The Power of Giving – A “New” Way To Make a Fortune

I just finished reading a book called ‘The power of giving’. At least this is how it is called in Hebrew.
The book has a really great massage and part of it is “give more value then you charge for”.
Unfortunately this is not something product owners and marketers are concerned about when they try to sell their product. They are mostly concerned about how to make money, and fast.

I am guilty of the same sin. When I used to create landing pages and sites promoting a product, giving value was not my main issue. When looking back on the things I’ve done and the sites I created, I now realize that a big part of those projects is useless since it didn’t give any value to the clients (or users) and this is probably why I only got a few sales from each and never made a killing.

The funny thing is that this is not the case when I’m dealing with my PPC clients. In that area I feel that I always gave more value than what I charge for. So I need to ask myself why didn’t I do it when I created my own sites?

I think that I was so eager to follow those “super affiliates”, and make a 5 figures income each month, that I forgot that I really need to care about the clients and give value.

It’s weird, but I now understand why Google ban one of my accounts. I really didn’t give any value to the users. So after 2 months I can now say “Thank you Google for doing the right thing”. Lucky me that I still have active accounts so after I will spend some time creating a site that actually gives value I will still be able to advertise it on Google.

Do you understand the power of giving more value than what you charge for? This is how you can create a great deal for your clients, this is how you can sell your product easier, and this is how you can crush the competition.

I think that the best way to give value is the show your clients that you actually care. People all around the world are eager for someone the show them affection and that will care about them. If you manage to give that to your clients I have no doubt in my mind you will make a fortune, no matter what you sell.

I am definitely going to follow this motto and I wish more will do the same.

Funny clip about Google

While this clip is so funny there is also a sad part – it’s true.

Murdoch vs. Google

This is the first post that is not about PPC marketing. Don’t expect to see many of those now, but every now and then I will post something that is somehow irrelevant to PPC.

This one though is relevant to search in general.

You must have all heard that Rupert Murdoch is tired of how his newspapers are doing online and decided that Google is to blame and specifically Google news. You see, when users get the newspaper they want without actually reading the newspaper, the newspaper loses the number of visitors and thus the advertisers want to pay less.

So Murdoch wants his newspapers to be out of Google’s index. When he first said it, Google’s reply was somewhat similar to “I dare you..”, but I actually think it’s a really good idea. Let me tell you why:

Well, as you all know, search engines are making a hell of a lot of money by putting relevant ads next to relevant content based on a user search queries. It the current situation, a lot of businesses, including Murdoch newspapers are depending on Google and how Google is ranking them in order to get traffic and therefore money. Out of all the businesses involved here, Google of course is making the most money.

Now, what if Google had no content to show to the searching user? Would it still make money out of these search queries? I think that after a while, the users will just stop searching for those queries on Google, and as we established before, less users means less money.  So let’s say no one lets Google index their content, in this situation, Google depends on all other businesses to allow them to index their content and make money out of it. Seems to me that Google will need to pay some money in order to index this content. Getting the point?

So Murdoch is now in some kind of negotiation with Bing in order to allow just Bing to index the content. That gives Bing a huge advantage over Google since Murdoch newspapers have a lot of loyal readers that will just look for the content on Bing, or will get it directly through the non-existing (yet) Bing news. I think this is worth some of Microsoft’s money if they want to even things up with Google.

If such a thing will actually happen, I believe it could change our industry. Search engines will now have to give something back except for relevant ads.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that today, most businesses and websites depend on Google’s algorithm and mood (yes, mood) in order to make a living and many companies are doing everything they can in order to please Google. But as a matter of fact, Google needs their content in order to make a living. But Google is not pleasing anyone. Something is ought to change.

Google Ad Planner – part 1

Not enough has been said and written about the Google Ad Planner and I intend to change that.

I recently needed to use this tool for a certain client and I was pretty amazed. The last time I tried using it, it was when the tool was in closed beta, and let me tell you, since than the guys at Google did a hell of a work improving it.

For you guys not familiar with the tool, it is a tool designed for online media buying plans. This is gathering its information for all kinds of Google properties and partners including Google analytics.

The tool gives you the option to research a certain site and find traffic data such as unique visitors, reach, page views and total visits. Other cool insights you can get are gender, education, users’ age, and household income. As you can see, the data is shown in the same way as it is shown on Quancast.

Another way of using this tool is a research of websites that are commonly visited by a certain audience. You can set your target audience by many available setting options such as:

• Geographic (country, state and city).
• Language (choose from 20 languages)
• Demographic settings (gender, education, users’ age, etc..)
• Site visited – this option is amazing! You can actually search for sites that your own users are also surfing on. Also, it’s a great way to get the most targeted websites using this tool.
• Keywords searched – you can get websites that are visited by users who searched for a certain keyword. Let’s say I want to target PPC marketers, I can enter the keyword “AdWords tips” and get relevant sites that users who searched for “AdWords tips” actually visiting on a regular basis.

The last cool thing you will find in the audience settings is a “load audience” button that by a drop of a menu lets you choose pre-defined audiences like baseball fans or moms.

More filters that you can use are:

• Ranking method – The tool gives you no more than 250 websites in every research. The ranking method filter lets you choose what sites are more important for you to get, high traffic ones (Audience reach) or more targeted ones (Composition index). You also have the option of combining the two.
• Ad Items – very important if you are doing a research for a campaign in the content network. This filter gives you the option to get only sites in Google’s content network.
• Category – another very important filter that lets you get more relevant sites.
• Ad specs – gives you the option to get only sites with certain ads format or sizes (example: flash ads in 160×600).
• Domain suffix – I don’t think you want to use this option, but it lets you choose between (dot)com’s , (dot)org’s, etc..

This post is longer than I thought so I guess I would divide it into 2 parts. The next part of the post will hopefully be in the next few day and it will be about few examples of how you can really use this tool to your benefit as a PPC marketer.

If you have questions about this tool, post it and I will try to answer in my next post.

PPC is me – Opening post

Wow, my first blog post. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited. I’ve wanted to do it for about a 10 months but I hit some road bumps trying to do it. First I lacked the WordPress knowledge, than, even after I got help with that, the weirdest things happened with my blog (I was actually kicked out of my dashboard every time I wanted to change something).

Anyway, I wanted my first post to be about what kind of posts you will find here in the future. So as you can figure out from the name of this blog, it’s going to be about PPC. Now I won’t write posts about “what is quality score” or “why you should separate your search campaigns from your content network campaigns”, I will talk about the news, the advanced tips, and the essence of PPC, both for affiliates and PPC managers (guys doing PPC for other people).

There is a big difference between affiliate PPC and PPC for clients and most people don’t know it because most people are doing just one of these things (I’m not sure why). The biggest difference I think is funds. For PPC managers, many times there are the first 3 months, in which they can spend $10K each month, and still not prove ROI positive. I don’t know any affiliate who’s willing to do so. Because of this main difference, there are different approaches in terms of keywords match type, first/last click keywords (I will write a post on that soon I hope), and daily budget.

If you’ll keep reading my blog, and you’re an affiliate, you will find how great it is sometimes to run a PPC campaign for other people and companies. And if you are a PPC manager, I hope to show you the great things about doing PPC as an affiliate.
I will set my posts categories as either “affiliates PPC” or “PPC managers” so if you are interested in just one, you can find your related posts easily.

This post has been a bit “messy” but I promise to improve as I go.

If you want to read more about me, got to the “about me” page and follow me on twitter: twitter.com/erez_z