Many of you have experienced difficulties with your websites’ quality ratings being downgraded by Google, or your AdWords account being shut down or suspended recently, in what has come to be known as the Google Slap. We have been approached by a number of affiliates asking for further information on what may have caused this and what can be done to have their sites’
quality ratings restored or
their AdWords accounts re-activated. Therefore, we are providing below the information provided by Google, in the hope that this will be helpful to you.

1. Duplicate Mini-sites
The issue is often that affiliates create sites for the purpose of circumventing Google’s affiliate link policy. This policy states: “We’ll only display one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL. This means that if you’re an affiliate advertiser, your ad may not show for a query because another affiliate or the website that runs the affiliate program also has ads using the same (or a similar) domain in the display URL.”
(http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=14844)
When one site is essentially the same site as another, while the product is fine, promoting it with different domains is against the rules. It violates the requirement that a site’s content be unique.

2. Use of trademarked terms in the Ad text:
AdWords ads will not show if they’re using a trademarked term (e.g.
Photoshop) in the ad text and
the landing page does not provide a reasonable amount of information about this product. Please make sure that the landing page provide enough information about the trade-marked term, so that it is not a ruse to attract visitors to the page but offers valuable information.

3. Squeeze Pages to obtain visitor names and email addresses:
Landing pages that act as squeeze pages to obtain visitors’ names and email addresses are often rated poorly on landing page quality. This is usually because the landing page is a data harvesting site that only contains a form. A site of this nature could most likely be advertised successfully if the user was taken to the page that describes the product and lets them buy it. Asking the users to provide a name and email before they can learn more about the product is not considered a good user experience and will be discouraged. If users are being asked for their name and email, then there should be some value that is provided to the user.

4. Thin reviews:
Review sites that contain short one paragraph reviews of products are considered thin reviews by Google and are not rated highly. If the review is a short abstract, and a link is provided to a more detailed version of the same review, then that review is considered by Google to be more valuable to the user and is therefore rated more highly. Google values reviews where the basis for arriving at the recommendation or the rating of the product is disclosed in the review, as it delivers a better user experience.

In general Google suggests the following practices to ensure a high rating on their search results:

- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.
- Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
- When in doubt consult Google’s webmaster guidelines for more general information.

I hope this information was useful to you. Make it a prosper year in 2010.

Cheers!

Andy Huang

Hello from Las Vegas Hilton Convention Center where I spent 3 days at PPC Classroom Live 3.

Hats off to Anik Singal as not only a good friend, but someone who really ecellerated my career in Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing.

I remember the first PPC Classroom Live in Las Vegas, where I made a comittment to come learn from Anik & the rest of the speakers. It only seems like it was yesterday. These guys definiately have come a long way to bring more than 18,000 people into the training, 500 people at this event to network and share their success stories.

The first day begun where the brought up the coaches on stage. At PPC Classroom Live 2, Anik had asked me to come on board and help train the students as a VIP Coach.

Amit Metha, David Ford, Stephanie Houstan, Vikas Bhatia, Andy Huang, Adrienne Devita

After working with the student for over 6 months, it is a great honor to finally meet some of them in person. So we started the 1st day by introducing the VIP coaches on stage so students can come to us during the event to help answer any questions they might have.

What I really enjoy is to really spend some face time with students to help review their current strategies as well as share what tactics I applied for my own business.

It was great to be part of the panel to help answer questions in the VIP session. I actually had caught a flu last week in Texas. I was glad I was able to make it through the event that day.

Day 2 was great when I was up on stage presenting with my business partner Simon Leung. We went into more detail in terms of the strategies we deploy as an agency as well as training materials we used to train our team in China.

Sharing our actual results of a success campaign. $1.2 Million in gross sales revenue with less than $9,000 adspent.

It was a great to be able to spent sometimes not only with the students, but the support staff of Lurn who are behind PPC Classroom that is teaching the 10s of 1000s of entrepreneurs worldwide.

David & Andy Huang

Andy Huang & Mark Roth my mentor of CPA network ( Offervalut.com)

We had a surpised guest from Beverly Hills to see Simon & I. Blake Mallen, CMO and Co-founder of ViSalus.

Blake Mallen, Andy Huang and Carol Yang

After the 3 Days of intensive work Anik treated all the coaches and staff to a nice steak dinner at TJ Steak house inside of Las Vegas Hilton

Andy Huang, Anik Singal, Carol Yang

David DiNucci & Andy Huang

Of course, with every success event, there is the after party. We were invited by Blake Mallen to join his crew at the Wynn hotel.

Inside shot of Tryst at Wynn Hotel

Carol Yang, Andy Huang, David

Look forward to the next PPC Classroom Live 4, and hope to see you there.

To your continual success!

Andy Huag

A important news you need to know how this deal will effect your advertising effort moving forward with the 2 biggest Giants of Internet.

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

Yahoo Inc. agreed Thursday to a search-advertising deal with rival Google Inc. just hours after announcing that Microsoft Corp. was no longer in the picture.

Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), based in Sunnyvale, said the nonexclusive pact with Mountain View-based Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) enables it to run Google ads alongside its search results and on some of its Web properties in the U.S. and Canada.

“We believe that the convergence of search and display is the next major development in the evolution of the rapidly changing online advertising industry,” Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang said in a statement. “Our strategies are specifically designed to capitalize on this convergence — and this agreement helps us move them forward in a significant way.”

Yahoo leaders said they hope the deal could generate as much as $800 million a year.

Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo will select the search term queries for which — and the pages on which — Yahoo may offer Google paid search results. Yahoo will define its users’ experience and will determine the number and placement of the results provided by Google and the mix of paid results provided by Panama, Google or other providers. The agreement applies to paid search and content match and does not apply to algorithmic search and also applies to current partners in Yahoo’s publisher network.

Analysts say in essence the Yahoo will be a reseller of Google ads.

Yahoos shares plunged after the announcement that Redmond,Wash.-based Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) walked away from an offer to buy a portion of Yahoo. They dropped 10 percent, or $2.63, to $23.52 by Thursday’s closing bell and declined as much as 7 percent more in Friday trading.

Start building position now as shares of Yahoo are now backdown to before their January earning announcement.

Andy Huang

If you would observe the company that delivers the daily paper to your doorstep for a business case study, you will come to learn that the newspaper publisher hires reporters, writers and other important staff to create the contents and deliver the papers to their readers.

In addition to the above mention, the publisher has to invest regularly in heavy duty machineries and tons of papers in printing tons of newspapers on a daily basis.

And in order to ensure that the newspapers are delivered on time, the publisher appoints agents at every part of the covered territory.

So, how does the newspaper company make money? It is obvious that selling a copy of the papers at less than a dollar would not even be able to even fund the operations.

The answer? Selling advertising spaces! You have definitely seen lots of advertisements in the newspaper. The publisher simply sells advertising space in the papers to advertisers who want to leverage their advertising efforts on the paper’s high readership.

On the same analogy, you can make money the exact way from your newsletter: simply by selling advertising space to prospective advertisers!

If your mailing list size exceeds 1,000 (5,000 is recommended) subscribers and beyond, you can start selling advertising space for say, $10.00 per sponsor ad.

In this manner, you turn every issue you send out to your subscribers into a profit-pulling device. And since there is virtually no end to the stream of advertisers as products, services and businesses are cropping every single day in every industry imaginable, so are your money making opportunities.

To your success!

Andy Huang

PPC search engine advertising is by far the most affordable form of advertising available. PPC search engine advertising is a flourishing business that by 2008 is expected to reach $ 8 billion. PPC search engine advertising is about producing leads. Creating leads will help potential buyers find the specific website that will provide them with the product or service they need.

However, PPC search engine advertising does not end there. It is important to understand that although PPC search engine advertising generates leads, it is also important for users to find relevant information at the website they are directed to. Information is a valuable asset in PPC search engine advertising that is often left unchecked by many websites. Keep in mind that users are more likely to purchase products or services from a company that provided them with the necessary information they needed in the first place.

Qualified traffic with PPC search engine advertising

One of the benefits of PPC search engine advertising is that it provides qualified traffic to a specific website. Users that click on a PPC ad are those in search of a particular product or service. This helps eliminate unnecessary clicks from non-prospective buyers that only produce expenditures not profits. PPC search engine advertising is also the fastest way to get a reasonable return on investment.

A bidding process is used to establish the price of a specific keyword. In general, the budget for PPC search engine advertising may be a $100 to $100,000 depending on the number of keywords used. These prices can skyrocket in just minutes as more and more sites bid for the same keyword thus causing the prices to jack up.

PPC ads are placed alongside search engine results to which they are relevant. The highest bids for a specific keyword or phrase gets top billing on the search engine results page. Getting top placement provides greater odds for a PPC ad to get clicked by a qualified searcher.

Elements of PPC search engine advertising

PPC search engine advertising involves three basic elements; constant monitoring, response analysis and refinement as the essential factors involved in PPC search engine advertising. Proper management of PPC search engine advertising can result in big profits for a website.

PPC search engine advertising makes it possible for sites to monitor the productivity of each PPC ad they place. This gives a site the opportunity to turn off any PPC ad that is not performing at its best. PPC search engine advertising provides the most economical way for a site to advertise on the World Wide Web.

The cost entailed in PPC search engine advertising is dictated by the clicks made on a particular PPC ad. The number of clicks made on a PPC ad is subtracted from the initial amount paid by the business to a search engine company. To minimize cost and maximize return on investment, a business will have to regularly monitor its PPC search engine advertising campaign.

How to use PPC search engine advertising

Many businesses are unable to get the most out of their PPC search engine advertising campaign. PPC search engine advertising involves a lot more than just bidding on the highest keywords. Information is a main concern of many online users.

Providing online users with relevant information they need will help bring about a more long-term relationship with an online user that will more likely result in a sale.
Information provided to online users may be in the form of a newsletter or e-zine that online users would likely sign up for. Sign-ups may be enough to cover the expenses of a PPC search engine advertising campaign.

Sign-ups also help generate leads for websites as they build opt in list from qualified online searchers who clicked their PPC ad. Getting personal information from qualified online searchers can be done in a variety of ways such as offering freebies for surveys or signing up for newsletters.

PPC search engine advertising is a continuous process that requires hands on supervision and a thorough understanding of PPC search engines. Businesses may opt to hire the services of a professional or do PPC search engine advertising with in-house experts. Whatever course of action is selected, a business is sure to get a huge return on investment with PPC search engine advertising.

PPC marketing or pay per click marketing is the most popular method of advertisement employed by various websites on the Internet. PPC marketing may often be referred to as pay for position, cost per click or pay for performance. But regardless of the term used, PPC marketing is the online advertiser’s medium of choice for promoting products and services to online consumers.PPC marketing is beneficial to both the advertiser and the consumer. Advertisers using PPC marketing only need to pay for the actual click throughs linked to their sites from search engines. At the same time as consumers are relieved of having to get annoying emails or pop-up ads for products and services.

When an online consumer searches for a specific product or service on the Internet, corresponding PPC marketing ads are also displayed alongside the results generated by the search engine. This forms a highly targeted consumer group that is more likely to purchase a specific product or service. In addition, websites get to limit their advertisement costs with the use of PPC marketing. PPC marketing is truly a winning solution for both parties.

Possible drawbacks of PPC marketing

Despite the obvious advantages of PPC marketing, there are possible drawbacks that can cancel out its benefits. One of the most common problems associated with PPC marketing is the inexperience of many people attempting to use this profitable advertisement method. Simply submitting PPC marketing ads to a search engine such as google, does not make up the entire campaign.

PPC marketing requires a calculated and systematic approach to setting up ads. PPC marketing involves the use of keywords and biddings in order to get top placement on a search engine. Getting top search engine placement helps boost traffic to a website that can easily translate into profit.

Without the necessary experience and knowledge to carry out a typical PPC marketing ad, may turn into an expensive campaign that does not convert into profit. PPC marketing ads also require continuous funding, as discontinued payments will also result in discontinued ads. This can be unfavorable for a website that has already built high rankings with their PPC marketing ads.

Bidding on keywords can also be quite costly, as the growing number of websites on the web struggle against each other to bid on the most popular keyword for their PPC marketing ad. Obviously small business websites are at a disadvantage here since big business websites are able to pay more for popular keywords related to their site. This is because most small businesses only set aside a small portion of their capital for advertisement, putting them at a disadvantage.

Running an effective PPC marketing campaign

There are a number of things that a website should consider when running an effective PPC marketing campaign. It is important to develop a marketing plan in order to get the most return on investment from PPC marketing. Selecting the most appropriate keywords that relate to the site’s business is essential in PPC marketing.

However, simply choosing the most popular keywords does not necessarily translate into profit. Selecting more specific keywords that will put a site within the first ten results of a search also gets greater awareness from online consumers. In addition, it doesn’t cost as much as getting the top spot for PPC marketing.

It is also important that a website constantly monitors the performance of their PPC marketing campaign. This will help the site modify any existing PPC marketing ad to make it more productive. At the same time any PPC marketing ad that has not proven effective can be immediately discontinued. Altering PPC marketing ads is a continuous process that many websites do in order to increase their return on investment.

Getting professional help with PPC marketing

The popularity of PPC marketing has given rise to professionals offering PPC marketing services for small and big businesses. Hiring a professional PPC marketing company is advisable for a small business without experience in PPC marketing. Most PPC marketing companies offer reasonable rates for their services and at the same time produce acceptable results.

A PPC marketing professional can attend to all the details commonly involved in a PPC marketing campaign. Handling a PPC marketing campaign is a time consuming process that can be overwhelming for a small business. A PPC marketing professional can help set up a PPC marketing campaign and later on train someone from within the business to handle it to ensure its continued success.

To your success!

Andy Huang

Tools for Internet Marketing have been rising to popularity these days because of cost-effectiveness and the possibility of measuring increase in profits and sales.

Pay per click (PPC) is a means to advertise business through the use of keywords/phrases in the search engines. The advertiser is required to only pay for each click that sends a visitor to his website. Search engines such as Overture, Google Adwords, Search Yahoo and Miva are just some examples of search engines. They offer top positions among the sponsored listings for particular keywords/phrases you choose. The idea for bidding is you have to buy/bid on keywords/phrases relevant to your business. The highest bidder gets to be on the top of the search result listing and the second highest bidder, of course, gets the next top listing and so on. Every time a visitor clicks on your website, you will have to pay the same amount that you bid on that particular keyword.

PPC can be very costly, time consuming and sometimes not worthy. But if you know how to go about the step by step procedures, PPC is a welcome change to traditional advertising.

If you do your searches for products, articles and auctions in the net, you usually type in a keyword or a set of phrase to guide you in your search. Either you use Google or Yahoo Search depending on where you are most comfortable at and where you usually get the best results. As soon as you key in the search button, immediately a long list of keywords or phrase will be displayed containing the keywords you key in. The first or the top link that you saw is most likely the one who bids the highest for that keyword you type. In this way, businessmen will produce the desired results; they get to be advertised, at the same time, saving and spending only for the clicks they need that might translate to potential sales.

The way to start PPC bid management is to identify first the maximum cost per click (CPC) you are willing to pay for a given keyword or phrase. CPC varies from time and even search engine to search engine too. Maximum CPC can be measured by averaging the current costs of bids (bids range from $0.25 to $5). Average of these bids is to be used as the maximum CPC to begin with. As your ad campaign progresses, the actual conversion rate (visitors turning to potential buyers/sales) will be determined and you may have to adjust your CPC (bidding rate) accordingly.

When you start to bid, see to it that you adopt different bidding strategies for various search engines. Search engines have their own PPC systems that require different approaches. It is also worthy to identify different bids for the same keyword phrases in various search engines.

Another thing, it is wiser not to bid for the top spot for two reasons: 1) It is very expensive and impractical, and 2) Surfers usually try different search queries in various search engines before they settle on the right one that fits to what they are looking for. This hardly results to conversion. Try to bid for the fifth spot instead and work your way up.

If you are now going steady on your PPC biddings, it is time for you to develop your own bidding strategy accordingly. It is important for you to track down which sites bring the bulk of your traffic and identify the ranking of your paid ads. This will help your bidding strategy to be effective and you should also decide where you want your ad to be positioned. Usually your maximum CPC will limit your choices.

Bid gaps (e.g. $ 0.40, 0.39, bid gap, 0.20, 0.19, 0.18) occur when there is a significant price increase to move up one spot in the PPC rankings. It is best if you take advantage of the bid gaps by filling them in so you can save up your cents to other bidding opportunities. Often there are keywords worthy of lesser bids to get the appropriate ranking on the list and produce a good number of clicks and higher conversion rate rather than bidding higher but having a poor conversion rate. You have to put in mind that overbidding too is not good but rather the best position for the most effective bid.

Using pay-per-click bid management in promoting your website will only be successful if you take time building many lists across many engines and studying the performance of every listing. In this way, you can make the most value from what you spend in the bidding process.  The key is to use the necessary precautions to stay ahead of the competition.

Bid Management Tools

In ensuring best results, you may use bid management tools. There are accepted and approved management tools that will help you in your bidding. They are categorized in two different types:

•    Web based (services by monthly subscription) or,
•    PC based (a purchased software)

Monitoring tools too may help in the tracking down of your keywords/phrases and search engines as to which among them often generate sales, overall and in relation to your cost per click. This is what you call return of investment (ROI) monitoring.

These bid management tools may include additional functions that may not get from online marketing tools that are readily available. Other tools can monitor competitor’s bids, produce reports for different parties and offer the ability to interface with multiple PPC engines. This is particularly helpful to those who manage more than a hundred keywords across several PPC engines to boost productivity and save time.

Pay-per-click bid management is ideal for the effective promotion of your business online without the hassles of draining your financial keeping too much. It is now fast catching up as a means used in marketing your goods and services to reach to as many consumers as possible.

To your success!

Andy Huang