  My ads were always profitable and when Google introduced the numeric scoring system, I maintained quality scores in the 7/10 range.   

In the summer of 2009 I modified an ad just like I had done countless times over the years.  The next morning I noticed my campaign had no ad impressions.  I dug into the keywords and saw that Google had given them quality scores of 0 and refused to display the ads, yet nothing on my site or keywords had changed and the modification I made to the ad was insignificant.  How is it possible to go from preferential positioning and pricing for 1-1/2 years and then in the blink of an eye lose it all?

Google Burns Its Bridges

As near as I can tell, the modification triggered a quality audit.  After weeks of wrangling with the AdWords team and their canned email replies, it came down to one thing.  Google considered my landing page a “bridge page” and my overall site content “poor” because my content wasn’t unique enough for them.

Google wants to create a good advertising experience for its shoppers by eliminating what it believes, replicates the vendor’s site.  In other words, they think that a shopper would rather / should rather (in their opinion) see only the vendor’s site and not an affiliate’s site promoting the vendor’s products.

One of my main arguments was that my customers didn’t know the product by its brand name.  Instead, they were searching for a solution to fill a fitness need.  That’s the sole reason for choosing the keywords I did.  My sales history was solid proof that I was dead on target with them.

My site converted those visitors into paying customers.  I received emails from the affiliate manager and the owner of the company telling me what a great job I was doing and to keep it up.  I was even rewarded with an exclusive coupon code.  I forwarded those comments to the AdWords team in my defense, but they still refused to reapprove my ads. 

Google Gives Advice, Even If It May Not Work…Which It Didn’t

Google provided a few recommendations for gaining back my former glory.  One caveat though, they warned that even if I did what they suggested, my campaign may never recover.  That turned out to be true.  I went through the entire dog and pony show and nothing I did to the site from that point on could pull it out of the abyss.  Even new pages I built following all of their guidelines got a quality score of 0.  It was obvious they weren’t rating the single landing page from my ad.  Instead, they were looking at the entire domain and my domain now seemed to be black-balled. 

1)  Google doesn’t like affiliate pages.  They consider them bridge pages to the vendor.  So what, I say.  There are times when experienced affiliates can make a better sales pitch than the vendor’s own site, can make a better visual presentation, or give testimonials from personal experience after using the product.  Or, I’ll point out once again, a shopper may not know the brand name of a product, therefore will search with generic terms describing what a product does or the benefits they hope to receive from a product.

2)  Google doesn’t like affiliates to promote only one product on their site.  It’s their stance that such sites replicate the vendor’s site.  Google told me that I had to add products to my site that the vendor doesn’t sell in order to make my site unique from the vendor’s.

I don’t like creating pages like that because they take the spotlight off of my featured product and send my visitors off shopping on another site.  People get sidetracked while browsing and if they don’t come back, that’s a lost sale.  I have one job as an affiliate and that’s to promote the vendor’s product to the best of my ability, not send them to another merchant’s site.    

In some cases, a vendor may not like its products being compared to those of another because their own products may cost more.  Consumers don’t always look at quality, they want a bargin.  A year ago I struck up a deal with a web hosting company to get lower pricing on their plans for my customers.  However, I was prohibited from advertising their company in any type of comparative manner, like many web hosting affiliates do, because even at the lower price, they were still two to three times more than other companies.

I’m not completely against all of Google’s advertising guidelines.  I agree with them that ads should not be misleading, a landing page should provide what the ad says it will and a visitor should not have to opt-in to a mailing list to get the information promised in the ad. 

The Google Monopoly

But the Google god has taken on the “gangster mentality” that Baron Dalberg-Acton referred to.  Google has monopolized AdWords by excluding single-merchant affiliates, yet permitting the original merchant of the product to advertise.  It drives down the competition by allowing the original merchants to corner the market on PPC.  Should Google be allowed to tell affiliate advertisers that their sites must contain products not sold on the merchant’s site in order to be able to participate in AdWords?  It’s an unethical, unfair business practice.

A vendor’s survival often times depends upon the sales generated by its affiliates.  By denying affiliates from competing in the keyword bidding process with single-vendor websites, Google is choking off the sales force of thousands of companies and turning off the cash flow to the affiliates who, in the past, and like myself, successfully used AdWords.  I instantly stopped making sales the day Google slapped me. 

Yes, affiliates can use other PPC services, but none of them have the coverage that AdWords does. 

Yes, affiliates can use search engine marketing to promote any product in any manner, but not everyone has the skill set and the tenacity to do it.  Fortunately, in about three months’ time I’ve managed to regain about 85% of my pre-Google slap using SEM, but it’s hard work.

You see, the beauty of PPC is that it’s “instant-on” advertising.  You don’t have to spend weeks or months trying to achieve top ranking in the SERPS, something that’s impossible for highly competitive niches.    

In my opinion, no white-hat advertiser should be denied running an honest PPC campaign because they chose to sell only products from a single vendor on their site.  The competitive bidding process should be amongst the advertisers, not Google. 

Since 2003, I’ve spent over $16,000 on AdWords.  That’s a grain of sand on the Google beach, but I can guarantee you, I won’t be spending another $16,000 with them.  Not when Google has turned into a gangbanging thug, killing off affiliate marketers one by one.

AJ Farro is a retired programmer and creative consultant for a variety of websites.  If you need a serious webpage builder that doesn’t require a computer science degree to use or flaky FrontPage extensions, take a look at some of the best web design software deals.  Then take care of your new website and our Earth with cheap green hosting from SuperGreen Hosting.

What To Do Before you Optimize Your Website


Today I am writing to warn everyone before you even start doing SEO you better know what keywords you want that are going to draw traffic. Just a short time ago I got a testimonial and a question from a client. She said my program worked great, got her to the first position in Google but she wasn’t getting the traffic she thought a number one position would bring.

There is truth in that some keywords are not searched for. I rank number one for a bunch of junk that people don’t search for and I NEVER draw traffic from those keywords. This was her scenario. She had targeted a keyword that she thought people would search for to find her site, the word actually had very little search volume. You have to spend your time upfront finding the words.

Using a tool like the Google Adwords Keyword tool can tell you words that people are searching for. Getting rankings for these words is excellent compared to purchasing them on adwords. But if you just guess at the keywords you are targeting then you are opening yourself up for wasting a lot of time to draw very little traffic. The fact is you can find words that are searched for that are pretty easy to rank for.

I always hit up the Google Adwords keyword tool and find words that are searched for between 30,000 and 100,000 a month. I like to set a goal of having 1000 visits per day. You can’t really go wrong with that number of visits per day. If you can’t convert some sales out of 1000 visits per day then there is some issue with your target audience or the website itself.

SEO is not rocket science, but before you even start you better find a keyword that you can actually rank for that will draw traffic. It really does no good to rank for a word that does not bring any traffic to your site. Ranking number one for a high traffic keyword is the ultimate, but you would rather rank for a high traffic keyword in a postion other than number one for a word that nobody searches for.

Click here for the real story on how to build thousands of one way links. We have a strategy that works for every site, every time.

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

micronichefinder

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

Everyone's an expert in something. Turn what you know into your own content-rich profitable business.

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