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.
Website Magazine
Nov0
I recently signed up to receive a free subscription to Website Magazine which is dedicated to bringing you information on Website Success. I’m actually impressed with the first issue so far. This month it has a lot of good articles on how to manage your PPC campaigns as well as some alternatives to Adsense. If you’re just getting into this kind of internet marketing it’s a good place to start.
You can get your free subscription over at their websites http://www.websitemagazine.com unless you live outside of the US, then it’s $49/year, sorry guys. It’s definitely an interesting magazine and although you can find most of the information on other websites and forums, it’s nice to be able to have something physical that I can take into the bathroom to read instead of having to lug the laptop in there, which is kind of gross.
TTZ Media After 10 Days
Jun2
So I’ve had TTZ Media ads showing on my sites now for about 10 days and I must say they are doing pretty well. You can tailor the ads that show up on your site based on keywords, so most of the ads are always relevant to what you are promoting on your site. Each click seems to be worth a little more than adsense pays, which is nice, and people seem to click them a little more than adsense. I don’t know if it’s because they look a little different or what, but it’s working out pretty well. I’m going to start pushing it a little more on a few sites in place of adsense and see what sort of numbers I can pull through this month, but so far I am very pleased with the results and am in the process of replacing everything that used “shoppingads” with TTZ Media ads.
P.S. Stay away from shoppingads.com, they were good before a larger company bought them out and now I don’t seem to make anything off of them.
Experimenting with New Ads - TTZ Media
Jun0
So I signed up for a new ad service last week, TTZ Media. From what I understand it was started by John Chow of johnchow.com and actually pays quite well. It uses a pay per click business model similar to adsense, so anytime anyone clicks on the ads you make money. In some niches you can make quite a bit for each click and obviously in some you don’t make as much, but so far I feel like it’s working out much better than adsense has.
I have added it to a few of my sites so far and replaced a lot of my shoppingads.com banners with TTZ banners. So far I am pleased to say that it is working out well and I am going to add these banners to a lot more of my sites in the near future. So if you feel your site can generate some cash from banners that promote products, then check out TTZ Media.
Build Traffic Using PPC or Pay-Per-Click
Feb0
If you’ve ever been on Google or Yahoo you have no doubt seen the “Sponsored Ads” on the top and right side of every single search results screen. I’m sure you’ve wondered how you can get your website there, well the beauty of it is anyone can, if you’re willing to pay. The sponsored ads on these search engines are what we call PPC or Pay Per Click ads and obviously you must pay for them, but how much you pay is determined by how much other people are paying. The main ones that I use are Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter, although I would also recommend Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) service although I have no direct experience with them a lot of people do.
This is by far the easiest way to get traffic to a new site while you’re adding content. Now remember your ad placement on the side/top is determined by how much you are willing to spend vs. how much your keyword competitors are willing to spend. Say for example you have a site dedicated to bologna, you love bologna and everything about it and you want people to know. So you decide you’re going to pay for some ads on google using adwords. So you go in and setup your campaign using the keyword “bologna”. Now just from going to google and searching for “bologna” I can tell you that you’re price per click is not going to be very expensive, nor does it have to be since you’re only competing with 3 other people that are paying for ads. So in this case you could probably only spend .01 cent per click and have your ad at the bottom of the 3 ads on the first page. First page is key, even if you’re not the first ad to appear on the right, at least make sure you’re on the first page or it’s really not worth it.
Now if you had a site dedicated to “cell phones” and you want to get noticed for the search term “cell phones” on Google, it’s going to cost you a lot more since there are a lot of companies out there buying for the top spot/first page on the sponsored ads for cell phones. This could cost you a lot more than .01 cents a click, probably upwards of .50-1.00 per click depending on where you want to be in the results (these numbers are just my estimates based on sites I’ve setup campaigns for using similar keywords). And at .50 cents a click those could ad up quite fast if you’re not careful.
This is the same basic idea with all the big PPC publishers. The idea is that you set a specific price you want to spend per click, then you set a maximum price you’re willing to spend per day/week/month and then you sit back and let the search terms do the work for you. This is a great way to bring in visitors if you know that you’ll be able to get clicks on your ads or be able to generate sales with your affiliate programs. At first you probably won’t see too many conversions until you get more content (if it’s a new site) but you should see a definite improvement.
As I said before I don’t have any experience with Yahoo Publisher so I cannot comment on how well it works, but I have read that it is very good and I am going to look into getting into it. Currently I am using Google Adwords along with MSN Adcenter for my PPC campaigns. I have found that Google Adwords generates more clicks but it seems like MSN Adcenter brings in more conversions. People must use MSN when they are looking to buy something specifically, where as everyone uses Google so people could be searching for anything at anytime. The key is to turn paid clicks into conversions. There’s no sense in paying for ads if you’re not going to get anything in return.