He wrote to warn his letter receiver about the evils of FireFox, and how it was taking away sales from Internet marketers. He reasoned that because of certain Firefox plugins, people weren’t getting our heavily-labored marketing materials.

He rants “It’s the add ons… and one in particular thats costs IM”ers thousands of dollars and thousands of subscribers every day.

Because people have no idea of the detrimental effect this add on has to their bottom line and this insidious little add on continues to deprive you of sales and subscribers every day.”

Sorry, Robert, but the only “detrimental effect” that Firefox plugins have on marketers, is that the plugins Firefox offers knocks out all those weak, annoying marketing techniques in the first place. If they didn’t suck, if they weren’t annoying to a bunch of present users, people wouldn’t download the plugins to stop them in the first place.

The only things that FireFox plugins knockout are the marketing techniques that are either A. horribly antiquated, or B. those that resort to spam techniques.

Yep, my pop-up killer is on, and it’s staying on. I don’t need them. If you want to advertise to me, or to any other web savvy person, it’s going to have to be on my terms.

And my e-mail filter is still knocking out everything with the word “FREE” (or “FR*EE). You wanna hard-sell with those terms? Sorry, that’s on you. If you don’t have a brain in your head that can come up with copy that doesn’t use the word, or it’s spammy counterparts, sorry ’bout ya.

Sorry that I’m killing your traffic exchanges and your flash pop-ups, and you aWeber signup pages. But, I came to get information, not a lifetime subscription to your crappy newsletter.

Here’s an idea: if you value repeat business and lifelong customers, simply pay to get them.

PPC, targeted postings, and good information will keep the people that you pay to get coming back. And you’ll probably end up treating them better too, because you’ll have a more substantial investment in each of them.

The problem isn’t Firefox, Robert, is the internet marketers that still think it’s 2002. Grow up, already. And I’ll still use Firefox, and load that up with every pop-up blocker and anti-advertising plugin I can find. Because I want to surf when I want to surf, and shop when I want to shop. ‘Nuff said.

Yahoo thinks that the move to a Google alliance could boost their revenue and increase their profits. Yahoo is squirming, and doing everything it can to fend off Microsoft’s charge at their company.

All I can say about it is this: I say that if it’s THAT bad at Yahoo, then they SHOULD sell to MS.

Let’s face it. When it comes to advertising and contextual ads, Yahoo’s Publisher Network is a joke. Their targeting is crap compared to Adsense. I was so happy when I finally got in to YPN, only to find that their ad inventory was low, and the ads they did have offer no relevance at all to my sites. So my time with YPN was short. About 1500 impressions, and no clicks. They couldn’t compare with Google in CTR or CPM. I’ve read that a lot of others feel the same way. Let’s face it, Yahoo wasn’t ready for stage two, and jumping in feet first into a head on war with Google’s Adsense and Adwords hurt them more than help them.

First, they alienated tons of people by taking away the Overture resources (even though they did suck, but you can’t tell that to a newbie who read it’s the place to go 1000 times), then they put out a piss poor service to a hungry mass who was looking for anything better than Google to make money with contextual ads.

Well that was enough for most people to see, including me.

But now Yahoo finds itself in a tough bind: either sell, or face the wrath of lawsuit hungry shareholders, who would argue that Yahoo isn’t doing enough to fulfill the company’s position and value.

For Yahoo, now it’s down to this: either sell to the devil (MSN), work with the devil (Google), or pay the devil(the greedy shareholders).

Yep. Yahoo’s up the creek for sure.

As I prepare for my foray back into the world of PPC, I was reading a good posting at highranking.com about the PPC conversion process that really got me thinking. If anything, I fancy myself a writer. I love reading Joe Vitale’s stuff, as well as the stories and techniques of the old-school marketers, because, let’s face it, they were onto something with their techniques, something that we need to remember, especially since we get only so much space to make an impact with our advertisements.

What a great opportunity we have to lead customers to the sale, but how often do we actually hear about people doing it? How often do we take the steps to do it ourselves?

With gas getting ready to top $5 a gallon, (yes, $5 a gallon, you’ll see), and people losing their homes, and worrying about how and what they spend, we’re going to have to be more subtle yet more persuasive in our offers to the buying public. Lying is out. Not that it was ever in, but buyers are going to be even more skeptical than ever.

In short, landing pages are going to be the key to all of this. If you don’t have a landing page that follows a logical, emotional pattern, you’re in trouble. And, if you’re ad can’t lead a buyer to that page in the same manner, you’re toast as well.

SO, instead of thinking about a good ad, let’s think about…

A good offer page as the whole of…
A good landing page (that you design and publish) as the whole of…
A good text ad.

I know that sounds simple, but many times, people don’t think about the importance that a landing page really has, and leaves it to the owner of the product to convince the seller to buy. We’ve got to get out of that mindset. I say we, because I’m as guilty as all of you of that. I didn’t like squeeze pages and pre-sell pages, but my eyes are opening up to it now. We have to be convincers and bridge builders from the SERPs and PPC listings to the sale page.

In short, it’s like this: You can have the best optimized page on the planet for the words you want, and the offer you want, and Google will still give you a $10 per keyword price tag if it’s just a single page floating in space. I’ve been guilty about doing that…have you? You build that page, optimize the heck out of it, and then get mad when Google hits you with a high bid price.

Well, Google’s about quality (real or perceived). Either you’re going to give them quality, or they are going to make you pay because of it.

I’ve been reading more and more about linking pages to your landing page. Specifically, pages with related terms to your adgroup copy, LSI keywords or the like to get a more favorable scan when the Adwords bot checks your page for quality. It’s becoming common knowledge that Adwords is not just looking at your landing page, it’s looking for many other factors.

So, it seems the best way to go is at least have several related pages to your keyword group linked to your landing pages to lower your bid and raise your quality score.

Like I said, it may not be a revelation for most of you, but for someone who tried Adwords and crashed and burned more than a few times, it may be saving grace for me.

I’ll let you know how that all works out…when I get me Adwords account back up. Ahh, but that’s ANOTHER story…

1. Wordtracker Free Tool
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Wordtracker is known for being the number one place to do keyword research for a fee (and their pay per search system is pretty good, no doubt, but they also have a free tool available for finding and deep mining keywords that’s pretty good as well. Plug in a keyword, hit return, and you’re off and runnng.

2. The GoodKeywords Tool at
http://www.goodkeywords.com/
Pulling keyword suggestions from Overture (when you CAN access their tool, more on that in a minute, and Google, the GoodKeywords free tool is a program that you can use to dig out prime keywords, and find long tail keywords as well. It’s interface is a little clunky, forcing you to either go back or remember the word you ant to mine to dig deeper, but what can I complain about. It’s free, man!

NOTE: The Good Keywords program is pretty much useless since Overture got rid of it’s keyword lookup capabilities.

Of course, the GoodKeywords program is a hook for you to get the upgraded program, or the suite of programs from the Softnik site (which are actually pretty cool programs), but don’t worry, GoodKeywords is free (for now, anyway.)

3. Overture Keyword Selector Tool (NOW GONE-SORRY..)
inventory.overture.com/
I put this third because, even though this has been considered on the primary tools for keyword research in the past, there has been rumor that Overture (Yahoo) is going to stop support of it. Shame. It was considered that this tool was the Bible for determining how much traffic a keyword actually got (though I never found it to be entirely accurate myself).

Even now, access to this this tool online is virtually impossible, probably due to reduced resources. But I read a thread ona forum online that stated that the tool is now dead, but being reworked for a later date. Let’s hope so. We can only wait and see. In the meantime, I can only say this: it’s the main keyword research tool you need that isn’t there. Does that make sense?

4. Google Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Though the Google Keyword Tool doesn’t give you hard number of searches like Overture’s tool, it’s great because, well, it’s Google’s. Love it or hate it, Google rules search, with 43 percent of the search market in it’s hot little hands. And this is their tool. With it you can find keyword variations, and keywords related to other sites (a handy tool to use when spying on other competitor sites as well).

The Google keyword also displays search volume, but it does it with a graph instead of hand numbers, so you can never really know how the graph relates to the numbers or other actual keywords. Still, for finding good keywords, it’s a good tool for the price-free.

We’ll cover more tools in a upcoming post.

Till then, keep building!

Gary

1. Google likes- no wants, no, needs real content. There’s no better way to get into Google’s good graces that a properly optimized page with good content on it. I have a site that regularly pulls SERP in the top 5 days after I put content on it, and itg beats out sites with more PR and more pages and more readers. Why? Good original content. You can’t touch it in terms of overall effectiveness.

2. Google doesn’t like your Flash graphics. And the rest of use really don’t either. The Googlebot can’t read Flash graphics, and don’t care how pretty they look. Your bottom line should be effectiveness, not beauty. Your site design should be a mixture of both.

Having said that, if you have to have Flash on your front page, make sure you have a way for visitors to bypass it to get to the meat of your site. Many people (including yours truly) pretty much bypass the “cool” graphics to get to why they are there- the content.

So the bottom line is: have a link that people can click to get past your work of art.

3. Google loves the idea of a site with interlinked pages, but make sure all of your links actually work. Even the Googlebot isn’t Einstien, and gets confused (which is the main reason that cloakers still work to an extent). If you have links that aren’t working, or lead to 404 errors- well it just looks bad, for your potential clickers, and on you. Just fix it, or at the very least, create a cool 404 page, or htaccess a redirect to bad links back to your home page.

4. Title tags drive your Adsense content. Title tags are a factor in your Adword Quality Score. Title tags tell people what to expect. Title tags shouldn’t lie about what’s on the page. Title tags should have the main keyword for the page in them. Title tags are good for SEO. Did I mention that Title tags are important?

5. I’ve hear the most ridiculous thing about meta tags, and that is this: that they don’t matter anymore. And with that, here’s a challenge. If you have a Adsense page that’s not giving you the ads you want on that page, 6 out of 10 times, it’s because you either don’t have meta keyword tags, or have bad meta keyword tags, or a bad title and bad meta keywords ( see #4). Fix that, and, it should fix that problem. Unless your copy just outright sucks. Even meta keywords can’t fix that. Try it

More coming soon. Till then, Keep Building!

Gary

People want to now they best way to assure that they get the ads that they are writing content for in their pages. After all, it would really suck if you got a 0.01 cent PSA ad when you were hoping to get a $10.00 lawyer ad.

The number one tip that I can give you is this… make sure that you have your target keyword in your URL. In other words, if you’re aiming for the keyword “grape jelly”, make sure that “grape-jelly” is in your URL:

http:www.axalda.info/grape-jelly.html

Also, people may think that meta keywords are H1 titles are dead… but not so with Adsense. The people at Google read them, too and consider that when dishing out ads. So make sure that you put meta keywords in, and that you have at least a H1 had that matches you keywords as well.

Some may not agree, but it doesn’t hurt your SEO in the long, especially if you are planning to get organic traffic form the search engines anytime soon, and, in case you want to direct some PPC traffic towards you r page for any reason, you will do much better with Google Adwords Quality Score criteria.

In other words, to coin that old song, “take the time, do it right.”

Till Next Time, Keep Building!

Gary

The ideal page that is built for Adsense page should contain ACTUAL content about a specific topic. That may sound like a very simple statement…until you come across a site that has pages generated by the newest content generators using “Markov Chain” technology and the like.

The truth of the matter is, that even though it may take you longer to actually generate good content, it’s worth it in the long run, especially if you are depending on the search engines and articles to deliver your traffic. Your pages will stay indexed longer, and avoid the scrutiny of search engine algorithms and humans who LOVE to out this week MFA (Made For Adsense site) in a hurry.

Another thing. Adsense is a very complicated beast technically, and Google has million of users, and has probably seen (or thought of) every Adsense scam in the book. Thinking about clicking on your own ads? Here’s a idea….DON’T DO IT.

Thinking about calling your pals back east to click on your ads? Again, don’t do it. Google’s got every scheme hard-wired, and you will get caught. Period.

Too many people put Adsense of their page,and get served ads that are irrelevant to the copy. Happens all the time. Adsense considers many factors when you are served ads to a page, including the title of the page, the meta tags, the content and word counts are considered as well.

Make sure that your title and meta keywords are lined up with the ads you want to show, or else you’ll be showing Red Cross PSAs on your Tech blog.

And really, it just helps your click-though rate overall when you use good content. It helps-in spades. It helps build your credibility with your end user, and it helps your actual ad click through rate.

Next time, I’ll be talking about CTR (click through rates), and more. Here’s a quick tip before I leave though…DON’T place a picture next to your Adsense ads. That’s now a no-no. You heard differently? Well, that’s OLD news.

I’ll explain next time.

Till then, keep building!

Gary

After one day, I’ve found 148 references on my headline “What Pam Anderson and Mr. Rogers taught me” on MSN. Not a bad start.

You can find the story on my blog here: axalda.info/blog.

Get the FREE Google Adsense Top 500 Keyword List at axalda.info/topkeywords.html

Gary