By Simon Dang

Today I would like to concentrate on some strategies to develop your initial PPC keyword list.

Words Words Words / Location Location Location

Any successful restaurateur can tell you location is one of the most important factors in achieving a successful business. The location determines the amount of foot traffic that a restaurant will be exposed to. In the same way, the cornerstone of any successful PPC marketing campaign is your list of keywords. Your choice of keywords will determine the quality and quantity of visitors to your ads and website.

Just Say NO To Client Keyword Lists

Often, during my initial meeting with a new PPC client, I am handed a list of keywords that the client requests to get ranked. They usually go on to explain that they must have keyword XXX because this keyword is the only one capable of driving business, they’ve seen their competitor bidding a lot of money for #1, and they are not interested in spending any of their marketing budget on any other keywords. Unless they are really adamant on handing me this list, I usually politely decline. Why? The problem with accepting a client’s list of keywords is that you are basically limiting yourself to their pre-conceived notions of what words would drive them traffic.

Derive The Keywords From The Business Model

My approach is to have a detailed conversation with the client first and try to nail down all of their main products and services that their business has to offer. Once I have a clear understanding of their business, their products and their services I can start to put together a list of words related to their products and service. After I finish my own list, I can compare it to theirs and in most cases my list is much more expansive. Companies who offer both products and services often advertise their products but neglect to market their services. In many cases the PPC keywords associated with products are more often more expensive than words associated with their services, so it is important to always consider services that companies offer in addition to products that they sell.

Sample questions to ask your client (or yourself if you are doing PPC for your own business):

What are the core products that you sell?
What are the core services that you offer?
How do you distinguish your products from your competitors?
How do you distinguish your services?
What industries are you involved with currently?
What industries would you like to get involved with?
What marketing material do you have addressing your products and services?
How do customers usually find out about your business?
Keywords that a customer would use

The goal of all PPC campaigns is obviously to drive more customers to a website, so you should try to think from the perspective of the customer. Ask yourself what words a potential customer would type into the search engines. For example, let’s say company A is an industrial manufacturer of stainless steel wastebaskets. If I were a customer, what words would I type into Google, Yahoo or MSN to find this company?

Stainless steel trash can
Metal trash can
Kitchen trash can

Or if you were a purchasing agent for a large company, you may type in other words such as:

Commercial trash cans
Commercial waste containers
Lobby trash cans
Public trash containers
Keyword Stemming

Stemming involves the interchanging of singular and plural forms of a keyword or the derivation of a verb from the gerund form (the “-ing” word). For example, if “educate” was part of a keyword phrase, “educated”, “educates”, “education” and “educating” should also be considered.

Local Words

If your client’s business depends on a certain location, then by all means try stemming with the location’s name. For example La Jolla surfboards, Southern California surfboards, etc. These words can be what we call the “gold between the cracks”. These could be less expensive PPC words that are high quality, high converting words.

Keyword Software Assistance

After growing your list to about 50 words you can then take advantage of all the wonderful software tools available for generating keywords. I particularly like using the Google keyword tool, Overture and Wordtracker. By using these three keyword tools I go on to expand the list to about 100+ keywords with various combinations

Conclusion

Generating your initial keyword list for PPC should be a well- thought out process. It is a critical step in a successful PPC campaign and should not be rushed. Spend time to ask your peers, your friends, etc. about what words they would think about if they were looking for the products and services that you or your client offers. Lastly, resist the temptation to use the software to do all of your work. The more words you have in your initial list, the more you can generate with the software tools.

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Despite all the free advice available to those who want to blog to earn a living, the vast majority don’t make much money. A blogger will read a blog or ebook that says “do this” or “do that” and will do “this” and “that” and a number of other things, but to no avail.

Why?

The main reasons why a blogger is unable to earn a decent income from his or her blog(s):

Lack Of Knowledge and/or Experience

Perhaps the blogger just isn’t experienced enough to know how to make sales, get the right kind of traffic, where to place contextual ads, etc. There is a lot to know, and it’s hard to do something we know very little about. It takes some time to learn all the tricks and drill them into our brains, and even then, there’s still a lot left to learn.

Not Enough Quality Content

The amount of content available affects the amount of money earned (most of the time). And not just any will do- this content must be valuable to a large number of people. Bloggers who do not put enough time and effort into developing this quality content (whether it be writing or having someone else write for them) usually will not be able to pull in much revenue, if any. The same goes for new blogs.

Try to think of your blog as a bridge, and you’re trying to get to the other side of a river- if you don’t build it, you will never be able to reach your destination. If you don’t build your blog, you will never be able to reach your income goals.

Non-Commercial Topic

Sometimes bloggers just choose the wrong topic to blog about. That is, the wrong topic to blog about if you want to make money doing it.

If you enjoy something unusual and want to write about it, go ahead. But if your main focus is money, there is a possibility that you have chosen the wrong niche. If you want to market your blog, it needs to be about something that people are familiar with and are interested in reading more about. Go where the people are.

Not Reaching Out To Others

In order for a blog’s readership to grow, the author must reach out to new audiences. Otherwise, how will anyone know you even exist? Communication, friendships and working relationships are extremely important.

Lack Of Time and Effort Invested

Blogging is not only hard work, but it is also very time-consuming. If you do not allow yourself enough time to write and promote your posts, or just don’t commit to it, you’re just wasting your time.

A blogger must have a passion for the topic he or she is writing about, and the discipline to update regularly and advertise new content- not just for a couple months, but for much longer- perhaps several years.

Concentrating On One Detail and Neglecting The Rest

It is not uncommon for a blogger to obsess over one aspect of a blog and let the rest go, and then he or she is left wondering why the blog went downhill.

For example, I’ve seen bloggers invest so much time into watching their stats, that the quality of their content dwindles as time progresses. Readers unsubscribe and don’t return, the blog receives less hits from search engines, etc.

Don’t let this happen to you. Divide your attention between all the necessary details.

Ignoring Readers

I will say this bluntly- when money is involved, a blog is nothing without its readers. These people are the ones giving feedback (whether it be good or bad) about the quality of your blog and what they would like to read about. Listen to them, and keep them in mind when writing. Do not take your audience for granted.

The Blog Is Not Original

An original design and content is essential for financial success in blogging. You could write and promote great articles all day, every day, but if people can find the same thing somewhere else (especially on a more popular blog), it will be difficult to gain anything from all that time invested. A blogger must constantly come up with new ideas and present them in a way that makes them stand out from all the others.

Ads Are Poorly Presented

There is a lot to think about when displaying advertisements. The blogger must know which programs and/or advertising techniques are suitable for his or her blog, and the ads must be relevant, placed in “hot spots” on the page, and blend well with the template.

Too Many Projects

Sometimes bloggers will commit to more than they can handle, and the quality of the blog will drop as they struggle to keep up with each project. It’s important to know what you are committing to before you choose to take on a new challenge. Doing too much is nothing more than a good way to burn yourself out.

Giving Up Too Soon

Most blogs don’t reach their peak until at least a year after the start date, given that the blogger has developed an effective posting schedule and rarely strays from it. Blogs take some time to mature, so don’t expect to start a new blog one day and the cash to come rolling in the next.

Luck Of The Draw

As bloggers gain experience and publicity, they may encounter some great opportunities for further advancement.

Sometimes they will not be able to take up those opportunities, or even choose to give them up, thus missing their chance for success.

Or, a blogger may be unlucky enough to never be presented with the opportunities that could launch their pro blogging career. It’s disappointing to see amazing talent and knowledge go to waste, but it happens sometimes.

When looking at a lot of the things that could go wrong, the topic of making money from a blog can seem a little more intimidating. But with focus, patience and dedication, it is possible to build a significant income stream with a blog, even in the most crowded niches. Don’t let my list get you down- use it as a guide to recognizing unprofitable habits and fixing them before they get out of hand.

What Every Blogger Should Know About Quality Content, and How To Create It

If you read a lot of blogs about blogging, you have probably noticed that “Provide quality content” is by far the most common tip given out, yet there aren’t a lot of people who have described exactly what quality content is, why it’s important, and how to create it.

Naturally, different people are going to have different ideas about what “quality content” really is, and that’s okay.

Quality content takes on many different forms, on many different blogs.

What Is Quality Content?

Quality content is the stuff that people are looking for to satisfy a need or desire. It is what people find useful, informative, or entertaining. It’s what makes them want to return to a website in search of more content, or even subscribe to RSS feeds. It is what people find to be valuable.

Quality content is also what search engines aim to provide for searchers. It is often rich in key words and phrases, and may be considered some of the best content available on the topic at hand.

Why Is It Important?

Who is going to read your blog if all you provide is a load of crap scraped from other sites, or thrown together with too many keywords, or anything that is not original or interesting? Few, if any at all.

And not only will people not read it, but the old SEO techniques used to cheat the search engines don’t work anymore. The ultimate goal for search engines is to provide searchers with the highest quality content on the net, and little by little, they’re coming closer to achieving it. The best thing a website owner can do is just that- give the search engines exactly what they want.

10 Tips for Creating Quality Content

1. Write about the things that interest you. It’s obvious when a blogger is not passionate about the subject he or she is writing about, and if the blogger isn’t interested in the topic at hand, why would anyone want to read the blog? They will most likely move on to another blog, by an author who deeply cares for the things he or she is writing about.

2. Only write what you know. Like the above, it’s obvious when a blogger doesn’t know the topic he or she is writing about.

3. Write for people first, search engines second. While writing specifically for the search engines may get you more search hits, you’ll most likely have fewer regular readers. People want to read something that they can understand, something that flows smoothly, something that sounds good. Give that to them.

4. Blog about something that isn’t being covered by a lot of bloggers, or provide a new point of view on a popular topic. Don’t be afraid to be different.

5. If you’re used to writing lots of short posts, perhaps you could try writing a few longer ones here and there. This tip may not work for some blogs (it depends on your topic, writing style, and audience), but many blogs could benefit from this.

6. Don’t paste a bunch of ads and other banners all over the place. Cluttered pages aren’t very attractive, and often discourage readers from returning.

7. Take your time when writing. While it’s important that bloggers learn to manage their time wisely, it’s also important to allow yourself enough time to write a great post without rushing. This often leads to mistakes- lots of them.

8. Proofread your work before posting.

9. Read other blogs and learn from them. Sometimes bloggers will write about their blogging achievements and how they accomplished their goals. Pay attention and make note of the things that may work for you.

10. Make sure your page design shows off at least some of your main content without scrolling. Huge logos, ads, and other banners are a big turnoff to new visitors. They’re usually there for the content, not for an elaborate design that requires you to scroll down before you can read anything.

Most of these tips can be applied to just about any type of blog. Try them, come up with some of your own, and make note of your experiences. Every blog and blogger is different and will require different methods of content creation in order to make something interesting, new, and unique.

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By Adam L. Penenberg

On one hand, you have a company that rose up from modest beginnings to become one of the richest businesses in America (indeed, the world), and in the process revolutionized the use of technology to create a new way to do business- helping people find what they want.

And then you have Google.

It turns out that Wal-Mart, the world’s most profitable retailer, and Google- the virtual world’s most profitable search seller, have a lot more in common than you might think.

Founders:

• Wal-Mart: Sam Walton (1918 - 1992), who personified “middle America.”

• Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who personify geek America.

Company Slogan:

• Wal-Mart: “Always low prices!”

• Google: “Don’t be evil.”

Alternative Slogan:

• Wal-Mart: “Always low wages.”

• Google: “Maybe not evil, but after the IPO not so good either.”

Market Cap:

• Wal-Mart: $202 billion (not bad for a company that peddles cheap goods imported from China).

• Google: $55 billion (not bad for a company that doesn’t actually make anything).

Reach:

• Wal-Mart: Accounts for almost 9 percent of all retail sales in the United States.

• Google: Accounts for almost four out of five internet searches (which includes sites that license Google’s search technology), and 75 percent of all referrals to websites.

Secrets To Success:

• Wal-Mart: Revolutionized the retail industry by offering a wider variety of products (at lower prices) than competitors in a clean, customer-friendly environment.

• Google: Revolutionized the search engine industry by offering faster, more useful searches (for free) than competitors on a clean, user-friendly website.

Key Moment In Company History:

• Wal-Mart: 1988, when it opened up its first Supercenter in Washington, Missouri, thereby giving new meaning to the term “one-stop shopping.”

• Google: 2000, when, following Yahoo’s lead, it began selling advertisements based on keywords, giving new emphasis to the term “relevancy.”

In-House Technology:

• Wal-Mart: Developed information technology (it operates the nation’s largest private satellite communication system) and perfected the use of the bar code to speed up the supply chain so that both Wal-Mart and the vendor know exactly how many blenders, brooms and baseball gloves they have sold, and how many need to be delivered to specific stores.

• Google: Developed algorithms to rank web pages by link popularity so that searches are not only fast, but also yield the most useful results.

Company Jargon:

• Wal-Mart: Refers to workers as “associates” and managers as “servant leaders.”

• Google: Refers to AdSense users as “affiliates” and discourages individual employees from communicating with outsiders, preferring all correspondence come from Google “team” members.

Company Maxims:

• Wal-Mart: Sam Walton compiled a list of 10 items that form the company’s core philosophy, including, “Exceed your customers’ expectations,” “Commit to your business,” “Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners,” “Control your expenses better than your competition” and “Swim upstream.”

• Google: Brin and Page compiled a list of 10 items that form the company’s core philosophy, which include, “Focus on the user and all else will follow,” “You can make money without doing evil,” “The need for information crosses all borders,” “You can be serious without wearing a suit” and “Great just isn’t good enough.”

Worker Salaries:

• Wal-Mart: Pays about 20 percent less than competing retailers, with many employees earning minimum wage and ineligible for health benefits.

• Google: Pays less than other Silicon Valley tech companies. A system administrator earns around $35,000, which in the San Francisco Bay Area, with its astronomical housing prices and cost of living, might as well be minimum wage.

Archenemies:

• Wal-Mart: Unions; community organizers dead set against Wal-Mart setting up shop in their towns; government investigators looking into the use of illegal immigrants at below minimum wage, the practice of locking employees inside stores past store hours, and shaving labor costs by forcing workers to work off the clock; the media.

• Google: Privacy experts, who are spooked by the company’s long-lasting cookie (which will expire in the year 2038 and can track a user’s search terms) and by Gmail, which scans e-mail to target ads based on messages’ content; unethical search engine optimization companies, which constantly find ways to rig search results; the media.

Biggest Threat:

• Wal-Mart: Falling dollar and rising yuan, which could make Chinese imports more expensive and potentially shave profit margins.

• Google: Click fraud, which would undermine advertisers’ faith in Google’s ad programs and force the company to refund millions of dollars, which could potentially shave profit margins.

Quote The Company Most Regrets:

• Wal-Mart: “I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We’re going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.” — Sam Walton

• Google: “Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.” — Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Runner-up: “We are moving to a Google that knows more about you.” — Schmidt

Allegations Of Censorship:

• Wal-Mart: Won’t stock magazines with racy material (Maxim, FHM and Stuff) and partially conceals the covers of certain women’s magazines; won’t carry music albums with explicit or profane lyrics, or albums that contain lyrics critical of Wal-Mart. (One famous example: In 1996, Wal-Mart refused to sell a Sheryl Crow CD containing lyrics that heaped scorn on the company for selling guns.)

• Google: Blocks users in Germany, France and Switzerland from accessing sites that contain potentially racist content or hate speech. Amended terms and conditions to bar criticism of the company’s AdSense service terms and conditions. Allows advertising for beer and wine but not for hard liquor, and won’t accept ads for guns. Amended AdSense policy so that affiliates are barred from criticizing Google on their sites.

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Whether you’re new to Internet marketing or not, you have probably come across the term “Long Tail Keywords”. This method is often recommended as the best marketing approach affiliates can use to make sales online. Long tail marketing seems complicated at first, but it really isn’t and it can be quite lucrative for affiliate marketers who use the marketing technique consistently.

Long tail marketing is based on the concept of leverage. Instead of trying to compete against thousands of other people for larger, broader markets or keywords, the long tail approach focuses on tiny little micro sections of each niche instead. And since there is much less competition for these smaller niches, you can get yourself or your affiliate products noticed much more easily. So you repeat this process for hundreds of tiny little niches, instead of struggling to get yourself seen among thousands of others in larger niches.

Now let’s break this down into examples you can use. Take the weight loss niche for instance, it’s huge. There is a ton of competition, and any new marketer or affiliate who tried to enter the niche today might need to work hard for several years before they start actually making a dent.

A small section of the weight loss niche though, includes things like diet pills or fitness equipment, fitness instructions, liposuction surgery, and any number of other branches. The point is: There are tons of sub topics within the general weight loss topic. So those sub topics is where affiliates need to concentrate their efforts. In this example though, even those sub topics are still too broad and busy.

So you pick one of the sub topics, and drill down further. Within the fitness equipment area for instance, there are treadmills, elliptical trainer machines, weight machines, resistance machines and so on. These are still too broad and competitive, so you’ll pick one and drill down again.

Eventually you get to the tiniest little pieces of each niche. If you chose Treadmills for instance, you might have then chosen the Nordic Track treadmill sub topic. Inside there are hundreds of different machine names, makes and models. And those are the long tail keywords.

If you have a hundred different exercise machines you’re promoting, and you’re focusing on just the machine’s name, make or model number for your promotions, you are much more likely to rank higher in search engines via natural search, and you’re going to pay much less money per click if you’re using PPC advertising methods.

Now each of these machine names may only get five or ten searches each day, but this is where the power of leverage comes in. Since you have very little competition for these long tail keywords, you’re more likely to get the most attention from interested buyers. And if you have 100 or 1000 long tail keywords each bringing in five or ten visitors a day, you’re getting 500 to 5000 laser targeted buying traffic every day.

Essentially, many more obscure words and phrases can make much more money than one or two really large general niche words or topics can. And that is the power of long tail keyword marketing. Since the more obscure words and combinations are almost limitless, you could theoretically have millions of visitors coming to an affiliate website just by targeting words and phrases which only get a few searches each day.

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Obviously, you don’t want to add your link to websites that are link farms as this will now penalize, rather than enhance your search engine ranking.

And, you should know that search engine optimization is interested in the relevance of your site compared to the content of your site. Understanding this makes it easier to understand that when your backlinks are analyzed, they aren’t just done so based on their isolated coding, they are done with respect to the environment too.

This environment includes the page rank of the site that is linking to you, your own website content and the page environment and content that the backlink springs from.

* PageRank (PR)

The best types of quality links come from sites that have a high page rank in Google’s search engine. Page rank ranges on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest page rank. This is a measure of the referral site’s reputation and will give the search engine an idea of how reliable this source is about giving out links that are not relevant or within their own content stream. If you don’t know a site’s PageRank (PR), you can download the Google toolbar and it will tell you what it is. It takes time to develop page rank and you should try to link to sites with a slightly higher page rank than your own, thus building up your own site’s reputation.

* Website Content Matching

Ideally, you would want to get a backlink from a site that not only has a higher page rank than you do, but also that has something to do with the content of your site. If your site is about dating, you may want to be included in a site that reviews dating sites. If you just get a backlink from someone who is selling Bibles, it’s likely to be ignored as a good quality backlink.

* Page Positioning

A link that shows up near the top of the referrer’s page is worth more than one at the bottom. This may seem odd, but you have to remember that paid links are often placed nearer the bottom or out of the way of the relevant content. Paid text links are now not considered good quality links by Google, but how that algorithm is determined, it’s anyone’s guess. They appear to make page positioning an indicator of whether a text link is paid or not.

* Page Hierarchy

Within any website, there is a directory tree that leads people deeper and deeper into the site. The higher a web page is in the directory structure the more value it has to you as a potential host for your backlink. The home page of a site with good ranking is an excellent place to get a backlink because this is the prime real estate for websites that everyone is sure to visit.

* Anchor Text

The anchor text used by the linking site is becoming more important. If you have a site that sells shoes and the anchor text that backlinks to you is “pretty wear” then it won’t be as efficient as one that clearly describes your offerings like “quality top-brand shoes.” This effect appears to be evaluated across the board with the more backlinks using quality anchor text, the higher your page ranking in the results pages becomes.

Applying these elements to your backlink campaigns will definitely result in additional traffic.

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