Adam Jewell - Search & Affiliate Marketing

The list of Pay Per Click (PPC) bid management systems in the marketplace today is rather large. When you want a system that works and you don’t want to spend your whole advertising budget on the management system, go with KeywordMax!

As search engine advertising gets more and more competitive and more and more advertisers wake up to the potential and opportunity that awaits, more and more technology solutions are developed to manage campaigns. If you are Target, Amazon, or Ebay, KeywordMax isn’t likely to be the tool for you. If you’re a mid sized, even fairly large company with thousands of keywords, KeywordMax may be just the system for you.

The beauty of KeywordMax is its simplicity. There are no redirects that may take hours and hours to generate, there is not fancy technology behind KeywordMax, it just works.

It tracks your bids, it tracks you match types, reports sales by keyword and engine and can track organic search traffic and other advertisements as well. It’s got the same bid rules at virtually all of the (often far) more expensive sysems from the industry heavyweights that often charge six to eighty times what KeywordMax charges. These bid rules are not particularly advanced but neither are the bid rules on most other systems. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of keywords to manage and even then, the additional cost for most other systems may be hard to justify.

KeywordMax charges based on actions which include bid updates, bid checks, tracking actions, clicks and other actions that the system tracks or initiates within the engines. With other systems you can pay up to $0.03 per click and probably won’t get below $0.01 per click. The cost per action on KeywordMax typically ranges between $0.00163 and $0.000125. In most cases, multiple actions will be associated with a click so the action & click process are not apples to apples comparisons, however in virtually all cases, especially for smaller advertisers, KeywordMax wins a price competition hands down.

With KeywordMax, you can track order IDs, you can automatically generate the tracking parameters needed to setup your campaigns and you can manage your campaigns from one central interface. What more do you need?

Well, generally not much but you also get a click auditor to help detect fraud traffic and if you’re an agency or SEM company you can get bulk accounts that can be private labeled so your clients will think they are using your in-house system.

When you want an inexpensive PPC bid management system with most of the features of the big names in the industry, go for KeywordMax. It just works.

Once again Comission Junction will be holding the highly esteemed CJU affiliate marketing conference in Santa Barbara at the stunning Fess Parker Double Tree Resort. Conference dates are September 9-11 (hope that is not a bad omen) with a full schedule of events planned, as always.

There are good conferences in the Internet Marketing industry and then there are great ones. CJU is a GREAT conference. When you work in search or affiliate marketing, you come to expect that unless they actually do what you do, nobody has any idea what you do. Even if they say they do, they probably don’t. No matter how you try to describe it, lay it out, or explain it, 99.9% of people just don’t get it.

At CJU, you have some of the best minds in the industry in performance marketing and Internet marketing in general. Unlike most agencies and marketing service providers that generally get paid just for buying, planning or setting up advertising campaings, affiliates only get paid when they sell something. At CJU you’re surrounded by people who are experts in targeting, keyword selection, landing page design, PPC advertising, and making money with limited resources and limited margins. If you can’t sell stuff you can’t be an affiliate. Since it’ll run you about 3K to go to CJU, you’ll have to be a pretty good affiliate to have the cash to go.

At CJU, like most conferences, it is the networking, the after hours events, chance meetings, and late night pub crawls that tend to be the best experiences and lead to the best connections and relationships.

The schedule of events this year will offer sessions including:

Speakers will typically be top affiliates, long term reps from CJ and superaffiliates like Jeremy Palmer from QuitYourDayJob.com

Along with the educational sessions, Buy.com will sponsor a party, there will be GREAT food (rare for a conference these days) and ample opportunity to network, explore and relax in the beutiful weather and beaches that are Santa Barbara, California.

See ya @ CJU!

It’s starting to be that time of year again for the Webmasterworld Pub Conference, Las Vegas December 4-7, 2007 so be sure to keep up to date with the official Webmasterworld PubCon blog. It looks like the conference will be at the Wynn Las Vegas which is a nice change from the Hilton and the Las Vegas Renaissance, though the Renaissance in particular is a fabulous hotel and provides a nice getway from the non-stop Vegas action at the end of the night. Get a great deal on rooms at the las Vegas Renaissance for PubCon if you prefer to stay away from the strip.

A lot has changed in the search conference industry over the last year or two. December 3-7, 2007 will prove to be a duel of two rival conferences; Webmasterworld PubCon Vegas and Search Engine Strategies in freezing cold Chicago December 3-6. This may be the first time the two conferences have been scheduled at essentially the same time and had to compete directly with one another. Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, the two search gurus who were to SES like Tiger Woods is to golf seem to have limited if any participation in the conference.

Danny Sullivan is off working on the Daggle blog as a personal endeavor. Chris Sherman is busy working on Search Engine Land as well as Searchwise.net while SES chugs ahead with no apparent figurehead.

Brett Tabke’s Webmasterworld forum continues to grow dramatically and with it the PubCon conference series. With a stellar lineup of keynote speakers including

and tracks covering most any search topic you can imagine including

you’re guaranteed to have the opportunity to learn from the best in the business. You’ll hear from speakers who built businesses in these arenas, who earned their keep, who are in the trenches everyday, passionately working away to build their online empires.

This isn’t a conference to hear fluff like some other conferences that try to do search now that search is hot. Stay tuned to the PubCon conference blog for the latest updates, bring your lucky dice and get ready to head out to Vegas for the Internet Marketing conference of the year! December 4-7. Put it on your calendar now and book your room at the Wynn early!

Prior to the arrival of the Internet, branding was most closely associated with images which evoked feelings and emotions associated with a particular brand of products or even a category of products like (got) milk. It was the type of advertising where one faced the dilemma noted by the famous Philadelphia department store pioneer, John Wanamaker “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.“? Babies were shown crawling around in tires to evoke images of safety, Coke associated its products with everything from celebrities to Polar Bears

When such advertisements first appeared on television, they enjoyed a captive audience. People gathered round the television to watch one of the few television stations available at the time and most likely enjoyed the commercials, at least at first. The media world was relatively uncluttered, life was relatively simple and advertisements had far fewer competing messages than they do today.

During the era of traditional (i.e. non-Internet) media print, radio and television advertisements were distinct from the products they promoted. The impression or association was created away from the product, away from the store. Advertisers had control over what they wanted to say and who they wanted to show it to. The consumer didn’t have a choice. They could sit and watch televison and the accompanying commercials or not watch television. Branding and brand experience were two distinct elements of the consumer experience.

In traditional media, there is still some separation of brand advertising and the brand experience; you can’t buy from television commercials…yet. Online, there is rarely such a separation but most companies still haven’t realized this. Consumers now choose whether or not they want to respond to or even see advertising in many cases. Get relevant or get out is the message.

Because the the line between “branding” and the “brand experience” is essentially one and the same, marketers need to see their online advertising and their website as one experience that also integrates with search engines. There is no such thing as “branding” online as defined solely by an ad agency or in-house team running an online advertising campaign, though rich media may once again make this possible.

On the Internet, the touchy feely brand experience immediately connects with the website. A great online advertising campaign can work wonders if and only if the brand experience that results from the consumer interation with the website is equally delightful. A great online advertising campaign can crush a brand extremly quickly if the site does not deliver on the perception portrayed by the advertising campaing.

The same is true for search engine marketing campaigns. Many marketers still seem to think search campaigns exist in a vaccuum and wonder why they achieve less than stellar results from PPP search capaigns when the site does not reflect the explicit or implicit promises made by the copy in the search ad.

Sooooo, what is online branding?

Quite simply, it is the integration of the entire online buying, browsing and conversion process into one continuous string of communication that is relevant to the consumer.

When you want to supercharge your e-commerce sales, take a look at Zappos Shoes at www.zappos.com and look at how they do e-commerce.

Well, it helps that Zappos got started way back in the early days of e-commerce!, but they also set out to do e-commerce right, from the moment they went into business. Zappos pionered the free shipping and free returns business model to reduce the barrier associated with ordering something like shoes (that may be hard to fit) online. The might as well have coined the phrase “Enjoy Free Shipping”

They Zappos team also had the foresight to recognize the importance of search engines. They built their site to maximize search enigne exposure and designed the shopping process to match the way people buy shoes. It’s crazy, but to many companies, this is still a very novel concept.

In traditional advertising and even online banner and rich media advertising you can pretty much say what you want to say and as long as it has your logo and some call to action, you’ll get some clicks and sales and “build brand awareness”.

Online, the game is much different. When is the last time you saw a banner ad for Zappos outside of a coupon or shopping site? Most likely never. Zappos does run an affiliate program through Commission Junction and some sites other than shopping sites do pick up the banners but the point is, Zappos brand was and is not being built by online branding campaigns.

When a site offers amazing customer service and is organized to reflect the way you want to shop and is designed from the ground up to maximize search engine exposure, you don’t need to blow money on advertising to build your brand. Instead, cutomers will have a delightful brand experience after they find the site through a search engine and they will build your brand for you. Where do you turn to figure out where to shop online? If a banner happens to catch your eye, a banner or display ad might influence where you shop. Most lilely you’re going to turn to a search engine, shopping site or a favorite blog and then rave about your experience to everyone you know when Zappos delivers exactly what you wanted with FREE overnight shipping and hassle free returns if you need to return an item.

Next, lets look at the Zappos site architecture. When you search for almost any kind of shoes online, either a specific shoe size or a particular brand of shoes, Zappos turns up near the top of the listings. As mentioned previously, it helps that they got an early start and have had years to build up links. In addition to that, however, the site is very lean, relatively simple and low tech and therefore search engine friendly, easy to use, and easy to buy from. What makes it easy to buy from?