Read Your SPAM Comments
SPAM is annoying, but it can also be a good source of information for you as a PPC marketer. One of my other blogs got flooded with new SPAM comments that Askimet did not pick up. But instead of just deleting I used the SPAM subject line and punched it into Google. You can tell these guys are pro’s – first of all they bypass Askimet SPAM protection and then it seems like these are actually pretty good keywords for PPC traffic. No, I am not talking about cheap Viagra SPAM or so – but keywords for credit card offers and car insurance. I checked the Google Adwords keywords tool and the keywords show decent search volume – but not many competitors. This will not give you an entire campaign, but it can be a good way to start building out a new campaign. 
Content Writing
I have not blogged in a while – affiliate marketing is keeping me busy. I started outsourcing some of my work – including content writing. In the past I had used writers from the Digitialpoint.com forums, but that forum has become the trash place in regards to quality and I am not visiting there anymore. A friend of mine recommended to try the Sitepoint.com Forum’s Marketplace. I decided to post a “wanted” ad for a content writer – that was 3 weeks ago. I know have 2 content writers working for me and I am really happy with the results. The quality of the content is good. It’s not perfect, but the quality is really good – nothing compared to the crap I have gotten in the past. One writer is from Canada and she charges only $5.00 per article and works fast. The other writer charges $8.00 per article and again – the quality is good.
But here comes the kicker – apparently the Sitepoint.com Market place is mirrored somewhere else and that increases the ad distribution. I am still getting applications – even from people who have written for the NY Times before. Of courses prices vary, but overall if I wanted I could now employ 10-15 quaity writers and no one would charge more than $8.00 per article.
So, if you need content writers on the cheap and still want quality – use the Sitepoint.com Forum’s Market Place.
I am at PPC Summit
I am currently at PPC Summit in Los Angeles, California. I was not sure what to expect from this event. I was hoping for maybe 10% new stuff, but at the end of the first day I have to say that the stuff I learned today is by far exceeding my expectations. Really good stuff that I will try to implement as soon as I get back home.
There were great sessions about landing page optimization and MSN Adcenter as an example. Another great session was about how to write ad copy that can help to increase the click through rates dramatically. The speaker showed a few things that were dramatic eye openers. Some people in the audience did not get it and it was way over their head, but the majority felt the same way I did – awesome stuff to try out.
I will write a little more about it in the next few days. I still have to review the first day and update my notes while the knowledge is fresh.
John McCain called me …
… and I hung up on him. Hey, don’t call me during nap time with my son. I’d love to take afternoon naps with my 3 year old son and I hate it when I get disturbed. On the other side – hey, thanks John. Those Sarah Palin keywords work awesome in my PPC campaigns. 
I really like her a lot – so many people are doing searches for her name and all kinda weird stuff related to that. The only bad thing is that it won’t last for too long, but that is fine. I take whatever comes along to give my PPC campaigns a boost. Just don’t expect me to vote for her (or John McCain) because of that …! I don’t think John McCain is the best choice to be president from an Internet Marketer perspective – at least from what I have seen so far. He promised “change” – let’s wait and see what he has in store for us.
It was quiet here for a few weeks because I was knee-deep in PPC campaigns, keyword research, landing page building, yada yada yada, but it seems like taking some time off from blogging was exactly what I needed. Once things stabilize I will write more about PPC marketing and the blog will probably see a shift towards that direction. Stay tuned.
Google Quality Score – Beat it up
I was playing with a new PPC campaign last night. I had designed a new landing page and was confident that I would get a good quality score. Man, was I wrong. The results were so disappointing that I deleted the entire campaign right away. I made a few changes this evening and boy, did that change things. I think the findings will help for sure to improve future landing pages and quality score ranking for me. Here is what I changed:
- DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion): I have been using DKI before, but now I doubled the number of how often the keyword would be displayed on the page.
- Keywords in Ads: I broke down my Adwords campaign into smaller chunks and now every ad group had keyword matching ads. I was too generic before.
- I added about 10 unique articles to the website as before the website was build from a CSV based data feed from the merchant (= duplicate content)
- I made the landing page load 2 seconds faster by manipulating the header image file size.
After these changes I re-uploaded the campaign and the quality score across the board is “great” with a majority of my minimum bids being $0.03 and $0.04 and only a small fraction being $0.05. Using SpeedPPC helped to make the changes to the campaign extremely painless. So, I am quite happy with the results. I think the 2 items that pushed this campaign up were the unique content the ads containing the keywords whenever possible.
Workload
Currently I am working hard on several affiliate marketing related projects. I hope that the next 5-6 days will shows some really interesting results. I am really looking forward to this. I have done a lot of keyword research and are now building a website for this product I am trying to promote accordingly. I got a great landing page ready for testing and I hope that this project will be able to bring in some great cash-flow.
How do I build my websites? I use Wordpress and the revolution themes. I do have a licensed copy of the developer pack and therefore have great options for almost any niche I am tackling. I build all my sites with SEO in mind as well and therefore spend about 2-3 hours customizing a website before loading the content. So, even if a PPC project does not work out as anticipated, often SEO comes into play and the websites start generating a small cash-flow 3-4 months down the road. They also gain some value that I could use and sell them on the open market, but I have not sold many websites lately as I see potential with them for my own portfolio. One thing I know and I am pretty sure about it, is that I will go back and revisit certain projects over time and that I have several websites where monetization started working 6-12 months later. One of my goals is still self-employment and I know once I have enough recurring income going that I will also have better resources to re-vitalize some projects. At that point I have aged websites that represent a great infrastructure.
Even if I would not become full-time self-employed, these website represent value which I can sell at one point if I wanted to. Currently my portfolio of websites is probably worth somewhere between $40K and $50K – maybe $10K less or maybe $10K more. You get the idea.