Ads on Google and Yahoo

Archive for March, 2006

Ads on Google and Yahoo

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Over the years, I’ve experimented quite a lot with on-line text ads. I’ve discovered that making a successful ad isn’t as easy as it might seem at first.

It has cost me a lot of money making mistakes along the way. If you’ll send me $100 cash, I’ll share my secrets . . . . .JUST KIDDING.

Let me say this before I continue: While I believe what I share with you is generally sound, there may be exceptions that would fit outside the box I’m about to draw.

Every website, whether purely for fun or for business, has a desired response for the person viewing the pages. The response that is desired must be the ultimate guide you use to gain the kind of traffic you need.

First, some of the mistakes to avoid when running on-line ads.

Don’t think that more traffic is equal to more desired response.

Why do you want more traffic? Each person is one more chance for the desired response, Right?

Thinking it is purely a numbers game can be very costly. To be true, you will get more desired response with ten times the traffic, but it will cost you ten times the money to get ten times the traffic. Your net gain with more traffic is NULL. Your averages will remain the same.

Here’s a rule of thumb about running ads for high quantity traffic. The more generic the search, the more generic the visitor.

Don’t think bidding higher will bring better customers.

Bidding higher does one thing besides cost you more for the same keywords. It puts you higher in the search listings. Being higher in the listings means you will get more traffic that is costing you more for each visitor.

Ok, it cost more per visit and gets more of the exact same traffic you’re getting. That’s fine if you like the kind of traffic you are getting. For now just notice that you are getting a certain kind of traffic based on your ad. With a higher bid, you are getting more of the same kind of traffic and costing more.

We’ll discuss when you would want to be higher or lower in the listing later.

Don’t think high traffic keywords are always best.

Really high traffic keywords usually have two things making them such high traffic. Either they are extremely generic, meaning they have high traffic because they capture an entire category under them–like the term ‘work.’ Or, they are extremely desirable, meaning they capture the heart of a category that is desired by everyone–like the term ‘money.’

Either of these terms will bring a ton of traffic with a high cost. We will discuss when this can be good. For beginners, just understand this usually isn’t what you want.

Ok, I haven’t said anything truly helpful yet. Let’s start by pulling two major things from what I have said.

First, the kind of traffic your ad generates is critical to it’s success.
Second, your ad simply must generate more income than it costs–period.

Allow me to show you the logic to making good ads. To help understand, let me ask you what kind of traffic you are right now? Yes. You–reading this right now? Didn’t consider yourself traffic right now?

Well, what do I know about you at this point?

I know you clicked a link that has to do with running ads on Google.
I know you may read a news feed, a blog site, or were searching specifically for help running ads.
I know you really want to know about this, since you’re still reading.
I know it didn’t cost me a penny to get you here.

From this I can guess some things about you. You have a website, an opportunity, or a product or brand to promote. If not, you are considering it, or have done so in the past. If this isn’t true, you are a very curious person wasting time on the internet. Or, you’re an information hound soaking up anything you can find anywhere you can find it.

So, what should my website do to get the desired response from you?

That’s right. Every website has a desired response. Remember?

So, the very first thing you must do to create a successful ad is define the response you need in the first place.

Since knowing how you got here tells me things about you, controlling how you got here even more will tell me even more about you. I can know exactly who you are if I control how you got here completely.

How?

Let’s say you were selling JoJo Car Insurance from your website.

1) Define the desired response.

buy car insurance

2) Define the visitor who would perform this response.

one who wants car insurance
one who will pay on-line

Which search do you think will generate more traffic for this:

insurance?
free?

Yes, ‘free’ will generate tons more traffic. Will they respond as you want? No.

What about insurance?

Here is where I want to introduce you to some key elements for creating successful ads.

Google will drop your ad if it shows thousands of times without a click. They will require you to change it. So, this forces you to make an ad with text that people will click. However, you want to make an ad that only responsive visitors will click.

Which keyword do you think will cost more?

insurance?
buy insurance?

‘Buy insurance’ will cost more. Why? Because advertisers will bid more. Why? Because someone who types ‘buy insurance’ in a search is obviously looking to buy insurance. This is exactly the kind of visitor you want.

So, here’s where the balancing act and artistry of ad creation begins. What if you bid the lower price for insurance, but put the following ad text:

Buy JoJo Insurance
Car Insurance OnLine
Secure Payment
jojoinsurance.com

Take a look at what this does. You bid the lower, more generic keyword. So, your ad text is designed to keep anyone from clicking who wants another brand, something for free, or other payment options other than on-line.

Here’s the whole of this in a nutshell.

The more generic the keyword, the more restricting you want your ad. The balance comes in keeping it clickable enough to keep Google showing it, but restrictive enough to scare away costly clicks that don’t generate income.

Ok, which search would you pay more for a click:

‘buy insurance’?
‘jojo insurance’?

That’s right, if a search defines you exactly, this person knows who you are. They are the absolute best kind of visitor.

Now, for a second major principle. How well does your website sell? The better your site is at closing a deal, the more of the generic traffic you can afford. This adds a slightly different color to the whole thing. This can change everything about how you run ads.

If you have multiple products, or proven visitor freebies that end up causing business, you can afford really generic, extreme traffic keywords.

How much do you make on a sale? You can have a successful campaign that would typically cost a hundred bucks or more to generate a sale if the commission is huge.

OK, back to being higher or lower in the listing. I know I said higher bids are just paying more for the same kind of traffic. Allow me to refine that with some examples of when you would want to be higher.

I already mentioned when someone searches for you specifically, you want to be there.

Now, consider that you are selling as an affiliate for commission. Most affiliate sites will use cookies to track a visitor. They may typically place a cookie that lasts a month on a visitors machine to give credit to the advertiser should the visitor return. This can cause you to do a lot of experimenting with your ads based on the following question: Does the first advertiser get the credit or does the last advertiser get the credit?

This can be a cost problem. It usually ends in a bidding war between a couple of big dogs in the program. If you can find a happy middle for this, you can offset it with the final concepts I’ll give you here.

There’s a lot more I need to say about this. Let me share this one last thing for this article.

More and more advertisers are getting wise to this, so it isn’t as good as it once was, but you can offset you traffic and generate some extremely directed traffic by looking for misspellings and higher definition keywords.

Like what?

In our insurance example:

by insurance
by iinsurance
buy iinsurance
buy insuranse
buy insurense
by insurense
buy inshurence
buy isurance
jo jo insurence
jojo car insurence

And on and on and on

And some higher definition keywords:

buy insurance online in texas
buy insurance ca
buy car insurance online in ca

The key to these is literally entering hundreds of them. They can be very cheap per click. They won’t generate much traffic on any one of them, but hundreds of them can generate a lot of quality traffic.

You can look at it two ways. Both are good. Smart people can enter typos too. Or, an idiots money spends just as well. Either way, the misspellings are all good.

And you might be surprised how many people [like me] enter very restrictive highly defined searches in a google or yahoo search box. I do it because I want exactly what I am searching for to be all I see. So, that kind of searcher is likely a very serious searcher.

I hope this gives you ideas about how to make better ads that generate more income for you. There is a great deal more I could share. This article is already too long.

Regards.

Posted in Advertising, Ads, internet | No Comments »

Negative Calories

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Have you ever gone on a diet? It wasn’t something I had to worry about when I was younger. It seems the older I get, the more my body metabolism shuts down. And I do mean shuts down.

I used to take my wife to Red Lobster and get the Admirals Feast, just for me. Now, we have trouble splitting it without getting too full. It saves money for sure, but sometimes I long for those days when I could chow down and still be a lean, mean machine.

Alas, those days are gone forever.

We’ve tried several diets over the years. A couple of them worked really well, but one was a pain, and the other one, I hated.

One was a three day diet. It even let you have ice cream. I hated it. By the third day, I was starving! One of the days, lunch was one measly boiled egg and a single saltine cracker. Yes, the diet worked. But it was like starving to death.

The other diet that worked was a life style change. Basically you ate as much as you wanted, but no starches or sugars of any kind. It made the body start using fat for its energy source. I must say it worked well. I was never hungry. In fact, I was supposed to eat as much bacon and eggs as I could stomach for breakfast.

The problem with that diet was that it just wore on me after a while. Never a potato. Never a piece of bread. No rice. Not even any fruit!! Remember, no sugars of any kind.

So, the wife and I aren’t fat by any means. But, neither are we the trimmer selves we once were either. Say what you want about getting caught up in the picture of perfection painted by the media. Like it or not, we live in this world with these influences. So, yes, we would like to be thinner.

Many or most of you might already know this. I’m not one that has been into the diet scene enough to have really researched it. This evening, I was looking for ads to run on my website. In the click-ads there was this one that sold recipes and a full list of dishes that used negative calorie foods. It’s here if you want to see it–Click Here.

Well, I started digging around on the web to see if the list of foods was there for the grabbing. I found several small lists. And my master list kept growing.

Below is the list of negative calorie foods I compiled from several lists. There may be others, and there may be ways to prepare these that would ruin their negative calorie effect. I’m just giving you what I found. If you want recipes and all the extra little info then you may want to get the book from the site I found here.

I had no idea there were so many fruits and vegetable that would be negative calorie. By the way, they aren’t negative calorie because they have no calories. They are negative calorie because the body has to burn more calories than they have to digest them. I had never thought of that.

Use the list below with the BMI calculator on my complete weight loss program page.

I think they should list the calories of a food by its ‘effective’ calories. That would just make it all more clear.

Vegetables	Fruits	Meats
Artichokes Asparagus Green beans String beans Beets Beet greens Broccoli Brussels sprouts Cabbage Chinese cabbage Carrots Cauliflower Celeriac Celery Chervil Chicory Chives Squash Tomato fresh canned Corn cob canned Cucumbers Dandelion greens Dill pickles Eggplant Endive Garlic Kale Kohlrabi Leeks Lettuce Mushrooms Mustard greens Okra Onions Parsley leaves Turnips Watercress Parsnips raw boiled Peas Peppers green red Pickles sour sweet Pumpkin Radishes Rappini Red cabbage Rhubarb Rutabagas Sauerkraut Salsify Scallions Shallots Sorrel Spinach	Apples Apricots Blackberries Blueberries Cantaloupe Cherries Cranberries Currants Damson plum Figs Fruit salad Grapefruit Grapes Honeydew melon Huckleberries Kiwi Kumquats Lemons Limes Loganberries Mangoes Muskmelons Nectarines Oranges Papaya Peaches Pears Pineapple Pomegranates Prunes Quince Raspberries Strawberries Tangerines Watermelon	Abalone Bass Buffalo fish Catfish Clams cooked Cod Steaks Crab Crayfish Flounder Frog legs Lean Beef Lean Pork Lobster Mussels Oysters half shell Shrimp Skinless Chicken Terrapin Trout Tuna

Wow! That’s quite a list. I was really surprised by some of these too. I never dreamed figs, strawberries, watermelon, or pineapple would require more calories to digest than they supplied. That’s rather incredible.

I believe I can live with a list like this. Well, here’s to thinner living.

Regards.

Posted in Self, Diet | 1 Comment »

Geologists are Stupid

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

First off, no geologists were harmed in the making of this article. I, however am in danger of becoming petrified in a mud slide.

There are basically two popular theories about the formation of the Grand Canyon. For this discussion, we’ll leave it that one theory is around 35 million years and the other around 20 million years for the formation.

Both theories include all the forces on the earth. The major force is the pressure of the water carving its way through the solid stone. For this discussion we’ll use the shorter time. Simplified, that water has been carving the Grand Canyon for 20 million years.

Around 20 million years ago the Colorado River carves into the Grand Canyon at its eastern end, Marble Canyon, and likely exiting through Kanab Canyon. 17 million years ago the Colorado Plateau uplifts causing deeper cutting.

Now, as a river cuts through the earth it reveals the layers of sediment from different periods in the earth’s history.

20 million years ago, the surface of the earth that was at the very top of the earth is the layer that is currently covered by 20 million years worth of new sediment. In other words, it is 20 million years down from the top of the earth’s surface today.

When the river started cutting it was at this 20 million year layer because the layers above that didn’t exist.

Well, the river cut deeper and deeper as the years progressed, while the new sediment over the last 20 million years was added above where the river first started cutting.

My question: How did sediment above the 20 million year mark get cut by water if the river was already below that point well before the new sediment even existed?

I’m not talking about wind and weather erosion. I’m talking about water cut sediment.

What am I saying? I’m saying that the newest level that was obviously cut by water will date when the water was there cutting it.

If you have a 1 million year old level that was cut by the Colorado, then the river was at that level to cut it after it had formed. Since that level didn’t exist until 1 million years ago, then the river couldn’t have cut below that point before it existed. Otherwise it wouldn’t be water cut. It would only have erosion.

I think we have to realize that the newest level that is obviously water cut will date when the river started cutting. It had to be there to be cut by the river. If the river started cutting 20 million years ago, and if we account for higher water levels in flooding, then nothing above 17 to 18 million years old could have been water cut. The river was well below that point before it would have existed. In Fact, it has cut fast enough to be at levels that are 1.7 billion years old today. So, if it started at a level 20 million years old, thats a total of 1.68 billion years of cutting in 20 million years.

The Colorado has been cutting through 84 million years of sediment every 1 million years. So, starting at a level 20 million years old, after only 1 million years, it would have been cutting at the 104 million year old level.

So, 19 million years ago the river would have been at the 104 million year old levels of the earths sediment. Do we have water cut levels above 19 million years old?

Anyone with any common sense whatsoever has to realize the river couldn’t have cut what didn’t exist.

Better get a new theory.

Regards.

Posted in Stupid Series | No Comments »

Psychologists are Stupid.

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

Have you ever heard any of the following statements?

Spanking a child is cruel.
Spanking promotes violence.
It sets an example of violence when one is angry.
It promotes a poor self image.
It creates an atmosphere of fear.

I’m sure most of you have heard this from an expert.

Well, a baby, at the moment it pops its head out, is more intelligent than a dog will ever be.

How do you potty train a dog? That’s right, you rub its nose near its mess and give it a light whack. And, just an average dog will understand this in a very short period. When combined with reward for desired responses, dogs are very quick to learn.

Ruining a child is a horrible thing. There is nothing worse than a spoiled brat.

Training should follow the level of the child’s understanding. When they are young, they are almost completely animal like. All they understand at a young age is stimulus and response. As they grow older, reward and punishment should change with response.

By the time our daughter was an early teenager, spankings never needed to happen any more. In fact, nothing broke her heart more than to feel she hurt her mother or me.

This kind of response was fashioned by creating boundaries in her life very early. Even when she was just weeks old, she could already distinguish a positive vocal sound from a negative vocal sound. That, combined with a very light tap that grew harder as she grew older, is what developed a healthy sense of direction and obedience.

When is a child forming who they will be? When do they encapsulate the personality of who they are? Simply stated, it is anytime they are learning. So, when are they taking in and learning the most? When are they laying the foundation for the person they will become? From the first day of their lives a child is being formed.

The early years are the most critical for healthy development. And the early years are exactly when experts and psychologists say children understand the least, and won’t understand punishment as intended. Well, psychologists are stupid. Where were they in Psych 101 when Pavlov’s dogs were being taught to salivate at the sound of a bell? Baby’s are much smarter than dogs from day one. Stimulus is ALL they understand. And the quickest, most easy to understand stimulus is something that isn’t comfortable. They’ll sure let you know it when they’re hungry.

Understand, I’m not advocating cruelty of any kind. Punishment and reward will need to be different for each child. They are extremely different little rascals. Never abuse a child. Marks that linger for more than a moment are touching on abuse that can last for a lifetime. That said, a strong willed child can really make appropriate punishment difficult to achieve.

For the strong willed child, I recommend combining punishments. A brisk spanking with being deprived of some favorite thing for a period of time along with a discussion about the whole matter can be magical.

Now, lets never forget reward and praise. These are critical elements for the child’s self esteem. All negative with no positive will make the stupid psychologists closer to being right.

Now we can’t have that. No.

Regards.

Posted in Stupid Series | No Comments »