My 2¢ Worth

o cyber gremlins exist? Now I'm not superstitious and I'm pretty skeptical of the supernatural. However, some strange things do happen out in cyber space.

or instance I have an associate who wanted me to take a look at her Web site and see if I could tell her why it looked different at 1024X 768 resolution. I could not access the site and told her I would look when the site came back up. She said the site was and had been up and that everybody else was able to access it. Funny thing is that it is only her site I have problems with, while nobody else does.

ome of you may recall when you subscribed to this E-zine that I was conducting a demographics survey. It was very nice and you could see the totals and percentages of those who had filled out the survey. One day, out of the clear blue, it just stopped working. I never did figure out why.

've had feedback forms stop working for no apparent reason — and then sudden start working again.

f you have any type of interactive pages on your site, check on them now and again to make sure they are still working. This could be a bulletin board or perhaps a guest book. It could be a feedback form or perhaps a calendar of events.

on't let the cyber gremlins catch you unaware!

Feature Article

Are You PPC (pay-per-click) Prejudiced?

by: Bonnie Kotch Trinity Internet Affiliate Marketing Training

I was reading an article one day that ironically I found while searching through Google for subject matter to write about. I wish I had bookmarked the page, but I didn’t. I do remember the content of the article:

Pay-Per-Click Fraud.

Now, being in and out of PPC advertising off and on as the mood strikes me, the title of the article hit me in the forehead like the snap of a strategically aimed wet towel. I believe I still sport the welt.

The article led you to believe that PPC was not only fraught with fraud, but the fraud was growing at an alarming rate with no controls to keep it in check! I read about instances of Competitors for keywords setting up "farms" of clickers to run out the PPC budgets of smaller businesses, ad copying, hackers using "click bots", and link spamming. The two giants (Google and Yahoo), who also offer a way for people to earn by placing those same PPC ads on their sites to get paid for each click and cheating abounds! There is no way to stop it or track it! Well, there are ways to track it, but little is being done to stop it. And it will only get worse before it gets better.

The article definitely gave the impression that pay-per-click search engines not only had no effective way to stop click-fraud, but had no INCENTIVE to stop it. It’s money in the bank for them and unless you as the advertiser, are vigilant in closely monitoring and analyzing your traffic (looking for too many clicks from the same domain, for example), you are high and dry with as much as 35%-50% of your traffic possibly being fraudulent! I don’t have time to baby-sit their business, do you?

After reading this article, I went searching for others (after pulling my PPC campaigns) and found the same consensus . . . PPC providers, especially the big guys, really did not, and will not care unless they start losing MANY advertising dollars. One site even estimated as much as $1 billion in click fraud across all search providers combined! Bill Gates could probably afford to lose that much but Google and Yahoo won’t refund that to advertiser/victims.

It was also popular belief that PPC fraud-eliminating technology (if the search engines had any incentive to research it) is way behind the brilliant, bored and malevolent hackers and their motivation to "stick it" to the "man".

Will Pay-Per-Click die in the throes of key word competition and click bots? Not anytime soon. I can tell you that I, as an advertiser, just can’t wrap my mind around the need to use a marketing method that is that rife with fraud. That’s MY money! There ARE better and more effective ways to make it work for me. PPC is not the only means to accomplish the desired end!

Do not despair. Although the popular and quickly visual advertising method that it is, there is still the good old fashioned site submission. You remember! The FREE ones! Google still takes free listings and many of the popular directories still take free listings and guess what? If you bone-up on keyword phrases and place them strategically on your web site, get some good back links with other web sites with similar keyword concentration, you can STILL get on the first page of the search results! It takes time and there is an art to it, but given some patience, you can benefit two ways . . . Traffic from those sites, and link popularity ranking in the search engines.

I’ve also noticed a few interesting alternatives popping up on the internet that should make some smaller businesses very happy. Let’s take a look at some of those:

1. Articles, if you write them, can still bring in traffic. I watched a brand new site of mine practically dominate 8 pages of Google search results for my chosen keywords within days. And every one of those articles had a link to my web site in my byline.

2. Affiliating your site. Do you sell a product or a service? Set yourself up as an affiliate manager. There are many sources out there to get affiliate manager software, or set it up through an affiliate network like CJ.com or Commission Source. Have hundreds or thousands of other people with a link on your site and pay only per sale or per lead. You will have much better ROI and it’s faster than writing web site owners asking them to exchange links to build up link popularity.

3. CPA advertising - There are tons of list owners, e-zine owners, newsletters, membership websites and the like that offer CPA (cost-per-action). Some of the most profitable campaigns I’ve ever run were through a list owner. Pay a deposit to get the campaign started, then a percentage of each sale.

4. Ad Swapping - Many think this is limited to e-zine advertising . . . it is not. It’s along the same lines as link exchanging. Dating sites and Horoscope sites do it all the time. Endorsement swapping is another way. Find a complimenting web site or business and agree to endorse each other. No money spent, and a lot of possible profit!

5. Something I’d like to see more of, like Snap.com’s approach. They have pay-per-click, but they have also implemented a CPA alternative to search engine advertising that currently does not cost you anything to start your campaign. You are charged only when you have a sale or a lead and they don’t bill you until you reach your first $100 dollars in campaign cost. In the next month or so they will probably require a deposit, but . . . CPA search advertising! Worth it with no possibility of click-fraud!

6. Press Releases are a lot more cost effective than PPC advertising. It could also help you with link popularity.

7. RSS Feed is currently free to submit to most search engines and web sites picking it up will help you in search engine ranking.

8. Leads - Many of the big marketers buy leads and import them into auto responders. I personally don’t like the spam ramifications of doing this, but many lead promoters now offer to send them to a landing page, where the interested parties opt themselves in. Many top earners I know ONLY market this way.

I can remember as little as six years ago, PPC search engine advertising was just getting started. In six short years it has grown into a revenue monster for the search engines. There are currently over 500 of these "pay-per-click" search engines and amazingly, except for the top tier search engines, most of them have very little of their own traffic.

I have also talked to people who LOVE PPC search advertising and swear by it. However, if more noise is not made about PPC fraud, less is going to be done about it. It is your advertising dollars at stake. It is getting harder and harder to get good key word ranking and it is getting more costly. The millions they generate from it should be invested in better security. As it stands now, they will not even admit there is a sizable problem. Just my opinion, but I’d rather go with an advertising source that has better regard for it’s customers money. Until they do, consider me PPC prejudiced.

**************

Bonnie is an internet marketing consultant and affiliate marketer as well as newsletter publisher and author. Access her free newsletter at www.trinityonlinemarketingschool.com/newsletter.htm
and www.trinityonlinemarketingschool.com

JavaScript Drop Down Menu

This is a simple drop down menu that will automatically advance to the selected page without a submit button. Place this script on the page where you'd like your menu to appear. You can add as many links as you like.

Customize the fields in red to reflect your menu's links.

For more links, just continue adding the <option value=" as shown.

Keep in mind that this will not work for those who have JavaScript turned off in their browsers.

<script language="JavaScript"> function AutoLink() { var number = document.Menu.Links.selectedIndex; location.href = document.Menu.Links.options[number].value; } </script> <form name="Menu"> <select name="Links" onChange="AutoLink(this.form)" > <option selected>Choose a Link <option value="first-page.html"> Page One <option value="second-page.html"> Page Two <option value="http://www.somewhere-else.com/"> Page Three </select> </form>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which gives you this:

Choose a Link Page One Page Two Page Three

* Get these syndicated tip feeds for yourweb site, free. *

Second Article

Top 7 Tips for Internet Business Success

by: Patricia R. Moynihan DealonBracelets.com

You've put your business on the web and now you're ready for the millions of orders you know will flood in! well, I hate to burst your bubble but it doesn't quite work like that. Like any business, your online business requires your time, energy and persistence. The good news is that the skills you need are easy to learn and a pleasure to implement. Here are 7 tips that work for all skill levels:

1. Check your site. You MUST list every possible contact method. Your visitors MUST be able to reach you. I find that listing all my phone numbers, fax numbers, e mail addresses and a page entitled About Us is essential. In your About Us page, put up your head shot. This personalizes your web site.
2. Promotion, promotion, promotion. You must spend at least two hours every day promoting your business. The best time to do this is first thing every morning. If you have the funds to advertise, then use PPC's (Pay Per Clicks). I'm not going to advertise their names. Just put PPC in your locator bar and decide which ones suit you best. If you have no advertising funds, then use the free ad sites and the Free For All sites. Same routine: put FFA in your locator bar and jump through the necessary hoops.
3. Now, when you've done all the preliminary advertising work, you need to reach your niche market. This is more complicated. If you sell say, parchment book marks, put "parchment book marks" in your locator bar. Visit every site that comes up and contact the users of that site by all permitted means. These are as diverse as message boards, blogs and articles explaining your product.
4. Deal with e mail ONLY in the evening. "But why?" you ask. "I love reading and answering my e mails." Right! That's the problem. E mail is time consuming. You must devote early morning time and energy to your promotion. You can read and answer e mail after business hours when your energy level is low you can take as long as you want, without impinging on your other business duties.
5. Get new business cards. You need to print not just your name and business address but your web address, your email address and your logo or slogan, if you have one.
6. Link with other sites complementary to your business. This is easy. Just bring up the site and write a note to their contact person suggesting a mutual link. You'll find that they will be delighted. Link popularity is very important for search engine optimization.
7. SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Many pundits consider this to be the most important strategy for boosting your internet business. Make sure your key words are absolutely relevant to your site and your product. Manually submit your site to as many search engines and directories as possible. Do NOT buy an automatic submission package. The search engine spiders ignore all automatic submissions. This manual submission procedure can, all by itself, take the whole two hours you allocate each morning but it's essential to the health of your site.

**************

Patricia R. Moynihan is the Irish lawyer who founded Dealon Bracelets in 1976. She is a noted speaker on alternative health care and internet marketing. You can reach her at her web site www.dealonbracelets.com

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