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Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Using YouTube To Illustrate And Introduce PPC Services

I've spent the last few months changing my focus as a webmaster. I had thought my future earnings as a self-employed web content producer lay with AdSense. Sensing it was not going to happen, I now consider my self more into, and enjoying getting to grips with affiliate and search marketing. As a result I've had to invest a lot of time with pay per click advertising, or PPC as we henceforth shall call it, to give an impression of expertise.

Basically, PPC means you pay for every visitor you get - the idea being you only pay for interested visitors. It's fair to say you can quickly and easily lose your shirt if you do it wrong, and if you can get it right, you'll be making money with various degrees of success.

It's become an important tool in my arsenal and aid to my quest to be a self-sufficient webmaster. I've been spending a lot of time trying different services and advertising models the last 6 months. I've made a few boo-boos along the way, and done some good stuff as well. The pleasure of launching a finely tuned and spending-optimized campaign and watching the visits and money role in is sublime.

Or so I'm told, I hope one day I'll find that feeling. In the meantime I'll continue bumbling along and at least thinking my campaigns will perform like finely tuned engines, as my budget quickly drains away on an ill conceived broadmatch or badly implemented landing page.

Tip to all: Andrew Goodman's awesome book Winning Results With Adwords - life changing, your wallet will thank you.

Gratuitous YouTube Embedding Alert

Most of my focus has been on using Google's Adwords, but I've been using a few other models also. With my recent exposure in mind, I thought I would try to sum up my experiences and feelings about the PPC services through the medium of YouTube. I spent literally hours minutes scouring everyone's favourite video site to find that one clip that epitomised the services I've used. I was considering the whole experience, user interface, performance, niggles etc.

There are a few big services I haven't gotten around too yet - notably Yahoo's Search Marketing service and some others, but for your entertainment, here's the one's I have had a lot of time with recently.

Google Adwords - Gimme Gimme Gimme

There was another clip I was going to use of a crackhead chained to a lamp post, desperately clawing the ground to get to his crack just inches from his fingers. Instead I went for this - common sense goes out the window and nothing else matters. Gimme my AdWords hit, now!

MSN AdCenter - Shudder, Bump, Arrrgh!

I don't care how well it converts. Do some usability testing, infringe some patents, make it shiny. In the meantime, Red Dwarf sums up the feeling I get when I log on to AdCenter.

AdBrite - Get It Down You My Son

First your like a kid in a sweet shop, you gulp down the cheap treats. 100s of 30 cent recurring ads on targeted sites, then recoil in horror when you come to figure out that none of it converts and you now have hours of paper work unravelling all those fifteen pence recurring charges in you accounts. OK, so that's the direct advertising model, but the PPC is little better.

7Search - Hello! Is Anybody There?

No governor, I'm not doing arbitrage, really! Ok, so you set it all up and fire them off in hope of lots of cheap conversions. Then you wait, and you wait and wait until an old tramp unexpectedly appears in one of the frames and passes through without a care to the epic tones of Godspeed You Black Emperor.

Miva - Robotical Fun

Ok, so I've not tried them, but everywhere I've heard them mentioned it's been along the lines of you'll be fighting off the robots and not converting dick, allegedly.

And Finally...

So there we have it, my thoughts on some of the services I've tried out in recent times. But don't just take my jaded words for it - discover the joys of PPC for yourself, if you haven't already. If you already have, chances are you're too rich to be reading this blog anyway. If you've tried it and been unsuccessful, chances are that's you in the crackhead video, in which case, take the five dollars and put it into ringtones at AdWords.

Posted by Dio Bach at 10:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

Monday, January 08, 2007

Back On The Third Party Widget Train

Ah, the joys of playing with third party things on your blog. I've just removed the Performancing advert from the side bar. It was getting depressing seeing that big green 'Advertise Here' badge every time I visited. It's been there a few months - chance enough to do something and it didn't.

Something I've done on my last few blog redesigns is kill nearly all third party stuff. No chicklets, third party tracking, mapping things, widgets or any of that stuff. On a bad day I found those errant blog services could kill my blogs dead and cause lots of hangs and stuff. I got fed up and dropped the rows of coloured graphics and buttons in favour of a nice clean look.

Let's face it, some blogs have a gazillion plugins, you just don't know where to look. Forget the overhead of the loading times and that - the eyes can only take so much. If there's one thing we should thank Web 2.0 for, it's the nice clean pages with readable fonts you can actually look at without getting a migraine.

The Performancing thing was one step back down the widget road for me. Once again I'd seen it slow the loading of the page down and had it show how bereft of an audience I am - so it was time for a change. I think I have the Technorati code on the bottom as well. But that was it for third party (AdSense aand xtreme tracking excluded). I'm all into keeping it clean these days, except when it gets a bit dirty.

Joining The Flockers

Sheep, like a flock of them...I've been seeing a proliferation of new plugins and buttons recently that have piqued my interest - partly because of the calibre of people using them and partly because there are some nice link and contact building opportunities going begging.

So, for not the first time in my web career, after a lot of friction and fighting it, I've decided to join the rest of the flock and plunged in with a new parasitic SEO opportunity widget. In the place of the Performancing ad, I've gone and done the MyBlogLog thing.

Why I hear you ask? Well, seeing a few of my favourite SEO/SEM bloggers and WebMaster Radio regulars use it, I thought it was time to rub avatars with such favourites as Shoemoney, Gray Wolf, Danny Sullivan and many more. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me to stalk them connect sociably and see who's dropped in here.

And let's not forget - with all that interconnectivity going on from all these high profile places, it'll be an authority domain and spammed to bits before you know it.

Other blog meme widgets that have piqued my interest and are likely to get played with when I get a chance are LinkedIn and Tick Me. Must be a new me for 2007, what with trying all these fun 2.0 tools. Hell, at this rate, I may even go for a MySpace page that is actually me rather than the ones I have with all those fake pictures of lovely ladies on. But that's for another post...

Posted by Dio Bach at 11:01 PM 0 comments links to this post