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Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

I have been playing around lately with Poll Factory 2.0 which is a nifty tool to have if you want to crank out tons of polls to test CPA offers with PPC.

Check out this screenshot of the control panel:

Here are a few of the new features in Poll Factory 2.0 compared to the original version:

1. The ability to upload your own templates. If you’re good at tweaking CSS templates, you can integrate polls into virtually any type of site you own. I’ve done some modifications to be able to integrate polls into an XSitePro-built site.

2. The ability to let the voters view the results before sending them on to the offer page.

3. You can track CTRs of your various polls.

4. You can store all your CPA offers on control panel and easily insert them for different polls.

5. Set up default about and privacy pages. Saves some time from copying and pasting if you’re going to host your polls on a single generic domain.

This is definitely a good supplement for those of you who are in the PPC Coach program.

Technorati Tags: Poll Factory 2.0

Popularity: 1% [?]

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I noticed in the last couple of days that the minimum bids for AdWords were no longer showing. Instead, if you hover over the little arrow next to the magnifying glass near your keyword, you’ll see if your ad is showing and what is the quality score (from 0 to 10) for that keyword.

This reminds me of the old days when there used to be a green quality bar under each ad.

Here is the announcement from Google with my emphasis in bold:

“Static per-keyword Quality Scores have been replaced with a system that evaluates an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query.”

The new per-query evaluation of Quality Score affects your account in two main ways. First, keywords will no longer appear as ‘inactive for search.’ Now all keywords will have the chance to show ads on Google web search and the search network (unless you’ve paused or deleted them). Keep in mind that keywords that were previously inactive for search likely won’t accrue much traffic after this change. This is because their combined real-time Quality Score and bid probably isn’t high enough to gain competitive placement.

Another way this change impacts you is that minimum bids no longer appear in your account. Instead, we’ve replaced minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric, which will appear on your Keyword Analysis page: first page bid estimates. This metric estimates the cost-per-click (CPC) bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results when the search query exactly matches your keyword. The estimates are based on the ad’s Quality Score and current advertiser competition on that keyword. Although not a guarantee for an impression, this new metric should give you greater insight when choosing bids for your keywords. Learn more about first page bid estimates.

I think they’re still ironing out kinks in the system. I saw for a couple of keywords that the first page estimates were $100!

What I like about the new system is that the numerical ranking gives more insight from the perspective of the advertiser. It’s more transparent that the old quality scores of Poor, OK, and Great. Now if you have a score of 5 for a keyword, you can measure your progress as you improve the score to a 6, 7 or higher. By the way, you’ll need a minimum score of 8 to get a “Great” QS.

Technorati Tags: Google AdWords, quality score

Popularity: 4% [?]

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I’m testing out the “Blog This” feature on Flock. Anyway, check out this funny video spoof of Extreme’s “More Than Words”.

YouTube - Bazaarvoice “More Than Words”

And here’s the original just for comparison…

Popularity: 9% [?]

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It’s about time! Now you can finally do away with getting the paper checks and get your Clickbank payments direct into your bank account. Log in to your account and read the news release from July 15th.

Technorati Tags: Clicbank, direct deposit

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Type “Google Insights” into Google and you will find that they have a sponsored link right on the top of the page even though they are ranked at the top. Does Google get to advertise for free on it’s own search engine? Can you beat Google for the top ad position by bidding for the same phrase?

Just wondering…

Anyway, Google Insights is a pretty nifty tool for doing market research. Just for illustration, I just did a search comparison for “John McCain” vs. “Barack Obama” and look at the results.

You can also get results for regional searches. It looks like USA is where most of the searches are coming from (no surprise there) but in second place is Iraq followed by Canada. It also shows you related search terms and searches that are becoming popular or “rising searches” as they call it.

If you click on USA, you’ll actually be able to see the results broken down by state. This data would be great for political strategists.

Click on a state and you can even drill down by cities.

Check this out for Alabama on the McCain vs. Obama search.

(Another hint: If you log on to your Google account, you’ll see numbers which are scaled to the total amount of searches over the time period selected)

For marketers, it’ll also be a valuable tool to search for regional demand and if you’re running PPC campaigns, you can adjust your ads accordingly.

You can also find new keywords by looking at the suggested related keywords shown in the results. If you expand the time scale you can also check out the seasonality of certain topics or products.

Go ahead and spend some time playing around with this free tool.

Technorati Tags: Google Insights, market research, keyword research

Popularity: 10% [?]

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I only browsed through this article quickly but it looks like a good guide about buying and selling websites, so I wanted to share it with everyone.

If you’re developing a site or looking to sell one of your existing sites, this would give you some ideas about how much your site is worth.

Technorati Tags: website valuation

Popularity: 10% [?]

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I took three weeks off traveling to Malaysia and Singapore. Now I’m back and recharged! It’s crucial to take some time off to relax both your mind and body.

Here are a few items to take note of.

AffSpy is now open to the public in beta. You can compare different affiliate programs that are offered by several affiliate networks. Sometimes more than one network carries the offer so you can pick and choose from the one that offers the highest payout. It would be nice if they also include programs from places like CJ, Linkshare and Shareasale. Currently, the participants are most of the major pay-per-lead type affiliate networks like CPA Empire, NeverblueAds, etc. Still it’s a nice tool if you need to do payout/promotion type, i.e. ppc vs. email vs. web, comparisons.

Ed Dale’s 30 day challenge has kicked off. Although this free training is aimed more for beginners, even seasoned marketers can pick up some good tips. The videos are very well produced although the resolution could be better. Check it out if you haven’t seen it already.

In particular, I’ve been playing around with the Market Samurai research tool. It lets you scope out keywords and the competition based on AdWords and SEO data.

Technorati Tags: AffSpy, 30 Day Challenge, Market Samurai

Popularity: 10% [?]

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