Google Advertising Professional Test
May0
So I just hit 900 dollars a month on spending for PPC with Google across all my campaigns so I think its going to be coming time to take the AdWords Professional Test. I took a look at what exactly you get from aligning yourself with Google in such a way and the benefits are many. Starting with the fact that you can now post an AdWords certified image on your site (great for perspective customers) but just for passing the test you get a 100 dollar credit for your accounts, free money is always welcome. You also get a professional status page which is like a mini-profile for people to look at and verify that Google is indeed backing you. And last but not least, to quote Google, you get a “warm, fuzzy feeling of accomplishment.”
The test itself costs $50 to take and inorder to even be eligible to take the test you have to build and maintain a minimum of $900 dollars spent over 90 days. Assuming you have built this up, the test should be too hard as you are already maintaining a decent amount of money in before you can even take the test.
Ill most likely do some research for a few days to make sure im “up to snuff,” no reason in wasting the $50 fee because i didnt feel like being prepared. Look for my results soon.
Saving Money
May0
It’s safe to assume that if you are reading this article, you are interested in making money. Be it money earned online or money earned offline, earning your keep can make you feel just as good as shooting your arch-nemisis with a net gun. However, making money is only one side of the coin, if you are going to be raking in the cash, you need to make sure that it isn’t running back out. You see, part of why internet moneymaking remains profitable is because you are able to start with such a low overhead. Once you see a decent ROI over time, you can then up the ante and start dishing out some money for AdWords campaigns and the like, but you want to spend your money wisely, and that includes budgeting and saving. There are several ways you can track what you have coming in vs what is going out. For a while i was using Mint, but for whatever reason, it seems not to ever be 100% accurate. It sometimes forgets to send me my balance text messages and it doesn’t connect to my BoA accounts correctly, so ultimatley its use has come second to me just logging into my Bank of America account and doing it that way. At any rate, when you are consious of the what you are spending and can put it in an actual dollar amount, you can inadvertently save where you might have otherwise spent.
Another tip for this upside-down economy. If you cant control yourself with your credit cards, why not ask the issuing company to lower your credit limit? I had a $17,000 limit for no reason on my Mastercard. I never spent over 1k/month, so i called them and had them drop it to 8500. I know its still not close to the 1k i spend a month(average) but it allows for half of thew wiggle room and potential trouble from the larger credit line.
Overall, just make sure to spend only the money you have. Just becasue things are cheaper now, does not mean they need to be bought. Its great to make a lot of money, but even if you do, be sure to save wisely, not just spend wisely.
Twitter: To Follow or Not To Follow
Apr0
Twitter has become an essential part of social marketing these days and you are starting to find more and more businesses utilizing this new technology as a way to connect with their clients or demographic, but with this sudden influx of users comes a question…. Do you follow people that follow you?
When I first signed up for twitter early last year I obviously didn’t have many followers, but with the apps available on the iPhone, I was able to see and interact with people within a certain amount of miles of me, which helped a lot when we went on our baseball roadtrip last year and didn’t know good places to eat, etc. But I started noticing that whenever I would follow someone, they would immediately follow me back. It was nice, because then I knew people were actually getting my tweets, whether or not they were reading them is a different story. So I decided to give this idea a try and setup a few Twitter accounts for some of my web sites, then I used the search function and searched people’s profiles looking for related keywords or interests and then I would proceed to follow them in hopes that they would follow me back.
And yes it did work. I quickly had a couple hundred followers for some of my websites which I would then feed links to trying to get people to visit the site. After a while though I stopped using this method because it seemed to me that people who were just following me because I follow them are probably going to be less inclined to click my links than the people that actually made an effort to follow me, plus now I was following an obscene amount of people and couldn’t interact with all of them.
That was then…. it seems like things have started to change in the Twitter-verse. Not as many people are following people that are following them. It could just be the influx of celebrities joining Twitter and obviously they can’t follow everyone that follows them, but I know personally I don’t follow everyone that is following me. I just feel like if you want to know what’s going on with me, that’s great, I appreciate it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to know what’s going on with you. It’s not that I think I’m any more interesting than the next guy (cause I’m definitely not, just take a look at my tweets @treding) it’s just that I like being able to communicate with the people I follow and I truely do want to know what’s going on with them. So if I had thousands of tweets coming up everytime I opened Tweetie on my iPhone, I would probably miss 90% of my actual friends’ tweets. Yes there are apps for the computer that help with this problem by allowing you to create groups so you can keep people apart and I do use TweetDeck at home for this very reason, but I’m not always at home so people like Ashton Kutcher and P Diddy are constantly flooding my Tweetie screen making it very likely that I missed some stuff that my actual friends are saying that might interest me.
So with that I’m asking this question, Do you follow everyone that follows you (as long as they aren’t spammers of course)? Or are you like me where it’s great that people are following you and want to know what you’re up to, but you don’t really care what they are doing so there’s no reason to follow them?
I think Twitter is moving away from the follow me follow you idea from a year ago, but what do you guys think? And feel free to post your Twitter names below if you’re looking for random followers.
Buying A New Domain Name to Increase SERPs
Apr2
Often overlooked by beginning companies, buying additional domains that relate to your products and services, and hosting blogs on them can be a valuable tool in creating valuable backlinks to your site. Lets say you own PetesOrganicDog.com and sell dog leashes, collars, dog bowls, poop bags, and more. Now, lets say you buy organic-dog-collars.com and natural-dog-products.com and host simple but related blogs on each. As the search engines spider those additional sites and see that not only a block of relavant content is pointing to your domain but an entire site on your topic favors your brand, it weights those links heavier. Also, aging links are often seen as the most important in search engines, and if you control the keyword rich domains, you can always make sure that your links stay valid. This also helps you create your own ring of sites, which has the potential to rack up a lot more valid traffic, and also helps you put yourself more in control of your important links.
Social Media In A B2B Environment
Apr0
I know it’s been a while since we’ve posted here and we genuinely feel bad about it, but nobody really reads it so I guess we can’t feel bad about it… But then again if we posted more maybe more people would read, it’s a vicious cycle, but we’re going to try to put a stop to that. We will be posting more starting now and hopefully you guys will enjoy what we have to say.
Does Social Media have a place in a Business to Business enviroment?
I was just in a meeting at my day job where we have been discussing some changes we are making to our website that will help our customers find what they are looking for. The software/logic that we have been using to run the website’s search hasn’t been the greatest mainly because we never tweaked the software used to drive that aspect of the site. So over the past couple weeks we have been working towards better logic to drive customers to find the products they are looking for. So in the meeting we had today about this situation social media was brought up. With Twitter making headline news pretty much everywhere these days I knew this topic was going to come up sooner or later (if I wasn’t the one to bring it up), but then it got me thinking, does this really apply to our business model? And would it really help anything?
I don’t like to get into too much personal information about where I work, but I work for a decent sized family owned company that acts as sort of a middleman for a specific industry. We buy from manufacturers and also produce our own goods and sell them to one industry that has multiple installations all over the world, not necessarily run by the same companies, just the same industry. These installations then offer a service to the public. That’s probably a terrible way to describe it, but hopefully you get the idea.
Google Adsense For Domains
Dec0
Looks like Google has added a new method of making some money on your websites, but this time it’s websites that you have nothing on. They have introduced Google Adsense for Domains, which is basically just parking domains with adsense ads all over them. I just set it up on a few of my domains, some of which had content at one point and some of which that has never had any content on it. So we’ll see if this method makes any money at all. It can’t hurt since the domains were just sitting with GoDaddy parking them for me, so why should they get all the money.
New Magento Version Released, Updated SEO Features
Nov0
The open-source ecommerce solution, Magento has just released a new version in time for all those online Holiday stores(woot!!). You can download the update within the Connect Manager in the admin portion of Magneto. It includes:
- Google Base integration
- Scheduled DV logs cleaning options
- Google Website Optimizer Integration
and more, its pretty slick, i sound like an advertisement - but im not, its that great. Here is a fancy little video showcasing the Google Website Optimizer options within 1.1.7.
Full 1.1.7 Patch Notes here.
ICANN Approves .tel Domain Names
Nov0
Who is going to be picking up some of these new .tel domain names? And yes, the article below is from 2006 when the .tel started making it’s move, but the sales are finally going to be happening. Check below for the dates.
An Internet regulator has approved the creation of the .tel domain, the company that proposed the domain announced on Monday.
Telnic, which proposed .tel to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2000, said the domain will give individuals and businesses a naming and navigation structure for Internet communications.
The idea is for people to use .tel as a way of communicating directly with the person or company behind a particular Web site, using technologies such as voice over Internet Protocol, e-mail or Short Message Service (SMS). Telnic used the examples of AdamSmith.tel or Hertz.tel.
“The .tel domain offers the first genuinely different use of domains since .com was first created. It will provide seamless integration of existing methods of communication, with emerging technologies like voice over IP,” Telnic’s chief executive, Khashayar Mahdavi, said in a statement.
“The days of needing to remember several telephone numbers, numerous VoIP or instant message identities and other points of contact for our social and professional networks are over. By leveraging innovative DNS (Domain Name System) technology, the .tel domain will allow anyone to publish and control, in real time, how they can be reached,” Mahdavi said.
Telnic, whose mission includes developing a text-based naming and navigation system for Internet communications, hopes to start awarding .tel addresses in 2007.
A similar initiative, called ENUM, already exists. It uses an architecture based on the Domain Name System to resolve telephone numbers to domain name addresses.
Last week ICANN rejected the adult-oriented .xxx domain, a move that was welcomed by adult industry insiders but criticized by the European Commission, which accused ICANN of bowing to pressure from the U.S. government.
Sunrise Registration (Trademark Holders Only)
Pre-booking available Now to December 3, 2008
Sunrise Registrations open December 3, 2008 & continues until February 2, 2009
Landrush Registration (Open to Everyone at a Premium Price)
Pre-booking available Now to February 3, 2009
Landrush registration opens February 3, 2009 & continues until March 24, 2009
General Registration (Open to Everyone at a Standard Price)
Pre-booking available Now to March 24, 2009
General registration opens March 24, 2009
source: CNET
Online Advertising In Decline
Nov0
I just read an interesting article over at Tech Crunch about online ad growth grinding to a halt and at first it had me a little worried, but after I read what they were getting at, it didn’t bother me as much. The article is really short so head over there and read it really quickly, it’s more charts than words. First of all the article is only dealing with the 4 large companies, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL and we all know that you don’t rely on one type of ad on your websites to pull in the cash. Not to mention that the economy all of the world is in a steady decline right now and therefore not everyone can be pulling record profits like the oil companies. If you look at the graphs in the article, these companies are still growing, just not as much as they had the previous year. With everything that is going on right now in the world, I think any growth for a company is good.
Now I don’t rely on internet marketing and advertising as my sole source of income, if I did I would barely be able to afford the cost of cable internet every month, ha! While I do make a fair amount, I haven’t seen any decrease lately in sales due to anything outside of the time of year (my niche is a spring/fall type niche). Recently I’ve actually seen an increase in sales and income, but this could be due to the revamp of my site and the focus on SEO, but none the less, this proves that if you still work at it you will be able to pull money.
So don’t worry when you see articles like this one stating that internet advertising is in decline, focus on what you are doing and don’t stop working at it. Things will get better around the world and industries will thrive again, so why not get in on it now when other people are getting away from it.
source: Tech Crunch
My Experience With .info vs .com
Nov0
One of my biggest money making websites had been on a “.info” domain for over a year and was pulling a fair amount of money. I know that “.info” domains are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to quality and they are usually picked up by spammers for cheap. When I initially started the website I didn’t anticipate the amount of revenue I could generate with it and therefore didn’t want to spend the extra money on a “.com”. This was a big mistake!
A dot com domain costs anywhere from $6-10 per year, depending on what GoDaddy promo codes you can dig up, where a dot info domain runs you $1.99 per year. I was trying to save money but had I known that meager $4-8 for the year would have had me pulling in much more money I would have done it right the first time.
Earlier this month I decided it was time for this .info site to get a makeover and a new domain. It was starting to become cluttered with ads that didn’t need to be there, information that nobody clicked on and so forth, plus it was out of season and I wasn’t making a lot of money. First thing I did was secured a brand new .com domain for the website, making sure to use a good keyword. After that was secured, I got a different layout going and setup everything how I wanted. I did a few tests to make sure everything was going well and setup all the plugins and other stuff I needed. Everything was done, I switched the RSS subscribers over the new site, the twitter feed, all I needed to do was make a post on the old site letting people know that we’ve moved and then start updating the new site instead.
Keep in mind that I hadn’t been making much money on this site over the summer, it’s off season for this niche. As soon as I turned on the new site and started making posts there I was getting a ton more visitors than I normally had gotten. I was coming up way higher in SERPs and getting more click throughs which in turn was generating more revenue. I also had more people signing up as followers on twitter and subscribers to my RSS feed. I was certainly happy with the way things were looking.
It’s been about 13 days since I’ve launched the new look/domain and I’ve made more this month than I did all summer. I can’t put a finger on exactly what caused the massive change in visitors, but I’m pretty confident it has to do with the the SEO tactics I’ve implemented as well as the dot com domain. People seem to trust a .com more than a .info. The site is also not cluttered with ads anymore, although there are still a few minor issues I have to fix. Overall I’m amazed at the turnaround of the site over the past few weeks and it seems as though it’s not slowing down.
So my advice to you is if you’re going to start up a website and are debating between a .info and a .com due to the cheaper price, I would always go with the .com (.net if you absolutely have to). Just from my personal experience this month I can tell you that you will regret it if you go with the lesser of the two.