Yea ! Thanks for the ulcer MSN, I’ll be calling you in the morning.

It was a total mess.. lots of clicks but because of my 40,000 keywords less than 500 are exactly what I offer I had no conversions.

I switched my ads back to the effective but “lower quality” ones that were converting quite nicely. I’ll have to find another way to increase my quality score. I am running some experiments right now to try and isolate how various changes affect quality score so I should clear it up soon enough.

One things for sure though.. don’t increase quality score at the expense of the quality of the traffic. Thats expensive !

Ouch..

Well no not really.. finding the right face for my lander is proving to be a pain. My research shows that my audience is likely to be middle aged black men and women. Ever try to find a good selection of black female models on iStockPhoto ?

Its a pita trust me. How many blonde bombshell photos does this world need ? Judging by their selection a lot.

Anyways I ran the 230 terms throught the Bid Statistics tool and found some interesting numbers. Specifically the high standard deviation that occurs on some of the most expensive terms. Soome of the terms had deviations over 8 and over 100 had deviations greater than 1.

You can get the CSV here if your like to look at it analyze it yourself.

Looks like google is running a some sort of sponsored video clip links in the top PPC spots.
Click to see for yourself ( searches for olmypic)

Interesting.. hunh.. the link takes you to a series of clips by NBC.

1. Search Engine Optimization is fairly straight forward there are no secrets.
2. Search Engine Optimization is marred by the fact anyone can discuss online and seem like an expert.
3. Online Marketing is where its at, and that should encompass SEO
4. The best blackhat stuff is not detectable by the search engines or people.
5. If you can’t program or pay someone to program you will be stuck using the same tools as everyone else.
6. Statistics and math are where its at. There are no fast answers in this business.
7. I’d rather spend time promoting my stuff than a clients. If I fail its my problem and at least I didn’t have to listen to my client
8. SEO is not a panacea for not having a product of your own.
9. Go to a conference its so much better discussing this stuff in person and honestly its more fun.
10. Forums are the suxors but you need to pick at least one to keep abreast of issues you may have missed.
11. Just because someone can argue well online doesn’t mean they know jack shit.
12. If you don’t have your own data to draw your own conclusions then you don’t know anything despite how much you read.
13. Don’t spend to much time arguing online. Its pointless. Spend that time proving or disproving your ideas for yourself.
14. If you want to make money with affiliate programs and your just starting out keep making sites. Make them big and small and in between but keep making them till your fingers bleed. Once you have a hundred then go back and see what is the most successful and then spend time on those.
15. The thing that is in the shortest supply online is creativity.
16. Don’t be afraid to be wrong and listen to the counsel of those who are honest.
17. Always try to find the successful mans networks, once you do don’t be an ass and out them just look and learn and if you feel like it warn them how you did it.
18. Google is not as smart as it seems.
19. Just because a search engineer is nice, smart, witty and reasonably honest doesn’t mean he isn’t your adversary.
20. Forums are good for getting clients. Help people out when you can for free and you’ll see what I mean.
21. What might have been true yesterday might not be true today.
22. Yahoo and MSN have traffic to send too
23. Don’t assume everyone knows what you discovered already when you study your stats. Save it for yourself.
24. Don’t underestimate how much your knowledge or programming skills are worth.
25. Read a book on marketing from a semi unbiased source. I prefer SCORE and the Small Business Association.
26. Remember its the world wide web and there are opportunities to be had in oversea’s markets.
27. Someone thinks you are an idiot.
28. Someone thinks you are a liar trying to fleece them.
29. If you charge for something make sure your potential customer knows that up front.
30. Don’t be afraid to tell someone you want money.
31. Get some exercise
32. There are two types of people in search & affiliate marketing, the Amway/Quixtar type hoping to get rich and keeping the faith and the business type which gets results and focuses on analysis, statistics, and sales.
33. There is always a guru willing to sell you a product to solve your problems.
34. Don’t be afraid to spend money for information, just try and buy it from someone who is honest and not a cult leader.
35. Write often, it doesn’t matter if your a sucky writer most people never take the risk of writing in the first place.
36. If you are a sucky writer get your college texts on writing and read them when you can. If you haven’t gone to college go and take a course in writing
37. SEO is not a replacement for a business plan
38. Be suspicious of a search professionals that run a forums, many are trying to build a cult following.
39. Read a few good articles on pricing strategies to make sure your not screwing yourself.
40. Initially you are going to fail in business often, make sure that if you succeed it is worth it.
41. Set goals and timelines for evaluations to determine if you business plans are working.
42. Don’t confuse business strategies with morality.
43. Read a book on ethics before you try to discuss them.
44. Integrity is not something you can get back after abandoning it.
45. Be honest but remember you are trying to make a sale so don’t give away to much. I know its a tough one to resolve sometimes.
46. You can’t convince customers they need a solution if they don’t know they have problem.
47. Don’t try to recruit potential customers by pointing out their problems unless asked.
48. Put yourself in a position where your customers seek you.
49. Treat your customers as if they were kings and queens. Its easier to retain them than to acquire new ones.
50. The cost of inaction is great.
51. A website, building, computer, or desk is not a business people are.
52. Luck favors the prepared.
53. Try your best not to flame people or sites. It does you no good and makes you look bad.
54. Most people are good.
55. A business budget, even a rudimentary one is required
56. Roboform is the coolest.
57. SEOBook was great I wish I had read it sooner it would have saved me a year or more of reading forums.
58. A Wall Street Journal subscription will pay for itself many times over.
59. On the web you can make money off of your mind but its still a lot of work.
60. I don’t care if you think there is a sandbox, I do and I plan for it so its not a big deal but it would be nice if I knew a way around it.
61. Don’t build your business on another business’s free services.
62. Its easier to sell a tangible good than a service.
63. Books that offer advice similar “Buy low, sell high” are crap. Always ask yourself “Is this to good to be true ?”
64. A good listener is well rewarded.
65. I hate its promotional “speak” and hyperbole but I actually found “How to win friends and influence others” useful.
66. Making a sale is a multi step process.
67. You have to spend money to learn things. Sometimes that means changing an ad layout on a successful page and losing money you would have made the other way. Sometimes it means buying someones knowledge.
68. If the web page is red white and blue, has four feet of text to scroll through, has red bold letters with yellow highlights, and has an offer where the seller is giving away $1300 of free items along with his great guide to X think of it as a tribute to the late Corey Rudl and close the page.
69. A bar full of internet marketers is a funny thing to watch.
70. Email sucks for real communication.
71. There is a big play to be made in local search and it doesn’t involve making a local search engine.
72. Reasonable good graphics can set your site apart from others
73. Usability and seo sometimes are the same thing

Post 100.. by the way :-)

1. Don’t Think of Adsense As Advertising, Think Of Adsense As Content – Ads can answer your visitors questions just as easily as your content. So let it. Integrate it. Mix it into your written paragraphs.

How To Make Money From Search Engines by Peter D

That is much better way of looking at it than the “blend it” advice you normally receive. Using adsense to answer your users questions serves not only your bank account but it also serves your user. You are no longer tricking them by making it not look like an ad, you are serving them by giving them answers to questions with ad’s.

—–
I think it was graywolf or Scott Fish that pointed out that “lens”. Not sure which but anyways…

I am not a big fan of Squidoo, the advertisements are too blended making me wonder about the authenticity of the articles, but that was awesome enough to make me read it once in awhile and see what happens over there. There are plenty of smart people over there to make it work :-)

If your writing your own copy for you made for adsense helpful guide site and feel like your producing the same lame rehashed content as every other site out there…. then mix it up.

1. Make outragous claims and extremely stupid statements in convincing ways.
2. Try to be as stupid and as outright crazy as you can be while trying to appear helpful.
3. Take an assembly of facts and come to absurd conclusions.
4. Point to astrology or medievil science websites and use them as proof of something.
5. If your talking about a city, find another landmark in a city with the same name and include it in your write up ( never actually say its in the city just say how its great for a city with the name X ).

It might get you links from people who stumble across your nonsense and point to it as lunacy/entertainment.

Besides its fun.

// added: of course be responsible don’t post information that would hurt someone like false medical information ( I have seen that !!! scum! ) and don’t go so far of the deep end people just click away, you have to be teetering on the edge and almost convincing so that once the reader gets it they feel smart.

The result was Bid Stats, a program that collects bid price information from the Overture bid tool and compiles useful statistics on each phrase checked. The program will allow you to check up to 15 phrases and tell you the following about the bid prices for each: average bid, minimum bid, maximium bid, median bid, standard deviation, and the number of bids present. The grid format should make it easy to scan the list and note which keywords are worth your time developing content for or bidding on.

I hope you find it as useful as I have.
Bid Stats is here

1. Topic is important.

If your forum is focused on car loans or investing your going to get better payoffs per click than if its about music. This is simple to understand so it should need no more explanation.

If your forum is in a low CPC ( cost per click ) topic then try putting in a for sale section, jobs section, an a wanted section. These will help build some better paying traffic for you.

2. Ugly URLS have got to go.

ModRewrite is a must ( assuming your using apache ), you have to have easily crawlable urls to get fully indexed in the search engines. Most of your clicks are going to happen by people reffered to your site not by your normal users, so the search engine referrrals are what are going to pay for the forum. Also your targeting will improve if your urls are simpler.

3. Regular users don’t click.

Regular users of your forum are their to talk to other people not click your advertisements. Once you accept this and move on you’ll be better off. I tested this several times by the following:

- showing ads to all users
- showing ads to only users referred to the site
- showing ads to only users not logged in.

The results were that regardless of who I displayed the ad’s to I always received the same number of clicks. With this in mind I chose to stop showing ads to logged in users all together.

4. Position the ads right.

Use the heatmap over in the google optimization tips page. It works.

5. Cloak your content. ( WARNING: This is considered risky by some )

Cloaking is presenting different data to different users based on what you know about them.
Most forum software uses large html templates and presents unrelated text to the topic of the thread to the requester. This screws up targeting of the advertisements sometimes since often times the extraneous information outweighs the thread. Cloaking allows you to make sure the content outweighs the html and other crud.

What I do is remove all unnecessary information ( signatures, profile links, etc ) to and present only the bare minimum to the adsense ( and all bots for that matter ) bot. This increased the accuracy of my targeting. Do this at your own risk. My recommendation would be to make sure the page is useful if it was sent to a regular browser and DO NOT STUFF KEYWORDS… just present the same data you would normally. As an added bonus you can use this for cell phones and other small screen devices.

6. Don’t hold your breath.

While all the tips did help me I still don’t make much from the forum sections of my sites. You would do better to add a content section if you don’t already have one and work on articles.

Best of luck!