Many small businesses take advantage of Google Adwords to bring traffic to their websites. You set up a keyword list, create your campaign and ad groups, get your targeting done, and go live. That’s all fine an dandy, but Google wants small businesses to have a better chance of reaching out to their prospects (for money of course). Google is test driving Local Listing Ads in California in order to launch the service nationwide in the near future. The service allows you to pay a fixed fee to show up on Google business listings (maps) above the SERPs.

So here is how Google Local Listing Ads work. You will have to add your business to Google’s Local Business Center. The process is painful and is free. You will have to verify your business before being able to move forward, but that’s nothing to sweat on.

Once you are listed on Google, you can take advantage of Google Local Listing Ads to not only reach out to new prospects in you area (through Google and Google Maps), but also have Google track your calls and user interactions with your ads. So how’s Google Local Listing different from “local ads” on Google Adwords? Local Listing Ads are much cheaper and don’t require small businesses to deal with keywords, campaigns, and so on. You can think of it as Paid Inclusion, except these are ads and won’t show up in the search results but rather above them as ads.

Should you try Google Local Listing Ads? It’s not currently available in a lot of areas, so you may not have the choice. But for those who do, Local Listing Ads is yet another simple, affordable way to get your business in front of your local customers. How affordable? That depends on how you define “affordable” for your business as well as your location and the category you want your business listed in. It never hurts to test it 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 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!