As some PPC marketers are aware, the primary ingredient in finding profitable campaigns is to test, test, test. But testing can be quite expensive and quickly leave you feeling discouraged when your campaigns don’t work as planned. That’s why a smarter way to test is using OPM (other people’s money).

Testing PPC campaigns using Google Adwords may not be the best route to take for a number of reasons. For one, the clicks are much more expensive than that of Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter. The competition is also much more fierce, so obtaining premium ad positions can be tricky and/or costly.

Also, Google will only allow its users to have one Adwords account, meaning that redeeming new coupon codes again and again for Adwords isn’t a possibility. (In actuality, multiple Adwords accounts are possible, but not recommended in the case that Google finds out and deletes ALL your accounts, not a good thing. Read More

It is often said that content is king online, and when it comes to getting love from the Big G using Adwords, having quality content on your landing pages is no exception. But often times, the laziness often attributed with being a PPC affiliate gets the best of us, making building quality landing pages a royal pain in the ass.

Basically, the secret to a good quality score with Adwords follows many of the same best practices normally performed when optimizing a website for SEO. Using proper titles, descriptions, h1, h2, h3 tags, having a privacy policy, contact page, about page, and a disclaimer are just a few of the on page factors that can determine how Google evaluates your quality score.

But in terms of relevant content, there are a few shortcuts we can use when adding quality to our landing pages, or at least simulate the “appearance of quality” as far as the Google spiders are concerned. Warning: Now entering Blackhat PPC territory. Read More

As PPC affiliates, we spend countless hours researching our market, collecting keywords, building landing pages, and writing ads. After endless splits tests and tweaks, we finally find that grand slam “campaign” that seemingly deposits money into our bank, hand over fist. Month after month, the campaign is running strong, until one day for no apparent reason, the money dries up. What happened?

A number of things “could’ve” happened, but there is no time for speculation. There are “intelligence gathering” spiders out there, crawling and collecting all of our hard work into a centralized repository, for other affiliates to simply shortcut their way to your hard earned riches. Can anything be done to stop them? Read More

Day 2: Continued from Day 1

Day 3: (Below)

Day 2 kicked off to a late start for me. I didn’t roll in from the partying the night before until about 5:30 AM, so waking up at 8 or 9 was far from my mind. Finally at about 12PM I began to stir, and about 1 or so, was back at the Seaport Convention Center to visit the booths and meet some more people.

The area where the booths were set up was much more spacious, making walking around and talking to new people much easier than at the Meet Market. Before I arrived in Boston, I had a nicely sized list of booths and people who I wanted to meet, but of course forgot to print it out and bring it along. I still managed to do ok, visiting just about (if not all) the booths I had planned.

Some of the highlights: Read More