Joel with guest Eric Holmlund

Dan Nickerson is on vacation, so today I was joined by my friend and joint venture partner, Eric Holmlund.

We answered a bunch of questions about Internet marketing and played with our toys.

Our sponsor for this week was KeywordExcavator.com

Enjoy the show!

The Impact Factor

Several years ago, I had the privilege of meeting a gentleman who I have sinced dubbed "The nicest guy in Internet marketing."

His name is Ken McArthur and he is the chief architect behind the highly successful JV Alert Live conferences.

You see, Ken is incredibly successful because he continually pours himself into the lives of those around him.

Whether it launching

I Hurt My Back

I was helping my wife clean out the closet yesterday and I've got a feeling I didn't pick up a box correctly.

Yesterday afternoon, my lower back began hurting... all the way down at the base of my spine.

I tried heat. I tried ointment. I tried advil.

I managed to sleep through the night without any trouble, but man am I hurting today!

Selling Online Subscriptions Summit, Flint McGlaughlin demonstrated the fallibility of marketing intuition with three recent case studies. Before presenting the results from our optimization tests, he asked the audience to pick the winners. Each time, the majority of the crowd selected the page that underperforme

Time for some spring cleaning on that landing page

One of my favorite “Flintisms” is a warning against “unsupervised thinking.”

In essence, it means that when a visitor gets to your landing page, it should be easy to find what they really want. Make sure they know they’re on the right site, and don’t obscure what they came for. Think Alice, always keeping that Brady house in order.

Simple, right?

Not so fast.

Our TSS team was recently brainstorming

Coming up: Tips and tactics for selling subscriptions online

If you manage a subscription website and are looking for ways to boost results, here's your chance to get insights from your peers and experts in the industry.

Next week, I'll be blogging from the

Quick takeaways from our eCommerce website optimization clinic

I hope you were able to join us for yesterday's Web Clinic on optimizing eCommerce websites. It was a lively, actionable session and we were sifting through attendee comments all morning.

(NOTE: Subscribe to our free MarketingExperiments Journal and you'll be notified by email when our Web Clinic content is posted online.)

Our optimization experts -- Flint McGlaughlin, Jimmy Ellis and Aaron Rosenthal -- plowed through a series of research-tested concepts, best practices a

MarketingExperiments' optimization advice produces results

overview of the 2008 Subscription Summit, with plenty of ideas and strategies for Web publishers -- including a top-six list with items such as ad sales vs. subscriptions, Web 2.0 and more.

Meanwhile

Wrap-up notes from the 2008 Subscription Summit

We all know how hard it can be to get caught up after a conference. Consider me guilty as charged. The 2008 Subscription Summit was packed with activity and information, and it's been a challenge distilling it into blog-sized chunks.

Fortunately, our colleagues at MarketingSherpa have just posted an outstanding overview of the 2008 Subscription Summit, with plenty of ideas and strategies for Web publishers -- including a top-six list with items such as ad sales vs. subscriptions, Web 2.0 and more.

Meanwhile

Want A Free Pass to Pay Per Click Summit?

Think you have the best search marketing strategy? PPC Summit is calling all Internet marketers to submit your proven technique or strategy that helped increase your conversions. Winner gets a FREE PASS to PPC Summit. Take note: the deadline is May 12th! Just answer these two questions to enter: Question #1: What Increased Your Search Marketing ROI ...]

Check This Out! Identify Unique Conversion Actions with Google AdWords

On April 18th, the AdWords blog announced the inclusion of a new feature in the conversion tracking tool-set. This new feature gives advertisers the ability to customize conversion reporting with conversion types, otherwise known as Actions. Instead of tracking conversions as a cumulative total, advertisers can now track various actions independent of each ...]

Blog News Roundup – 5/7/2008

Need to project how your PPC campaigns are performing? Try KoMarketing new PPC calculator tool available for download. It’s an excel document that allows you to enter values for various metrics within your PPC campaign and it will help you project whether or not your PPC campaign will be profitable. Want to double conversions in ...]

Has Google’s Display URL Policy Affected You Yet?

Hat-tip to Stuart Brown for the “Google is a Giant Robot” Image Back in February we announced Google’s intention to change their Display URL policy. Well, more accurately, their intention to strictly enforce policies they’ve had for some time! In the weeks that followed, Google made it’s own announcement and other sites ...]

Your Contact Form Might Be Hurting Your PPC Campaign

Beyond your keywords, ad text, and your landing page, the engine that drives your PPC campaign is your contact form (if you’re generating leads). If your contact form isn’t geared toward your core audience, and if it’s not requesting the appropriate amount of information, then you’re shooting yourself (and your PPC campaign) in the foot. Most ...]

PPC News Roundup – 5/13/2008

“You just launched your PPC campaign, now what?”, says Shimon Sandler. Shimon gives excellent ideas for a post launch PPC process. We use some of these ideas here at Hanapin Marketing and they truly enhance the quality of our PPC campaigns and customer satisfaction. Take it from the Multivariate Testing Expert, Jonathan Mendez, as he gives ...]

PPC Hero Readers Are Winners!

The results from the PPC Summit Best Practices & Successful Strategies Contest are in, and one of our very own readers has won! The winner is Sterling Simpson from AbeBooks.com. Sterling has won a free pass to either PPC Summit San Francisco (May 19-20) or Los Angeles (Sept. 25-26). Way to go Sterling! Just for participating ...]

“My Change History” Tool Soon to Add Account Performance Charts

I just got an update from my Google rep about the addition of account performance graphs that are going to be added in the next few weeks in the ‘my change history tool’. These new additions will show you how changes you make to your account effect your account performance. “These graphs will give ...]

Increase Customer Retention with Simple Social Networking

If you’ve sat in a marketing meeting lately you may have heard the ever evolving question of online marketing today, “How can we add social networking to our site?” Google may have mastered a way to do this, and it’s a very simple process. It’s a new program my Google rep emailed us today called, ...]

A Quick Review & Expansion on “Best Paid Search Practices”

Whenever the PPC Hero team attends a webinar or an actual real-life seminar, listens to a podcast, or reads a case study/white paper, we like to share a summary of what we’ve learned, a critique on the information provided, and additional resources for further research. I recently read “Paid Search Best Practices: 10 Tips to ...]

Why isn’t Google Ad Manager affiliate and AdSense publisher friendly?

When Google Ad Manager was announced, one of the places it was showcased was on the Google AdSense official blog, touted as a great ad management solution for publishers. It is supposed to be a great way to mix AdSense with non-AdSense and to be used as a testing tool for publishers… the key is ...]

Google launches Google Ad Manager for publishers

If you have been wanting to run an ad server for testing AdSense or simply to just better manage your ad inventory and available placements, you are in luck. Google has launched their new Ad Manager platform, a “hosted ad management solution”. It is free for publishers (at least it is as of now), although ...]

Is your site content compliant with Google AdSense?

AdSense Optimization Boot Camp Tip #8 I have just returned from Search Engine Strategies New York where I spoke on two panels, one of them being an AdSense & Contextual Advertising site clinic. In this, we go and look at websites volunteered by audience members to be reviewed. And most of the time, Bryan Vu from ...]

Are your AdSense ads too blended?

AdSense Optimization Boot Camp Tip #9 A few years ago it was the latest thing to start blending AdSense ads by matching the ad units border and background color with the background of the site. People started trying it to increase CTR and slowly, seeing garishly styled ads slowly disappeared except on sites that needed to ...]

Supplementing AdSense with affiliate ads

AdSense Optimization Boot Camp Tip #10 It doesn’t cease to amaze me how many publishers are so concerned about their AdSense revenue - especially when it is the most significant portion, if not all, of their income - that they don’t dare use anything else on the page in case “Google gets mad”. Well, fortunately for publishers, ...]

Using Pepperjam Network with Google Adsense

Looking at affiliate programs that you can easily use to supplement your AdSense income, Pepperjam Network is one of the newer affiliate networks on the block, although Pepperjam has been around the search industry for quite some time. And if you frequent the many search engine conferences, you have probably seen Kris Jones speak before, ...]

Using Clickbooth as an AdSense alternative

This is the second affiliate program I am having a look at as part of the Supplementing AdSense with Affiliate Ads article I wrote. Up on deck today is Clickbooth, which has been getting a lot of buzz recently in the blogosphere. I first heard about them a while back, and a couple people recommended them as a good compliment ...]

Massive delay updating AdSense stats today

Before you start panicking when you login to your trusty AdSense account only to discover you have about 2% of the earnings you would expect for this time of day, Google seems to be experiencing a massive delay in updating their stats. So when you see $2.87 when you would should be seeing something like $130, ...]

So how are your AdSense link units performing?

If you wanted to see how your link units were performing on a site or a page, you used to have to tag them with a seperate channel, but the results were skewed because there were impressions on the site and impressions once the actual page of link units was displayed. Google has just updated their ...]

How to set up an alternate ad for AdSense

AdSense Optimization Boot Camp Tip #11 I have had a few people comment and email about how to set up an alternate ad for AdSense when I talked about Supplementing your AdSense income with affiliate ads, the instructions Google provides aren’t completely clear. So here is how to set up your own alternate ad for AdSense, so that ...]

Online Advertisement: From Spam to Art

After a decade of dealing with online marketing, I keep noticing clear differences between online and offline advertisements. In most cases, offline advertisements feature a variety of creative ideas, subliminal messages and twisted concepts, while online advertisements are generally more aggressive and straightforward. One of the unfortunate but most common attributes of online marketing is spam. No matter how hard we try to

Efficiency Versus Entertainment

In one of my earlier posts I wrote about the new search engine SearchMe.com, which has been available in Beta mode for some time now. In my post I've touched upon two innovative features this search engine was going to employ: visual fluidity and relevancy by niche. I remember myself being quite excited by these new user experience concepts. After using SearchMe.com, I've come

Q&A with Sanjay: Episode 4

Episode 4 of Q&A with Sanjay reveals to Affiliates, online marketers and webmasters what the best source of search arbitrage traffic is. You can calculate everything from conversion rates to keyword price differences, but if Affiliates and publishers can't find the best source of traffic to purchase, then no PPC search engine or Affiliate program will accept it. So here it is - the best source of search arbitrage traffic revealed...! If you have a question you’d like Sanjay to answer, feel free to fill out our contact fo

MySpace is No Longer Mine

Why I am closing my account on MySpace

Built in & Superimposed

How often do we face the manifestations of the so-called "user friendly"? How often do we actually need it?

Search Me Changes the SEO Balance

We are all of us blinded by Google, the set standard for the online search industry. So when new developments occur outside the Google-sphere, my interests start getting piqued. I have recently come across a new search engine called Search Me – an innovative web resource that, while not up and running yet, has unveiled the main principle it will operates on – visual fluidity and relevancy by niche. The most exiting feature of this search engine is the way it delivers the searc

Facebook Marketing

In this video I will share my thoughts about easy way to get extra benefits for your online business using your Facebook account. Making virtual friends, communicating with them and creating a group related to your online services will help you attract additional traffic to your online resource.

Pay-Per-Click Industry: What's Going On?

In the following video I am talking about the situation in the Pay-Per-Click field. What are the problems, solutions and indicators?

100% Natural

Q&A with Sanjay: Episode 3

Episode 3 of Q&A with Sanjay provides a brief explanation of the difference between CTR (click-through rate) and conversion rates, and what it means to web publishers and online advertisers. If you can learn to optimize and read these two stats well, you'll be able to drastically increase your PPC search engine traffic and earnings. If you have a question you’d like Sanjay to answer, feel free to fill out our contact form. We look forward to hearing from you!.

A Press Release is NOT a PR Campaign

Article explaining how an effective online PR campaign is a lot more than a simple press release. There’s a pretty common misconception (especially on the Web where press releases are booming) that one press release alone is supposed to bring massive exposure, traffic, and links. Well sorry folks. In the vast majority of cases, that’s just not how it works!...

Google Global Video Guide

Our good friend Vittorio over at Tech Savvy Marketer has created a video tutorial on the installation and usage of the new Google Global Firefox extension we recently released. For all of you have have emailed asking how to install the extension and how to use the extension once it is installed, this should answer all of your questions.

Seasons Greetings To All

RedFly LTD would like to wish every single one of our readers, friends and especially clients the very best tidings to you and your loved ones this festive season. Be good and enjoy the celebrations.

Dublin SEO, SEM & Webmaster Meetup

The stage has been set and flights to Dublin from most European and domestic locations are fully booked. The first annual Dublin webmaster, SEO, Designer and webworker meetup will take place on Saturday the 9th of February. This is an event that will certainly go down in the history books. Ireland’s web workers have long ...]

7 Tips For Finding & Expanding Your Negative Keywords

A detailed how to guide on building an effective negative keyword list for your PPC campaigns to improve CTR and increase conversion rate and quality score using some known and some little known methods for negative keyword research.

How Too Many Press Releases Can Damage Your Credibility

As an online PR consultant, there are a few questions I repeatedly get from webmasters and online entrepreneurs. One of those common questions is how many press releases a company should send (weekly, monthly, more?). I always give the same answer: Send a press release whenever you have something newsworthy to say.

The Desktop Analytics Package Of Your Dreams

Details about the fantastic new up and coming Google analytics desktop version build in Adobe Air.

The Irish Blog Awards - Best Blog from a Journalist

The 2008 Irish blog awards are to be held on the 1st of March at 7.30pm in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin. This is a non profit event and al proceeds will go to charity. RedFly will be sponsoring the best journalist category. We hope to see you there.

Use PPC To Dominate Your Typo SEO Landscape

PPC advertising is not only great for generating sales and qualified traffic, it’s also the BEST possible keyword research tool available. While other keyword research tools offer a general “starter” set of keywords in most verticals, most only give general words and without demographic information. PPC data can be used for a whole lot more ...]

Take The Guesswork Out Of PPC Campaign Setup

As we grow and take on more and more clients as well as consult with smaller clients, there has been one very alarming trend that we have noticed. The majority of business owners coming to us asking us to “fix” or “improve” their PPC campaigns all arrive with their accounts in the same state. Poorly ...]

Google Sitelinks Explained

Selected web sites have been given Sitelinks on Google search result pages since awhile ago. Google Sitelinks are links that appear directly underneath the search result of a site and are determined by Google’s algorithms. Currently, Sitelinks are only shown for top search results. Google usually shows 2 to 8 Sitelinks for a site. Google usually gives ...]

Google Adwords Enforcing Display URL Policy

Adwords is to strictly enforce a new policy to all advertisers for using display URL starting from 1 April 2008, as announced in this post of Inside Adwords Blog. With the display URL policy, Adwords will no longer allow certain exceptions which will include, but will not be limited to redirects and vanity URLs, regardless ...]

Adsense Adding Previous and Next Browsing Feature

Google recently added the “Next and Previous” buttons to its contextual ad units. Now visitors are not restricted to view only one single set of ads (say normally 4 ads per set), but they can browse through all the ads by using the buttons. For advertisers who are running Adwords content-targeting ads, this may already have ...]

Using Demographic Bidding to Improve Adwords Campaign ROI

When you are running a site-targeted (performance-targeted) campaign on Google Adwords, Demographic Bidding is a tool that provides the options to target by gender, age, annual household income, or ethnicity. At the same time, it is also a tool to exclude certain undesirable demographics that have been causing low ROI. Select Demographics Choose the audience you want ...]

Adwords Updating Trademark Policy in UK and Ireland

Google is updating its Adwords trademark policy in UK and Ireland that will allow any relevant ads from any advertisers to be triggered by trademarked keywords, which previously was forbidden. This new policy will be effective by 5 May 2008. For Adwords advertisers with text ads targeting the UK and Ireland, keywords that were disabled for ...]

Market your Company on LinkedIn

LinkedIn.com, the social network site for professionals, has launched Companies Beta which is essentially a company page visible to all its users. I believe a large part of this page was created through relevant LinkedIn user data. Let’s take Alibaba.com’s page as an example. You may need to log onto your LinkedIn account before viewing the ...]

Google Improving User Experience and Stickiness

Google seems to be trying continuously to improve both user experience and stickiness on its web search and PPC ads. If you use Google regularly, you could already have spotted most of the minor and major changes below. The first example is on the search box, in which it normally looks like: Below is the extended ...]

Canonical URLs and 301 Redirects Explained

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, according to Google’s Matt Cutts. Consider canonicalization that refers to home pages like the examples below: * www.example.com * example.com/ * www.example.com/index.html * example.com/home.asp All of the above URLs seem to be the same URL, however, technically they are all different (the www version is essentially ...]

LinkedIn Self Branding Strategies

LinkedIn.com is a social networking site for professionals. You can easily self-brand yourself on the LinkedIn platform. Profile Create your personal profile, which can be used very much like an online resume (or CV). Besides your current job, the jobs you have participated in the past and your educations / qualifications, you can also fill in a ...]

Adwords Content Network Traffic Exclusion Options Explained

Effectively optimizing Google Adwords content targeting campaigns does require the separation of search and content campaigns, the implementation of conversion tracking, and the use of placement performance report. If you have been paying for excessive traffic with low conversion rate and are hoping to improve your campaign ROI, the following site exclusion methods should also ...]

PPC Rockstar Episode

Just a reminder that if you missed the 1st episode of PPC Rockstars with Dave Szetela you can download the show at webmasterradio.fm. The first episode covers dynamic keyword insertion with Matt Van Wagner: Dynamic Keyword Insertion Matt Van Wagner of FindMeFaster discusses dynamic keyword insertion , including if DKI can improve marketing score, click through ...]

Adwords Call Tracking

Call Tracking has become a very important part of PPC campaign strategy with many of my clients over the last year or two. This is especially true among the most chronically underserved business segment in the SEM industry - the successful small to mid sized regional business. This business often relies on the phone as ...]

Unrealistic Expectations

I’m watching with some bemusement this morning at all the financial news surrounding Google’s ‘deceleration’. This absolutely kills me. Here are some snippets: Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley: Meeker writes that she still thinks Google’s fundamental business trends are intact. But she also calculates that if ComScore’s data are accurate, and assuming international paid clicks are growing ...]

Murphy’s Law of campaign management

Rule 1: The campaign you think is the greatest thing to ever hit adwords will also be the client who is least impressed. “I don’t care if you show 482 leads in the last 2 weeks, I was getting that before you started working with us (even though I don’t have stats to prove it, I ...]

Keyword List Building - Take what the defense gives you

There’s an old adage in the sporting world that goes something to the effect of: “Take what the defense gives you”. For example, in basketball, the opposing defense might double team your center down low, and therefore leave you with someone open on the perimeter. Now you have 2 choices, you can: a. take the ...]

Net Neutrality

This issue hasn’t had much ink in this election season, but we in this industry should be voicing our opinions, loud and clear. Today is your chance - head on over to the freepress blog and leave a comment.

Play to your strengths

I know a lot about about paid search. I know nothing about home renovation related activities. Put me in front of a paid search campaign and I’ll slice and dice and segment like the Iron chef. I’ll bring out the beef, cut with conviction and tell you bad jokes while I prepare your meal. ...]

Landing Page Load Time

Per the Adwords blog, landing page load time is now visible from the keyword detail page: This is especially useful when a client needs a little encouragement towards optimizing their site performance. A picture is worth a thousand (key)words.

Mother’s Day PPC Ads - Where art thou?

I’m a guy, and a husband, which means among other things, I can’t remember important dates….at all. So today I go to search ‘mothers day’ because, don’t laugh, I couldn’t remember what the exact date was. I know it’s soon, so I get points for that right? Anyway, I expected a barrage of flower and gift ...]

I’m not above it…

Google Beats Estimates, Stock Flies Am I allowed to say I told you so? Not so long ago I criticized analysts for not understanding Google. This is a situation where Google is not listening to the street at all when making decisions about how they tweak their platform, and it will benefit them in the long run. Thank goodness ...]

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 15, 2008

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web....

ISP to Spy on User Activity to Deliver Targeted Ads

United States ISP Charter Communications announced that it will start looking at your surfing behavior to find you relevant ads. While continuing to deliver the same fast and reliable Internet service you’ve always received, innovative new technology in the field...

Yahoo Opens SearchMonkey Doors to Everyone

Are you a developer? You may be interested in SearchMonkey, Yahoo's new open developer platform, which was released to all developers yesterday. The concept behind SearchMonkey is to empower developers to build applications that increase relevancy of search results. Developers...

Google's Malware Review Form Now Working Again

Google's Malware Review form, which was added back in August of last year had some technical issues this week. First reports came via Google Groups at about 1am on May 15th. Webmasters trying to utilize the form received a "oops,...

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator Figures From The API Wrong?

A Google Groups thread reports that the numbers reported from the traffic estimator tool within Google's AdWords API interface is reporting different numbers based on the IP calling the data. The AdWords advertiser said that depending on which IP is...

Overstock Terminates All New York Based Affiliates

Months before the Former Governor of New York, Elliott Spitzer was in the news for his scandalous behavior he was making news for his potential major impact on e-commerce. The buzz was from his attempt to pass legislation that would make it necessary for online merchants to collect taxes on Internet sales made by New Yorkers. Specifically, the legislature would...

WOMMA WOMM-U- Jordan Corredera Keynote

With the previous keynote running 10 minutes over it's timeslot, and technical issues further delaying the start, this keynote shrank from a 45 minute presentation to a 30 minute presentation, which as it turned out was probably a good thing. Unlike the previous, more polished / rehearsed presentations, this one came off as more like a time filler. Which isn't...

WOMMA WOMM-U: Jen Gulvik Presents Houlihan's WOMM Case Study

Houlihan's went through an entire restructuring, down to even changing the forks and the music. Half the people who live within a 3 mile radius of the restaurants, have never been to a Houlihan's or were lapse customers. The only people who really knew about Houlihan's was employees, current customers and a "few" others. They do limited mass media advertising....

Twitter Policy - Do You Have One In Place?

Twitter is growing at a phenomenal pace. There's no doubt that as more and more companies adopt new communication platforms like Twitter into their marketing strategies, as well as allowing their employees to use them, some rules should be set up along the way. Back in December I wrote a piece about "Is Twitter Really Dangerous?", which was prompted by...

Trolls or Upset Customers? Do You Know the Difference

Shining a bright light on a troll isn't always the wisest thing to do (especially when they are certifiably crazy, or have had issues in the past). You have to be careful because sometimes they will steal your goat, or steal your baby (as those old fairy tales would tell us) or they will flame you in a community or...

WOMMA WOMM-U- Carla Hendra Keynote

The last keynote of the day is delivered by Carla Hendra - Co-CEO Ogilvy North America, Chairman of Ogilvy New York. Her take on WOM - "Brand Marketing: It's all word of mouth now!" There currently exists the opportunity to engage a global network of brand activists, and what's better than having the consumer do our jobs for us?

social blog roll with tag: PPC

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters