If you thought Google was getting annoying with all its new policies, you are going to have to brace yourself for even more guidelines from Google. Google is trying awfully heart to cover itself against liabilities and protect consumers in the process. Whether that has helped small businesses that make money off of Google is another story. While I am not a big fan of a lot of policies that Google has adopted in the past, I actually agree with the latest move by Google to address issues caused by hosted domains (e.g. those on blogspot or WordPress). There are plenty of people who are spamming on Google by using free hosting services or hosted portals such as WordPress. The new URL policy addresses that.

Here is what Google is asking its advertisers to do: display the full URL of your website if you are on a domain that hosts multiple websites. Here are a few nuggets from the announcement:

all ads leading to sites on hosted domains will need to have display URLs that accurately reflect their destinations….

Incorrect:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: blogspot.com

Correct:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: adwords.blogspot.com

(more…)

Finding a job over the Internet is fairly normal these days. There was a time when the Internet was an overrated channel as far as job hunting was concerned but not these days. With all social job hunting sites and networking sites out there, many have found it easier to find jobs online. Communities such as Linkedin, Facebook, and even Twitter are great for reaching out to people, find new contacts, and find out about those not-so-public job openings. If you are involved in these communities and play your card right, there is no reason you can’t find a job online fast. And then there’s Adwords. Believe it or not, Adwords can be a great channel to pursue to get your name out there. You’ve got to choose the right keywords and do a whole lot of research, but the opportunity is certainly there to find a job using a combination of all these tactics.

So what do I mean by playing your cards right? It’s one thing to be involved in these communities and hoping for the best. It’s another thing to have a clear strategy and implementing it step by step. It’s not enough to just have a social media strategy or just an Adwords one. You have to pay attention to both channels. Here is how:

• Landing page: your landing page is where people find out about who you are and what you do. You want to make a lasting impression here. Don’t direct traffic solely to your Linkedin profile. It may work, but it’s always better to have your own landing page so you can track your traffic and find out how you can optimize your page.
• Domain: always buy your own domains. Preferably, you want to register your own name as well as a few more specific domains with your core keywords (e.g. BestITanalyst.com).
• Content: make sure your website has all the information a recruiter would need to decide if you are right for a job. Give them an easy way to get their hands on your resume. Don’t go overboard but do share the right kind of information.
• Keywords: do focus on long-tail keywords, but make sure your visitors know what your website is about. Have a descriptive title for your own website and develop the right information structure to help your visitors find more information about you.
• Profiles: you should get your name out there as much as you can. Don’t just focus on Linkedin. There are many other communities you can be a part of. Use a service such as DandyID to manage your social media profiles. Once you have all your profiles ready to go, you can push them on your website.
• Social Networking: be involved on social networking websites. Ask and answer questions on LinkedIn. Participate in Facebook groups. Join rooms on Friendfeed. Blog on StumbleUpon. You get the point.
• Adwords: approach your job hunting process as you would promoting a product. If you have the budget to spend a lot of money on Adwords, make sure you do it the right way. Focus on more specific terms and structure your campaigns the right way.
• Analytics: don’t leave things to chance. Track your traffic and find out how they interact with your website. It’s good to know what pages your visitors are visiting the most.
• New Media: you do want to test things out on your website to see what works the best. You can create a video resume and push it on your website.

There is really no major difference between advertising yourself or a product on Adwords. The audience will be different, and the keywords may be different in nature as well. Think of yourself as a product and market yourself the right way. If you play your cards right, you are going to get a lot of traffic to your website (through SEO, PPC, and Social Media) and get surprise job offers. The job market may be tough but there are jobs out there. You just have to better market yourself and get the word out.

It’s old news that Google Adwords has gotten a new look. I signed up to try the new look a while ago, and I’ve got to admit it makes it easier to set up campaigns and manage my accounts. You can also set up your local campaigns and target a certain demographics on Google easily with this new interface. I also like the fact that you get to manage your impressions on the content network easily using the interface.

Google has gone out of its way to create a smarter interface to help newbies set up Adwords campaigns fast. After all, if you help people spend money on your network, you are going to make more money in the process as well.

Even the process of research keywords and setting up adgroups has gotten easier. The concept of inheritance has been introduced to the interface to make easy to create similar adgroups fast.

Overall, I like the new interface a lot. I do object to Google setting the default options in a way to extract more money from advertisers but Google is out there to make a profit. What you want to do is make sure you change the default settings in a way that saves you money and gains more exposure for your business. The new interface may take some time getting used to but it’s certainly more exciting than the old interface.

Your take: what do you like/dislike about Adwords’ new interface?

Are you risk averse? Afraid of taking risk, wondering what might happen if and when you do take the risk? Well, I can tell you from experience that being risk averse can help you live an easy life without having too much stress. Don’t get me wrong. There will be tough times, and there will be challenges, but your life won’t be more complicated than that of a risk lover.

But being risk averse is exactly what you shouldn’t be in the pay per click marketing world. Pay per click marketing is a tough business, and nobody is going to have any sympathy for you if you lose your shirt. But a wise man told me once, “you have to spend money to gain money.” That’s really all to it. Now, you shouldn’t burn money recklessly to achieve your goal, but you shouldn’t be afraid of spending a little either.

Being risk averse can put a lot of pressure on you when running your PPC business. Risk averse businesses tend to stay ultra conservative, and their goal is usually to stay in business longer than actually growing their business. But my goal has always been making enough money to retire or have the convenience of being able to set my schedule. At the end of the day, being risk averse doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. You’d just have to find the right balance being too conservative and too reckless.

Your take: are you risk averse? Does bidding on adwords make you stay awake at night?

Your click through rate is one of the most important factors that can be the difference between you running a successful pay per click marketing business Google or achieve utter failure on Adwords. Google’s ranking system is sophisticated. There is no question about that, and while you can burn your money through the first position by putting up an obscenely high amount for your Max CPC, you should try to optimize your Quality score to pay less to Google.

Your ad CTR is a big part of your quality score. Google wants to take your money and a low CPR means they are leaving money on the table. So what they do is raise your min bids to either make you optimize your ads or pay the penalty for your negligence. While increasing your CTR dramatically will depend on many factors, there are simple steps that you can take to gradually increase your click through rate. Here is how:

• Call to action: you should try to use call to action phrases in your ads. Google does put limitations on what you can use in your ads. For instance, Google frowns up using the word “click here” in your ads. But you can use the word “apply now” or similar words, and that usually does the job.
• Keyword Phrases: make sure you have your keywords in the ad. Google emboldens phrases that folks have searched for on Google if you have them in your ads.
• Keyword Insertion: going back to the previous point, if you have an Adwords with more than a few keyword phrases, you can’t possibly fit your exact keyword inside your ad. That’s why you should use Google keyword insertion to automatically show the keywords in your ads that are relevant to what people are searching for. Use {keyword: keywords phrase} in your title, your body, or your URL. You can read more about it here.
• Symbols: Google is not comfortable with folks who use symbols such as “@” or “!” in their ads to attract the searchers’ attention. Having said that, you can still use “!” in your ads body (one time). So you should take advantage of it to set yourself apart from your competitors and attract the searcher’s attention.
• Unique Feature/Benefit: you have heard it before. Being unique can make you stand out in a crowd. Google Adwords has enabled lots of folks to come online and participate, which means in most niches the competition has intensified. What that means for you is that you should provide a unique benefit/feature in your ad to make people want to click on your ad. I would put a major feature or benefit on the first line of the add to grab the attention of the searcher as quickly as possible. Make sure your benefit is relevant to the product you are advertising.

Your CTR on Adwords is only a part of the equation but is a big part of it. In fact, without a good CTR, you are not going to be able to compete effectively. But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be able to achieve respectable CTR with your ads. And don’t forget to test your ads! That’s all that matters in the end.

If you have been using Google Adwords for a while, you are certainly familiar with the pain that was minimum bid. Google changed the concept to 1st-page bid but the underlying concept is the same. If your landing page is deemed to be not optimized for your search term, you are going to have to pay more to stay on the first page. After all Ad Rank = Quality Score * mCPC.

Many of us have been slapped by Google in the past. You start a campaign, and you run it for a while for $0.20 per click just to find out after a couple of weeks that Google is asking for a minimum of $5 per click to show you on the first page (not the first position). That’s really painful and if you are running affiliate offers through Adwords, I doubt you can make enough revenue to cover your costs.

Now people pray to God hoping for Google to change its mind and reduce your min bids. Here is the thing. God’s not going to fix your problem. There is actually a simple way to get around it. All you got to do is use Google Adwords keyword tool to figure out what Google sees on your page.

Just select the second option (Website content) and use your own URL to figure out what keywords Google comes up with your site. If the keyword that you are bidding on is on that list, then that could be why you are not getting the excellent quality score that you have always been wanting.

Your listing’s quality score is not just about the keywords that are on your page. You have to truly optimize your landing page to ensure Google that your page is relevant to the phrase you are bidding on, so don’t expect to get “great” quality score by just dropping keywords on your pages. But Google’s free tool does allow you to find out what areas you can improve on. With tools from Google, who needs paid tools!

I have said it before and stand by it yet again. Google and its tools are probably the only tools that you will need to get started with an effective PPC campaign. Google Adwords keyword tool is so powerful that paid keyword subscription services can be in trouble unless they start innovating and offering features that are remarkably better than the ones offered by Google. What folks don’t understand is that Google loves us all. Google wants us all to throw our money to get traffic to our sites. That’s a big part of its business. That’s why Google offers these free tools.

But Google search can give you so much information about your niche, it’s not even funny. One of the fastest ways to get started in any niche is by looking at what others are doing. So let’s say you want to promote an offer using Google Adwords. The best way to do is by searching for a core keyword in that niche on Google. By looking at people who are advertising in your niche, you can find out a lot about the niche. For instance, if there are 4 pages of advertisers for your niche, then you can tell the market is a red ocean. By monitoring the ads on the first page for a week or a month, you can figure out who’s actually making money on Google. There are very subtle things, but at the same time are as powerful as any information you can get from paid tools.

So here is my recommendation for folks who are getting started with pay per click marketing: know you Google basics. It’s free, and there are plenty of online resources to learn from. And don’t forget to subscribe to Inside Adwords.

I have a confession to make. I have never been good in naming anything in my life. Whether it is naming files or naming sites, I have just been terrible at it. That trait followed me to the Internet marketing world and to my PPC campaigns. When you start your first pay per click marketing campaign, you don’t have to worry about what you name your campaign (or so I thought), but it is very easy to get in trouble when you keep expanding your campaigns every day.

Google allows you to have a total of 2500 ad-groups in your campaign. Now you can do it the wrong way, like I did at first, and reuse your paused campaigns to promote totally different products (without renaming the campaign) or you can come up with a good naming convention for your Adwords account. Using Adwords default naming convention is not recommended. By default Adwords name your campaigns “Campaign #N.” You are obviously allowed to change the name of the campaign at the very beginning of campaign creation process. I used to click on the next button fast until I got to the more important part of the process. That meant that my campaign structure was something like the following:

Campaign #1 – Adgroup #1,#2, #3

Campaign #2 – Adgroup #1, #2, #3

What you want to do is to clearly define what each campaign is about. For instance, if you are selling “ebook x”, and you are bidding on the URL (e.g. ebookx.com, ebookx.net, ebook-x.com), you could name the campaign “ebookx – URL.” This name tells me that the campaign is about ebookx and you are bidding on URLs in that campaign. You could also create a campaign for branded terms and put your URLs in an ad-group called “ebookx-branded-URL.” Isn’t that easier to understand?

You can get as complicated as you want with your naming convention, but at the end of the day as long as you have a campaign naming convention that allows you to figure out what the campaign is about without having to open it up, you are all set. I wonder how many folks have made the same mistake that I explained above.

Let’s say you are running a couple of campaigns on Google Adwords and you are trying to figure out ways to optimize your campaigns. You have optimized your landing page, your keywords, your ad headlines, and everything else under the sun. Is that all you can do? The answer is no. One important factor that most marketers miss about pay per click campaigns is the quality of clicks that you are receiving on Google network. At the end of the day, Google clicks have a different quality than AOL or other search network clicks. Now, I am not suggesting that Google clicks are more valuable than other clicks. It all depends on what you see in your data, but you should always seperate your campaigns to figure out how the clicks from the search network are doing.

One easy way to do that is by having to absolutely identical campaigns on Google Adwords. One that has Google and search network checked and one that has only Google checked. You should then increase the bids on your Google only campaign by 10-20% and keep everything else identical. What that does is make sure that your Google only clicks go through your Google only campaign. All the other clicks that you receive on your G+S campaign will be likely from the search network. Now you got to make sure you give all your keywords their unique URLs so you can measure their success.

Depending on your product type, you may find that Google search network is useless to your business. But unless you have hard data to back it up, you shouldn’t discard the search network. By seperating your Google clicks and search network clicks, you can gather enough data to take your campaigns to the next level.

Anybody who has worked with Google Adwords to promote a product or service has probably seen all the policies that are going around about the ability to bid on other brands. For instance, marketers are not allowed to use trademarked terms in their copy unless they have permission from the merchants. A lot of people I know ban affiliates and PPC marketers from bidding on their branded terms as they would like to get the cheap clicks for themselves. Now here is the thing. Let’s say you are a big company such as IBM. Should you bid on your own brand and leak money to Google?

There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on this issue in the Internet marketing world. A lot of gurus talk about how you want to be out there in front of people, and if it means you lose a little bit of money on Adwords, so be it. I personally believe you need to look at the situation more closely before making a decision on this. If your branded terms bring you the most conversions with the lowest CPA, then you would be crazy to get rid of them. In fact, no smart marketer would do that as taking these words out would seriously hurt your PPC numbers, making you look bad in front of the top management. Having said that, if you are paying $5000 a week on branded terms, and your CPA on your brand campaign is $5000, then there is a problem.

I understand that to a lot of big companies that kind of money is nothing, but to a small business, that is huge money, and I’d suggest you divert your money to a campaign that is better forming. At the end of the day, your brand will be there on the SERPs (hopefully!), and there are better things to do with that money. So if you have the money to burn, why not! But if you are a startup or small-business, do yourself a favor and put the money where it counts.