Yeah so I noticed I haven't updated this blog for months. Reason being, I'm real busy nowadays. Work, and with my campaigns. Its still going strong, in fact, it's never been better.

Formed a PPC mastermind group in Singapore with some guys, where we'll meet occasionally to discuss about PPC related topics. http://affiliate.meetup.com/44/ And yes, its totally free. Reason I'm doing this is so I can share what I have learnt, and to see if my methods are transferable and teachable. I plan on doing workshops/seminars next time, and this is a platform for me to 'practise'.

So if you're wondering if I have given up on PPC -> CPA, now you know what I've been up to. 

Ok so now you've gotten your off-page and on-page optimization done, what you want to do next, is to focus on SEO-ing your sites, before actually using them for Adwords. There are a few approaches to this:

1) Getting your sites indexed - this can take anywhere from a few hours, to a few days, to even weeks. The most popular method is probably to get your link to as many authoritative places as you can, like related blogs, forums, or by link building/exchange with fellow webmasters. To check if your site has been indexed, type "site: http://www.yourdomain.com" into Google and you can see for yourself.

2) Link building - Alot of emphasis has been placed on Web 2.0 nowadays, and I personally find it useful as well. Do stuff such as Social Bookmarking (I use SENuke and Bookmarking Demon), buying links, exchanging links with others, etc. Also try commenting on high PR blogs, frequenting busy forums, and posting quality content. Also you could try this method mentioned on BHW (pretty blackhat, but works!)

3) Article submission - Write or outsource it. Target a keyword with little competition in Google (do a allintitle: {your keyword} in Google and look for keywords with not too many results), and write an article with the keyword in the Title, and also repeat it a few times in the article body (aim for >1% keyword density, but don't overspam it). Submit it to Ezinearticles and Goarticles, and social bookmark them. 

Doing the above steps will get your sites indexed, and with some nice linkjuice pointing to them. This increases their overall 'authority' in Google's eyes, and you will be rewarded with some nice 'great' quality score.

Do note that although your QS may read $0.01 min bid, most of the time bidding that low will not get you any impression or clicks - so this just helps to beat the Google Slap, but not give you a ton of clicks at rock bottom price.

Ok so you've gotten your campaign structure all done up properly, but you're not nearly done yet. There's another important aspect left - onpage optimization.

In a nutshell, it is doing stuff to your site that is pleasing to Google's eyes. Here are some steps you might consider doing to make your page more SEO friendly.

1) Install Google Sitemap - make your site more search engine friendly.

2) Dynamically insert your keywords into your landing pages. Use the best performing keyword from that adgroup to maximize efficiency.

3) Meta tags - Title tags, meta tags, descriptions, they all should contain your main keyword. People have asked whether meta tags still work, and the answer is YES. To a certain extent.

4) About pages | Privacy Policy | Contact Us - these pages are often looked for by Google, and having them increases your site's presence.

5) Landing page load time - Google have confirmed that they take the time for your page to load into account for calculating Quality Score. So if you're using huge .jpg files, lengthy flash movies etc, you might want to consider removing them, or at least putting up a compressed version of it. Nobody would want to wait 20s for your website to load anyway!

6) Link out to authority sites - Doesn't harm you, and might add some weight to your site. Find some related blogs, wiki sites, .edu/.gov sites, and link to them. 

Here are just some onpage optimization techniques that work. Do try them out, and you will be pleasantly surprised. Will be posting Part 3 on SEO-ing your sites soon. 

There are 3 things you can do to help to improve your Quality Score in Adwords.

1) Off page optimization
2) On page optimization
3) SEO (not exactly proven yet!)

Will be touching on off-page optimization in this post.

Simply, what off-page optimization means, is to tweak your campaign to achieve the maximum CTR%. This is done in a few ways:

CREATE SMALL, TIGHT, FOCUSED and THEMATIC adgroups.

This has probably been repeated dozens of times over the Internet, and even by Google, and for good reason - it works! But yet many people still do not do this! They grab a bunch of keywords, and toss a few hundred relevant keywords into each adgroup, turn on BROAD, PHRASE and MATCH, and wonder why they get OK/POOR quality score.

Here's what I believe in - unless you are simply gunning for curiousity clicks, volume, or branding, you should never turn "broad match" on. Never.

By having tight adgroups with proper themes, and I mean adgroups with no more than 10 keywords inside (with phrase and exact match), you should have a fantastic CTR%. I just recently did a campaign that is currently a week old, and it has a CTR% of over 5%, and average positions of 2.1. This is in a rather competitive niche, and least to say, all my Quality Score reads great.

So to recap, the 1st thing you should do, is to create tightly focused and themed adgroups with a few relevant keywords inside.

The 2nd thing you want to be doing, is to set position preferencing. The old belief that being in position 5-8 is equally good as being in 1-3, is sadly, just a belief. Research have shown that the top 3 results in PPC and organic will be looked at the most, and by showing up in position 5-8, you are getting the equal amount of impressions, but less people looking at your ad. This will cause your adgroup to have less than ideal CTR%, which will make your quality score stink.

Bid high off the start, and slowly adjust down once you have a decent CTR% (anything above 2% campaign wide is pretty ok imo)

3rd, you also want to be bold when writing ads. Use the theme in your adgroup. Say your adgroup looks like this:

Theme: find online dateKeyword: find an online date, where to find online date, finding online date, online date finding

Your ad would want to be something like:

Finding Online Date?
Find Your Date Here. Fast And Easy.
1000s Of Singles. Join Us Today!
FindOnlineDate.com

In the title, it will be bolded, and your description line1 will be bolded as well, making it stand out. In your ad, you always want to have a catchy title. Either ask a question, or address their wants. (in this case). In your ad description, have a feature and a benefit. And ALWAYS use Title Caps.

4th, you will always want to split test ads. I personally split test 4 ads simultaneously - 2 titles and 2 descriptions. After 50 clicks or so, I thrash the rest and leave the best, and write some more. This should be pretty basic, but still worth a mention.

Also, under campaign settings, I would set a budget of $20-30/day for testing/optimizing purposes, and set it to 'Equally served throughout the day'. Only when my campaign has been tweaked, then will I set it to accelerated delivery, to show as much as possible.

The last thing you might want to do, is negative keywords. If you're selling something, your negative keyword would probably be stuff like "free, compare". Think along those lines and you'll have your own set of negative keywords. Also, non-converting keywords can be included in your negative keyword lists.

Keep working on that campaign, and eventually you'll see GREAT QS all the time. Will be posting up Part 2 on On-Page optimization soon.

We all need a break once in a while. Take time to listen to them if you haven't already come across them, they are all highly relevant. Take notice of the lyrics.

Landing Page Design

Pay Per Click

Conversion Closing

Link Building

Will be doing a series about Quality Score, particularly with Google, and how to overcome it. 

Before we even begin, we must understand the rationale behind Google's decision to strictly implement Quality Score for every website. Google's ambition all along was to be the #1 search engine delivering the most relevant results, and to improve the overall user experience on the Internet. It wouldn't have attained this if it showed you irrelevant search results for your keywords.

Even though I find the QS filters a huge hassle at times, all affiliate marketers know that it is essential to keep blackhat SEO-ers and the like in check. For the uninformed regarding Quality Score, here are a few excerpt taken from Google itself:

"Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query."

"For calculating a keyword's minimum bid:

• The keyword's historical clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• Other relevance factors"

Most PPC marketers have problems with their keyword's minimum bid, as they do not comply with one or more of the above factors. If everyone tries their best to follow Google's policy, there is no reason for unreasonable Google Slaps. 

Will be posting more about this soon.  

Came across this site recently called Qassia, and it seems to be a Web 2.0 like site, except that it has quite a few interesting features…

It works like a Directory, but how you rank well in Qassia, depends on your 'Qassia Dollars'. How you earn such credit, is simply to contribute 'Intel' - nuggets of information. Unlike Wikipedia where you have to reference credible sources, Qassia accepts mundane info about anything ranging from your boss's culinary habits to what you felt about the dining house your family ate at yesterday. Qassia aims to be a huge library of collective intelligence, where you can find nuggets of information you would never find anywhere else.

Currently its in Closed Beta, and you can only get in when you have a referral link. Going from the fact that it was registered in Nov 07, and that it already is a PR5 with Alexa of 30,000+, I would say this might be the next big site. And with the prospect of getting unlimited quality backlinks from Qassia, it doesn't harm to sign-up and give it a try!

When I started building full-blown content sites, the #1 problem I face is speed of implementation. Often, even after I have built a site with good content, it takes time for the Search Engine Spiders to crawl and index my website. I have been trying to find out ways to shorten the process of getting indexed, and I came across this software recently that did exactly just that.

*Disclaimer* Softwares are not necessary to get your site indexed - all you really has to do, is to get back-links from sites already indexed to your site, so that the bots will come and crawl your website eventually. But of course I can't sit back and wait for that to happen, so I went ahead to search for a quick-fix solution, and I came across this amazing software…. 

SENuke!

Now some of you may have heard of SENuke via e-mails or have read it somewhere else. For the rest, it is essentially a SEO software that helps you to get multiple listings on the first page of search engines. With the right targeted keyword, you can literally "Completely and Utterly Dominate the first 3 Pages of Google Listing…" (taken from their headline). 

There has been a buzz recently around the term Web 2.0, and social network sites, and SENuke is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the huge influence such sites get. 

To summarize, here is what SENuke does:

• Research for niche keywords that are highly searched and have low demand
• Get 13 high PR backlinks from the web's busiest Web 2.0 sites - all with one click
• Create hundreds of article variations from a single article - no duplicate content!
• Post your own videos to the top 14 video sites, and gain another 14 high PR backlinks
• Social bookmark your sites on the top 22 social bookmarking sites - gallons of link juice (:
• Publish your content to over 16 RSS aggregators for more high PR backlink

All that, will make your PR surge and you will undoubtedly gain a swarm of traffic to your site, if done right. Your site will appear established and authoritative, with so many high PR links, and doing PPC on it should be a breeze. 

Even if you do not have a website, this software is also great, as you can promote a blogspot blog that is promoting a CPA product, or even a Clickbank product. 

SENuke has only been launched recently in June 08, and the founders are constantly coming up with new modules and updates, and the price is very affordable. It starts at $47/month for a basic membership, and $97/month for the full membership. For most, the basic would suffice.

They also have a free 7 day trial for you to see if the software is suitable for you - so go ahead and take advantage of this! I guarantee you will love this software. I know I do

Check it out here. 

Dave from ZipCodeGuy.com has just released a huge database of free zip codes he's been collecting on the Internet since 2003. It contains zip code, states, abbreviations, countries, cities, etc.

How can CPA marketers capitalize on this? Well, think of it as a keyword expansion list - simply append zip codes to your keywords and guess what? You just have an extremely targeted adgroup.

Just imagine how targeted a prospect would be if he types in "car insurance 60701" and your ad pops up and says "Illinois Car Insurance" in the title. If that is not a targeted ad, I don't know what is.

Go here to see how you can get your database for free - Do it quickly as he might pull this offer anytime!