Internet Marketing

You know that a company has a corner on the market when people refer to pay per click advertising as Adwords campaigns.

This is a testimony to the Google empire. But make no mistake about it. Google Adwords may be the biggest game in town but they’re not the only game in town. And unless they start easing up on advertisers, there is a good chance that Google may very well be knocked off their thrown.

This article is going to point out the problems with Google Adwords that may very well lead to their downfall.

As what usually happens when a company gets big is that they get too big for their own good and think that they can do and get away with just about anything.

That may hold true for a while, but anybody who thinks that a giant can’t be knocked off its thrown, better take a look at what happened to AT&T and IBM. They are both no longer the monopoly that they once were. And in the case of IBM, they’re not even number 1 anymore.

The first problem with Google pay per click that is really getting advertisers annoyed is their rule that you can no longer send customers to a sales page that isn’t yours. Well, you could, but you won’t get very far. Turns out that they really penalize you heavily if all you’re doing is sending people to a landing page of somebody else’s product as an affiliate.

The reason, they say, is because when they allowed this, customers would click on ads and each one would take them to the same page. This was ticking off customers so Google had to put a clamp on landing pages for affiliate products. This has driven costs for some keywords through the roof.

Another problem with Google is how strictly they hold you to the targeting of keywords and the pages they apply to. It is quite understandable if you are targeting keywords that don’t at all apply to the pages you are sending customers to, but when Google thinks that a keyword maybe only slightly applies, they’re going to hammer you almost as hard as if the keyword didn’t apply at all.

Take a look at some of your campaigns and check out the keywords that you “thought” were perfectly acceptable. Many of them are now costing 10 to 100 times what your other keywords are costing.

And finally, let’s be honest, Google is not all that easy to use and master. That’s the reason why there are so many books written on the subject. It takes an awful lot of study to get Google pay per click to work efficiently.

Many people simply don’t have that kind of time and ultimately give up on their Google campaigns, especially after they’ve been slapped. That’s a term used to apply to the act of turning your keyword costs into yesterday’s filet mignon.

As more and more people get fed up with Google because of high click costs, they will slowly turn to the other engines like Yahoo and MSN. After a while, Google will realize that they’re not the only game in town.

Filed under: Google by Craig

There are a lot of scams floating around the Internet for sure, but in defense to paid surveys, they’re not scams.

They’re just not very good for earning any kind of real income on the Internet. Well, I thought it was about time that somebody set the record straight about these paid survey sites and the programs that sell information on paid survey sites. I think after reading this, scam or not, you’ll probably want very little to do with doing paid surveys online.

First off, let me explain just what paid surveys are for those who haven’t heard of them yet. Paid surveys are just as they sound. You sign up with a site and they send you a survey on some topic. It could be your shopping habits, your job, your dating preferences and a number of various topics. For each survey that you fill out, the company will pay you for doing so. On paper, this sounds really great. However, the reality of these surveys is a different matter altogether.

For starters, you just don’t get to take a survey. You have to first qualify for them. To do this, you have to fill out a questionnaire, which sometimes even longer than the survey you have to take. This questionnaire will ask you things like your age, sex and employment status. After you fill in the questionnaire, you will then get a message informing you of whether or not you even qualify for the survey. And therein lies the rub of this whole business.

When I first got online, paid surveys was one of the first things I tried. I quickly learned that many of the surveys are geared towards people other than myself. In other words, I didn’t qualify. I spend countless hours filling out questionnaires and never even got to take a survey. It was quite frustrating. Finally, when I did qualify for a survey and took it, what I got paid was a joke. And therein lies the final rub on surveys.

Each survey site has a different pay structure so this will have to be a general description. For the most part, the payment is about $5 for a survey that takes about 30 to 60 minutes to complete. Sometimes it’s as little as $2 and some sites don’t pay you in money at all. What they do is give you what they call credits.

Sometimes the credits they give you are quite considerable, on the surface. But then you go to cash them in and you see the exchange rate from credits to cash is something like 1000 credits gets you $10. Usually it takes about 10 surveys to make those 1000 credits. When you compute the number of hours it took you to make that $10 it comes out to less than $1 per hour. Yes, it’s pretty bad.

Technically, you can make money with paid surveys, so they aren’t technically a scam. However, the amount of work that goes into doing this is considerably more than you are going to make, and that is if you even qualify for the surveys. In the meantime, you’re receiving all this junk email of offers because of being signed up with these sites, which is the real reason they want you in the first place.

So, if you’re looking to make any kind of decent money online, stay away from paid survey sites.

Even if they ARE legit.

Filed under: Make Money Online by Craig

No matter what business you’re in, you need to know how to write effective ads or you’re not going to get people to your site.

The mystery of effective ad writing has eluded many people since the beginning of the printed word. The truth is, there is really no big secret to it. This article will unravel the mystery for you and give you the basic things you need so that you will be able to write effective ad copy with a little practice.

Probably the most important part of the ad is the subject. Without a compelling subject, people are not going to read your ads, especially if they are email ads. You need to be outrageous. You need to be different. Don’t be afraid to use subjects like “Martians Have Landed And They’ve Captured YOUR Business” or something crazy like that. Also, if you are using autoresponders, use the person’s name in the subject. People like to be referred to personally. This is a big thing with getting people to read your ads.

In the body of your ad you want to start out by introducing yourself. Make it personal. People want to get to know you so that they can trust you. If you start off with a sales pitch, they’re just going to tune you out. You have to get their trust first. Then you can give them your pitch down the road.

The next thing you want to do is tell them how you can help them. Tell them YOUR story. Stories sell. Explain to them how you were going through the same thing that they are going through now until you came up with a solution to the problem. Then, tell them what this solution is. Explain how it will help them by pointing out the benefits.

Next thing you want to do is assure them that they have nothing to worry about. Point out the guarantee. It’s a lot easier to promote a product that has a guarantee with it. Explain to them that if they are not completely satisfied with their purchase within however many days or months, that they can get a full refund on their purchase.

The next thing you want to do is tell them about all the bonuses that they will get if they order now. Explain to them that these bonuses are only going to be available for a limited time and if they don’t act fast they may lose out on them. Fear is a great motivator. If people think they will lose out on something they are more likely to act.

The next thing you want to do is offer testimonial proof if you have it. If people see that others have been satisfied with whatever it is that you’re selling, they will be more inclined to make a purchase. This is just one more thing to reinforce a feeling of trust.

Finally, tell them that if they have any questions at all they can contact you and you’ll be happy to help them. This further gains their trust.

Writing ad copy is not rocket science. If you follow the basic steps that I have outlined, you should have no trouble writing ad copy that converts.

Filed under: Internet Advertising by Craig

This is another one of those articles where I need to put a disclaimer up at the top or people are going to start running off to creating web sites for people looking for lawyers to bail them out of the drunk tank somewhere in Austin Texas or sites promoting auto insurance quotes.

So here’s the disclaimer. Take it for what it’s worth to you. The rates you are about to see in this article are NOT the rates that you are going to get paid whenever somebody clicks on your Adsense ads for these niches. This is what the advertiser is paying and Google will take a good chunk of it. Okay, now that we have that out of the way, just how do we find the top paying keywords for Adsense?

There are actually three ways to do this. The first way is simply to go to the Google Adwords site and use their traffic estimator. You’ll of course have to have a list of keywords to start with, but by simply plugging them in, you’ll see what Google estimates as your average cost per click as an Adwords advertiser.

Of course this really only gives you some idea of what you’ll actually get paid, as like I said, Google is going to take a healthy chunk of this money. Plus, this is the going rate for search sites and not content sites, which are generally lower. So it’s not unusual that a keyword that costs $30 only brings the Adsense click a buck or two.

The next way to find the top paying keywords for Adsense is to go to the Google search engine itself and type in any keyword or keyword phrase that you’re interested in. After you do this, look to the right of the page at how many paid ads there are. If there are a lot of paid ads for that keyword or keyword phrase, that means there is a lot of competition for those keywords.

More competition means higher cost per clicks. Of course this is all relative to the niche you’re targeting. So if you want to get an exact dollar figure, you can go to the Google traffic estimator and plug that keyword in to see what the actual amount is.

The third way to find the top paying keywords for Adsense is to go back to the search engine and type in the phrase “how to find top paying keywords for Adsense.” You are quite likely to find a number of sites that have already done this research for you and have listed the top paying keywords.

The problem with these lists is that some of these sites don’t update regularly, so you don’t know how accurate these figures are. Therefore, you have to be careful with these lists. Always double check with Google.

There is no rocket science to doing this. If you’re really hung up on doing this, you can buy something like Keyword Elite and find all the high paying keywords you want. It may very well be worth your time, depending on how many sites you plan to put up.

Filed under: Adsense by Craig

Email advertising, in spite of what many people think, is not dead. However, the art of writing effective email ad copy seems to be dying a slow death.

Seems that most of the email ads I get in my in box are nothing but junk and very poorly written. Hopefully, this article will alert you to some of the do’s and don’ts of writing email ad copy so that you actually have a snowball’s prayer of making a few sales. If I have accomplished that much, then I have done my job.

The first thing that people do wrong with their ad copy is write subjects that are full of hype. People are sick and tired of the “Make $30,000 in 30 Days” subjects. They know they’re nothing but hype and simply chuck them in the trash. Also, the subjects like “You’ve Been Paid” are really ticking people off because when they open them and realize that they haven’t been paid, they just chuck them in the trash in anger.

You want your subjects to be original, not full of hype, but interesting. Don’t be afraid to use subjects like “There’s Something About Your Site That You MUST Know” People are going to wonder. What is it about my site? Is there a problem with it? Did I do something wrong? Is it even still on the Internet? These kind of subjects are going to invoke curiosity without resorting to hype or outright deceptive headlines. Be original but be honest.

In the body of your email you don’t want to hit people with a sales pitch right away. You want to take some time for them to get to know you. Tell them your story. Heck, start them off with a joke. Don’t be so darn serious all the time. You know what they say, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Keep it light, but get the point across.

One very big problem that people have when writing email ad copy is that they don’t pay attention to spam trigger words. You can’t load up your emails with words and phrases like “make money” or “guaranteed income.” These phrases and words will trigger off the spam filters on many email accounts and your ad will ultimately not even get delivered. So run your ad through a spam checker. There are plenty of free ones online. They’re all basically the same. Just pick one and use it.

Finally, you don’t want your email ad copy to come off as an infomercial. You want to write like you speak. People are so tired of the sales pitch. If you communicate with them in a way that makes you sound sincere, you have a much better shot at converting them to paying customers than if you spout out garbage like “You too can live the life of a millionaire with our easy 3 step system guaranteed to…”

Got the picture?

Honesty goes a long way in business as in life. Write an email ad that is honest and not full of hype and there is no reason why you can’t have a successful email ad campaign.

Filed under: SEO by Craig

There are a lot of evil people in the world who pray on those of us who are simply trying to make an honest living from home. Unfortunately, our desperation to earn an income drives us to try just about anything.

That’s when we are most open to falling victim to some of the most horrible work from home scams that you could possibly imagine. While there are way too many of them to go over in this article, I hope to give you a general idea of what to look out for. Hopefully, this information will keep you from getting taken in.

Most work at home scams actually come in the form of emails that we receive. The details vary, but are usually very sketchy. The person will start raving about this work at home opportunity that sounds just too good to be true. Usually, it will involve processing emails. Now trust me, nobody is going to pay you just to process emails.

But okay. Anyway, they go on to say that all you have to do is send $20 to get your kit. Well, to make a long story short, what you end up doing is sending out the same email that you just got. That’s right. It’s no real job. You’re just trying to get people to send you $20 so you can tell them how to get others to do the same. This racket has been going on for a long time. Eventually, somebody will put a stop to it.

Another popular work from home scam is the “data entry” scam. This one is very cleverly disguised and many people fall for it. You’ll receive an email telling you how you can get paid to do data entry right from the comfort of your own home. They will then send you to a web site that explains the whole process.

Basically it will tell you that all you have to do is fill in a few forms and get paid. They then tell you that to find out what companies pay you for doing this all you have to do is send them some amount of money, and it varies.

Anyway, here is the rub. These are not data entry jobs. All they are doing is sending you instructions on how to use Google Adwords to sell Clickbank products. This is not even close to a data entry job, as they so put it. Many people fall for this and actually attempt to go through the process, many losing a ton of money because Google Adwords is not for the timid.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. As I said, there are many scams. So how can you tell if something is a scam? You really can’t until you actually try it. However, here is a basic guideline that I use. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Also, if you have no way of contacting the company or person, then they probably are running a scam. If you do contact them and they don’t respond to your questions, again, most likely it is a scam. Use your common sense. If something sounds fishy, stay away.

Filed under: Make Money Online by Craig

Nowadays it is not easy to find a quality directory with useful resources. There are just too many directories out there which get you confused as which ones can improve your online presence. On the other hand Fabulous Links Web Directory is one strong directory. The hompepage of the directory is a Google PageRank 5 which is pretty impressive.

The Directory even has good articles along with listing resourceful sites. You can have a look at the E-books and Tutorials section. The Fabulous Links Web Directory also has its own ‘Bid Directory’ which you can checkout as well.

Filed under: Directories by Craig