There are a lot of publishers out there who make more than a few bucks a day with Adsense these days. If you happen to receive a decent amount of traffic to your blog or portal, there is a good chance that you can use Google Adsense to make money online. Google Custom Search has always been one of the best ways to implement Adsense on content portals and provide more value to your readers. You can also make money from the ads displayed on your website as well.

Google Custom Search was decent before, but the company has introduced a few additional rich features to help you get more out of your custom search snippets. For starters, you now access to more themes to choose from. So you can give your search page a better look and feel. (more…)

The Rich Jerk is one of my favorite online marketers of all time. Not because I love her products or even have tried any of them, but the way she has create a persona for herself that is magnetic and brash at the same time. The Rich Jerk is not your average marketer. You see, top marketers tell you why their products rock and why you shouldn’t leave without them. Some bombard you with testimonials and bonuses to get your attention. The Rich Jerk does that and more. For starters, he uses geocoding and advanced technologies to grab your attention. So when you log in to his landing page, you are going to see your own city show up on the page. You are also going to get so many bonuses, your head is going to spin.

These landing pages all come with benefits, features, proofs, testimonials, content break down, call to action, and extreme call to action. And the colors used on these pages are proven to be the most effective when it comes to increasing conversion rates. The Rich Jerk’s landing pages are magnetic as well. You are constantly reminded how rare this opportunity is and how it can change your life. But there is more. The Rich Jerk doesn’t mind insulting you while she is at it. Not that she really wants to insult her visitors. But it’s a cool way to grab the attention of visitors and give them something they have not experienced before.

So why is the Rich Jerk so successful? It’s very simple. She is too frank and her words bring out emotions in people. You read it, and you feel the need to get the material to get to where the Rich Jerk has gotten selling products online. As I have mentioned, I have not tested any of the Rich Jerk products. I don’t know too much about the Rich Jerk, but I can see why she is so effective with her sales copy and landing pages. Her approach is outside the box and innovative. Is it to brash for my taste? Maybe. But there is a reason she has made lots of money selling her course. This approach is not going to work for everyone, but the Rich Jerk has adopted and implemented this strategy to perfection. Who says differentiation is too hard?

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.

You want to succeed with your pay per click campaigns? You’ve got to have super campaigns and high converting landing pages. Many marketers have no trouble mastering the first part. There are thousands of blogs that you can read to pick up a nugget here or there. But when it comes to designing or putting up a landing page fast, a lot of marketers have their doubts. After all, creating a landing page from scratch is something only the geek nation is capable of, right? The reality is, anyone who knows anything about the Internet should be able to put up his/her own landing pages fast. These days there are simply no excuses for not being able to launch landing pages for your campaigns. There are just too many solutions out there. You can do it yourself or you can outsource it. What you can’t do is sit around and curse yourself for not knowing HTML.

Here are a few solutions you can use to build and optimize your own landing page:

1. Affiliate Theme: if you are using WordPress for your website, there is no reason not to use it for your landing pages. WordPress is free and so easy to use. All you need is a theme that allows you to put up and optimize your pages fast. Affiliate Theme is a new WordPress theme that makes it so easy to develop all kinds of landing pages. These layouts are all optimized for search engines to give you the highest quality scores possible.

2. Ajax Landing Pages: if you have used those cool looking Web 2.0 sites, you probably heard of Ajax. With Ajax landing pages, you can put up highly interactive landing pages fast. You get over 8000 Ajax landing pages, and that should be enough to keep you busy with your tests for a long time.

3. Outsource: if you don’t want to use the above solutions, you can always ask a freelancer to do the job for you. It won’t cost you much if you use websites such as Rentacoder. Just make sure you check your freelancer’s background before asking them to do a job for you.

4. Landing page optimization: so you have your landing pages up and ready. That doesn’t mean your work is done. You’ve got to test your landing pages to make sure you have the best conversion rate possible. You can use tools such as Long-Tail Magic and HyperTracker to test and optimize your pages. If you slack off here, you are going to end up spending a lot of money and get nothing in return.

5. Ask a Consultant: if you can’t improve your conversion rates all by yourself maybe you should talk to a landing page consultant. There are many of them around. Asking an expert never hurts.

As you can see, there are just too many options available to us marketers these days. Whether you want to create a landing page or optimize it, you can do it all by yourself or outsource it all. There is no right way or wrong way here. The key here is to get the job done!

If you have advertised affiliate products on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine for that matter, you have probably faced this fundamental question. “Should I build my own landing page or should I use the ones provided by the merchants?” A few years ago, you could just redirect traffic to your merchant’s landing pages, and you could make a lot of money without having to worry too much about making a landing page. But even then, smart marketers were developing their own landing pages.

There is this tendency among some online marketers to be lazy. Everybody wants to make $1 M online in 24 hours. But the online marketing business takes hard work. As always you should test your landing page against that of your merchant to figure out which one performs the best. It’s true that some merchants spend a lot of time and effort optimizing their landing pages. That’s great. But that doesn’t mean their landing pages will convert the best with your audience, does it?

You should always try to create, test, modify, test to find out the best you can get from your landing pages. It take a lot of time and effort but even if you improve your conversion rate by 1%, that could make a big difference in the long run. By the way, don’t for a second think that building a landing page requires a doctorate in programming

Google Adwords is becoming so competitive that unless you are getting great quality scores from Google, you are going to have break your bank to get any decent traffic. I remember when I started my financial site a while back. Google was asking me to pay, get this, $10 a click to be in the top 10! That’s like paying a million dollars to get a used car. Of course, if you are getting a great quality score from Google, you are going to pay less.

It is apparent that getting “great” quality score from Google on your landing pages is a must. But do you really need to create one landing page per each keyword? I have been hearing from some experts that you don’t have to do that to get great quality scores. I really don’t have any evidence for that argument, so I will consider it B.S. for now. Here is what has worked for me. You create a landing page for each keyword, and you start your title tag with that same keyword. You also use the same keyword throughout your content. I have tried this many times, and it works like a charm. Keep in mind that the keyword “books” is different from “book.” You need to create one landing page for “book” and one landing page for “books” (just an example).

Is this approach inefficient? You may say so. But that’s the only sure way to get great quality scores from Google. Everybody knows about LSI and all that nonesense. I am not saying an LSI-based approach to landing page optimization doesn’t work. I just personally have not had 100% success with that approach. I have had 100% success with the above approach, and that’s why I recommend it. And if you are a hard-worker, willing to put hours and resources to implement this, more power to you. But you can always trust the “experts” and get no results. It really depends on your taste.

If you have been doing Google Adwords for a while, you probably know the bid prices are not going any lower. If you are in any somewhat common niche, you are going to have to pay through your nose to get those highly coveted places on the first page. But if you have a great quality score, you can reduce your bids dramatically. Getting the quality score without too much work can be a bit complicated. Google has gone out of its way to penalize thin sites, and the mini landing page approach does not work as well as it used to.

That’s where you can use articles to your advantage. Services such as SimplyPLR allow you to create fully-fledged websites for every niche without having to spend time and write the articles yourself. The good thing about private label articles is that you can actually change the content and insert your own keywords in there. The key to getting a good quality score on Google is optimizing down to molecules for individual keywords. By that I mean you should use the “exact” keyword you are trying to bid for in your text.

PLRs are usually written around one keyword, which makes these great for quality score optimization purposes. All you would need to do is make small changes to the article and replace the main keyword with yours, and you can have more success with Google Adwords as a result of it. Paying Google $10, $20 or more per click just doesn’t make sense unless you have money to burn. I don’t know about you, but considering the amount of effort involved to use PLR articles to create Adwords ready sites, this is all well worth it.

Well, are you? Most people don’t know that they are leaving something on the table or they wouldn’t. I mean either you are not greedy at all or you don’t have the same logic most people do. If you know your advertising campaigns are not as effective as they should be, you  test and optimize. If you feel you don’t have enough exposure in a market, you try new channels, do PR, and so on. When there is a problem, you try to find a solution for it.

When it comes to paid advertising, many folks waste their traffic without knowing it. If you send traffic to a page that does not ask for your visitor’s information or gives them a way to come back to your site for more, you are wasting your traffic. When folks come to your site, either they are ready to make a purchase, or they are just shopping around. Maybe, they are just curious about your product and are non-buyers. It doesn’t matter what their mindset is at that point. You should always have a back up plan (a flow-chart scenario tree if you will). If they end up buying from you, you will get their contact information to sell more to them in the future. If they don’t buy from you, you should provide folks with enough incentive to sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your RSS feed.

You may say, “nobody is going to sign up for my newsletter.” That can’t be further from the truth. If you provide the right incentive, people will sign up. Signing up people is not really that hard but retaining them is. That’s why you want to have a clear plan about what you will communicate with your leads about. Most folks have a set of autoresponder messages at had that will go out every 2 or 3 days. They don’t even have to break a sweat to keep their leads. Others try to do it day by day, which is really inefficient.

Planning is the differnence here. If you plan for the scenarios that I mentioned above, you can make sure you have everything ready to go once you start giving your money away to Google. Even if you are paying $0.01 per clickto Google, you should still try to turn those clicks to leads. The more effective you are in that department, the more money you are going to make through your PPC efforts. It’s no rocket science.

Google is famous for throwing curve-balls at us marketers once in a while. In fact, those curveballs have been coming to us more frequently in the past few months. But the one factor that is still important to your success on Google Adwords is quality score. Google doesn’t tell us the exact formula behind Adwords Quality Score, but it does give us enough information on landing page and ad quality to com up with quick ways to improve the quality score throughout our campaigns.

5 Quick Ways To Improve Google Adwords Quality Score

• Landing Page Title: your landing page title is one of the most important factors when it comes to improving your quality score and SEO rankings. Make sure you include your ad keywords in your title (between “<title></title>”).
• Landing Page Header: h1 and h2 tags are very important in helping Google determine your landing page’s relevance to the keyword you are bidding on. Make sure you include your keywords in your headers. But don’t overdo it. This should be done in a natural way or it could back fire.
• Text Ad Quality: having your keywords in your text ads not only helps improve your quality score but it can nab you a higher CTR. Use your keywords in your ad’s text (hint: use dynamic keyword insertion for the best possible results).
• Ad URL Quality: having a keyword in your ad URL could also help with your quality score. It can also increase your CTR. You should test all these things to make sure you are getting the biggest bang for your advertising bucks.
• Landing Page Keywords: Google Adwords keyword tool has helped me a lot with making my landing pages optimized by adding LSI keywords to my pages. You should use the Google Adwords keyword tool to find the related keywords to your ad phrases and use them throughout your pages. You should also use a combination of your ad phrase + an LSI keyword in your alt tags or meta tags.

When optimizing your pages for paid search or organic search, you want to make sure that things look natural to Google. A page that is written for Google only is not going to convert too well. Always keep your visitors in mind, but the above steps are so simple that you’d be missing out big time if you ignore them.

P.S. I’ll write a few more posts on Quality Score and how I have improved my own quality scores with my campaigns. Let me know if you want me to write about something specific or if you have a specific question about Google Adwords Quality Score.

This is one of the biggest issue for pay per click marketers. Let’s say you are planning to promote a product on Google adwords. Should you direct your traffic to a landing page or should you direct traffic to where it all happens?

It’s true that not many people agree on one or the other approach being better. That’s why we have sophisticated testing solutions out there on the market. If we knew the answer to this question already, then why are we wasting time grappling with it. The truth is, depending on your market, your conversion is going to be better with one of the above approach. Having been an affiliate in the credit card industry, I can tell you that I have seen both approaches work. We all know that Google cash is pretty much dead. In essence, you can’t direct traffic directly to the merchant’s side (actually there is a way around it ) But if you are an advertiser with a product, you have a decision to make. You can use your landing page to convince people to take that extra step or you can rely on your ads to do the job for you. But a lot of it depends on your product.

One thing that you should do is test the two approaches to figure out what works the best for you. I personally like the landing page approach better as I get to sell other products or collect information on my landing pages. But then again, I don’t use the same approach for different products. So when in doubt, let the numbers speak.