Cameron Gibbs

So I recently upgraded wordpress (again) and despite all the experience (upgrading and creating new blogs), it still takes me A LOT longer than what it should.

Both times I upgraded, I followed the instructions wordpress gives but I’ve found most of the tips a waste of time. I think it’s best (at least in the circumstances I’ve been in) to just completely deletd all of the files on the server (but not your databse, of course) and then upload the new wordpress files and then your plugins. After spending an hour or two trying to “upgrade” wordpress, I did this and the blog worked flawlessly. Oh yeah, and it took an enitre 3 minutes.

So today we got an invitation to try out Google’s Pay-per-action (read affiliate program) and it’s got an obvious problem: the cost structure — you have to set a fixed dollar cost for an action (in most cases, a sale).  This is a problem because if you have a product line with a wide range of prices, the justifiable cost per action (CPA) will vary based on the price of each product.  The cost should be a percentage of the sale — just like affiliate networks do it. 

With a fixed cost, I can’t figure out a justifible CPA that would attract affiliates.  The only option we’re left with is to put a reasonable CPA for the majority of our products and watch it carefully.  To be honest though, I don’t see this being any more effective than AdSense so if AdSense doesn’t work for you, CPA probably won’t either… hopefully I’m wrong.

Google AdWords allows you to dynacially match a searcher’s query.  Aaron Wall explains it in this post.  It’s definitely helpful but it’s got a couple of drawbacks to consider before implementing.

First, if you’re bidding on broad keywords like ‘dvd player’ and you sell cases for dvd players, if you use keyword insertion for the ad, searches are going to click on your ad thinking you sell dvd players… not the kind of traffic you want to be paying for.  This is probably a bad example since you shouldn’t be bidding on that keyword anyway but it clearly gets the point across. 

Also, regular google users can tell which ads are dynamically generated and which ones aren’t.  Why does that matter? You probably already know… usually those advertisers don’t have what you’re looking for (thanks ebay, amazon, and other lazy advertisers).  If you do keyword insertion, I highly recommend capitalizing the W in keyword so that all of the words in the title of the ad are capitalized — it makes it looks a little less dynamicically generated.

One good reason to use keyword insertion is to get around use of trademarks (or inability to use them).  For example, if you sell iPod cases, you can’t put the word iPod in your ad but you can do the insertion code.  Yet, I have seen some sites place the word iPod in their ad without using insertion.  I’m not sure what it is they’re doing.  Do you know?

A little over a week ago, I was shoked to log into our our AdWords account to discover that our brand keywords, terms we have registered the trademark for, were inactive because they were deemed “irrelevent” and to activate them, we had to increase the minimum CPC to $1.00.  What the… ?  Our site is the most relevent for those keywords!!!  Needless to say, I was not impressed.

I contacted Google in an outrage.  They got back saying that the ads (which showed the store name) didn’t include the keywords in them.  The rep recommened creating an ad group for the store name keywords and one for the brand name keywords.  In the meantime, after our ppc management company (which I’m anxious to write about and will soon) had uped the bid to $1.00 afterwhich Google imposed a minimum CPC of $5.00!!!  Something’s not right here Google.

Our ppc manager called me the following day to tell me he had been on the phone with Google for about an hour.  Turns out they had recently done an update to AdWords which put significant weight on the ad text and, I believe, the landing page.

Fortunately, Google credited us for the pricey keywords fessing up to the mistake.

Well, I just did some searches on the issue and it sounds like this problem has been going on for weeks.  I’m surprised it took so long for us to be affected.

Hello, its me again.  I’m back. 

You know, its kind of hard to write a post when you’ve let so much time go by without writing.  I feel like the constantly drunk, wife-beating husband going back, pleading for forgiveness, promising to be a better man…”I will be a better blogger, I promise.”

Well, I think I’m back for good this time.  Just tired of being a consumer and not much of a producer.  Stay tuned…

Well, I’m back.  After posting daily for an entire month, I took a longer break than I anticipated.

Today was my first day of work at ShieldZone corp, makers of the InvisibleShield (a protective shield for your handheld devices).  The company has an incredible history despite the fact that it hasn’t even been in business for two full years yet and the future is very bright.  To read about how the company started, check out this article from connect, a Utah business magazine.

I’ve actually been surprised at how well-known the product already is.  Of everyone I’ve told about my new job, almost half of them have either heard of the InvisibileShield or have one.  Now I’ve just got to educate the other half.

Just two days after I was venting my frustration with the Overture keyword selector, SearchEngineWatch posted about Wordtracker’s new free keyword suggestion tool.  Though the tool provides hard numbers on keyword search volume, the calculation is somewhat crude (I don’t think the searches done on dogpile and metacrawler are a very good representation of searches done on more popular search engines).   

That being said, I think this was a smart move by Wordtracker.  Thousands like me used overture’s (Yahoo’s) tool and miss it.  Wordtracker’s tool will now be the go-to tool for keyword volume and many of those users will signup for a paying account.

Want to find out how much you know about SEO?  Try taking seomoz’s SEO quiz.  It’s not easy, so you may want to warm up by taking webconfs’s 10 question SEO quiz first.  After getting bored of the quizzes, webconfs’ crossword puzzle is a nice relaxer.

If you’re new to renting links, text-link-ads has a comprehensive white paper on the subject.  If you’re not new to renting links but you haven’t read the paper, it has some good link building tips.

Though TLA will tell you anything to get you to buy their product, the paper is, for the most part, right on.  It actually mentions other methods of building inbound links.  One thing that is inaccurate in the paper, however, is how long you should wait to see results.  The paper says you should wait at least 90 days… that may be the case for Yahoo or MSN, but for Google, it’s a good six months or longer for competitive terms.

I can’t ever seem to get the overture keyword selector tool to work (though it will once in a while) and its driving me crazy.  Its the only tool I’ve come across that actually gives hard numbers on searches for specific keywords.  I never had trouble with the tool when logged into a ysm account but when they upgraded the UI, they got rid of it :(.  I actually got it to work tonight for one query but that was it.

If anyone knows of a keyword volume tool comparable to overture’s, please share.