I have talked in the past about the importance of optimizing your landing pages and websites to get the most out of your landing pages. You can spend years learning the art of working with Google Adwords. You can spend a lot of money driving traffic to your website. But if your site is not designed with your users in mind, you may as well burn your money. I hear these low conversion rate numbers from marketers everyday, and it seems people have accepted that you shouldn’t be able to convert more than 4-6% of people who come to your landing page. That could be true but you wouldn’t know it unless you keep testing and optimizing every aspect of your website. Web Design for ROI is a great book that teaches you exactly how to design your website to increase your ROI and get the biggest bang out of each click.

Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads brings to light what many companies have been doing wrong for years. Quite frankly, a lot of large corporations used to not worry too much about optimizing their landing pages. After all, if you have a lot of money, you may want to just throw it at your problems to solve them. But as the economy has hit us hard, a lot of big corporations are now changing their ways. These companies are now learning from their mistakes and wish they had paid more attention to the testing process. This book covers every area that you need to pay attention to to increase your ROI. Here are some of the concepts you should pay extra attention to:

• Mistakes: the common mistakes made by marketers and how you can avoid them.
• Landing pages: how to optimize your landing pages and increase your conversion rates by 3-5%.
• Home pages: how not to treat your home page and get the best out of your home page traffic.
• Category pages: ways to design your category pages to let your visitors navigate through your pages.
• Forms: how to design forms like a pro without turning off your visitors.
• Checkout process: increasing your checkout conversion rate is an art. You are going to learn exactly how to optimize your checkout process and make it easier for your visitors to buy from you.

It’s one thing to know web design. It’s another thing to know how to optimize a page for a better conversion rate. Web Design for ROI provides you with all the tips you need to make the transition from a good web designer to a great web designer who knows how to design pages with visitors’ needs in mind. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get into the business of web design and landing page optimization.

Pay per click marketing may sound easy on the surface, but there is more to PPC than just giving your credit card number to Google and have them charge it for your campaigns. Unless you take time to track your online marketing campaigns and change things around, you can’t expect to maximize your ROI with your online marketing campaigns. Tracking your pay per click campaigns may look difficult, but you have got nothing to worry about with Tracking202. Tracking202 is an innovative tracking solution that allows you to track your pay per click marketing campaigns like a pro and optimize your campaigns to make more money online.

Track202 is a comprehensive PPC tracking system that allows you to track your Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter campaigns all on a single interface. If you have been playing with these networks before, you know it’s not too much fun to grab daily reports and format them all by yourself. This service does the job for you. You don’t even have to lift a finger. You can clearly see how much profit your campaigns are bringing you, and which campaigns need to be optimized. You can also figure out how much profit you are making from your content campaigns as opposed to your search network campaigns.

Tracking202 is also fully integrated with top affiliate networks (e.g. eBay). That means you can grab you info from these networks and use them to conduct deep analysis of your online marketing campaigns. I also love the fact that you can create and track unique tracking URLs for each keyword and creative right on Tracking202.

You can also implement conversion tracking for your keywords to make sure how much money you are making per keyword. If you plan to build a real PPC business, you will have to track your keywords individually and see how they convert on a consistent basis. You can even go deeper and find out what exact keywords have triggered your broad matches and whether you need to block them (if they are not converting well). And the real-time spy makes it easy to track your visitors live.

Tracking202 is updated to help you better track your campaigns and optimize them fast. If you are running campaigns on the 3 major search networks and plan to track your keywords and creative extensively, you can’t go wrong with Tracking202. Tracking202 Pro not only saves you time, but it makes it helps you increase your ROI fast.

If you have been to a marketing conference recently, you have probably heard how some online marketers are claiming there is no recession. They are right! There is no recession for marketers these days. A lot of these guys have products out that promise to teach you how to make a million dollars in the next 2 weeks as long as you are willing to part ways with $97 of your money. I have been testing Adwords products for a living. There are some really good products out there. But a lot of Adwords courses that you see online don’t teach you much more than you can read in a book. In fact, Adwords for Dummies beats a lot of these courses flat out.

So are these marketers lying to you when they claim to be making hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every year. Yes an No. A lot of these folks have been around for years. Some of them have already made a fortune out of their lists and other products. Teaching you how to start with Adwords is another way for these folks to make money. Are they making lots of money from Adwords? It depends how you look at it.. A few of these marketers advertise their Adwords products on the web and use their sales numbers to entice you. There is nothing wrong with that picture. The only issue is, not everyone has her own product. That means, you are probably going to have to settle for affiliate commissions. That immediately sets you back. Getting 8-20% affiliate commission for each sale you make is not the same as selling your own product and making money online.

The devil is in the details

I have also noticed that some marketers don’t disclose their costs. They tell you they’ve made a million dollars the previous month. But what they are talking about is their revenue and not net income. In reality, you can have millions of dollars in revenue and still be in the red. That doesn’t make you successful.

The moral of story here is, you shouldn’t trust every number you see in a salesletter. There are a lot of folks who are making lots of money from ClickBank. But most of these guys are selling their own products. And you can tell by looking at their commission table. Some have gotten smarter and show you numbers that differ from week to week. But if you can find any pattern in the numbers you see in a salesletter, you are probably dealing with a product owner and not a PPC marketer. This is a hit and miss tactic, but at least it gives you an idea about what you are dealing with. Making money with PPC marketing is possible. But don’t for a second think it’ll be easy. In fact, it’s getting harder everyday, which is why you see a lot of PPC marketers get out of the game and try to sell you their knowledge, and who could blame them.

Recently, I had a chance to review Google Ambush by Andrew X. It’s not that I am looking for more ways to spend money on PPC products, but rather you want to see what new PPC products are teaching these days. Google Ambush is a new product designed to help you dominate the world of Google. Unlike other pay per click marketing product on the market, Google Ambush focuses on a comprehensive approach to set up campaigns and make profit on them on Google. There are many pay per click courses that teach you the basics on how to run your own Adwords campaigns. With Google Ambush, you can easily find what products to choose to make money online. So in a sense, it is designed for pay per click affiliate marketers.

Google Ambush teaches you how to find products, the right keywords, and the right structure for your ad campaigns. Whether you are new to affiliate marketing or just want to pick up a few new tricks, you are covered with Google Ambush. Here is what I liked about Google Ambush:

• Plan: you can’t have success online without a plan. There is a difference between barely making it online and having a profitable business. Google Ambush covers all areas of niche marketing and even shows you how to create your landing pages and track your results fast. You can use the blueprint provided in the course to launch profitable campaigns one after another.
• Software: nothing can replace a good software that can automate parts or your whole business operation. A lot of marketers fail as they keep focusing on tactics rather than strategies. The software finds you profitable niches, helps you gain access to lots of profit making products, allows you to do your own keyword research, and even allows you to spy on your competitors (read all about it here).
• PPC Tools: Google Ambush not only allows you to find hot products, it helps you create your own Ad campaigns fast. You can create multiple ads and campaigns fast. And the split-test functionality is integrated into the software. So you get it all in one package.
• Landing Pages: Google Ambush comes with everything you need to create your landing pages fast. All you have to do is use the template provided to you to customize your landing pages and go live fast!
• Optimization: this was by far my favorite part. I am obsessive when it comes to testing and am all for software packages that help me test things out more easily. With Google Ambush, you get a software package that has everything you need to test your campaigns fast and find out what’s not working.

Overall, I was very impressed with Google Ambush. You are not getting an e-book that may or may not help you make more money online. You are getting a comprehensive software package that helps you find niche products, conduct your market research, find the right keywords, create your campaigns, build your landing pages, and keep testing until you pass out. Google If you are planning to outsource your Adwords processes and spend more time doing more important things with your business, you should give Google Ambush a try.

A lot of affiliate marketers have made a fortune out of promoting Amazon products using pay per click engines. But as of May 1st, 2009, the U.S. affiliates won’t be making any money off of the Amazon Associates Program. Amazon has announced that they won’t be paying fees to PPC marketers which should be a big blow to a lot of affiliate marketers:

After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks.

This change applies only to the Associates programs in North America. If you are conducting paid search activities in connection with one of Amazon’s Associates Programs outside of the US and Canada, please refer to the applicable country’s Associates Program Operating Agreement for relevant terms and conditions.

This is a big decision by Amazon.com but there could be a couple of good reasons behind it. It could be that Amazon is finally feeling the heat from high PPC costs, and by lowering the competition it expects to pay less for their PPC leads. And let’s not forget that direct PPC marketers don’t provide any added value to Amazon. I’d be surprised if Amazon made the same decision about bloggers (unlike American Express). Bloggers and niche marketers provide added value with their content, so as long as the tax issues don’t catch up with Amazon, non-PPC marketers should be safe.

Your take: did you expect this decision by Amazon?

Recently, I had a chance to review CopyNProfit to see whether all the hype was justified. If you are not familiar with the product, CopyNProfit is a pay per click solution that helps you set up your pay per click campaigns fast. These guys have taken the guess work out of the process. They literally share with you the campaigns that they have used to make a killing online. That way you won’t have a blueprint to follow. You’ll have the whole thing. Plug & Play.

I was impressed with the wealth of content available through this program. The guys behind CopyNProfit have gone out of their way to make sure you see everything they are doing to prepare their campaigns. Here is what you get:

• Campaigns: all you have to do is pick a niche or keyword that you want to get started with. You get access to 37+ niches that you can choose based on popularity or supply/demand ratio. These guys have everything you need to get your campaign fast in any niche. They even provide you with data, so you know you are not taking a leap of faith. You can copy campaigns to your own PPC accounts fast with the templates available in this program.
• Ad Creator: with Copy & Profit, you get access to Ad Creator which makes it so easy to develop multiple ads on the fly. Remember, you are going to have to test things for yourself to make sure you increase your conversion and click through rates.
• Forum Marketing: if you want to make more money from your affiliate campaigns, you can always use forums to build links and drive traffic to your website. With this software, you can just find the top keywords and use them to drive free traffic through forums.
• Article Marketing: similar to forum marketing, you can increase your commission check by using your profitable keywords on your articles.

This is one innovative way to outsource your pay per click marketing campaigns. Sure. You’ll be managing your own campaigns, but these guy are doing the testing and niche research for you.  And they provide you with so much content to absorb that you are going to become a super PPC guru by the time you are done with this package. I was personally impressed by the niche list and the campaigns that you get with PlugNPlay.

PlugNPlay is not for everyone. First of all, there is a lot to go over. You are going to be bombarded with videos, campaign samples, tools, and everything in between. Secondly, you are going to have want to make money from pay per click marketing. Pay per click marketing is not for folks who are afraid of spending money online. But if you are already using pay per click to make money online, you are going to enjoy using CopyNProfit.