The marketing machine is in full swing right now for PPC Bully – any why not, I’m sure it’s a great product. I got my copy so I’ll be reporting on my results in the near future.

But I’ve been using some of the forefathers of PPC Bully to practice ‘don’t pay per click‘ – DPPC.

I figure that it’s getting to the point where it’s harder and harder to make PPC profitable unless you’re very good or you have some of these PPC spy tools in your arsenal.

But what if you grab the tool and then use it in a very different way? Instead of using it to compete like crazy in the Adwords space, why not try something a bit more subtle, a lot less expensive and perhaps a lot longer lasting?

Nearly everyone that managed to grab a copy of PPC Bully is going to be using it to create adwords campaigns but I’m going to be pursuing a different tack, something I’ve been quietly doing over the last 6 months. You’ll see some evidence of it on this blog.

You see, these tools (and I’m going to come on to a much cheaper one than PPC Bully soon) allow you to spy on the competition, giving you a real advantage. And while it’s not totally childs play, you should be able to get a profitable campaign going in far less time and with far less risk.

But another approach is to use the extra information to position organic search results on the same page as the PPC ads!

You see, for a long time I was doing keyword research to know what to fill my articles, blog posts etc with and I suspect if I were spending more time on it, I would do ok. Certainly many of the posts on this blog rate reasonably well for the amount of effort expended.

But what we can do with these spy tools is really find out what’s making people money, what adverts are working – then let them play on the right hand side and we’ll play on the left.

These tools give another perspective on our keywords. A more financially biased view. It’s probably true that if people are in buying mode they tend to use the PPC ads and if they’re in research mode, they’ll often use the organic results. But whereas the PPC ads people tend to need deep pockets to get started (the tools help with this of course), the organic people only need effort and patience – and a bit of assistance from tools like PPC Bully.

If you’re competing in the organic listings then you don’t need to pay the $1500 price tag of PPC Bully either. A tool that will do admirably is Brad Callen’s PPC Web Spy. A really powerful tool at an incredibly low price (check out the web page for the latest price).

If you’re not a firefox fan then you’re going to have to lump it I’m afraid because this is a firefox add-in but boy, is it good.

Imagine doing your regular Google search and having a button below each PPC ad showing you their campaign. Ok, that would be good. But this tool gives you a lot of information about their keywords and their spend, the clicks per day and so on – powerful stuff indeed.

By all means use it to compete in the PPC arena. Or, consider using it as another tool in helping your written content get free traffic.

Be patient, track and bask in the knowledge that you don’t need to worry if your campaign is making a loss – it can’t. It may not be the aggressive approach but it lets anyone compete with the guys with the expensive tools.

PyraBang can be a great way to get traffic to a blog and done correctly can get many comments added to a chosen post.

PyraBang is great fun too. The concept will remind you of Digg and similar tools – you can use it to advertise directly (which costs credits – known as ‘bangs’) or you can write something informational only with a view to earning bangs.

We all know that Google loves a good blog. A blog, grown organically will become a Google magnet. And that’s even if you just write naturally about subjects. If you think ahead and plan some keywords into the post then you can really get ranked well for some great terms.

So where does PyraBang come into this?

Well as I said, you can place adverts on PyraBang. But to attract comments on a blog, you first need to create a new post on your blog. Write about something topical, humerous, interesting, factual - anything that lots of people might want to read.

And then, much as you might Twitter, post to PyraBang. A ‘post’ in Pyrabang is almost exactly like a Google sponsored Ad. You have a limited length headline and a limited length description and it has to capture attention. The great thing about PyraBang compared to Digg is that you can determine how long the story stays around for by how many bangs you ‘invest’ in it.

You will certainly see traffic to your blog. And some of those people are likely to comment. Particularly if you write in such a way as to invite comments. E.g. ask a question, be controversial, do a poll.

If you’re even luckier, you might get others investing in your post too.

There are other benefits to the internet marketer too. PyraBang gives you stats. So you can practice writing headlines and descriptions – these are very much like sponsored Google Ads but much cheaper to experiment with.

You can also see what other people post and try to work out why some posts get more views and earn more bangs. This is going to be a great tool for those who work out how to use it to their advantage.

Google has always had Beta projects and this week, Google opened another one to the public.

Known as knol – which they say stands for ‘a unit of knowledge’ – a neat concept. Superficially, knol would look much like a squidoo lens or a hub page. Google’s blog states ‘A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read’ – which sounds ominously like a knol ought to be at the top of the organic SERPs.

They go on to say that knols can contain ads from which the author will receive a substantial share! They won’t be moderated, only ranked so there is no censoring and marketers will flock to get their affiliate links in this new format.

It certainly seems like it would be worth trying to get in early and write some definitive knols about your pet subjects.

Perhaps this is why squidoo lens fell from favour!

Here is an example knol from the big G – they have a more serious and business-like feel to them than lenses.

While there will no doubt be plenty of rubbish appearing, community tools like ranking will help to make sure the genuinely good ones get to the top.

So go forth and nab your knols.

You can find the service at http://knol.google.com

I am truly grateful for the internet but as I go through my day, there’s always little things that would make a big difference if they were different.

Here’s a few that occur to me, feel free to add any of your own…

OK, obviously we wouldn’t have spam. Or deceptive subject lines.

And using re: when it isn’t a re: would get your internet access banned for a month.

And no marketers would cross that line and still use it just because they’ve proved the open rate is higher. Re: would retain it’s importance.

Emails wouldn’t be marked as important unless…they were important to me.

Scripts that let me buy through paypal but then insist on using my paypal address for emailing me everything would not exist. I don’t want noise in my account email addresses.

In fact everything I have to sign up for where there might be truly important messages like ‘your credit card is about to expire’ would allow you to have 2 email addresses – one for critical must respond messages and one for everything else. And no-one would abuse that just because they know the critals would get opened.

Membership sites that also have a forum would use the same login (oops, my site fails this one before anyone points that out . Same for support desk function.

All sites would allow me to determine how long I want my session timeout to be. I know who uses my PC. Me. You don’t have to take responsibility for my security in that way.

People who register with you and have spam arrest protecting their email address would whitelist you before they sign up for your service. As I saw someone point out recently, the marketer cannot do that for you because they would be declaring they will never send a commercial message.

Joe public would become educated and not send emails with 138 people in the CC field.

Nobody would email me out of the blue by replying to a 3 month old email nothing to do with what they want to say and not even edit the subject line.

No audio on web pages would start automatically. I think many marketers are becoming more respectful of their visitors and doing things right even if they might get lower results. Treat others…

Quicktime wouldn’t exist or if it did, it would respect my wishes to not keep going into automatic start every time it does an update.

Websites wouldn’t pop up a non-resizable window that was too small for the contents so you had to use scroll bars.

Newsletters wouldn’t have an unsubscribe link that unsubscribes you without a confirmation prompt.

If I’ve made a mistake on a field on a form and have to go back, I wouldn’t have to retype anything that was OK, including the password twice.

I wouldn’t have to put my email address twice (because I only copy & paste anyway )

Oh, I nearly forgot: marketers would no longer tell prospects they have to clear their cookies to make sure the marketer gets the sale – what about all the other affiliates cookies that are then cleared? Not to mention the general inconvenience to me when I clear my cookies.

A couple of those are subjective I know…what do you think? What would you add to this list?

Coolest plugin I’ve seen in quite a while. I post to my blog and I tweet without moving my lips (methaphorically speaking).

See that ‘My Twitter Feed’ on the right? That’s part of it.

The coolest things is when I post and my automatic tweet is generated. Twitter users following me or somehow seeing my tweet see an automatically shortened url to my blog post. When they click on the URL, they see my blog post but in a frame with a prominent ‘advert’ for TweetMyBlog at the top – which is of course my referral link for TweetMyBlog.

And if they join TweetMyBlog, I get their email address (via the TweetMyBlog back office) so I can always send them a welcome email with an invite to follow me or some other kind of link.

Sweet!

You can get it for yourself here

Comment here if you like/dislike it  

If you’ve tried Google Adwords then you may have come across the frustration of having one or more of your keywords getting a poor quality score. All Google will tell you is that your landing page should be related to your keywords and your advert.

Well there is a way to make sure that your landing page matches your keywords in Google’s eyes – use the keywords Google thinks are right for your landing page!

After all, if they suggest the keywords for your landing page, they can hardly give those a low quality score, can they? This works really well. Of course the keywords might not include the ones you wanted. So instead of trying to add the keyword you want, try editing the landing page so that Google suggests that keyword. Bingo!

This is not a great secret but a lot of people haven’t been made aware of this really simple and cool way to keep your Adwords campaigns in great shape.

Having used the excellent free service for generating sitemaps (xml-sitemaps.com) I decided to but their full product today for just $20.

I am used to installing scripts but their documentation looked pretty good even if you’re not so experienced.

The bought version has several advantages over the free one notably no restriction on sitemap size and the ability to have your sitemaps updated automatically. It even has the facility to ping Google when your sitemap is updated, though if you genuinely do update your site frequently then I would not use this option – I think it’s always better to let Google decide when to crawl.

The license gives me unlimited use on my own personal sites too so all in all I’m very pleased and give this a thumbs up.

By the way – as with any script, do follow the security steps. Failure to do so could leave a security hole for your site.