Friday I received my very own painting from the onethousandpaintings.com project. I purchased it a few months ago and it finally arrived. To me, this is a great collector’s piece and a small fragmet of Internet history or “old Internet lore” as I’m sure we’ll all call it in a few years.

The number holds a certain significance, but I’ll keep that private. The painting itself is very well done and now adorns the wall above my desk. The project is a rather fascinating blend of art, economics, internet hype, mathematics, and scarcity theory (I’ll pretend such a theory exists). Seems the 700’s are quite popular in this project.

$50 MSN Adcenter Promo Code
Get $50 in Free clicks from Microsoft Adcenter in 2008
Adcenter Promo Code

$25 Yahoo Search Marketing Promotional Code
$25 in Free Clicks when you sign up with Yahoo Small Business Search Marketing
Yahoo Search Promo Code

How to get $381 in FREE targeted (PPC) advertising with Google, Yahoo, and Looksmart.

$231 in Google ($450 credit for $229 investment, GoDaddy trick)
$50 in MSN ($50 credit for new accounts)
$25 in Yahoo ($50 credit for new accounts)
$50 in Looksmart ($50 off $100 spend on new accounts)

Ok, so I stumbled on this cool little way to turn $230 into a $450 Adwords credit that takes less than a half hour to do. Then I snooped around some more and found 2 more deals – 1 for Yahoo, 1 for Looksmart. These deals/promos are a good way for anybody new to the PPC (pay-per-click) world to start off their campaigns.

GOOGLE ADWORDS

May 2007 Update: check out this comment for an update on this technique.

Here’s how to do it:

(You can checkout what Pro Reseller account looks like so you get an idea - but don’t sign up yet - come back here. I’ll wait.)

1. Sign up to be a GoDaddy Super Reseller (it’s a bit confusing but basically it lets you sell reseller accounts) via their partner Wild West Domains. It will cost you $229. You get a promotional code for $250 Google Adwords credit in an email after you sign up (you’re already $31 up).
2. With a new GoDaddy Super reseller account, you get 1 free pro reseller account. After you get your email confirming the super reseller account, activate your Super reseller storefront & buy one reseller account using your super reseller link. The total cost will be $0 when you checkout (like I said, you get 1 free pro account with a super account). You become your fist new customer.
3. Once you get your Pro Reseller account activated, you will get an email with a promotional code for a $200 Google Adwords credit.
4. Now all you need to do is open 2 different Adwords accounts and use 1 promotional code per account. Now you have $450 worth of Google Adwords credit for a total investment of $229. (You might be able to use both promotional codes on 1 account, but I haven’t tested this). Click here to open your new adwords accounts:

As a bonus you can now register domain names for $7.00 (cost of $7.85 with 85 cents credited to your reseller account). Plus you can get private domain registration (Domains By Proxy) for $1 to $1.95. GoDaddy now offers total DNS control, which pretty much makes it the best registrar around.

As you do all this, keep a pen and paper around to keep track of your user ID’s, logins, etc. It can get a little complicated with the number of levels involved here. If you don’t want to remain a super reseller, just remember to cancel your accounts within a year so you don’t get charged another $229 next year.

YAHOO SEARCH MARKETING (FORMELY OVERTURE)

Yahoo Search Marketing promotion code: Link ($25 credit when you sign up – new accounts).
YSM is a pretty good alternative to Adwords. They require approval before you ads run and have a 10 cent per click minimum. They don’t have as much traffic as Google, but it’s not bad.

LOOKSMART

Looksmart coupon code: Q3GOFISH ($50 off $100 order – new accounts)
UPDATE: You might want to check out this post before trying Looksmart.
Looksmart can be a bit of a wildcard from what I understand. If you have a global audience and have specific products, then they might be worth a try (since I guess they have defined portals). They definately don’t have the volume that G or Y has. I just started testing Looksmart so I will post back and let you know how they perform for me.

(I couldn’t find any promos for MSN Adcenter. If anyone knows of any, please email me.)
Update: Found $50 credit link for MSN Adcenter.

Comments or suggestions welcome. Happy advertising!

$10 Paypal prize to whoever comes up with the best Madlib for this website: Website Promotion for Unicorns

This was inspired by Shoemoney’s radio show where somebody pointed out the domain’s great Google rankings for a ton of city-specific keywords. You can make the page say anything you want by inserting your own text in the URL variables. It’s the trick it uses to rank well, but also the thing that can provide tons of amusement. Call it internet Madlibs 2.0. I would imagine that page will get pulled soon and also devalued in search engines, so come on and play the game while you still can.

Just insert your own words after “txtState=” and “txtCity=”.

I received the following email from MSN Adcenter at 2:05 PM today:

Microsoft would like to invite you to participate in a short survey about Microsoft^® adCenter.
This survey is easy to fill out and should take no more than 6 minutes of your time. Plus, when you complete the survey, you will be e-mailed a gift certificate to amazon.com worth $10.
To access the survey, simply visit the URL below, or copy and paste the address into your browser:
http://survey.sotech.com/195008/start.asp?s=1
We sincerely value your opinions and look forward to your participation.

At 4:30PM I followed the link and got this:

Thank you for your interest in this study; however, this survey is now closed. We appreciate your willingness to share your opinions with us and hope that you will participate in future surveys.

C’mon now MSN - that’s a sure fire way to piss off a lot of your subscribers, some of whom are already pretty annoyed with you.