Trimming Your PPC Fat

In order to meet your conversion objectives in a pay per click campaign with AdWords, it will be of critical importance to manage the costs of your campaign. Controlling spending throughout your campaign occurs at a number of levels. You can make a small number of manual changes that can cut your costs. A more practical solution though is to employ automatic software— particularly software that has control over bid management—as these programs are able to automatically adjust costs for keywords.

First you will want to determine your costs on the level of the campaign. If your campaign is utilizing both Google’s ad networks as well as its content networks, then you will want to set up a campaign that exclusively targets the search aspect and a duplicate campaign that focuses on the content side. Creating these separate campaigns will allow to you control spending for each one separately, so you can find optimum costs that maximize the utility of each campaign. In your content based campaigns it is also important to use exclusions for both site and category terms that will prevent your click dollars being spent by putting your ads on unrelated websites.

When your campaign has gotten started and you are seeing some results, you will want to analyze the data coming back on your top performing keywords, and adjust their spending so that you can see even more returns on them. In addition to this, you can also add new query match formats for your existing and underperforming keywords to boost their functionality, allowing you to develop a unique bid for every match type that you are using.

Be sure to monitor the quality scores of all of your keywords. Stop using terms that have zero conversions and/or low quality scores, as they are essentially wasting your time and money. Remember, that your keyword’s quality score will affect its cost per click and its estimate in bids for the first page. Quality Score also affects the ranking of your ad and its eligibility to be featured in an ad auction.

When you are working with an insurmountable number of key words, it is simply not possible to manage them by hand, you will require the assistance of software to help manage your spending for each of your selected terms. The following list details a number of management tools that will help you to adjust your campaign spending in the most efficient manner possible:

• Acquisio SEARCH. This is a top of the line, well programmed pay per click bid management tool. It is able to offer suggestions on which keywords should be paused, alerts you by email to keywords that are given low quality scores, and allows you to set programmable cost per click values for your keywords.
• Clickable. This tool is able to offer performance enhancing recommendations for your campaign. It will indicate calculated and reasonable bid increases on high performing keywords, a reduction of bids on your lower performing keywords, or alerting you when keywords have not met their first page estimates.
• DoubleClick DART Search. This tool is able to automatically bid on any of your keywords a maximum of twelve times daily. You can create a bid strategy that is executed based on a variety of factors concerning your keywords.
• Omniture SearchCenter. This tool offers the standard bid management tactics that you find in such software which includes portfolio based or rules based routines. This tool also features day-parting, but this comes standard with almost any modern pay per click engine.
• Podium adCore. This tool can adjust your bids on a wide level and will allow you to remove underperforming words that do not meet specific performance requirements.

Though these tools sound like they will have your campaign running itself, it will still require regular human intervention, if only to collect your earnings. Though these tools will help maximize your profits, they still require solid human generated ideas to be truly effective. If you give your campaign the human touch that it needs and employ the tools above, your campaign will really start gaining steam and really getting your ads out there!

SEO In The Dating Niche

Dating is one of the most competitive industries when it comes to the web because so many well funded sites are appearing to grab their piece of the pie. The paid dating sites have huge revenue budgets to allow them to spend a fortune in SEO as well as advertising and promotion in general. The free sites however are able to recruit thousands of members which create thousands of internal pages on their websites creating a very strong search engine optimized site.

Both free and paid dating sites have their advantages and disadvantages, but for this case study we will discuss smart SEO techniques for promoting a free internet dating site that has an average monthly advertising budget but needs to do smart SEO. The simple SEO techniques still apply, such as strong on site content as well as submitting the site to a plethora of strong directories. The problem with being in the dating niche is that there are not a lot of dating related blogs like there are in other industries. This lack of normal every-day-joe blog’s means dating webmasters need to make up for it somewhere else, and that usually means it is a competition of buying the most links.

However, with a smart search engine optimization plan, this is not necessary. The are the recommended link building strategies for a site in the competitive dating niche would be social bookmarking, blog commenting, press releases, strong internal structure, and throwing a small contest to attract bloggers to write a dating site that they otherwise wouldn’t have on their blogs. Hope this is a good start for all of you in the free dating niche!

Yahoo / Bing – What Does it Mean?

Bing is new, new stuff looks shiny for a while.

Google is used as a verb instead of ’searching’. Bing/Yahoo have a long way to go before they steal permanent market share.  At this point I suspect Microsoft will shovel money into marketing for the next few years with no hope of generating anything close to a profit.  They have a big stockpile of money, but at some point shareholders will complain.  When the marketing ends, their product better deliver results as good or better than Google.  I doubt that will be the case.

The search algorithm seems fairly straight forward for Bing.  Unfortunately big company sites with huge budgets and blackhat auto link techniques will be more effective on Bing than Google.

My prediction:  the simple nature of the search algorithm used by Bing will be either exploited and results will look like your email spam folder, or they will look like Forbes 500 list — neither is as useful as Google’s results.

Think big by targeting small in your SEO

It has been of my own experience, when you ask most companies which main keywords they are going to be targeting for their new flagship startup company, they will tell you that they want to rank for very competitive keywords in an unbelievable time frame. While yes it is true that ranking for mortgage, debt, dating, or banking will bring you a plethora of high quality traffic that will convert into leads and sales, getting those rankings without years of work or lots of money is impossible.

Most search engine optimizers do not realize there is a better solution. All you need to do is to start thinking big by targeting small. It does not matter what niche your company or website is in, every single niche has a more targeted keyword that you can be targeting. You will be able to rank higher for this keyword, in a shorter time frame. When you start ranking for this niche keyword, you will start receiving a representative sample of the traffic you will be seeing for the big keyword you are targeting for the long term. You will be able to build up sales, leads, customer contact information, and most importantly cash while you are slowly building up to your long term keyword goal. It is often easier to rank for the number one spot for five to ten niche keywords with a high volume traffic than it is to rank for one mega keyword as it is often called. For those of you who learn by example, imagine you own an affiliate company that sells supplements. Ranking for for a term like weight loss will result in potentially hundreds of thousands of sales because so many people search for it every day, however the traffic is only semi targeted. Instead of trying to target a term like weight loss, a company that sells bottles containing maqui berry could target a term like weight loss pills, which is a slightly more targeted and less competitive keyword. Depending on the size and competition of the niche, you could keep going smaller and smaller in your niche search. Instead of targeting weight loss pills, you could target a very longtail term like how to lose weight fast. The more longtail and smaller the niche, the faster you will be able to rank. You can then easily rank number one for a niche term which you can then shift the focus to a bigger keyword, ultimately moving closer and closer to ranking for your ultimate keyword in the long term. If its going to take two years to rank for a term like weight loss which will let your company make ten thousand dollars per day… wouldn’t it be smarter to rank for ten niche keywords earning you a thousand dollars a day and then have an entire year of that to rank for your big term and have the benefits of 11 income earning keywords, 10 of which have been earning you money every day for an entire year? I think you are finally now seeing the benefits of targeting small, so go out and search google for your favorite keyword tool and start doing keyword research to find the niches you can rank for in a lot shorter timeframe than trying to stick it out with your main keyword.

The New China Syndrome: USA DOD Uses Google To Foil Hackers?!

The China Syndrome has taken on a whole new meaning. Not a movie with pretty faces, not a nuclear meltdown of molten material ripping through the earth’s core; it’s now the threat of World War Three in the form of a Hacker War, conducted in cyber space, that could happen in the course of a second without anyone knowing anything had occurred.

Believe it or not…in 2001, the White House web site was completely shut down thanks to a hacker war launched by thousands of people in China, then joined by people from other countries including Saudi Arabia, India and Argentina. These hackers turned the Navy website’s home page into the blaring phrase, “I Am Chinese!” Over at the Labor Department the main page screamed, “China Hack”. The National Business Center was dealt the worst blow with the proclamation, “Beat down Imperialism of American! Attack anti-Chinese arrogance!” Imagine how devastating this could all be if these hackers’ English grammar were as accurate as their computer acumen!

So why do Chinese hackers show such disdain towards America? It all started with an American spy plane crashing into a Chinese jet. The American pilot walked away unharmed while the Chinese pilot died, escalating the tension between the two countries. Many believe China is working towards world dominance in the electronics arena and sees the United States as their premier competitor. In the years following this initial Cyber War of the World, China has launched close to 100,000 computer attacks against the US. In 2005 alone, The Pentagon logged more than 79,000 attempted intrusions with a whopping 1300 successes.

Are these invasions orchestrated by the Chinese Government or the general populace of China? The PLA (People’s Liberation Army), is the unified military organization of all land, sea, and air forces of the People’s Republic of China. For years, it is believed that the PLA outsources its hacking efforts to individuals who are the winners of hacking competitions held throughout China. In Sichuan province, one such winner uses the nom de guerre Wicked Rose. He, or she, went on to set up a hacking business that penetrated computers at a defense contractor for the United States aerospace division. Wicked Rose is believed to be employed by The PLA. There’s no definitive proof which allows the Chinese Government to comfortably deny any involvement.

So how has the United States responded to this cyber espionage? Three years after the 2001 incident, the U.S. Government assigned ONE person to investigate.(He knew nothing about intelligence; his only qualification was that he could read and write in Mandarin.) None-the-less, he managed to retrieve names, photos, cell phone numbers, and the software used by the leaders of the hacker assault, after just one day on the job, by typing in the Chinese characters for “hacker” into Google. How Mickey Mouse is that!

The China Syndrome and its new meaning has brought on a new division of terror to our modern world. It can shut down a major corporation, derail a bank, and above all, it could start a New World War that could change the face of this earth. And you could be innocently sleeping when it all happens.