Wow…haven’t been keeping up to date!  That’s going to change.  Finally have some more time to Blog.

There are some big changes brewing in Adwords.  Nothing absolute or confirmed.  But…enough to be worried about.

If you have campaigns where you bid on trademarked terms at all.  Start to put in place a contingency plan in the event that Google starts to forbid this.

There are several court cases and other issues that are pending right now, that point to the fact that Google may take this position soon.

Those of you in the EU already have this restriction to deal with!

Theoretically, it will only impact campaigns where you are bidding on one trademark term and selling unrelated or competetive items/services.  However, knowing how these things usually go…I’m certain that even legitimate uses of trademark bidding will be affected…if only temporarily.  Obviously, that can still have a huge impact on revenue.

Maybe it won’t happen, but it’s looking as if it’s inevitable.  Make sure you have a plan…so you don’t get caught unprepared.

I’ve been experimenting with YouTube’s PPC engine.  I’m seeing clicks available for as low as $.10 USD on VERY competetive terms.

Now, on the one hand, the clicks are perhaps not as valuable as an Adwords click because it can only link your “clicker” to a YouTube video…BUT…on the other hand, you’ve got a great opportunity to really market and pre-sell your “clicker” if you do a decent video.

Bottom line…Looking at an overall earnings per click measurement, the YouTube click appears to be every bit as valuable as an Adwords click…perhaps even more so.  Combine that with costs that can be a fraction of Adword’s…I can’t understand why more people aren’t doing this.

Maybe it’s people’s reluctance to do video.  Everyone needs to get over this.  You’ve heard it enough to be pretty sure it’s true by now…everyday, video becomes more and more important to Internet marketers.

The best advice I can give…is just try it…just start it…just do one darn video!  With each one you’ll get better…so if you never start…you’re never going to be the best you can be.  Also…just be yourself!  You don’t have to copy others’ styles and deliveries…people can sense when you’re being “you” and they respond to it.

Final prizes today from our customer appreciation giveaway!

Flip video camera goes to BillVannerus

and….DRUMROLL PLEASE…..

The MacBook goes to: cookieqc1

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Thank Goodness!  Now we can actually manage our campaigns again (from AE).  This new update includes the ever popular “first page bid estimate” and the keyword quality score.

This will make a huge difference in the ability to optimize campaigns…large and small.  If you’re an adwords editor user (and if you’re using adwords, you SHOULD be!), get the new version right away.

AdWords Agency Blog: AdWords Editor v7.0

Two more prizes today from our customer appreciation giveaway!

1.  Sony High-Definition Video Camera goes to Jill_Bond

2.  Panasonic Lumix Semi-Pro Camera goes to ThomasMueller

Remember, you just have to be following me on Twitter to have a shot at winning!

Two more prizes today from our customer appreciation giveaway!

1.  Final Cut Express 4 goes to Don_Heath

2.  PlayStation 3 goes to Eggman1

Remember, you just have to be following me on Twitter to have a shot at winning!

Ok..we’re giving away two prizes today from our customer appreciation giveaway!

1.  iPod Touch goes to Rex Turner

2.  $500 in cash goes to Ezili

In case anyone is interested…the way I do this, is I download all twitter followers into excel, then I use a random number generator to pick two numbers.  Whoever’s in that row number, is the winner!

Remember, you just have to be following me on Twitter to have a shot at winning!

My father is 65 years old.  He’s retired, he’s very smart, he’s a mechanical engineer by education…he left Corporate America at 50 after being a very successful executive.  He’s an analytical guy…certainly not very “salesy”…in addition, he has VERY little technical experience with computers, web sites, etc.

So…naturally, after listenting to me talk his ear off about Internet marketing for years…he wanted to give it a go.  I kind of tried to talk him out of it.  He really doesn’t strike me as the “marketing type”, he has zero marketing experience, he has no technical experience, and he seemed a bit skeptical of the whole thing really…so I wasn’t sure he’d really take it seriously.  I didn’t want to see him fail, and I didn’t want to be the Internet marketing teacher that couldn’t even coach his own Dad! (more…)

I’m surprised I don’t see more people talking about this.  It’s a great new tool to help research your market.  People type in actual questions into search engines all the time.  If you could see all of these for a particular niche…you could do 2 important things.

• Come up with nice long tail keyword phrases
• Understand what your market is looking for…and try to give it to them (conversions!!!)

Well now, thanks to Wordtracker Labs…you can do just that.

Simply put in a very broad term for your market or niche…and it will return the questions that people are typing into the search engines…VERY nice.

Wordtracker Labs - Questions Tool

Here’s the Link

Those of us who use Adwords to drive traffic to our sites spend a LOT of money (going up all the time I might add) for the privelege.  Of course, we hope to get a good conversion rate and eek out a profit.  But…there is more that we can do with this data that we’ve paid for.  It amazes me how many people don’t take the time to do this.

The general idea, is to find high volume keywords, that convert, and have low organic search engine ranking competition.  Here’s how I go about it.

1. I make a list of my high ctr, high converting, high traffic keywords by looking in adwords editor and slicing/dicing/sorting keywords and stats.  You could also just use the adwords web interface.
2. I go into the logs of the my site (google analytics, awestats, webalizer etc. ) and I get the top 100 or so kw phrases that drove traffic to the site.  This will get you the ones that you “don’t know about”.  The ones that were probably triggered by broad match kw’s.  For example…you may be bidding on “acne treatments”, and find that you’re getting lots of traffic from “acne natural treatments” (of course, this would also be good to put as a new kw phrase into adwords too!).  I add these to the list.
3. I fire up market samurai, and I filter down until I get to the top 3-5 kw phrases with high volume and low organic search competition.
4. I use these keywords as SEO targets!

Give it a try, and make sure you’re getting every penny’s worth of the big bucks you’re paying Google.