Guest Post by Alan K'necht

Over the past five to eight years, Search Engine Marketing (“SEM”) professionals have finally woken up to the reality that the goal of their campaigns, be it search engine optimization (“SEO”), pay per click (“ppc”) like Google Adwords or any other effort is not about driving the maximum number of eyeballs to a web site; it’s about conversions. Yes, the goal must be to drive quality traffic that converts on the site.

With the advances in web analytic products like WebTrends, SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics (just to name a few of the more popular tools); the ability to assign conversions to specific marketing efforts has improved immensely and allow a the Search Engine Marketer and more importantly their clients the ability to properly evaluate their efforts. Through this effort campaigns can be more effectively optimized to maximize the return on the investments (“ROI”).

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Are you a Google affiliate publisher? If so and you haven’t logged into your account for a while, make sure you log in and select your payment preference in the Adsense dashboard or you might not get paid by your regular date.

Google announced this on the GAN blog today:

Affiliate publishers have new payment options through the integration with AdSense. As we head into the busy holiday season, please take a few minutes to check on the status of your payment preferences.

Publishers can view payments that have been posted to your AdSense account in the Google Affiliate Network platform; on the “Home” page click “Payments.” This view captures all payments and a detailed breakdown of your earnings per advertiser.

Payment information is stored in your AdSense account and Google lets you select your desired form of payment. Publishers can currently choose to be paid by electronic funds transfer, check, Western Union Quick Cash or Rapida. Check out the Help Center for a detailed overview your options.

Note if you see a message in your AdSense account prompting you to complete your payment information, it’s important you act quickly. This message means that there is some information missing in your payment profile and action is required to avoid payment delays.

Since Google integrated Adsense with Google Affiliate network there has been reports from a lot of users with difficulties in the transition, our recommendation is that you log into your account immediately and check for any system messages. If you have a problem, try emailing Google support first than try the GAN forum.

As you can see, there is a fair bit of user problems associated with the switch over in the forum. Hopefully Google will sort this out for their users soon.

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Our top tips to optimize your ecommerce for holiday seasons

The holiday shopping season is approaching and you’ve worked hard this year to improve the SEO of your website. Now its getting to the busiest month of the year and you are checking your web stats everyday to see if sales and traffic are increasing.

You’re thinking to yourself, what can I do in the next few weeks to generate more sales? Clearly its too late to make any drastic changes to the SEO campaign? And you would be right, what follows are some simple tips you can implement today to capture more sales during the holiday season.

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PPC Audit Guest Post by Steve Loszewski

Identifying Areas of Improvement

Popular pay per click programs include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), and Microsoft adCenter.  If you have accounts in these programs, you’re probably interested in improving them to increase (or achieve) profitability.  There are a number of ways to improve a pay per click account – what follows is a summary of some of the most common methods in identifying and improving elements of a campaign. Google AdWords is given heavy focus in this article, although many of the concepts can be applied to YSM and MSN as well.

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FTC announces guidelines for disclosures

What has got every internet marketer up in arms this week? If you have not heard, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission, USA ) has released its final guidelines for advertisements using endorsements and testimonials.

In its press release on the FTC blog, the commission released two PDFS titled;

Guides Concerning the Use of : Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – PDF

Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides – PDF

A combined behemoth of 94 pages, most of which is filled with legal jargon ( Hint – skip to the end of the first PDF and the second PDF, it has some easier to read scenarios and examples of what the FTC classifies as an endorsement etc ) .

While this author has not attempted to completely analysis the guidelines, which is a task too daunting at 3:31am, I have managed to find some great resources for our readers, that should help explain and clarify the report and its impacts.

Update: There is a great interview by Jim Edwards of igottatellyou.com with Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission that really clearifies a great deal of misconceptions of the new FTC guidelines. Thank you to @smbusinesscoach for the twitter update.

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Next time you perform a search in Google, note how many results appear on page one?

Out of millions of hits there are only 10 results on page one. as research indicates 89% will click page 1 results. and 4% on page 2, 6% page 3.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization competitor research plays a very important part to a successful campaign. By knowing who is on the top 10 result, and digging deeper to find out how they achieved this, you will be able to budget and plan your campaign. To be on page 1, you have to beat the other 10 results.

In the world of online business, knowing your competition is the key to success. From knowing who your top competitors are, why they are at the top and finding out when a new competitor appears will help your business grow and prosper.

Knowledge is power, here are some great tools I use on a daily basis to help my clients and to spy on my competitors. I will be covering each tool in separate posts to keep reading at a minimum.

Case Scenario

My company ( Clear-A-Face ) sales a fast acting acne removal cream, recently a new competitor ( Super Clear-A-Face ) has launched a similar product claiming to remove acne twice as fast. Been a smart business man, I want to know what this new competitor is up to and how they are marketing the product.

Google Alerts

Imagine if you had a personal assistant that was scouring the internet for information about your competitors 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. No overtime pay, no holiday leave and best of all , they work for free and deliver their research to you without fail, everyday.

Google Alerts

This is Google Alerts. A free service provided by Google which delivers to you in the latest customised topics from ;

• Google News
• Blogs
• Web Search results ( new SERPs )
• Videos
• Google Groups

Use this great tool to gather intelligence about your competitors products, their online marketing efforts and the markets interests on your competitors products. There are of course many other websites that offer a similar service, but to be able to see the news from Google’s eyes is great for SEO.

Using Google alerts I can setup as many campaigns based on keywords related to my competition.

• Campaign A for their brand name Super-Clear-A-Face.
• Campaign B for product related keywords : Acne Cream, acne treatment cream, pimple removal cream, acne gel.
• Campaign C for treatment , symptoms related keywords : Acne treatment, rid acne, cure acne, acne medication

Google News alerts will let me know if my competitor appears on major news networks or official press releases

Google Blogs alerts for possible product reviews by their customers, or any new competitors on the scene.

Google web search alerts to inform me of their SEO / online marketing efforts. I will see when their new website has appeared in Google’s index, any new pages they may have added, websites selling their products, websites possibly been used for link building purposes and research websites / forums dealing with acne.

I can also find out what products are gaining popularity by following discussions and forums found in my alerts.

You can really build a great overview of your competitor’s SEO and marketing strategy, the markets interests and awareness in your competitors products. Any interesting alerts should be bookmarked and filed for reference. After a few weeks you should have enough data to make a calculated decision whether this competitor poses a serious threat.

If you are reading this, stop. Click here and setup a Google alert campaign for your own keywords. Currently I have Google alerts tracking keywords such as SEO, SEM, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Google Caffeine, Caffeine, Goobinghoo, lil engine, li’l engine, little engine.

I really can’t stress how useful this tool is, if you are already a Google Alerts user let us know how you have benefited.

As always if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section, or discuss it on our forum. Please pass on this article if you found it to be useful. ( http://bit.ly/Gripp )

In the next few posts I will be introducing competitor research tools like Google Ad Planner, Real-time search monitoring and link analysis, keyword scraping tools.

Follow us on twitter or subscribe to our RSS and get notified of new posts.

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Great news for local sites in Thailand. You can now benefit from better targeted ads with Google’s announcement of its support for Thai in Adsense for Content. Last year, it was already included in the Adsense for Search program, so this just comes as the next logical move. Hopefully, other languages will soon follow. I’m all for localized content.

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From my experience, AdSense for Search churns out great CPM (at least in most cases, better than those for my AdSense for Content). The problem is that on average, very few people use the search feature on websites, translating into even fewer ad clicks. I’ve already written a post on how to try and boost your AdSense earnings, but here’s a few more little tweaks you can do, courtesy of Google’s AdSense blog.

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It may come as a surprise for many webmasters and bloggers, but the truth is that waiting for advertisers to come to you is generally not a good idea. Unless you already have a famous site, of course. If you aren’t that lucky yet, it’s time to realise your site won’t be easily found by prospects. So, having an “advertise here” page won’t be enough. If you really want to make some money by selling ads, you will have to approach potential buyers.

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So, you decided that you aren’t going to wait for advertisers to find your site. Instead, you’ll take the initiative to look for them and offer them a good advertising spot or package. That’s great! But now you must be wondering where those ad buyers can be located.

There are several places where you can find advertisers for your blog or website, but today I’m going to focus on the following ones:

1. Your own site

Yes, your own site can help you compile a list of prospect ad buyers. Here’s how: install AdSense (or other contextual ad network’s code) on your template. Wait a few days, until Google learns what your site is about and starts showing appropriate ads. Now visit the sponsor sites (don’t click on your own ads; type their URLs on your browser) and see if they are indeed relevant to your audience. If the answer is positive, these are ad buyers you may want to offer a deal to.

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