My new PPC course is all finished… let me know what you think!

The video below is the introductory module – there are several others, but this one alone should give you plenty to think about unless you’re already a real Adwords expert.

If you’ve been around for a while, you probably know how long I’ve been preaching and teaching about the power of paid search, but this is my first new pay per click training program in over 3 years… just in time for you to take advantage of some recent pro-advertiser changes at Google and elsewhere.

Continue reading →

It’s been a while since I’ve spoken at a search marketing conference. Like, a couple years I think. But I am coming out of the “shell” at SMX Advanced to talk about advanced pay-per-click strategies for the “Amazing PPC Tactics” session.

As is always the case with conference sessions – I have to cram a whole bunch of content into a very short speaking slot, because there will be 3 or 4 other people there dishing out killer PPC tactics as fast as they can.

For a StomperNet Live event, where I usually get to deliver 75-90 minutes to several hundred people, it’s easy to prepare a presentation. I don’t know if it was Mark Twain or not – somebody put it better than I can once upon a time – but the shortest presentations require the greatest preparation.

Too bad that doesn’t apply to Twitter posts. Anyway, I could use a little help from my readers in narrowing down (or broadening if necessary) the scope of this presentation.

I’d love to hear your suggestions on topics, or knotty PPC problems that could really use an amazing tactical solution, in the comments below.

Just a quick heads up for my readers here…

Adwords new display URL rules went into effect yesterday. Pretty simple stuff – the domain name you show in your ad’s display URL must match the domain name where the visitor actually lands after they click the ad. Pretty simple for most advertisers, but for affiliate marketers who want to avoid looking like affiliates, a little troublesome… and even for honest affiliate marketers trying to play by the rules, it creates a challenge.

Affiliate marketing via PPC advertising is tough, and one of the ways you try to get ahead in the game is by split testing domain names, and using keyword-specific domain names to raise the click through rate as much as possible.

Bryan Todd, over at Perry Marshall’s shop, wrote an article on how to get around these rules in order to split test domain names in ads. I appreciate Bryan offering a solution, but I wish he’d been a little more careful with his research. While the process Bryan outlines apparently worked with *his* hosting setup, it won’t work for everyone, and there are SEO implications that weren’t considered.

Bryan’s plan (pointing another domain at the I.P. address of the existing web site) works if the web server is configured to serve up the same site as the default. Many servers will instead deliver something else, like a default page, if you do what Bryan recommends.

If your server configuration happens to work with Bryan’s method, you’ll still have more than one domain name serving up the same web site. That’s duplicate content. If you must split test domains (affiliate marketers are advised to do so), and you care about SEO, you’ll want to copy the site and use robots.txt to make sure that only the Adwords quality bot reads the extra domains.