I started a direct link campaign the other day on the Google Content Network. The product is a higher priced Clickbank product, and is not internet marketing related.

I bid .01 for search since I didn’t feel like setting up the ad groups to be tight with relevant landing pages, etc. etc.

I bid about $0.22 for the content network and kept my daily campaign limit to $25.

I checked my CB account today and saw a nice ~$100 commission from 1 click from the content network.

I was pleasantly surprised. This just shows you that not all content traffic is bad. Advanced PPC marketers know this. You can get incredible traffic (in quality and amount) from content networks. If you try it, just make sure to keep your bids low at first and set a low daily budget and TRACK. See what sites convert for you and what sites don’t.

More on this later…

Vinnie

PS - I use Keyword Radar for all of my tracking.

Affiliate Elite Review - First there was SEO Elite. Then there was Keyword Elite. Now, the latest Elite edition is called Affiliate Elite. First, you should know that if it’s from Brad Callen, it’s probably going to be very good. Brad Callen is known for putting out some excellent pieces of software, so let’s take a look at Affiliate Elite.

On the surface, Affiliate Elite does look extremely powerful.

Here are some of what you can do with Affiliate Elite:

Find profitable affiliate products to promote…

Copy entire marketing strategies of top affiliates…

See what keywords are making them sales…

See the highest converting webpages for affiliates…

You’re probably wondering how Affiliate Elite does all this. Here’s some more details…

Project #1: Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote - Search Clickbank and PayDotCom like you never have before. The advanced features in Affiliate Elite make it easy to compare several different factors among several products at once. For example, you can see the gravity, how long the product has been in the database, or the percentage referred to the site. Of course you can do all these things without Affiliate Elite, but it becomes much easier and less time consuming when using Affiliate Elite.

Project #2: Reverse Google Search - Enter a site url and Affiliate Elite returns keywords that people are bidding on for that url and what position they are in. Other products that do this can run pretty high compared to Affiliate Elite’s cost. What value does this have? Imagine all the affiliates promoting a piece of software like SEO Elite. Think that a few hundred or a few thousand affiliates can come up with a pretty thorough keyword list? There’s a lot of power in groups and Affiliate Elite takes advantage of this.

Project #3: Analyze Adwords (and Yahoo) Competition: Take your keywords from Project #2 and see who is bidding on which keyword. And, you can use this over time to see how often certain competitors ran a particular ad for each keyword.

Project #4: Find Super Affiliates - Extremely powerful. Finding Super Affiliates is not only powerful because you can “copy” their strategies, but you can also leverage this knowledge when planning joint ventures or product launches. When you can easily find SuperAffiliates, you’ll be able to more easily do business with them in the future. Affiliate Elite finds Super Affiliates by seeing which affiliate id is promoting a certain product. In addition, you’ll see info like Alexa Rank, Google PR, Google/MSN/Yahoo backlinks, and Whois information for each site.

In addition to all the projects, Affiliate Elite offers ridiculously thorough video training and daily webinars.

Bottom line: Affiliate Elite isn’t the cheapest piece of software you’ll find. But considering Projects 1-4 and Brad’s reputation for keeping his products up-to-date and an active forum, the investment is well worth it as long as you actually use the software.

You’d be surprised how many affiliate marketers purchase an ebook or piece of software and let it collect digital dust on their hard drives. I’ve been guilty of it myself. Don’t let it happen to you! Get a copy of Affiliate Elite and use the hell out of it.

-Vinnie-

Article Marketer Review - One of the best ways to promote yourself and/or your website online is through article marketing. Article marketing allows you to get some of your content out on the web in a way that has tons of sites linking back to your site.

This strategy is suitable for all internet marketers, beginner or not.

I used to write an article and then hand submit them to a few sites, but it never made a huge impact. Then, I tried using a “free” article announcer tool that I got as a bonus with an ebook I bought. This software was a little buggy, and I never got great results from this either.

Recently, I decided to try Article Marketer. There are a few different packages that you can try ranging from Free to a Lifetime membership.

I actually decided to go with the 1 year membership for $199, which I believe is now $169 with a discount.

Once your article is uploaded and approved (within 1 business day), Article Marketer submits your article to over 4000 sites and over 67,000 people. It does this over the period of a year. This way, the search engines see you gaining backlinks over time, and not all at once. This ensures that your article marketing will be seen as a “white hat” strategy. Your site won’t be punished by the search engines.

The thing is now that I’ve used Article Marketer, I’ll never go back to the old way of doing things. It simply saves me too much time.

Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this Article Marketer Review and learned a little bit about the service. A few days ago, Article Marketer came out with an Instant Savings program that has some heavy discounts on quarterly, annual, and lifetime memberships. Plus, now they’re including custom written articles with the membership so there is no reason not to get started. At the very least, try out the free program.

Hilarious internet marketing video. Check it out below. Man! I need to get a copy of this!

Bob and Mike just released a 40 page V-book on the Tollgate method!

Tollgate Method V-book - check it out here

A few days ago, I was reading an email from a guy who is usually promoting an affiliate product of some sort.  This email was different though.  Just pure high quality content that is worthy of being a product itself.  If you’ve never heard of the “Tollgate” strategy of making money, then this is probably going to amaze you.

 Check out Bob Serling, Mike Long, and their Tollgate strategy here….

A few weeks ago I came across an awesome tool by Derek Beau. It does a lot of the same things as Speed PPC, but it is absolutely free. If you’re heavily into PPC marketing, you know that you need to automate as much as possible. This tool helps you create huge campaigns without spending a lot of time or money.

Definitely check it out … PPC Campaign Builder (link removed).

UPDATE:  Derek has removed the tool from his website.  There were some issues concerning copyrights and such.  So Derek’s PPC Campaign Builder is no longer available.

However, SpeedPPC is not only an excellent tool, it offers a interactive forum, video training, and access to the developer as well.  I use the Speed PPC campaign builder fairly regularly and if you want to create huge, targeted campaigns in Google, MSN, or Yahoo, you should definitely check it out.  It is well worth the investment if you use ppc to drive traffic to your site.

Have you ever been punkd by Google Adwords?

I have.

A few weeks ago, I started promoting Keyword Elite on Adwords. It started to go very well as I was getting pretty good conversions and getting a ROI of about 100%.

It’s a great feeling when you can wake up, go to your Clickbank account, and see on a regular basis that you made XXX amount of dollars yesterday and only spent xx.

One day last week, I logged into my Adwords account and see the dreaded “Alert” message. I had several of them.

I noticed I had alerts for several of my KE ads, but not all of them. I made some edits on some of the language I used (took out words like “killer” and “kicks butt”) because I thought they didn’t like the way that I was writing my ads. My ads came back online for a short time, but were disapproved again.

Eventually, my keywords for this ad group are disapproved (in red letters - scary!). However, I still have several other ad groups that are still running. For some reason, Google disapproved the following keywords

keyword elite
“keyword elite”
[keyword elite]

but they did not touch the ones like

keyword elite review (all match types)
keyword elite discount (all match types
etc.

I decided to contact them to see what was up.

Within 1 day, I got a reply.

Thank you for your email. I understand your concerns and frustrations
regarding the recent changes to our content policy. Only after careful
consideration did we decide to implement our Template Sites For Ad
Networks policy. This change was based on several factors, including user
and customer experience. We regularly review Google AdWords content
policies and make changes to keep them current and effective. Our goal is
to have policies that are fair, consistent, and adaptable.

In order to maintain this fairness for our advertisers and consistency for
our users, all Google AdWords ads must follow the Editorial Guidelines and
content policy.

Please note, we do allow advertising for sites and programs that offer
general AdSense optimization tips and advice, as well as sites that
promote web marketing strategy. AdWords/AdSense Search Engine Marketing
(SEM) service providers are acceptable.

Thank you for informing us of your concern, and we appreciate your
understanding.

I had violated their “new” Template Sites for Ad Networks Content policy. That’s a mouthful.
Basically, they don’t want anyone promoting any type of software that can be used to make spammy sites that are made solely for the purpose of making money from ads.

Isn’t that what 99% of websites are for - to make money from ads? I understand what they mean, but I don’t agree with the implementation of the rule.

The real problem is that Keyword Elite is an excellent keyword research tool. It has several powerful “projects” that can be used to help generate huge lists of keywords.

There is 1 option within KE that would allow a user to build a Template Site for Ad Networks type page, but that is not the focus of KE.

Since my keywords were effectively “banned,” I wanted to see if anyone else had experienced this.

I found that I was not alone.

On John Jonas’ blog, he explains how one of the folks he’s working with experienced a similar problem, except the result was much worse - he was BANNED from Google Adwords. A little harsh for a simple keyword “violation,” no?

It’s not like the guy was promoting something sordid or illegal.

At least I wasn’t banned. The only reason I wasn’t is most likely that I spend a decent amount per month. There must be a threshold but I’m not sure what it is. Probably like $500 or $1000. If you meet that minimum per month, maybe Google is less harsh in its Judge, Jury, and Executioner style.

What pisses me off even more is that if you go to Google and type in “keyword elite,” guess what you’ll see. Tons of ads! What the hell? I thought it was funny how in Google’s email reply to me they said how they want to be fair and consistent, blah blah blah… but if you look at their actions, they are neither fair nor consistent. Some people are banned while some have keywords disapproved while some are still allowed to run the EXACT SAME ADS!

Thanks Google - there goes an extra $500 - $1000 per month out the window.

btw, if you want to know how to get KE for $83.50, check this out…

http://keywordelite.goodtimesathome.com

Have you ever been punkd by Google Adwords in a similar way? Let me know here…

There aren’t too many people who can claim to have made $1,000,000 in 24 hours. One guy who has is releasing a new product, and it’s really quite an amazing piece of work. The guy is John Reese (Traffic Secrets) and the tool is BlogRush.

BlogRush is a free widget for blogs that helps drive traffic to your site. Embed the code into your pages and your posts are automatically promoted throughout the net on other peoples’ sites (related to the same topic as your site) who are also running BlogRush. This is a really cool idea and an awesome way to get new targeted visitors to your site.

Here’s the widget that will go on your blog when you install BlogRush.

Definitely check this out here…BlogRush.

If you have Keyword Elite, help me review it here.  Thanks! - Vinnie