My Buy Essay

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With its global audience, the Internet provides a unique revenue generation platform with search engines. This is where your business will be made or thrown on the refuse pile.

Marketing on Search Engines &ndash Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Buck

Search engines are similar to the streets of a major city. Some search engines represent the major avenues where people congregate while others are more similar to back alleys where almost nobody goes or at least not the kind of people you want to meet in…a dark alley.

Cutting to the chase, your traffic generation efforts should focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines control the vast majority of traffic on the Internet. Not only do lots of people uses them to find things, the big three provide search results to many other search engines as well. For instance, Google supplies ads and search results for AOL. Dogpile compiles the various search results from the big three in its listings. Alta Vista uses Yahoo search results. This scenario is so expansive that the big three search engines are simply the only way to go. This means you need to focus on them to the exclusion of others.

When you focus on these sites, two approaches can be taken &ndash pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Other forms of search engine marketing, such as banner ads, produce poor results and should be avoided. Let’s take a closer look at the big two.

Pay-per-click advertising [ppc] is platform whereby you pay for placement on a search engine. The two major ppc platforms are Overture and Google Adwords. Overture places ads on the Yahoo and MSN search engines. Google Adwords places ads on Google and AOL search results. Both platforms place ads on other search engines and sites, so you will see your listings appearing everywhere.

The advantage of PPC advertising is you get immediate traffic for your site. You can use the traffic to test the content on the site and whether visitors convert into paying customers. The downside is you are paying for traffic, which means you must pay close attention to your return on investment. All and all, PPC advertising should be used at the outset of a marketing campaign while you wait for optimized pages to get natural rankings.

Search engine optimization [seo] is by far the most effective way to go on the big three. Once you obtain top three rankings for a keyword, you receive more traffic than you would from ppc and it is all free! This does wonders for your profitability. If you can figure out seo on your own, your cost of marketing should eventually become your time and a few dollars a month for tools. This results in obscenely high profits margins. If you prefer to use a seo firm, your costs are going to go up significantly. Once the free traffic starts rolling in, however, you should get an excellent return on investment.

The downside to seo is it takes a lot of time and work. You can expect to wait up to a year for top Google rankings, although Yahoo and MSN rankings will appear much sooner. In light of this waiting period, PPC advertising is a must at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign.

Internet marketing is a fairly simple game. Focus on the big three search engines with a combination of ppc and seo efforts. Stick to these two and you should see good results.

You’ve been quite some time at the Internet, marketing your products, or other’s products and running multiple Google adwords campaigns. Although your market is a competitive market, your sales letter is amazing, your ads are targeted, your landing pages are specific and well designed, you offer free ebooks to tempt your potential customers, but still you cannot convert your visitors into customers. What is happening? If this is you then keep reading.

Ok, first stop crying please. I know it’s frustrating to work hard and get no results but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Here are some tips that will help you write killer ads that will convert prospects into customers.

There are many factors that affect the quality of your ads especially when using adwords campaigns. Here’s an example of a three line ad and how to write it:

Ad Line 1: The headline. It’s so important to write a good compelling headline. I will assume you already know this. Now, try to use as many targeted keywords and search terms as you can. That means you have to do some keyword research on your topic before you start writing your ad. If you don’t use specific and well targeted keywords when writing your headline your ad is bound to fail.

Ad Line 2: Main text. Here you have to tell your prospects/potential customers exactly what to expect when they click your ad. Don’t use all caps. You may capitalize the first letter of every word, that’s ok. You also have to create interest here. State a fact, a solution to the problem. Create desire and an emotional attachment. What will your product help the customer do? How quickly can your product help the customers accomplish their goal? Don’t be afraid to use cliches like “How To..”, “Amazing..”, “Top selling..” etc. They do work.

Ad Line 3: Call to action. Tell the readers why they should immediately click your ad. Maybe because they will miss some important offer or something like that. Maybe because you offer free shipping for the next 7 days. Maybe because you throw 3 exclusive bonuses. Can you find a clear and cool reason for your call of action? Use it here. Do not forget to proof-read your ads again and again before publishing.

Landing pages

Yes, landing pages are important. Especially if you are on Google adwords campaigns. You should know that your landing pages affect your overall quality score of your ads too, according to Google. Do you have any idea how frustrating can be to decide to click to a quality ad that points to a lousy landing page? Another bad example would be to “hide” your product under adsense ads, images or text. Try to help your visitors to see exactly what they want when they land on your page.

In May of 2006, among other announcements, Google announced Google Co-op. This article is a follow-on article to a previous article, “Google Co-Op Overview”, which provided a high-level overview of Google Co-op. This article will go into one of the components of Google Co-Op, Topics, in more detail than was covered in the previous article.

Google Co-Op is important to users for several reasons. Google Co-Op allows users to contribute information that will help Google to improve search results for everyone. In addition, Google Co-Op allows an end-user to customize their own search experience so that information that is more relevant and trusted will appear at the top of the user’s search results. Users accomplish this by subscribing to “trusted” sources of information. Information from those trusted sources will appear at the top of a user’s search results for relevant searches.

Google Co-Op is a beta-test service now being offered by Google. Anyone with a Google account may participate. While still in its infancy, Google Co-Op represents Google’s efforts to embrace social web and social search concepts in a major way to help improve Google search results. Google Co-op consists of two things:

1. Topics, which are simply a means of labeling web content

2. Subscribed links, which are a means for users to subscribe to a particular web site’s content

Topics can further be sub-divided into two things:

1. The ability to create an entire categorization or labeling scheme

2. The ability to simply provide labels for web content, which Google calls annotations

The remainder of this article will focus on the annotations aspect of Google Topics.

Annotations to URLs

Annotating URLs is perhaps the easiest part of Google Co-Op to understand. It also requires the least amount of technical expertise to implement. A “topic” is simply Google’s way of saying “area of interest”. Topics are a labeling or categorization scheme. Topics allow users a way of providing labels (which may also be referred to as tags, or categories) for information on the web (represented by URLs). Labels may be provided for an entire web site, portions of a web site, or even a specific web page. These “labels” provide some indication of the topic or topics for a given web site or page. In essence, they provide additional information on what the web site is all about.

Anyone with a Google account can label web sites. Google refers to the process of providing labels for web sites as “Annotating URLs”. An annotation is simply the association of a label, or multiple labels, with a URL. For example, a travel site might get the label “destination_guide”.

Users may use labels for topics that Google already has under development, which include: health, destination guides, autos, computer & video games, photo & video equipment, and stereo & home theater. Users may also develop their own labels for topics. For example, if a user has an interest in “wine” they may develop labels for the topic wine, which may include “wine_regions”, “wine_types“, etc. They can then use these labels to annotate sites that deal with wine.

An end user may submit their annotations to Google in one of two formats: 1) in a tab-delimited format (which can be created using Microsoft Excel or any spreadsheet); or 2) in an XML file. Perhaps the easiest format for most users to deal with is simply to create a spreadsheet where the first column contains a URL or URL pattern, and the subsequent columns contain labels, one label to a column. Further information that may be associated with a URL in subsequent columns includes:

• Score – a ranking of relevance from 0 to 1 (0 to 100%)
• Comment




• Attributes – user defined attributes which may only be included in the tab-delimited file format

Annotation Examples

A few examples will go a long way to illustrate annotating URLs. If I were using a tab-delimited file to annotate a travel related web site it might look something like this:

URL&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Label&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Label&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Label&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Score Comment

.travelsite.com/* &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp sightseeing&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp museums &nbsp&nbsp shopping&nbsp&nbsp 1 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Detailed destination information

If I were using an XML file to annotate the same travel related web site it might look something like this:

<Annotations>


<file>travelsite-annotations.xml</file>

<Annotation>


<about>.travelsite.com/*</about>

<Label>


<name>sightseeing</name>


<score>1</score>


<Comment>Detailed destination information</Comment>

</Label>

<Label>


<name>museums</name>


<score>1</score>


<Comment>Detailed destination information</Comment>

</Label>

<Label>


<name>shopping</name>


<score>1</score>


<Comment>Detailed destination information</Comment>

</Label>

</Annotation>

</Annotations>

Conventions for Labels

There are some simple conventions that should be followed when labeling content. First it is important to understand that labels may be applied to URLs or wildcard URLs. Using wildcards makes it much easier to label a lot of content with a few statements. For example:

• Labels applied to .mywebsite.com/ would only apply to that specific page of the web site
• Labels applied to .mywebsite.com/* would apply to all URLs that starts with the URL “.mywebsite.com”
• Labels applied .mywebsite.com/*tips would apply to all URLs that start with the URL “.mywebsite.com” and contain the word “tips”

A single URL may have multiple labels. If using a tab-delimited file, each label must appear in its own column.

Labels should be all lower case with all punctuation and conjunctions (and, or) removed. For example, “hardware and software” would become “hardware_software”.

Labels should be as short as possible and as unambiguous as possible. Watch out for words that can mean multiple things.

Additional Information

There are many good places to find additional information. The first is the Google Co-Op Site (.google.com/coop) where they have posted a Topics Developers Guide. The Google Co-Op FAQ is also helpful. There is also a good article entitled “How to Use Google Co-op” at Google Blogoscoped (blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-05-11-n40.html).

Why is Labeling Content Important?

The process of labeling content will benefit everyone in several ways. Labels will provide Google with a vast amount of information about web sites, potentially down to a very granular, or individual page level. If an individual’s annotations are found to improve the quality of the search results, they will be shown to everyone. In essence, over time, Google will use annotations and other aspects of Google Co-Op to improve search results.

Conclusion

Annotating URLs is a relatively low effort task for individuals that can reap benefits for everyone – better and more relevant search results. While still in its infancy, and going through the growing pains that are normal for services that are in beta test, Google Co-op clearly has a lot of promise to enable Google to provide much more powerful and relevant search results to users.

Are you aware of how vitally important and valuable CONTENT is to your online business and adsense site? In fact, content can do more to build your business and adsense profits than just about any other resource or service available.

Following is a list of 5 key ways that content can help build your traffic, adsense profits, subscribers, and customers starting today!…

1. Boost your search engine ranking and daily visitor count by posting keyword rich articles and content on your web-site. For example, if your business involves offering information and services related to adsense, posting adsense related articles and content will attract unlimited prospective customers on a regular basis!

2. Generate double or even triple the number of newsletter subscribers you do currently, simply by offering content in the form of “special reports” or manuals as bonuses for subscribing to your publication. People love freebies, so give them what they want and watch as your results increase!

3. Create an automated cash flow by using content to formulate multi-part email training courses with related web-site or affiliate links “sprinkled” throughout each course. Use an autoresponder service to automate the delivery of your training course (such as a 5 part training course delivered over a 5 day period).

Training courses can also serve as excellent bonus offers for your prospective newsletter subscribers.

4. One of the most important keys to a successful online business is not JUST having a mailing list or newsletter subscribers… It’s about building a trusting relationship with your subscribers. By sending informative articles (content) to your list on a regular basis you will establish yourself as an expert on your topic of business, as well as gain the trust of your subscribers over time. As a result, your subscribers will be EAGER to take advantage of your “paid” product and service offers. (Just make sure that you NEVER take advantage of the relationship you develop with your list by offering products or services of poor quality just to make a quick buck!)

If there is one “constant” in Internet marketing, it’s this: A cultivated list of subscribers is as good as money in the bank. Write that down and never forget it!

5. Another excellent way to generate no cost traffic is by submitting ready-made articles to “content hungry” web-site and newsletter publishers with your “resource box” attached. A resource box is nothing more than a little 3-6 line “bio” about you and/or your web-site – including a link to your site (or even instructions on how to subscribe to your newsletter)…

When submitting or offering your article(s) for reprint purposes, just make sure to specify that each article is to be reprinted “as is” with your resource box attached.

…Even one article can go a LONG way towards generating no cost traffic and visitors for you. Just imagine your article being sent out to a newsletter subscriber base of 100,000 individuals – many of whom will be reading YOUR included resource box and clicking on your URL to learn more about what you have to offer!

Well there you have it, 5 sure ways to build your online business exponentially with the help of articles and content…

With the declining effectiveness of many of the online advertising methods that we’ve relied on in past years, content is only strengthening its position as the ultimate KEY to generating unlimited traffic, adsense profits, subscribers, and customers!

Yo, Santa! How’s it going in the great white north? Seeing as it tis’ the season, here is my letter about what I want for Christmas.

Been Good

Santa, I know you do that whole good versus bad thing. I promise I’ve been a good internet marketer this year. I haven’t spammed the search engines with mirror sites, link farm purchases or little tricks to tweak your friends at Google. Now, while I’ve been good, I would like a few bad things for Christmas. No ponies here, I want the good stuff.

Dear Santa, I want:

1. A lump of coal to be given to the bad person or persons at Yahoo who’ve been deleting my pages from their search engine results.

2. A lump of coal to the same people at Yahoo who came up with the Site Match nonsense. Feel free to let the reindeer relieve themselves while on the roofs of these peoples’ homes.

3. To meet a person from Google who handles the ranking updates in a bar late at night after they’ve been drinking for four or five hours. I only need 15 minutes. Pleeeeasssee! I’ve been so good.

4. Five minutes in the Ultimate Fighting Octagon with Bill Gates.

5. A few hours with your list of bad people who will get coal for the holidays. Don’t worry, I can figure out which ones are fraudulently clicking my PPC ads.

6. Please send the Santa virus to the people who keep sending me the phishing Pay Pal emails.

7. Same thing for the bad boys and girls sending me pharmaceutical spam.

8. The opportunity to beat each dmoz volunteer editor over the head with my keyboard just once. Okay, maybe twice.

Now I realize you are a master of being subtle. When I visited you at the mall, you acted like I was a lunatic and you didn’t know what I was talking about. I really didn’t appreciate you calling security and the FBI, but I guess everybody has a bad day. I’m sure I can count on you to come through this year.

Oh, I forgot something. Angelina Jolie. Definitely Angelina Jolie. Leave her short dork boyfriend at home.

Now that isn’t too much to ask is it? Is it?

They are calling him the million dollar man. Jason Calacanis recently revealed in his blog that he is on track to earn a million dollars from AdSense over the year ahead.

And if that number doesn’t wake you up and have you sitting on the edge of your seat, consider for a moment that he reached this level in less than a year. His company only started using AdSense in September 2004.

Calacanis runs Weblogs Inc., a network dedicated to creating trade weblogs across niche industries. And he’s quickly proven that AdSense is a credible advertising partner.

As their network has grown, so has their AdSense revenue. In January 2005 they earned an average of $580 per day. In March it was $737. In May it was $1,585. One day in July, just before he made the blog entry referred to above, they earned $2,335. Remember that is just for one day. If they can take that daily average to $2,740 they’ll be earning a rate of $1 million for a year. And Calacanis predicts that reaching daily earnings of $3,000 or even $5,000 is quite achievable.

That’s quite an achievement. Keep in mind that Calacanis has 103 bloggers on the payroll and nine staffers. Even so, many webmasters would give an arm or a leg to have even a third of that.

Google’s AdSense has been revolutionary. It has become firmly established as the darling of the online advertising industry. Although rumors are heard of major competitors launching a similar service, AdSense’s premier position seems secure for now.

In essence, AdSense has made it possible for almost anyone with a web site or blog to earn some revenue from advertising, without having to employ sales people or spend precious time searching for advertisers.

AdSense works like this. Webmasters sign up for an account in just a few minutes. They receive a small snippet of code to include on their web pages. Google will then automatically serve advertisements that are relevant to the content on the webmaster’s pages. When someone visits the webmaster’s site and clicks on one of Google’s AdSense advertisements, the webmaster earns a fee. Advertisers can pay anywhere from five cents to a hundred dollars per click, and the webmaster receives a percentage of that fee.

Many webmasters are content with earning five to ten dollars from AdSense to cover the cost of web hosting. But many, unsurprising, have higher ambitions. At a popular WebmasterWorld forum, participants share tips and encouragement on reaching a goal of $300 per day from AdSense. So it is no wonder that Calacanis created quite a buzz when he made his million dollar blog entry.

Google have proven once again that they excel at designing innovative Internet services. If you are in the web industry and have not yet used AdSense, then perhaps you should try it out. Or if you are already using it, perhaps Calacanis’ impressive results will encourage you to track the performance of your AdSense units more closely, fine tune their positions and formats, and take your earnings to a new level.

Calacanis’ million dollar blog entry can be viewed at: calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000403051129/