Okay so it’s the end of the month, I’ve done a fair few posts, some good some bad, some abusive some pointless, but overall I hope it’s been enjoyable to read and you’ve taken something away.

I’ve also done some minor renovations, updated the navigation, and added my Facebook link so if you like me you can add me as a friend! Why not?

Next month I’m going to try and see if people are interested in the form side of the blog, I’ve only got back into posting again at the end of Feb, and the forum has been stagnant since the end of last year, so I might try and post some more links to the forum.

Also, subscribe to me in a reader dammit, would like to see my feed count rise a little!

Some posts of interest this month:

• A good investment - if you like renovating
• Repeat customers is where your profit is
• Diversification, it’s easy, make it happen
• Project wonderful: good idea, bad execution
• What’s your advertising really worth
• The price of buying a site is more than just its revenue

See you Monday!… Subscribe! RSS!

I don’t usually run ads on my blog, mostly because I’m not blogging to make money, and I’m not blogging about how much money I make to help you make more money online, this is a blog about business - most of the time.

But in saying that I’m not against giving away traffic or to get some traffic back in return!

So, I might come up with a competition or something to give away a few 125x ads for a month in exchange for a link back…

Thinking about it, let me know what you think, should I give some ads away? How should I do it?

The quality of some of these sites on entrecard.com are pretty subpar.

Sure there’s a good number with traffic, and some with some quite nice designs and content, there’s even more that have next to nothing to say at all, and on top of that are sporting really horrid layouts.

There are thousands of good themes out there for all the blog platforms so I don’t see why people deploy these blogs without a half decent one.

I must have gone through over 200 sites today to try and find some good blogs to read, and I came away with nothing. Nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing that captivated me and made me wants to read.

Some of the sites in there I do already read, and I like them, but aside from those, I found almost nothing new, just wasted a few hrs trying to discover some.

I did say almost, there were some alright sites that had content worth reading, not just regurgitated crap.

http://www.entrepreneur.com.sg

http://dotcommogul.net/

http://theblogentrepreneur.com/

http://www.toasteggme.com/

there were a few more but I lost the links… heh.

Figures as much though, it’s one of the things that stumped me in the first place, I wanted to write new content, things that people haven’t blogged to death about, but I found it hard to do and I ended up getting lazy and stopped blogging.

I’ve been away for about 3 months from blogging, and in that time I’ve totally 100% stopped reading any feeds, I’ve not read a single RSS feed from anyone for 3 months.

I’ve come back now, checked out a few blogs around the place and sure enough, nothing has changed.

Johnchow.com still has nothing of value and talks about food, people are still talking about the same old ways to drive traffic, blog carnivals and dig traffic, Wordpress themes, seo for blogs, link list building, social marketing and mini affiliate sites etc etc etc…

I’m so bored of the same old crap, it was regurgitation 6 months ago and now it’s just pointless to read.

Anyway, I’ve updated some images and links around the blog. I’m going to start talking about Ruby on rails and other things going on soon.

Is duplicate content really that bad?

I haven’t got on the ’stop stealing my content’ bandwagon yet that every blog I’ve seen is on, I understand people copying general content, images etc for websites is a straight up violation, but blogs being syndicated isn’t the same in my opinion.

There are heaps of blogs out there that syndicate other blogs content automatically, these blogs provide no value to anyone really, most are bad default templates so it’s obvious no one really works the blog, their only purpose is to build links, and search traffic which in turn produces money from advertising for whoever owns them, bloggers bitch and whinge about their content being syndicated on these blogs but seriously, they are doing you a favour.

They are pushing your content to more people, giving you more back links and saving you time that you would spend marketing and ‘guest blogging’ anyway.

Yes, Google punishes duplicate content, but it’s not super harsh and not for the owner of the content, your site will be more legit and less punished then someone who is syndicating lots of content anyway.

If your content is being syndicated, start posting with more links back to your own site and win from whatever traffic these syndicators are bringing in, like shit people, its free marketing, use it eh?

10. Been island hopping and jet skiing
9. Too Drunk
8. Way too busy to even think about blogging
7. I have a life outside where there aren’t any computers
6. I’m really trying not to be one of those bloggers who regurgitates other peoples shit cause they have nothing else better to say
5. Been out shopping a lot
4. Too busy playing games
3. My other businesses are more profitable and less time consuming!
2. I’m in the progress of writing a business investment plan for one of my other businesses

And the #1 reason why I haven’t blogged all week is….

1. I’m really trying not to be one of those bloggers who regurgitates the same old shit that has been said 1,000 times already

Oh and there you have it, I said it mostly because I’ve come back after doing so much, read all my feeds and out of almost 1,000 new posts that I’ve skimmed through there was only about 5 I actually read, the rest was regurgitated crap that I’ve read 1,000 times before.

Yes traffic is the main currency of bloggers not money and no I don’t want to read another self serving bullshit ebook… this is why I read and respect bloggers like Maki over at DoshDosh, he’s made a commitment to deliver real content that you probably haven’t seen or read before, and if you have, it’ll be different and provide something new.

Another reason for this post is that after skimming through them all it kind of pissed me off to see the same crap over and over again and I wanted something easy to get me back into the rhythm of blogging daily again, so there it is.

I’m creating a PPC marketing campaign for a new site in our network – poposco, and I’m going to be creating the campaign on the AdBrite PPC network for a change.

While I do this I’ll walk you through the process and why I do it.

In a couple of weeks I’ll show the results of the campaign and any tweaking I performed to increase its performance. Let’s get started.

PPC marketing can be a very effective way of marketing any website if you do it correctly, the effectiveness of any campaign can be measured by your KPI’s (key performance indicators), so this is where we’re going to start, at the measuring point.

What’s a KPI and why are they so important?

A Key Performance Indicator is basically a point of measurement, before you build any marketing campaign, free or paid, you need to think, why am I doing this? At the end of it all, what would I look at to deem my marketing efforts a success?
In our case, I want to achieve two things

1. Attract visitors who would use the service and return to the site
2. Build a member base of users who submit content

So my KPI for number 1 would be traffic, and not just traffic I’ve bought, but sustained traffic and increased traffic.

For example, if I buy 1,000 clicks, I will receive 1,000 visitors. If all I receive over the duration of the campaign is 1,000 visitors – then my fist KPI wasn’t much of a success, the visitors aren’t returning, nor are they referring other people – if they like what they see and if it’s of relevance you’ll find users will refer other users. Regardless, if our total traffic is just 1k then we’ve failed on the first KPI.

On the other hand, if we buy 1k clicks and over the duration of the campaign we end up with 1,500 then we’ve had some success.

For the second KPI we’re going to keep an eye on registrations, since we’re not advertising anywhere else at the moment, only on AdBrite, we can assume most of the registrations will be driven from this marketing, we’re not going to assume too much, but at this stage it’s not going to hurt too much to assume. In future campaigns we will track clicks to registrations with tracking codes.

Kids, don’t try this at home, never assume anything, and always track with codes. I’m not since we’re not advertising anywhere else right now.

It’s not all running around blind, I will be checking my referral stats and look at the tracking data, I can see the number of registration page and submit page hits from ads we’ve placed, it’s not optimal but It’ll do for now.

Pre-creating the campaign

Now that we have our KPIs, we need to think about what we’re doing before we rush off and do it; firstly yes we need to build some ads, but not just any old ads, we need to build ads that will help us meet those KPIs of ours.

When your building ads, one thing I see way too often are ads with no meaning, pointless ads that aren’t targeting anyone, there’s no call to action or reason for anyone to click the ads, and the ads on describe where they are going to be landing, they are pointless.

This is where building KPIs first helps, we now know what we need to build the ads for, we need to build ads that meet our KPI requirements, that why were marketing in the first place right?

Other overlooked items when creating a campaign is our budget and duration. Our KPIs are measured on those factors as well, marketing campaigns aren’t open ended forever funded ordeals; they should end in a set period with a fixed cost in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind here is the marketplace in which you’re advertising with, AdBrite isn’t the greatest place to advertise a website for webmasters, so this is going to be a little test marketing campaign, I’m going to keep the budget small and time short… see what happens. If it turns out that the response based on our KPIs are good, then I’ll increase the amount of spend and extend the campaigns for a few more months.

For the time being I’m going to restrict us to a $5 a day 1 month long campaign to limit our potential loss.

Creating the campaign

SO let’s get started, shoot on over to AdBrite, if you don’t already have an account, create one.

Once you’re there, login then click on the ‘for advertisers’ tab.

Under the ‘for advertisers’ tab there’s a link called ‘create a new campaign‘, click it to get started.

The first thing we need to do with this Text Ad is to setup our Geographic Targeting.

I want to target the big English speaking countries, I think that’s going to be our demographc, so under geographic targeting, I’m going to specify regions (countries) – Australia, United States, United Kingdom and Canada.

The next step in our campaign creation process is Category Targeting.

Since the site is based around webmaster topics, business, marketing, technology and what not, I’m going to select specific categories rather than showing the advert across the whole AdBrite network.

I think this is a crucial step when creating a campaign on AdBrite, the whole network is deadly, there are lots of random sites out there you really don’t need your advert to display on, like humour sites, real estate sites and more.

So to keep away from those areas I’m going to use the following categories

• Business and Industrial
• News
• Technology
• Blogs
• Business and Finance
• News and Reference
• Small / Medium Business
• Social Networking

On the category targeting page, at the bottom there’s an additional option – Target site by quality, again another step which I think is important to the success of a webmaster targeted campaign, by choosing the option ‘Only show ads on sites with family-friendly content and professional presentation’ should hopefully weed out the sites that are built to exploit clicks on ads and keep the advert on more professional sites with quality traffic.

Demographic targeting is next but there’s nothing there in need of change so I’m leaving that alone and skipping direct to Keyword Targeting.

I’m not going to describe how I came up with my list of keywords, there’s lots of ways and articles around about how to come up with a list of keywords for your site, if I was do start talking about it here it I could do a few posts worth of content so I’ll leave that for another time, this article will be big enough as it is.

Anyway, I recommend coming up with a list of keywords and using them for keyword targeting. Again this should help cut back on sites that aren’t relevant to people we’re targeting.

Setting your budget

To start off I usually set my campaigns to a modest $5 a day budget, with a $0.20 cost per click.

I keep my daily budget low so in case all the clicks end up being $0.20 each and were not receiving traffic that meets our targets we don’t blow too much money too fast. You will see below that even though our MAX cost per click is 20 cents, most of the clicks ’should’ be in the 2 cent per click range.

It’s always a good idea when testing things to keep your daily budget low; it allows you to not over do your spending while you’re still testing, it gives you time to tweak your targeting and the text in your adverts.

Once your campaign is producing quality traffic then start ramping up your daily budget, but in the meantime start small and build up over time.

You can see in the image above that our campaign is expected to be shown 3.5million times a day, across around 600 sites with an average cost per click of $0.02.

We should expect around 121 clicks per day which will only eat into 45% of our budget.

Now that data is based on their current network averages, I think with the way we word our adverts that we should be able to max out our daily spend and produce over 200 clicks a day.

If we can max our daily spend with keeping our CPC low then we’re in a good position to control the flow to of traffic to our site, not having to sit around desperately wanting more traffic, we have a tap we can turn on and off when we want more or less traffic – which in my opinion is a good thing.

Creating our text adverts

To create our actual text adverts we need to again look at our KPIs

1. Attract visitors who would use the service and return
2. Build a member base of users who submit content

We have 2 different targets here to achieve and in order to do this I’m going to create at least 3 ads per KPI.

Why 3? Well there’s no real great reasoning, I usually create more, but I wouldn’t create any less than 3 per KPI, having a few variations will give you enough of an indication of what style of ads are attracting more clicks than others and for what reasons.

For example if one of your ads has the word FREE in it, and the other doesn’t, but the advert with FREE in it is getting the majority of the clicks then we know why, the clickers are after something for free. Make sure they are getting it or cut the advert.

For our first KPI since our site is unknown (we don’t have any brand awareness yet) I’m going to try and use the name of the site in the adverts, the more the users see the unique name hopefully the more they remember it or notice that it’s being advertised around the place and build some interest within them to visit the site. This is a benefit with text ads; the domain is at the bottom of the advert and I’m going to keep it simple with just showing ‘poposco.com’ not some random URL on our server like ‘http://www.poposco.com/home/index.php’

Another tactic I’m going to use is include the word ‘digg’ in the advert, since poposco is a digg.com style of site, if the users are interested in that kind of thing then that’s our target market and we hope they click.

The final thing I’m going to try is direct the user to an article link direct on the site.

I’m no genius ad copywriter but there’s enough variation there to let me know what will work and what won’t and I can go from there re-writing and tweaking the adverts.

Our next ad group is going to target our 2^nd KPI, attracting new article submitters.

Again I’m going to use the digg angle, everyone knows it so why not, I’m also going to try the newspaper style ‘wanted’ ad headlines, see what it does.

Okay that should do.

There’s a rule I always use when I create a PPC advert, and that is to never send users to a generic homepage. It’s stupid, your advert is giving the users an expectation of what they are going to see after they click, and if you don’t deliver that expectation they will leave your site in seconds.

Deliver that expectation. Whatever you describe in your text ad, send them to a page with more information about what you told them already. Not a generic product page, build a page for the text ad if you’re selling a product, be specific and to the point, don’t content overload either.

However, when your homepage is the bulk of your content and that is what you are promising, then it’s alright, and in our case that’s what we have, a content rich homepage and that’s what the site and adverts are all about, all except our 6^th advert in the first group.

For that last advert in the first group I’m going send the user direct to the link of that article on poposco.

By doing this I’m going to achieve 3 things. Firstly I’ll know by the click through rates what people are more interested in, a digg style webmaster site, or 8 tips of PPC marketing. Secondly if they do click the advert they will be exposed to the site which is our KPI goal, and thirdly if they don’t visit any other pages on poposco hopefully they click the link to read the whole article which is on my talkingdynamics site – so more traffic for here.

For the second group of adverts I’m going to send half direct to the submit page, and the other half to the homepage. Why not everyone to the submit page? Well I want to see how smart people are; I’m thrown them to our site which obviously works like digg, if they want to submit an article is the site easy enough to use to achieve that?

That’s something we need to know, if submissions are low maybe we need to have a bigger more visual button on the pages to let people know how to submit an article, the rest that hit the submit page hopefully will submit.

I’ve put together an incentive to submit an article, it’s imperative for a new site to have a hook to get people using it, in our case we want content submitted all the time, if the users are submitting and reading hopefully it will help the site more returning visitors, until there’s a steady stream of submissions we’re going to offer some freebies like advertising.

When creating a campaign always consider a hook, most of the time a product of service isn’t all that interesting, but if you can offer something else attached to your boring product then it’ll help it sell, you see this done all the time in traditional marketing.

Conclusion

Well that’s it really, there’s a fair bit to consider when building a campaign, even on a simple network like AdBrite. You need the appropriate landing pages, hooks (offers) and ad variations to test your advertising before you dive in spending too much.

The next thing you need to do is report and optimize your campaign before you increase your ad spend, but that’s a different article. Subscribe to the RSS Feed to make sure you don’t miss that one.

Feel free to join in the discussion about AdBrite on the forums.

I signed up to Kontera a while ago; they sent me the install details and code etc to install on the site a couple of days ago… If you don’t know already, Kontera is a context based advertising system.

It works like this, you install the code on your site, and based on keywords in your content, they will dynamically turn that keyword that someone has paid for into a link that pops up a little link window – see the image.

After having it running on the site for all of 3 minutes I removed it.

I’m a fan of design and useability, everything I do, I try to make easy to use and friendly on the eye.

If you can’t read the content well or there’s links and what not everywhere distracting you from trying to read something then there’s no point in having content to start with in my opinion.

After having the Kontera installed I checked out my page and their links were all over the place, which is no big deal, that’s the point, but I really didn’t like how they looked and from a reader’s point of view, it affected how I read my own content.

If I didn’t like reading my own copy with it on the site then who else would eh? So I removed it. I know other blogs have it installed but honestly I don’t read their sites, most of the time sites with good content that I want to read I find they are over monetizing it, links and ads everywhere, so I subscribe to their feed in my Outlook 2007 and I read the posts in my feed reader, never visit their site again, and no money for them.

I’ve often said less is more when it comes to advertising and that’s my case in point, in my opinion you’re better off having more readers of your site then of your feed, and then utilising your advertising space on your site more efficiently rather than saturating it with crap 90% of people won’t click on.

There’s a reason JohnChow makes the large majority of his money from affiliate sales

It’s because he recommends them in his posts etc, they don’t advertise on his site, they aren’t PPC clicks, his affiliate links are in his posts and throughout what he talks about when he shows how much he makes.

The small earners are the PPC networks he has everywhere, Google and Kontera, TZZ media and buy him a beer.

His big earners never paid for any clicks, affiliate sales, review me and text link ads.

It’s been an interesting month, I’ve had lots of work on, lots of projects on the go and I’ve still managed to push out blog posts that have created some interest, some traffic, some comments and my features about domain kiting and making money from domain names made it on the front page of dnscoop.com – a digg for domain names, which I’m pretty happy about.

August also marks the 1 month old mark for this new little blog that I’m building and in this first month we’ve had over 600 visitors, over 1,500 page views, over 20 subscribers, 44 posts and 58 comments. I’m happy with that, for the first month it’s fine, I haven’t been able to give the site as much attention that I would have liked, I’ve been busy with the company’s other developments, which I’m hoping I can announce over the next few weeks.

In August I’m hoping to be a bit more active on the blog posting, keeping the posts more regular, I’ve been taking weekends off, I’ll experiment with that a little more, maybe schedule some posts or something like that, I’ll see how it goes.

I’m also going to be a bit more active on other blogs, get to know a few more people around me, I had the chance to debate with Kevin from Blogging Tips earlier in the month which I really liked, I like a good objective debate, sometimes I try to debate a topic with people and all they do is get the angry and want to fight over it, which in turn pisses me off but Kevin actually engaged in a debate / discussion on a post I made, which was a direct rebuttal from a post he made which was fun.

From the looks of it Kevin likes a good debate; he’s offering $100 cash to the top 2 replies to his latest debate “Blogger or Wordpress.com, which is better“.

Anyway, back to ME any my blog, here’s a roundup of the most popular and some of my favourite posts for the month

• Profiting from domain names – the complete how to guide
• The secrets of profiting from domain names and domain kiting
• PPC campaign intelligence
• Perfect example of a bad Adwords ad
• Google can’t sell anything but search
• Sponsoring the underdog, underrated marketing that pays off
• 8 PPC marketing tips that I use for every campaign I do

I keep a simple robots.txt and I rarely change it, mostly because I’m no pro SEO expert, I know a fair bit about it, I can often get sites to rank high but I don’t spend my days tweaking sites for search engines, I spend my time tweaking for the end user.

SEOBook on the other hand is a pro SEO kinda guy and he does spend all his time optimizing for search engines, that his business, but with one change he’s managed to cut himself out of $10,000 in profits because of an edit of this robots.txt.

One little wildcard in the file has dumped heaps of his profitable pages into Google’s supplemental index, you may remember JohnChow did something similar a while back, he liked to screw with his robots.txt and he ended up in the supplemental index to, now his whole site has dropped from Google pretty much.

Beware when editing your robots.txt, if you need to edit it, do your research first. The best guide I’ve found for SEO and robots.txt is Dan Thies SEO optimization guide, it’s an in-depth 100 page PDF, skip to page 93 to read about robots.txt. Actually it’s the only good eBook I’ve ever read, it’s not self serving crap like most eBooks people publish to try and get popular, it’s an actual helpful guide.