The online world has been hit by changes made by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to its Guidelines Concerning the Use of Testimonials and Endorsement in Advertising

 As defined by the FTC, an endorsement or testimonial is “any advertising message of an individual or the name or seal of an organization that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs and findings, or experiences of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser”.

 Below outlines some of the more significant changes made by the FTC:

-The endorsement message must reflect the true opinion, experience and findings of the endorser (whether a consumer, celebrity or an organization)

- All claims and statements made in an the endorsement message must reflect what consumers can generally achieve otherwise it should clearly disclose the generally expected performance

- All claims and statements must be substantiated

- All material connections between the advertiser and endorser must be disclosed (whether monetary, in form of gift or research funding)

 FTC Press Release can be found here: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

 So what does it all mean??

 - Less Guru’s

- Less Hype

- Less Products to sell for affiliate marketers

- Less CPA Networks

- More Fear

- More Consumer Confidence

- More Trusted Advisors

- More money for Lawyers..

 Did I miss anything?? 

 Although this might cause a big headache for allot of people, it will certainly be a good thing for the industry that has a reputation of deception..

 Please provide your thoughts below,

The basis of a FAILED campaign.

My two first questions to them are:

1) Are you running these campaigns yourself?
2) Are you running negative keywords on these campaigns?

Look, DYI Google Adwords is certainly a steep learning curve. This learning curve costs YOU money.

Negative keywords are a root cause of most failed search campaigns.

This post is geared towards software companies that are utilizing the paid search environments as part of their online marketing mix.

First and foremost if you are unclear as to what negative keywords are you can read about them here.

One of the most UNDERUTILIZED ways of acquiring a negative keyword list is your own data, under your nose.

Print out a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly report (depending on volume) of the keywords being used to find your website. This data can be acquired through your organic data source or through Adwords own, Search Query Performance report.

Sift through these reports and you will notice many negative keywords that just do not apply to your product or service.

Here is a list of generic ones that I use for my ppc campaign management and I use as a starting point.

To negate freeloaders I use the following:
free
freeware
gratis
kostenlos
gratuit
“public domain”
“open source”

To negate people looking for cracks or pirated software:
crack
cracks
cracked
crackz
key
key gen
keygen
keygens
key gens
key generator
key gens
keygenz
“registration key”
“license key”
pirated
pirate
patch
patches
rapidshare
rapid share
serial
serials
serialz
wares
warez
unlock
unlocking
hack
hacked
hacks
password
torrent
torrents
torrentz
bittorrent

Programmers love to click on ads to search for sample code:

c++
delphi
php
flash
xml
visual basic
ajax
vb
api
excel
java
code
source
template
templates
model
example
sample
xls
xsl
sheet
schema
project

What about negating exact terms such as:
[software]
[program]
[programs]
[shareware]

The above are just a quick sample which might help my readers out in running their own campaigns. It is certainly NOT an exhausted list.

Negative Keyword Search is imperative to your paid search success.

As a Pay Per Performance PPC Management Company we take as much of the guesswork out of our PPC Managed Campaigns as we can. Not because we can, because we have too..

I hope this helps..

Good luck.. And good marketing..

Cheers,

How are you using social marketing?
Search Marketing?
eMail Marketing?
Convergence marketing?

If your understand Today’s environment then you know that today is the fastest, easiest & cheapest way to get a hold of your target market.

Not convinced? Have a look at this:

In the coming months Google will open its Content Network to competing ad networks and give the power to it’s AdSense publishers to turn ON other certified network in order for these networks to compete for advertising space.

This will undoubtedly increase average cost per click on the Google Content Network.

Check out this video:

Google Content Network is expanding

Google writes to their publishers (affiliates):

“This new capability will help you generate the most profit for every ad that appears on your site, whether the ads come from AdWords advertisers or Google-certified ad networks,”

From an advertiser perspective or affiliate perspective..  This is going to hurt..

Time to diversify boys & girls…

Still don’t understand the impact this could have on your business.

We can help through our Pay Per Performance Marketing Services.

http://ppcsummit.com/newsletter/?p=404

I myself am noticing that PPC Training is on the rise

Back to helping my clients get ready for the holiday season..

The old way of stuffing keywords into your titles are long gone, not only is google ’s algorithm getting smarter the average Internet searcher reads the title for spammy looking sites.

In other words, you might be losing out on good clicks by being a bit to spammy with your titles.

Let’s dissect our title here for a second..

“What does Internet Marketing and “Potty Training” have in common?”

Well the fact that I used the words “Internet marketing” might suggest that people clicking on this link would actually be interested in the subject and/or topic. The basis of a question as your title always makes the person reading it think and comparing “Potty Training” suggest that this might be a funny post..

So if you are reading this post..  HELLO…  thanks for dropping by but this post is really about how to choose your title in order to get targeted clicks..

So why “Potty Training”?

Well I am going through that right now and my 2 year old loves Elmo..

If you like this post please share it..

If not please leave your comments below..

The idea here is to knock off those sites that link directly to CPA offers and/or networks. This overlay also affects sites with little to no content.

This should hardly be a surprise to any knowledgeable internet marketing consultant who has been in the business for quite sometime.

It is another measure for Google AdWords to make sure that the user experience is the number one factor for their Quality Score measures.

I am writing this during a break in a 3 Day Pay Per Click Training Workshops.

I will be starting a series on how to utilize the Google content network as a means of getting results. Watch for at soon

The class awaits,

Cheers,

“Keywords are the currency of the Internet.”

The most important part of Search Engine Marketing is choosing the correct keywords. The basis of our Pay Per Click Training workshops is to instill the following rules to keyword research.

1) Pick keywords and phrases with traffic.  This sounds easy enough, but did you know that roughly 90% of keywords get little to NO traffic. With all the F.R.E.E. tools available online, why do people still guess at choosing keywords? What keywords are you currently ranked for? are you getting what you want from those keywords?

2) Target Keywords that have the intention that you are looking for. Every user has some intention when they type in a particular phrase into any search engine.  Can you see the different in intent between “Jeans” and “Levis 301 Jeans”?  Microsoft Adlab has a terrific Commercial Intent Tool that can help you with that.

3) Target Keywords with Lower competition. Do your market research carefully and find the low hanging fruit within your industry and STOP fighting the battles you can’t win.

Now Go Revisit Your Keywords Today!