Have you been stuck in a company that is not really paying too much respect to its pay per click unit? Maybe your top management folks say the right things and do the right things, but if pay per click is not really a big part of your company’s strategy, it’s going to show sooner than later. I had a similar situation when I worked as a marketing expert at a company that was making money from PPC but was not paying too much attention to SEO. We did everything we could to help the company generate lead for free through Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, but when the recession hit, our budget was cut and the project was finally discontinued. The same thing has happened to a lot of pay per click professionals.

The latest U.S recession has been tough on many small and big businesses. A lot of companies have laid people off and many others have decreased their advertising budgets to stay afloat. But recession is not the time to cut your advertising budget. Think about it. If you own a product or promoting affiliate offers, if you cut your advertising budget, you are going to get less leads and make less money in the process. A lot of affiliate marketers have the option to focus on the social media or search engine optimization tactics to offset the effects of reducing their PPC budget, but a lot of companies don’t have the option. If you are a small business, you are going to need a certain level of business to break even. It may be difficult to generate enough business without proper spending in advertising.

The recession has been a big eye opener as far as big companies are concerned. When a company decides that the first unit to get laid off is its online marketing unit, you know where its priorities lie. If you have been spending time at a company, hoping to take their PPC to the next level, you probably wouldn’t expect the company to pull the rug from under you. In reality, a company that is not willing to spend money advertising online during recession is either dying a slow death or is not dedicated enough to its pay per click marketing and SEM channel. A lot of people may be upset about losing their marketing jobs, but if your company is not smart enough to keep its advertising going during these tough times, it’s probably a waste of time working for it anyway.

Pay per click marketing is not the only way to generate business online, but it’s probably the fastest way and gives you a lot of control as far as your message, keywords and landing pages are concerned. The times may be tough but if your business is not dying and has cash in hand, wouldn’t it be smart to spend it on generating new business? PPC may not be right for your company but it shouldn’t take a recession (or depression) to figure that out!

Hate to be dramatic about it, but there was no question in my mind since I tried Google Adsense for Videos that the service won’t last too long. YouTube has not been the cash cow Google hoped it’d be, which is why it’s getting a makeover to move a bit away from user-generated content to generate more revenue for Google. Google Adsense for Video was a bad waste of ad space at best and a torture for publishers at worst. Google didn’t make enough money with them either:

… we frequently review our products and features to ensure their effectiveness. After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we’ve found that it hasn’t had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we’ve decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites.

It’s noble to try new things and test things out to figure out what works and what doesn’t on your website. But Google Adsense video units were truly atrocious. That doesn’t mean there weren’t people who were having success with Google Adsense Video. It’s just that it wasn’t making enough money for Google to continue the product.

If you have read popular Adsense books such as Adsense Secrets, you know that your goal should be to integrate Adsense into your pages in a way that it doesn’t screen “I am an Ad!” People are mentally blocking ads these days, and I didn’t think it was going to change with video ads. If you still enjoy displaying videos on your blog, you don’t have to necessarily remove your Adsense video codes from your site. They will automatically show YouTube videos on your site:

Once video units are retired at the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units on your pages will direct users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs. If you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

Of course, you may want to replace your video units with something that actually pays you in the long run. YouTube is great but who would want to display YouTube videos in hot ad spots?

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.

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?

Nobody is born with all the Pay Per Click knowledge in this world. Everyone has to start from somewhere. The problem is a lot of folks end up banging their heads against the wall more than they have to. Some of these folks have gotten their basics wrong. That’s why they keep failing with their campaigns. But there is another group of folks who actually know what they are doing but don’t pay attention to the smallest curve balls that Google throws at us marketers.

There is no question that traffic is one of the most important success factors when it comes to PPC marketing. You can have the best converting landing page and a very sophisticated sales process, but if you are not able to get a decent amount of traffic to your website, you are setting yourself up for failure. A lot of folks put hours into setting up their landing pages and optimizing their back-end sales process, but you really need to focus on getting traffic to your website to avoid struggling in this field.

A lot of people treat Adwords as a gambling machine. They keep throwing money at it without any real strategy, and they pay the price big time. It’s not really that hard to go through thousands of dollars every hour with Google Adwords. But you’ve got to have a real strategy to get it right. Here is how you should go about building your business on Adwords:

• Have a business plan: you’ve got to have a plan to succeed online. Adwords is too complicated a system to leave anything to chance. You’ve got to come up with strategies that bring you the most traffic with the least cost. But don’t forget your success factors (EPC, CPA, …).
• Know your position: a lot of people want to be No. 1 on Adwords. It may pay off for you but you shouldn’t just choose a magic number and try to get there. You should test rigorously to figure out what positions work for you.
• Avoid Google Slaps: it constantly amazes me to see people surprised by Google slaps. If you read Google guidelines and pay attention to what’s going on in this industry, you can see slaps coming from a mile. And if you know something’s coming, it’s easier to avoid it.
• Choose the Right Keywords: not all keywords are created equal. You’ve got to catch folks while they are in buying mode. That’s where you convert the most.
• Choose the Right Keyword Strategy: a lot of marketers tell you that you should focus on the long-tail. It may work for you but getting enough traffic from these keywords could take a while. Don’t set yourself up for failure by being a one trick pony.
• Use Negative Keywords: you should try to qualify your traffic by using negative keywords. Not only that, be prepared to use embedded matching to get your game to the next level.
• Organize  Your Ad groups: a lot of marketers don’t pay attention to this, but your ad groups organization can hurt your business seriously if you get it wrong.
• Write decent Ad copy: your CTR matters big time. You should always try to write ad copy that is catchy and makes people want to click (buy from you).
• Be Aggressive and Smart: it’s one thing to throw too much money at Adwords. It’s another thing to throw money and be smart about it. If you are making $2 per $1 spend, who cares if you are spending $100 a day or $100,000 a day.
• Learn from competitors: if your competitors are spending money on Adwords, they must be making money off of it. Use the tools available on the market to figure out their exact keywords and ads to see what they are doing right.

There are many other things that you should consider before throwing your life-savings away on Adwords. You need to be aggressive on Adwords. There is nothing wrong with that. At least be smart about it.

Adwords Manifesto is a world class PPC training course that is designed for PPC marketers who want to stop the bleeding and actually make money online. Adwords Manifesto provides you with everything you need to know to succeed online. If you are looking for someone to teach you how to get PPC done properly, consider signing up for Adwords Manifesto.

I don’t know about you, but I have been in the pay per click marketing industry for years. And obviously, I must have been doing something right for not having gone bankrupt in all these years. What surprises me is when the so called superstars come out and claim, “it is proven NOW that you can make money with PPC.” Huh? That’s just a silly statement. Of course you can make money from pay per click marketing. A lot of folks are doing it on a daily basis. It’s also true that a lot of folks are burning cash everyday. But to come out and claim that it’s something new is plain stupid.

You can make money with pay per click. But you need to be diligent about your process. You need to test your landing pages to death to increase your conversion rates. You need to find products that actually sell online, and you need to think big. If you spend $1000 a month online, there is so much money you can earn. But if you spend $20,000 a week on the right offer, your earnings may go through the roof.

Earning money from PPC is possible. You just have to be careful not to burn yourself in the process. And you won’t need a guru training course to start making it.

If you have worked as an affiliate marketer or just a webmaster trying to push a product online, you have probably seen the issues that you may have with bidding on branded terms on Google. Let’s say you have a site about Macbooks, and you want to put an ad up and get folks to your site. Unfortunately, Google does not allow you to put the word Mac in your ads. What that means that your ads won’t be emboldened when somebody searches for the word Macbook. A lot of expert consider that to be a deal breaker as your ad going against branded ads can be a mismatch.

In reality, you should never give up trying to push branded terms in your ads. You can use “@” (e.g M@cbook) to get your ads approved under the radar. But some companies don’t even forbid folks bidding on their brands, so you should not just assume anything. Your ads may not show up in bold, but folks who are searching for a brand are targeted and more likely to convert. Think about it. Who’s more likely to buy: someone who is searching for a  laptop or a Macbook. The latter is not super targeted as “15 inch 2GB Ram Macbook” but it’s still pretty good. With a lot of other products, you can bid on the exact term and gain access to a stream of super-targeted visitors. Now that’s worth a lot.

At the end of the day, you shouldn’t be shy about doing things on Google and other engines. What have you got to lose? As long as you are not cloaking and doing sneaky things, Google won’t ban you for playing with your keyword terms. So just keep plugging away!

It feels like yesterday that I signed up for the Immediate Edge program. It was actually last August. Last summer I had a chance to review  the thirty day challenge, and I decided to give the Immediate Edge program a try. The program is designed for folks who are fairly advanced marketers. The community doesn’t wonder what Facebook is or how to use Twitter. They already get that. They are looking for super advanced tactics to build business using the social media, ninja SEO tactics, and PPC. Unfortunately, the program could not handle too many people at the time (hosting all those videos and audio content can be a challenge).

After months of being a closed program, the Immediate Edge is finally open to new members. But it won’t be for long. The last time the Immediate Edge closed its doors, it took a few months for the guys behind the program to allow new members, so if you want to give this program a try you may want to take your shot now. But make sure you know what you get yourself into .

P.S. read a review of the Immediate Edge program here.

I have been taking shots at Google for the past few months now. I find Google to be terrible in applying the same standard to all advertisers. I have seen to many folks get away with spamming their ad system, and top advertisers get preferential treatment or so it seems. But what I haven’t criticized so far is Google’s customer service. These guys take time to answer all our questions and they are the unsung heroes.

Google understands that a good customer service allows you to keep your clients happy. Google understands that clients are always wrong, which means you can send them the same standard reply asking them to take a hike. Now, if you are a big advertiser and spend a lot of money on Google, you can have your complaints heard. But if you are a smaller client, you don’t need to have your issues heard. It’s all probably your fault anyway. That’s why complaining about others cheating the system often goes nowhere.

To be fair to Google, there are folks in its customer service department that actually want to help clients out. But based on my interactions with Google, I have come to conclusion that you’d have to be very persistent to get anything done with these guys. Do I feel bitter about all this? No. I understand Google’s strategy. Google is a great company but I wish they would provide better customer service for its cash cow.

Are you, too, frustrated with Google’s customer service? Please share your stories here.

The economy keeps getting worse, but life keeps getting better for Google. With Microsoft and Yahoo! struggling to making a serious run at Google’s market share in the Search Industry, Google is taking the next steps to become the dominant global force that some of us have been predicting for a few years now. As someone who has been reliant on Google to make a living, I find it hard to imagine life without it. But sometimes you have to express what is right from wrong – Google is not the white knight we have all been waiting for!

Google has been dominating the Internet industry (just to generalize) for quite some time. Many have tried and failed to get anything going against this giant. But cracks have started to appear in Google’s armor. Not that their dominance is in any danger, but Google’s quality of service has deteriorated in the past few months. Google still has the best search engine around, but SE-gamers have taken the fight to Google in recent months. Google Adwords is just a mess, and one has to wonder why Google applies double standards when dealing with its users.

Microsoft was once in Google’s position. A company at the top of the world, putting competitors to sleep, and seemingly impossible to stop. But they have learned that you can’t endure your dominance without becoming agile and providing value to your customers. I have no doubt Google has every intention to bring value to customers. But Google’s obsession to extract money from its users at any cost has simply taken away from the “White Knight” image that Google has been trying to portray. Google’s goal may be to “change the world,” but actions speak louder than words. What kind of change is it that Google aims to bring upon us?!