Do what you do best.  It is classic advice, and in business parlance it is often referred to as sticking to the core competency of a business.  What is one to do if their core competency does not include advertising/copywriting skills?  The answer is that they need to outsource, at least temporarily.  Some copywriting skills can be learned, but some skills are particularly difficult to master.  For example, writing three line advertisements/calls to action that are even shorter than the notoriously minuscule offerings found in newspapers for generations.  For this, BoostCTR might be the place to turn to for outsourcing because this is BoostCTR’s core competency.

The One Potential Flaw

Well, it would be more accurate to say that writing three lines of effective copy is not necessarily BoostCTR’s core competency, but the core competency of their writers.  Those writers are freelancers, and that means that they are transitory by nature; if the economy is down, then it is very likely that BoostCTR will have an ample stable of very capable writers.  If the economy is up, then there might be fewer and/or less talented writers that will be less willing to compete for bargain basement assignments.  It is certainly not fair to hold a single company responsible for the economy, but it is worth pointing out that there may be very strong links between the two in this case.  Perhaps the net effect is very little, but it would be nice to have professional writers on salary to offset this potential risk.

How Does BoostCTR Work?

The big question most people have when first hearing about BoostCTR is simple: how does the service work?  The answer is a little more complex than the question itself, but it is still relatively easy to follow: BoostCTR requires access to one’s AdWords login credentials in order to access existing ad groups which will be used to generate contests.  These contests are not dissimilar to a sort of copywriting fight club (we don’t talk about copywriting fight club) in which the initial text(s) taken from AdWords will be given the position as the reigning champion.  As better texts are created and tested in a real world environment, the champion will (almost always) be dethroned by a contender.  How long can that contender hang on to the crown?  That all depends on the quality and that is one of the best aspects of BoostCTR: the ability to reject texts and try them in the wild ensures effective copy, meaning that there is almost no risk factor.

Keeping Writers On-Board

Cash prizes can also be added to further entice writers to provide excellent copy.  As previously mentioned, this might be necessary in certain situations that may be predicated primarily upon the economy.

Impressive Value

The only risk associated with BoostCTR is that of the payment system, and it truly is not that risky.  In fact, it would be safe to say that it is really only an opportunity cost, and one that is well spent.  Here is how it works: every advertisement group sent in for an upgrade is subject to a toll of 1 credit.  These credits can be purchased in lots of one, three, five, and ten.  The price per advertisement group revision depends on how many credits are purchased at any one time, with more purchased at one time being a better idea for those with a frugal mindset.  The price per ad group for a single credit purchase is $75, while the cost per ad group on a 10 credit purchase is only $50.  Given that the advertisements are already field-proven, even a fee of over $100 would seem quite reasonable.

Agencies Get Something Too

Agencies looking to outsource their highly-specialized three-line copy are in luck too!  BoostCTR has exactly what they need, and that can be good for a number of reasons.  Agencies can certainly increase their bottom line substantially by only receiving quality work for a fair price.  The same is certainly true for webmasters and business operators as well; sticking to what one does best is a great way to make money, but that only works if it is possible to find others who will do what they do best at a reasonable price.  BoostCTR offers top-notch talent at prices that seem very reasonable.

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SEO Moz offers a familiar promise to potential users: a suite of tools that will check a website for errors and possible search engine optimizations, as well as another set of keyword/phrase tools.  Many packages offer either error checking/content analysis or the keyword research tools, but few offer effective tools that handle both types of tasks.  Does SEO Moz deliver, or does it simply serve up too many promises to actually have any hope of meeting them?

Before Getting Started

Before we answer this question and delve into the features that SEO Moz does have to offer, it is worth noting that SEO Moz has a LOT to offer.  In fact, it can be a little intimidating to use at first because it actually includes a lot of tools.  This is a mixed blessing because there are a lot of tools to learn.  On the other side, SEO Moz’s individual tools are cleanly laid out and are fairly intuitive.  This makes SEO Moz easy to start using, but it would not be an understatement to say that it could take one a long time to become an SEO Moz guru.

The Tools of the SEO Trade

Without a doubt, SEO Moz has some very effective tools.  It does not really matter what one needs an SEO package to do, SEO Moz almost certainly has a tool to handle that need.    SEO Moz includes tools that not only handle the traditional keyword analysis/competitor tracking, but also a unique tool called the Keyword Difficulty Tool.  The Keyword Difficulty Tool is a unique idea that takes a lot of data and distills it into the answer of a single question: is this keyword/phrase worth trying to rank for?  This is an impressive tool in and of itself, but there are times when the data available on the Internet is misleading; in fact, many have made a lot of money with nothing but a little foresight required to arrive first on any particular keyword scene.

While the Keyword Difficulty Tool is certainly a unique and useful tool (most of the time), SEO Moz still has more to offer.  Once a site is up, it needs to have a sitemap and pages filled with meta-tags.  Anyone who has spent any amount of time studying SEO knows the value of meta-tags, and SEO Moz also knows the value and offers some tools that are not dissimilar from the competition.  Tools that evaluate meta-data and/or content are fairly common, so we will not cover them in detail other than to say that SEO Moz can automatically point out everything from glaring errors and omissions to providing useful hints and tips on a per page, whole site, or selected page basis.

SEO Moz also includes a full suite of tracking and reporting tools, most of which are incredibly flexible.  One of our first thoughts upon looking at the reporting aspect of SEO Moz was that it was obvious that people who like reports work at SEO Moz.  It would be impossible to create such concise yet elegant reports unless one were to have a fetish for reports and data.  While we are not sure just who it is over at SEO Moz that has a ‘thing’ for reports, we do appreciate their amazing attention to detail.

How Much Would You Buy Time For?

One of the most interesting aspects of SEO Moz is how much time it saves.  Want to see all of the page ranking information on a single page?  SEO Moz can do it, and that can save one time checking several different tools that individually manage Yahoo!, Google, Bing, and other search engines.  Examples such of this are found throughout SEO Moz’s user interface, and the entire package honestly feels as if it was written by people with a design doctrine that was equal parts engineering for efficiency and no-time-to-waste-Corporate-America.  That is not a bad thing, it means that the no-nonsense interface generate answers to questions in significantly less time than almost any other tool that we could name off the top of our heads.

This brings up a good question: how much is your time worth?  If you need to look at only one or two tools at a time, then SEO Moz might not have much value.  If you need to look at many different data sources in one legible format, then it is difficult to argue against the value of a package that puts everything in one place.

So, how much does SEO Moz cost?  There are three plans to choose from: PRO Basic, PRO Plus, and PRO Elite.  All plans include all of the tools, but are primarily differentiated by the number of Linkscape reports and tracked ranking.  For example, the PRO Basic plan offers 50 tracked rankings per month and 20 Linkscape reports for $79 versus the 100 tracked rankings and 50 Linkscape reports of the PRO Plus package that costs $129 per month.  The PRO Elite package costs $229 per month, but offers up a stunning 300 tracked rankings and 500 Liinkscape reports.  While some of these fees might seem a bit high, there is no substitute for SEO Moz’s ability to buy time with its incredible array of well-laid out tools.

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Last week we got hit by the Google slap on one of our Adwords campaigns that we’ve been running for a long time. Overnight, traffic went to zero – the domain was nuked – even the content ads stopped running.

The irony is that we had just shored up the site to be better quality for both SEO and PPC. I know Google has been waging war on affiliates for a while now – so we thought we’d create better quality content and really make the site into a great resource with the end user in mind. We surveyed our users, answered their most common questions on the page, added useful outbound links to non-affiliate pages, and worked hard to make the site into something useful.

Then BAM – we got hit. I’m not sure whether it was a manual review or an algorithmic adjustment that caused our domain to tank from a 7/10 landing page quality score to 1/10 with the dreaded “below first page bid” penalty.

Our competitors in paid search have very crude and basic affiliate pages that add little value to the buying process, but they’re still running, just under different domains. I guess the name of the game is – create crap landing pages, move domains, get slapped, move again – rinse and repeat.

Our lesson has been – why spend time creating good quality content when doing so still gets us penalized? It’s sort of the opposite effect of what Google engineers intended. Instead of creating quality resources, we’re now more likely to just throw crap up and move domains every time we get slapped when it comes to our PPC efforts. As a matter of fact, we threw together a lower quality domain and quality score on the new pages is back to 7/10, even though the content is nowhere near the same quality. *sigh*

Anyone else have similar experiences?

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I just received an email from Microsoft’s affiliate program with the following:

adCenter Affiliate Program to Close February 29, 2008

Thank you for your participation in the adCenter Affiliate program. Unfortunately, the adCenter offer will no longer be available after February 29th, 2008.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been running the Adcenter “$50 in free clicks” ad at the top of this site. It was a good offer since anyone who signed up would get free $50 in paid advertising and I’d get a commission for the referral. It was a 3-way win.

Way to piss off your affiliates, Microsoft! I feel bad for anyone who spent any amount of effort promoting this only to have it pulled with 9 days notice.

It looks like they’ll be ending the $50 in clicks promo soon, so if you want to try out their ad network, hurry up and check it out. The volume sucks, the interface is horrible, but hey – it’s free clicks and the average bid is usually lower than Adwords.

I really want to like AdCenter (I still use it), but they keep giving me more reasons to dislike Microsoft. Ugh.

Update: Apparently the program still exists, but you have to become a Microsoft Partner first and the terms are a bit different.

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Lately we’ve been doing a lot more PPC (pay per click) – Adwords, Yahoo, MSN – and the more PPC I get into, the more I appreciate SEO.

If you have a real brand or something worth advertising, you should probably do both. But from my perspective, I’ll take SEO over PPC anyday. Why?

In many categories a good CTR for paid ads is 5% (this is assuming you have a good quality score and are bidding for good placement). That means that if you’re spending enough money, you will only get 5 visitors per 100 to go to your site. Compare that with about 50%, which is about what you should expect from being in the top organic spot.

10 times the traffic? That sounds a lot better. And you’re not paying for it! That means you’re immune to bidding wars, click fraud, etc. Plus if you have the content and the authority, you’re pulling in long tail traffic that you could never really even bid on in PPC.

Yes, SEO is a lot more work up front. But PPC has gotten a lot more complicated over the past few years – in some ways there’s just as much to know about it as there is in SEO. Most good marketers agree that you should do both, but if I had to choose I’d pick SEO.

P.S. Oh, one another HUGE advantage of SEO over PPC: branded terms. Lots of affiliate programs won’t allow you to bid on branded terms and trademarks in PPC, and those are often the highest converting keywords out there.

P.P.S. If you don’t believe me, ask the SEO dream team.

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I started running some tests today on Facebook’s new-ish Facebook Flyers Pro program. It’s fairly new but significantly different from the normal Facebook Flyers ad system.

Facebook Flyers is similar to CPM – you pay $10 per 5000 “impressions”. Facebook Flyers Pro is cost per click, which is more like Google Adwords, where you pay for clicks as opposed to just impressions (which you can burn through at a ridiculous rate). The CPM system doesn’t do much for you unless you’re a big brand advertiser – and even then it’s questionable.

Facebook Flyers Pro (or should I say Facebook CPC) is really meant for smaller type ads – there’s a daily spending cap of $50. The advantage of the system is that it allows you to target very specific demographics. It’s even better than MSN’s demographic targeting – and probably a lot more accurate. You can choose:

• country and/or city (good for international ads)
• sex
• age
• political view
• relationship status
• education status (with the ability to drill down further)
• workplace
• keywords

This is awesome targeting. Here’s an example: “You are targeting about 8,200 liberal men between 18 and 24 years old who are single in the United States who are sophomores in college and like Red Hot Chili Peppers.” It’s a marketer’s dream, assuming you have something good to market. And yes, that’s the actual number of people who fit that precise demographic. Notice that it gives you the precise number of people you’re targeting.

The type of stuff you can advertise is limited. Here are some things you’re not allowed to advertise:

• ATF (alcohol, tobacco, firearms)
• Gambling
• Ringtones
• Software downloads – freeware, or shareware
• Pharmaceuticals
• Adult friend finders or dating sites with a sexual emphasis
• Web cams or surveillance equipment (No X10)
• Web-based non-accredited colleges that offer degrees (No Devry)
• Politically religious agendas or hate stuff, or inflammatory religious content
• Political content that exploits political agendas or uses “hot button” political issues (so no FOX News?)

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of Facebook users are there for social reasons (and are probably not in the buying mindset). So if you have something really targeted that’s not too commercial, it’s probably a good advertising channel. The jury is still out on whether it’s good for targeted affiliate marketing.

I setup a few flyers in the system and have learned a few things along the way. I already had a dating ad shut down (even though it did not have a “sexual emphasis”) so I’m assuming all dating ads are disallowed. Here was the message I got after a few minutes:

An This ad has been disabled and should not be run again on the site under any circumstance. Generally we disable an ad if it violates our Terms of Service of Advertising Guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms and Guidelines if you have further questions.

Anyone else have any experience with Facebook ads?

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I’m going to share this little gem from the Future of Online Advertising Conference in NYC from earlier this year…

Check out this powerpoint presentation by Jed Nahum from Microsoft Adcenter, which can be found on the FOOA conference page.

This was shared with us towards the end of the second day and everyone wanted to hit the bar by then so I’m not sure how many people were paying attention. But if you look at page 6 (and read down) you will see a breakdown of what specific words in PPC ads had the best clickthrough rate, broken down by vertical.

The MSN AdCenter people crunched the data from a ton of ads in their network and came up with a nice breakdown of what verticals are best suited for calls to action, and which specific keywords performed best. If I recall correctly Jed mentioned that he hadn’t cleared with MSN if this data was ok to be shared (so shhhh).

For instance, call to action words are well suited for travel and health care, but not as much for education or automotive.

Example: having “get yours” in a real estate typically perform far better than “sign up”. There’s a ton of good information like that in the pdf.

Caveat: do keep in mind that these are averages (and there’s always an inherent risk when you’re looking at averages). This is a pretty good guide to where you might want to start, but you ALWAYS need to test (and keep testing).

For more PPC tips check out these two articles:

• PPC management mistakes,
• 17 Most Common PPC Mistakes Web Marketers Make
• 10 Adwords Mistakes

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It seems you can’t go swingin’ a dead cat around the net these days without hitting a story about Microsoft and their big push to unseat Google in online advertising. The good news is that you can now find a number of Microsoft adCenter promotional codes and get $50 $75 worth of free credit by signing up using the following link:

Click here to claim your coupon to try out Microsoft adCenter free* with a $75 credit for paid search clicks.

They do charge you $5 to start, but that’s still $45 $70 per promo code of free pay per click advertising. I’m not sure how many accounts you can have under 1 credit card and/or name and address, but I know you can spread it around a little. So get one account for everyone in your family and try them out.

I’m not sure when this offer will expire. Also, you have 90 days to spend the $75, otherwise the credit from the promotional code is forfeited. I learned this the hard way a few months ago when my $100 Yahoo promo code expired with $80 left unspent.

I reviewed Microsoft adCenter last year, when their system was in beta – they’ve improved their interface and features quite a bit since then. I just hope their volume ramps up soon because as of now, Google AdWords still kills them in traffic volume – however, conversion in often way better with MSN.

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Tired of Paying too Much for Adwords? Try Yahoo! Search Marketing & Get $25 in Free clicks – lower click prices, better conversion.

As much as Google likes to pontificate on how we should all run and structure our websites, I’m really surprised to still see a 404 error page when I go to:

http://www.google.com/adwords/

C’mon Google, 301 that thing over to http://adwords.google.com already so I don’t have to see this misplaced Google Adwords Login error anymore:

It gets confusing when you mix and match subdomains and subfolders for your services:

• google.com/analytics/
• google.com/adsense/
• adwords.google.com/
• google.com/ig
• docs.google.com/

Am I the only one who can’t keep them straight 100% of the time?

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I’m just amazed at how bad MSN’s AdCenter is – even after having all this time to grow and improve? . Without ado, here are some reasons why MSN AdCenter is a flaming pile of poo:

1. Retro Beta. This might be the first time I’ve ever seen a product launch THEN regress into beta a year afterwards. The “new” version that just came out just got a “beta” sticker attached to it. I thought the natural sequence of events was “beta -> lots of testing -> not beta”. I’m just waiting for the announcement: “Coming in 3Q, 2007: MSN AdCenter Alpha.”

2. Charging $281 per click. This issue of severe overcharging surfaced today (via SEORoundTable) – it seems that a number of accounts are seeing these wild errors. It’s likely just a reporting issue, but scary nonetheless.

3. 30 emails for the price of 1. See Shoemoney’s rant. He also laments the lack of an API and the really bad user interface.

4. Security Warnings. This only seems to happen in Firefox for me so maybe there’s a Firefox conspiracy at play here – feel free to investigate this yourself. This is annoying enough when it happens as you’re trying to login to AdCenter. But here’s the kicker. This pops up on a client’s website if you have conversion tracking installed. So if you fill out a contact form on a website that has adcenter tracking, you get this giant error after submitting. To less-savvy visitors this makes your site look really bad and suspicious. I can just hear them, “what the hell? is this a phishing site or something? what’s this about ‘site not trusted’?”

(click for the large version of this security warning)

5. All kids of fun errors. To be fair, this only happens while you’re doing stuff – like runing a report or navigating the AdCenter site. Below are a few examples: “your report is failed” and “incorrect or unexpected message”:

I guess we Windows users should be used to this from Microsoft. But c’mon, it’s 2000 friggin 7 and you need this to work, Microsoft! Else Google is going to beat the ever living bejeezus out of you on all fronts, even ones you are completely used to dominating.

P.S. This post doesn’t even get into other MSN AdCenter problems that I’ve ranted about previously.

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