Continue reading »]]> Anyone can create a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertisement. Sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and 7 Search are just a few.

In many cases these services attach a quality score to an Ad. This among other factors help decide positioning of the Ad.

In order to increase the click rate of your advertisement, craft a superior quality Ad. More visits to your website presents an oppertunity for more sales.

When I say superior, I mean better than a low quality advertisement. I also mean better than the competitions Ad. Badly written Ads can garner high impressions, but under 1% of those people are clicking through.

It doesn’t matter if it’s search traffic or content network traffic. You can tell your Ad is weak when thousands of people view it, and too small an amount visit your site.

If you’re this far along on the marketing path, then you should have a fair idea of howin demand your offering is.

But there is time tested techniques to use that improve the click rate. These have been employed by traditional marketers for decades. It’s hardly any different from todays online marketing.

People have used Pay Per Click to drive visits to their website for years. More often than not, it’s the quality of the advertisement that determined the amount of people coming back to their website.

At that point, it was up to the Advertiser to convert them into sales. This puts the control back into their hands.

With countless testing on variations, their now capable of writing high converting Ads. Some now offer this as a stand-alone service.

Do you want to know what these methods of improving quality score and click rates are?

When targeting a specific keyword or phrase, that’s what needs to be in the first line. Using the exact word the person is searching for. Thisshows precise relevance.

But just including the search word is not enough. It must be included properly in the Headline. The headline of course being the first line. It must sound like a normal sentence.

The description is usually two lines of text. Use these wisely to communicate the benefit of your offering. Clearly outline the features or value of your product or service. Again, use normal sentences.

Tell the person viewing the Ad what to do. Use a call to action. This is classicadvertising. Command them to click, call or visit. Directing the next action is the most powerful use of your advertisement. This should only be done on the last line of the description.Give them a price. Don’t make this a mystery . What do you have to hide? If you don’t, then you’re not confident in the pricing. It means you wouldn’t pay that for your own product. If the price is not right, you need to fix it.

Use these techniques however you want. Test various Ad layouts to see which brings the most clicks. Not only will it improve the quality of your advertisement, but it will surely boost the amount of interest in your product or service.

Continue reading »]]> This last month I have seen record earnings from Text Link Ads, both from referrals and from sold links. This has not only been a one off month but a trend of increasing earnings over the last few months. I am now up to about $400 per month from TLA alone.

This shows that Text Link Ads are not dead after Googles decision to penalise sites selling links. With the new Word Press Plug-in TLA have allowed you to customise how the links show on your site.

In light of this I have decided to run a competition, if you sign up for a free TLA account, I will give create a link from Earning from Affiliates to your site. TLA control panel allows me to view the names of people who have signed up. So if you sign up through the link below, then email me on office@earningfromaffiliates.com with the name you signed up with and the details of the link (URL and text) I will create a link for you on the links page.

This offer is worth over £50 ($100) per month as this is what I charge others for links on the site. In addition TLA will give you $100 worth of free links, as signing up for an account costs you nothing, you are getting $100 of paid links and a free link from this site.

Sign Up for a free Text Link Ads Account and win a link!

Continue reading »]]> If you have been in the Internet business for as long as I have I am sure like me you will have built up a whole range of domain names that you have parked away.

Some will have been bought for that brilliant idea you just haven’t got round to as yet, some will be domains you have bought speculatively in the hope they might be worth something, some maybe ones that clients no-longer wish to continue with and you have decided to keep hold of.

Perhaps more embarrassingly if you are like me some will have been bought when surfing while drunk, you wake up in the morning and that brilliant idea you had last night after a couple of bottles of wine just does not seem so good in the morning, but when you check your email through the fog of a hang over you can just about make out that invoice for the domain name you bought for your not so brilliant idea!

In all seriousness, I have built up a portfolio of domain names reaching into the thousands, some good and some not so good, most of which are just parked, so I thought why not make these pay? Even if that is only a few pounds per year at least they would pay for themselves covering the registration costs. This got me thinking about possible ways to monetise them, so here are my ideas, if you have anymore please do post a  comment. Indeed if you have a funny story about one of those not so great ideas please do post those too!

 1. Sedo or other Auction site – The option that sedo provides is actually a way of selling domain names, however many people use it simply as a parking service, you see you point your domain at sedo, add some details about a price you are looking for and then Sedo put pay per click adverts on the domain name, you get a cut of that revenue. The service is intended to sell the domains, however you can simply reject any bids and earn from the PPC. If that great bid happens to come in you can always decide to let it go.

2. Create your own ppc or affiliate landing page. Simply creating one static html page, put some PPC adverts or banner adverts related to the domains subject and leave it alone. You may want to track with Google analytics to see what people are searching for and custom your banners to them, but all I am doing is setting up those pages and leaving them. The aim of this is not to generate myself extra work, but to do something quick and simple that might drip some money in.

3. The final option that I can come up with requires some additional work but not much. If you have a merchant that provides a product data feed related to your domains subject, grab yourself a copy of AffiliStore (setup takes minutes), setup a data feed from a URL (which updates automatically). This will create an online store with all the products of the merchant. This advantage here is you are more likely to make commissions, but the disadvantages are that it takes a little longer to setup and also takes up more server resources if that is an issue.

With all of these I have decided to simply setup the sites or holding pages. I will not market them in anyway other than submitting them to search engines (which in most cases is already done). Then I will leave them until such a date that I decide to use the domains for something more productive.

In the mean time if each domain earns £5 per year, and yes my expectations are very low, then on the 2000 parked domains I have this will earn  10,000, this will cover the domain registration fees. If they earn any more then that will be great.

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> I am currently puzzled by what seems to be lost clicks. While running a PPC campaign on Google Adwords, I tend to track their performance in real time, or as near to real time as Google and the affiliate networks allow.

I have noticed that the clicks that Google Adwords reports differs from the clicks that the Affiliate Network reports.

Take Yesterday for example. I am running a PPC campaign on Google Adwords for an Affiliate on AffiliateWindow. Google Adwords reports 102 paid clicks, while AffiliateWindow reports only 89. So where have my lost clicks gone? Should these not be identical?

Thinking that this must be a one off, I checked other campaigns for Yesterday and then went back several days and I have noticed that there are regular discrepancies.

Research time I think!

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> I have been setting up some PPC campaigns on Adwords. I have been working with many 100’s of keywords.

What I tend to do is create my keyword lists externally then paste them into Adwords, however I have been coming up against a problem where it keeps rejecting wanting an ‘Online Pharmacy ID’

At first this was fairly intelligent; I has some keywords for some sweets called ‘sherbet tablets’ and it rejected the tables. I can understand this, and I have taken out those keywords.

When adding a number of keywords for clothing I came up against the problem again, this time rather more frustrating and not so easy to accept. I added a keyword of “Snugpak Pile Shirt” and guess what…? Yes it rejected the pil.

See the screen shot below, very very frustrating. Come on Google, we all know what you are trying to do here, but cant you become a little more intelligent about your algorithms?

Click image to see Screenshot

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> I applied to join Google Adsense for this site and what do you know I was rejected. Apparently this site does not meet their approval criteria… no other information than that. Seems to me rather a silly decision, firstly this is a site that looks at affiliate and online marketing, and reviews and recommends services which include the types of services Adsense offer.

My advice to you therefore can only be to recommend alternatives to Adsense, whom I can verify, and whose service I can test. Services such as:

Bidvertiser – Text ads

ClickSor - Text ads – $20 of free clicks when you sign up

Auction Ads- Earn from Ebay Auctions – they will give you $25 for simply signing up

Text-Link-Ads - Buy and sell text ads on your site, join now for $100 worth of free links

Adbrite - Text and Image ads

Adversal - Text Ads

Continue reading »]]> If you are running a Google AdWords campaign, you can make your ads targeted to your keywords using Googles keyword insertion tool.

In the title of your ad use:

 {keyword:}

This will insert the keyword that hit your ad and this will become the title of your ad. So if the user searched for Ford Mondeo your title would become ‘Ford Mondeo’

Of course you can make this more effective using something like:

 Buy {keyword:} now

 which using the above example of ‘Ford Mondeo’ will create an ad title of Buy Ford Mondeo now’.

 Another tip is to use a backup title or word in your keyword insertion, this is so that if the keyword is too long for the title or for some reason the keyword cannot be shown the default will be shown, for example:

Buy {keyword: a car} now

In this example if ‘Ford Mondeo’ can not be shown the ad title will become, ‘Buy a car now’.

You can also capitalise the first letters of the inserted keywords using:

Buy {KeyWord: } now

Note the capital K and W, which will create an ad title of ‘Buy Ford Monedo now’ rather than if you used:

Buy {keyword: } now

Which would create an ad title of ‘Buy ford mondeo now’

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> Tools for Generating Keywords

Before you start on your AdWords campaign you need to pay very close attention to the words that you are going to target. This is not as hit and miss as you may think as you will already have words that are obviously associated with your product or service and you can then use these to generate more. Wordtracker and Nichebot are two paid for subscription services that you can use to research keywords but there are also free services such as Keyword Discovery, Hit Tail and Wordtracker’s free tool, FreeKeyWords. Yahoo offered Overture but this is no longer supported and produces outdated data so best to be avoided. Of course Google offers a free keyword tool for AdWords as well, but I strongly recommend that you try several tools so you can gain a broader picture of the context within which you AdWords campaign is going to be operating.

A simpler and very effective method for generating keywords is to look at your competitors and see what they are using for their sites and especially the landing pages. If you take “mp3 download” as a search term you can then see what is ranking highly on the search results. Examining the pages of these high ranking sites will give you a wealth of keyword and key phrase data for complimentary search terms. Performing this manually is possible however time consuming and costly as a result. The answer is to use a comparison software tool such as IBP/Alexa which will run comparatives of your existing site against

the top ranking URL’s and identify the factors that are accounting for their high search engine rank and recommend steps for you to take. In relation to your AdWords campaign this will generate a large number of keywords and phrases with a relevant weighting that has been arrived at in an objective fashion and usefully presented.

Why should we be so concerned at generating different keywords for our AdWords campaign?

For a start think of the popularity of the keyword that first springs to mind with your product or service. If you are selling music downloads just consider how popular the terms “mp3” and “download” actually are and you will then gain an idea of the task in front of you to gain exposure. Not only does the very heavy search volume for these terms make them expensive ads you will also be competing with a myriad of other products and services offering themselves on the same page and revolving around these terms.

It makes sense to think laterally and move outside of the box. Here’s a good example of how a slight difference can make a huge impact. This is a search engine example rather than AdWords but the principle is the same. Place “supermarkets” in google.co.uk and you will see Sainsburys come up at the top of the page but if you drop the plural and place “supermarket” into Google you will see something very different – try it and see for yourself.

Mispellings

The point is that slight changes in the word you are using can dramatically affect the impact of how you appear. If there is a difference between singular and plural spellings, consider the differences between English and American spellings for your keywords. This is particularly relevant if you are a UK company selling to the North American market where there are not only different spellings but words also hold a different meaning – just consider the word “randy” and try not to snigger when you meet an American by that name.

Another consideration with selecting your keywords is to look at common misspellings of search terms. Many people do have an issue with their spelling and this is reflected in how they use a search engine. It is not only the deliberate misspelling that you should be considering but the vernacular that is being used by your target market so try this example with Google. Input “cars” and you will have a mainstream car search engine come up but try “carz” and you get something very different.

How Many Keywords Should You Use

Answering this question is rather like solving how long is a piece of string.

In setting the parameters for your AdWords campaign I believe in keeping a very tight rein on the number of keywords that are being used. AdWord campaigns tend to reap the greatest success when they are tightly focused on a relatively small number of carefully chosen keywords rather than simply using a shotgun scattering method that blows your marketing budget. By carefully monitoring the ROI on your campaign keywords you can change the balance of the keywords used and let your campaign evolve over it’s life.

How Does Google Match the Keywords?

Google provides four ways of using your keywords and though all are important I recommend you pay particular attention to the last – negative keywords.

Broad Match

This is Google’s default setting so if your ad group has within it the terms “mp3” and “download” then your ad will appear for any search that contains these terms no matter what order they are in and also a wide variety of variations. You may find your ad displayed if “upload” or “mp4” was used in the search term or anything that is broadly related to the keywords you have selected.

Phrase Match

This provides more control over when your ad will be displayed. If you use quotation marks and enter in your keywords “mp3 download” then your ad can be displayed when that phrase is used but not when “download mp3” is the search term nor when plurals or synonyms are used by the user.

Exact Match

This allows your ad to be displayed only when an exact match to your keywords is used. Placing brackets around the key phrase [mp3 download] will only allow the ad to be displayed when and only when “mp3 download” was the search term. If the user specifies other search terms or they are not in the right order then your ad will not be displayed so you can see immediately that this is the most targeted and focused tool for your campaign.

Negative Keywords

Now we have covered how Google is matching keywords but we are looking to maximise the click throughs that are from potential buyers of our product or service. This is where you need to be thinking outside of the box so consider the following.

Earlier we used an example “mp3 download” so it would seem obvious that we are going to be using “mp3” and “download” as two of our keywords. This means that if “download” appears in a search we may ave our ad placed up there in the hope of a click through. Sounds good except…..

What if the search used is “computer anti virus download” ?

Is someone looking for an anti virus download really a prospective customer for an mp3 download?

What if someone uses the search term “mp3 accessories” ?

Are we really looking to market a music download to someone who is actually looking for a new set of headphones?

The question becomes how to stop our ad from being displayed to searchers that are using a keyword we’ve specified but in fact have little prospect of clicking through and purchasing from our ad? The answer is to use negative words. Negative words act to block our ad from being displayed if one of the negative words we specify is used in the search.

So with our previous examples, if we input “-computer”, or “-accessories” in our AdWords keywords then the searches “computer anti virus download” and “mp3 accessories” would no trigger our ad display.

In short, negative keywords allow you to target you ads far more tightly and allow you to qualify your traffic to a much larger extent than simple keyword matching and this will avoid wasting your PPC budget.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads