Highly targeted traffic is one of the most important entities in the internet universe. Any website owner or administrator recognizes the importance of driving traffic to a website. The success of any website does not rely entirely on the site itself. You may have a terrific idea for a website, offer an excellent product or service, or have an exceptionally designed site with superb content, but if you do not use the right strategies to advertise, your site would not attract the high traffic you need. Attracting targeted traffic is a task that should be taken seriously for any site to succeed or make a profit. Fortunately, there are internet-marketing tools that…

Finish Reading: Adwords-Affiliate-Google here

If you’re running an online advertising campaign such as Google Adwords or Overture (Yahoo! Search Advertising), you should make sure your visitor lands on a page that follows through on what the advertisement promised. If someone cannot find what they are looking for on a web page within 10 seconds of arriving, they will usually hit the “back” button and look somewhere else.

The special page made just for an advertisement is called a landing page, because the visitor “lands” on the page after clicking on the advertisement. Your advertising campaigns’ landing pages (or sales pages) will probably be the most important pages on your website in terms of getting new business.

Yet many small business owners have never even heard of a landing page, and instead are wasting money needlessly by sending visitors from advertising to the website’s homepage, where new visitors are less likely to find the information they need to become customers.

You can find good landing page ideas simply by searching on Google or another search engine, then clicking on the “sponsored” links on the right-hand side.

But if you need a good start, try this template. Just replace the brackets and their contents ([]) with the recommended content.

Landing Page Template

[Heading with Hook–Make sure you use your keyword at the beginning of the heading–the very first word(s) of the heading, if possible

Author-Bio: Joel Walsh has written more articles on getting sales and leads from your business website content: http://upmarketcontent.com [Web publication requirement: create live link for the URL/web address using “business website content” as visible link text/anchor text

This article examines the basics behind quality site promotion.

Let us take a good look at acronyms in the industry! Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is a term thrown around a million times a day online. So many sites use old techniques that will get there rankings hurt or reversed with there hap-hazard web designs it frustrates me. I don t want you to be one of them. In fact this article is aimed for creating SEEN web design projects. If you don t use this anti-SEO (i.e. cloaking and doorway pages) and follow the following rules you can expect decent results with your web design. The basics for SEO are simple and should be used by all web designers and web design services (although that doesn t mean they are always used):

1. Optimize your site with a high percentage of text relevant to the search terms you intend to go after.

2. Make sure all alt (alternate image tags) and title tags have relative descriptions including keywords.

3. Make sure your site meets current online standards and can be equally viewed among all browsers and operating machines. Even though some pages may still display correctly with incorrect HTML, it can hinder the way search engines will …

Read the rest of: What is SEO, PPC & Ranking? here

As an online business, you may be familiar with or currently utilize “pay for performance” search engines to send visitor traffic to your website. Also known as pay-per-click, PPC or paid search, it has literally taken the online marketing world by storm especially the two largest players, Overture and Google Adwords.

A 2004 “New Methods in Search Marketing” study by Piper Jaffray stated that “paid search constitutes more than 87% of U.S. search market revenues.” This staggering statistic begs the question, “Are advertisers achieving a positive return on their paid search investment?” In other words, are sales being generated or is money just being spent?

The answer to this question may stem from understanding the role of the two critical performance metrics generated by all paid search campaigns (1) click-through rate and (2) website conversion.

The click-through rate is defined as…

Read the rest of: Adwords Advertising here

Comparison shoppers are the mortal enemy of pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers. When you’re paying each time someone clicks your AdWords (or other PPC) ad, the last thing you want is a person determined to visit every site to find the best price, the closest location or the most secure guarantee. But, with many categories of products or services, it’s bound to happen. There is a way to eliminate many of the lookers, however.

When you qualify your AdWords leads, you can reduce the click-through rate (CTR) of browsers and help direct only those most interested in your offer to your site. How is it done? By inserting text that will purposely eliminate arbitrary visitors.

Qualifying Your PPC Leads

Purposely eliminating visitors sounds like an awful thing to do, doesn’t it? Perhaps, until you consider the fact that - once these visitors got to your site and found out the details of your offer - they’d most likely leave anyway.

Why not save yourself a click (and the money associated with that click!) and prevent the visitor from running up your monthly AdWords bill? This is exactly what Steve Jackson of Conversion Chronicles and I discussed awhile back. Since that discussion, I’ve come up with a process that will allow you to easily write pre-qualifying ads when you use these simple steps.

Step One

Outline the specifications of your offer. Be precise. List all the details of the offer, the price, length of time, physical location, size, etc. For example, say you have luxury cruise packages available. You’d want to list the details such as: packages depart from New York City and go to several destinations in Mexico including Cozumel, Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán from December 5-15 for a cost of $2500 per person.

Step Two

Go back and highlight anything that would be a deal breaker. This is a luxury cruise, so the cost of $2500 per person might be too much for most people. Quite often, cruisers are looking for the best deal possible.

Also, the cruise only leaves from New York City. The additional airfare cost might not be something your site visitors want to add to the cost of their trip. Or, it may be inconvenient to depart from New York City.

What about the dates? These cruises are only available on the dates of December 5-15. Your site visitors may not be able to take a holiday during that time.

Does the visitor want to sail to the locations on the itinerary? Maybe they’ve already been to Cozumel, Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán and are looking for a cruise to Cabo San Lucas.

Are there other factors that might force shoppers to decline the offer and move to another site? If so, list them here.

Step Three

Now, decide which bits of information you want to include in your AdWords ads. You’ll want to test and track to see which combination of details bring the lowest click-through rates along with the highest conversions. For example, your ad might read:

Luxury Mexico Cruise 12/5
Tour tropical Cozumel, Puerto
Vallarta & more. Leave NYC. $2500pp
www.whatever.com

That would give a lot of information that would keep unqualified visitors from clicking through to your site (and running up your AdWords bill). At the same time, the use of words like “luxury” and “tropical” help the searcher visualize their wonderful vacation.

Another example could be a special shipment of microwave ovens. Let’s go through the steps once again.

Step One

The specifications include: convection/microwave combination, built-in with light and vent features, 1200 watts, white, $900, available on the Internet only.

Step Two

Any of these could be used to weed out visitors. Someone may not want the convection feature. They want a countertop microwave rather than a built-in model. Twelve-hundred watts may be more powerful (and larger) than the visitor needs. Their kitchen may have stainless steel or black appliances, not white. Lastly, $900 could be more than they have budgeted for a microwave.

Step Three

Again, you’ll want to test and track to see which tidbits of information work best to bring qualified leads, reduce CTR and costs, and improve conversions.

Your ad might look like this:

Powerful Convec/Microwave
Special purchase. Attractive range
built-in with 1200w. Only $900.
www.whatever.com

Rather than using generic terms to describe high cost or frequently compared PPC items, get as specific as you can with “disqualifying” copy. By weeding out those who would likely take one look and leave, you can save yourself a lot of money in AdWords expenses while increasing conversions.

Author-Bio: Karon Thackston is author of “The Step by Step Copywriting Course” at http://www.copywritingcourse.com and How To Increase Keyword Saturation (Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy). Discover the secrets to creating SEO copy with a perfect balance between keywords and natural language. http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword

For people that use the content network, you may have been aware about the ability to site target your campaign. Well, Google has done it again, now tweaking their technology even more, so that you can show your ads on an exact SECTION of a site. This is actually huge.

Here’s the message you may or may not have seen when you logged in:
“Target your ads to specific pages on content sites with Section Targeting.

Now you can advertise on specific sections of a site in the Google content network.

Choose the section ’sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla’ rather than all of sourceforge.net. Or place your ads only on ‘anandtech.com/digitalcameras’ instead of the entire AnandTech site.”

Here’s a link with more information on how this works:

You know, I get mad at Google like anyone else, and then they do a tweak like this, and you see why they are the total leader in this area. For both advertisors and publishers this is a real godsend, and gives you the ability to laser target your advertising to the exact people that you most want to reach. I will definately be working with this in the near future.

Steve Blom, Adwordstraining.org

With the recent ‘Florida’ update on google & its impact on the SERPs, typically on the commercial search phrases, it has become imperative that we now examine paid advertising scenario at google. For scores of merchants, now paid advertising will be the only way to help them salvage their holiday sales, as also future revenues. This will be a two parts article, with the first part focusing on the google paid advertising space & the second part on the best practices thereof. However, before we start on googles adwords & adsense programs a word or two on online advertising industry performance in 2003.

Online Advertising Industry:

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the online advertising industry sales have been robust this year with three consecutive quarters of growth witnessed for the first time in last two years. Lets first look at the yearly sales figures for last three years. Online advertising climaxed in 2000 with $8 billion in revenue (dot com boom) before declining to $7.1 billion in 2001, and $6 billion in 2002. This year in the first three quarters, the sales have been estimated at a healthy 5.07 billion (up 13% from the same period last year). The break up of the quarterly sales figure is as under:

The first quarter sales have been at 1.63BUSD

Second quarter is pegged to have clocked 1.69 billion (up 14% from same quarter last year)

Third quarter is estimated to have done 1.75billion.( 20% growth from this quarter last year)

>From figures the emerging pattern is towards keyword based text ads gaining popularity.

According to IAB, out of the 6bUSD figure of 2002, 15.4% (or roughly 1 billion) can be attributed to Search term related sales. This is up 200% from the figures of 2001.

The contribution of search term related ads has been estimated to 31% of the second quarter figures. No break up for third quarter figures is however available. Financial firm Salomon Smith Barney expects the estimated $1.4 billion market in 2003, to grow 30 percent to 35 percent per year, reaching $5 billion by 2008.

This Advertising space is dominated by two major players (obviously): Google & Overture.

Google Adwords

Google has two services for its paid advertisers. Adwords & Adsense. Lets start with Adwords.

This is a program run by Google in which it lets the advertisers bid for a chunk of the real estate on the search engine results page related to specific queries. The ads appear as “sponsored listings/premium listings” next to the organic search results. Along with getting exposure at the googles own site, these ads are also syndicated at Google’s partner sites like: America Online, Inc.,Ask Jeeves ,AT&T Worldnet ,CompuServe ,EarthLink, Inc. ,Netscape ,Sympatico Inc. etc.

Currently, Google is supposed to have approx 150,000 monthly advertisers for its paid placement services.

Adwords Account Statistics:

Following are the statistics for every adword account google has; One can set up 25 campaigns in every account. Each campaign can have up to 100 adgroups in it; with each adgroup capable of having up to 750 Keywords in it. The overall limit on any account is 2000 keywords.

Adwords offers four kinds of Keyphrse matching namely: Broad, Phrase,Exact & Negative. Recently, Google has introduced expanded matching for its broad matches. More on this later.

It lets you target your ads to specifically 14 languages, 250 countries or 200 states /regions in US. Google claims 99% accuracy for its IP tracking system to deliver the ad effectively to the target audience.

Recent Features on Adwords:

Google has added three new features to its adwords campaign in October. Those are:

Conversion Tracking

Expanded Matching

Increased Click Through Threshold

Conversion Tracking:

Google has introduced a conversion tracking feature for its advertisers, wherein they can now track the conversions resulting from their advertisement traffic. This conversion tracking helps the advertisers by quantifying the ROI they are achieving with their campaigns.

This feature works by introducing a cookie on the user computer whenever someone clicks on an advertisement. This cookie is connected to the conversion page if the user reaches there. If it is matched, google records a successful conversion.

Expanded Matching:

As a part of its broad matching of keywords, Google has introduced a ’smart’ feature called expanded matching. With expanded matching, AdWords system automatically runs ads on highly relevant keywords, including synonyms, related phrases, misspellings and plurals, even if they aren’t in the original list of keywords that you submitted with google.

For example if you keyword is ’software development’, google system will try & guess alternate searches to display your ads on. Some examples are ’software solutions’ or ’software services’ or ‘technical solutions’. Over time, it will monitor the click through rates (CTR) for these searches & ‘learn’ the relevance of these searches for you. This will help it make expanded searches more specific. Also, based on its mining the search queries, it will be able to develop fresh combination of search terms which will be relevant to the business.

In an effort to let you know what are the keywords it will look to broaden your exposure to, google has for the first time put out a Adwords keyword suggestion tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

This tool highlights the googles view of what other terms, it ‘understands’ to be relating to your business. (Tip :This tool works well for broad searches.)

This theme based adwords tuning, is in sync with googles trend of trying to understand ‘available content’ & ‘user queries’ & make ‘intelligent matching’ of the two.

Increased Click Through Threshold

The increased click-through threshold is designed to help ads that may have struggled for traffic due to poor search relevance. These include those related to contextual ads as well.

Now for evaluating the Account performance evaluates each account after every 1,000 ad impressions. If the CTR for the account falls below a minimum required CTR (which varies by ad position, geography etc but is 0.5% for the top spot and slightly reduced for each subsequent position) the ads will only be displayed occasionally for under performing keywords.

Google Adsense:

Google AdSense is an offshoot of the Google Content-Targeted Advertising program that was launched in early March 2003.

This early program let large websites integrate Google AdWords into their websites. Each deal was independently negotiated with Google, and sites with less than 20 million page views couldn’t participate.

The Google AdSense program democratizes the content based text ad display process. Even small merchants,bloggers with only a few thousand page views per month, can now apply to the AdSense program.

The AdSense program allows Web publishers to apply for the program online. After Google vets a site for popularity and quality — a process the company estimates will take two to three days — accepted applicants download a string of HTML code to insert on Web pages on which they wish to carry text-link ads.

Google draws the listings from its base of 150,000 advertisers, using its algorithmic search technology to scan the content page and match it up with relevant links that are displayed as either skyscraper ads on the right side of the page or banners at the top.

Some of the large Googles partner networks are :HowStuffWorks ,Mac Publishing (includes Macworld.com, MacCentral, JavaWorld, LinuxWorld ,New York Post Online Edition ,Reed Business Information (includes Variety.com and Manufacturing.net) ,U.S.News & World Report online.

All the rules that apply to adwords listings also apply to Adsense in respect of CTR, Positioning etc.

Author-Bio: Vikas Malhotra is a successful Internet marketer utilizing both pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimization to increase website traffic. To learn more, visit http://sem.mosaic-service.com

Everyone is scrambling for news about the new kids on the net AdWords and AdSense that is. You ve got to hand it to Google. They ve really outdone themselves this time.

AdWords is Google s pay-per-click advertising program. AdWords is similar to other pay-per-click advertising programs, but the other side of the coin, AdSense, makes it an incredibly powerful advertising program. I ll get to that in a moment, for now let s take a look at AdWords and how it works.

With AdWords, you can create your very own advertisements or you can have Google s team design the advertising campaign for you. When you create AdWords advertisements, they appear on the internet right away. You have complete control of your budget as you only pay when your ad is clicked on and you can set your very own daily limits for what you are willing to pay. There is no minimum budget or locked in time that you have to run your campaign. You choose the keywords you want to target, so you get targeted traffic from your ads people who are looking for specifically what you have to offer.

You can rely on Google for quick, friendly and knowledgeable support when you need it. Additionally, you can access performance reports that keep you informed on how well your advertising is doing so you can make changes as needed.

I know all that sounds pretty similar to other pay-per-click programs, but now let s take a look at the other side.

AdSense

AdSense adds a powerful punch to the AdWords program as well as giving website operators the ability to make money from their websites by displaying Google Ads (those from the AdWords program). So, as an AdWords advertiser, you ve got an advantage in that website operators are providing high quality content to browsers and because of the keywords, your ads appear on their websites in clear view of individuals who are looking for your products or services.

As a website operator, you can choose keywords for the AdSense program that are relevant to the content you provide. The keywords will draw in relative advertisements to be displayed on your website, things that your browsers are interested in, which adds value to the information provided to your visitors. When your website visitors click on a Google Ad, you gain revenue from that click. Providing high quality, relative content is key to making money with AdSense.

AdWords and AdSense are win-win propositions for advertisers and website operators. Advertisers get targeted traffic to their websites at minimal costs and website operators make money for having the ads displayed on their websites. AdWords and AdSense are welcomed additions to the world of e-business and internet marketing.

Author-Bio: Jason Tarasi publishes the reciprocal links newsletter “Elite Links” Learn HOW thousands of other Elite Links members generate FREE traffic and increase their search engine rankings by swapping links. Grab your free lifetime subscription now at: http://www.elitelinksnewsletter.com

Free Business Newsletter HERE!

Google is beta testing a new product which allows website owners and AdWords advertisers to automatically generate their AdWords campaigns by submitting a list of their product details via data feeds. The search engine uses the information from the feeds to determine the best keywords for those pages and automatically creates ads that link to them. This is brilliant news for any site owners who have a large database of products as they can now upload the whole lot at once.

The new Google ad automator feature is initially only being offered to select Froogle merchants who also advertise on the AdWords platform. The tool allows you to manage large, scalable campaigns without investing much time and effort. The ad automator dynamically generates accurate AdWords ads targeted to search queries. The content for these ads comes from the data feeds (that you submit as often as you like) containing your product descriptions, specifications, and information. These data feeds are simply tab delaminated text files. You can in fact use your existing Froogle data feed with some extra columns.

The AdWords system then generates ads from the content in your data feed (or from information you submit through the AdWords interface). This means that you can either let Google create your ad copy for you or you can set it yourself. It then continually analyzes all search queries to see whether they’re relevant to any of your products. When it finds a relevant match, it shows your ads on the search page results.

Once setup, you can set daily campaign budget much like a normal adwords campaign. The CPC is set in one of three places. You can either specify your maximum CPC in the data feed, in the AdWords interface, or you can allow Google to determine it for you. The later method automatically sets your max CPC by using the average CPC of the competing ads. As with normal AdWords campaigns, you can have your ads displayed on both the Search Network or the Content Network, and geo-target them.

Some benefits of Ad Automator are that ads are dynamically targeted to queries. They are also automatically compliant with AdWords policies; once your data feed is approved, ads don’t need to be reviewed again. You don’t need to create new ad text. You can leverage existing product descriptions that are likely already on your website. (However, you may submit customized ad text in your data feed or through the AdWords interface if you like.) You can supplement existing marketing efforts without much additional effort.

All in all I think this is set to be a big improvement when it is fully launched. It will compete with Yahoo s Search Submit product whereby advertisers can pay to have their pages included in the search results.

Author-Bio: For more information see http://www.ad-automator.com

In order to get the most out of a search program, you simply must have a great adwords list. If your adwords list is not deep enough, you will end up paying top dollar on only very few highly-trafficked phrases that post the top dollar bids. So, what are the steps to making adwords lists?

First things first: you need your list of targeted keywords and search phrases. There are many different and distinct search terms that will get you where you want to go. In making adwords lists, your aim is to save hours researching solutions to common problems.

However, try to place yourself in the shoes of an advertiser. So, how can you determine which search terms to use when advertising your goods and services? Follow these instructions:

First, write down the top search terms that you can think of that describe your business or service. In making adwords lists, keep this list of search terms on a spreadsheet if at all possible — this will make it easier to organize and submit later.

Next, use the Overture ‘Search Suggestion Tool’ to get an idea of the popularity of each search term and enter this number under a ‘monthly impressions’ column in your spreadsheet.

Third step in making adwords lists, use the Search Suggestion Tool to lengthen your list of search terms. Not only does the Search Suggestion Tool reveal the number of searches for any given search phrase, it also displays any closely related search terms.

Aside from Overture, another excellent resource is found at www.wordtracker.com.

In making adwords lists, the fourth step is to go back to your list, which should be pretty lengthy by now. Try to add modifying words that are relevant to your product or service, such as: cheap, discount, low cost, free, premium, authentic, etc. Check the Search Suggestion Tool to assess the number of searches conducted for those terms in the previous month. Enter the terms and data into your spreadsheet under ‘monthly impressions’.

If you use a keyword in making your adwords list, such as ‘Palm Pilot’, why not consider using ‘discount Palm Pilot’, ‘cheap Palm Pilot’, or ‘low cost Palm Pilot’ if they apply to your business? The purpose of these activities is to generate the longest possible list of relevant search terms possible. Why? Remember, you only pay when someone actually clicks on your message. You pay nothing extra to simply list more keywords. Additionally, the more keywords you have, and the more specific the search phrases are, the more likely that your visitor will be truly interested in your product or service. Customers need to be narrowed to a particular brand and model.

In making a longer adwords lists of relevant search phrases also increases the likelihood that you will attract visitors to your site at a lower cost. That is because it is often possible to bid less for a click if the search term is less popular. More search terms, bid at a lower cost, mean more traffic to your site for fewer advertising dollars.

The fifth step to making adwords lists is to sort the terms on your spreadsheet by ‘monthly impressions’ to get a sense of which terms are most popular. These are the terms that can end up costing you the most advertising dollars if you choose to bid for a high ranking.

Congratulate yourself now, for you have now made a comprehensive adwords list that will get you ahead of your competitors.

Author-Bio: Ben Shaffer is a known expert in website design and development as well as being a valuable contributor to online forums.

His latest website http://www.shaffbuilder.com is currently causing a near-revolution. It is a free online website builder which will create for you an optimized site in 1 easy step. You can then make money using Adsense on this site