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.

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.

I just received an email from Jonathan Leger and as I’m in content mode at the moment, I went straight and watched the video.

Boy, am I glad I did. This software sets the bar very high indeed. At least based on the video preview – I would love to be reviewing this product for real right now but I guess I’ll have to wait.

There’s a link to the video at the end of this review.

I have never used Instant Article Wizard 1.0 so I don’t know how that performed but it gleaned its content from free articles. Version 2.0 uses the web at large! And the preview shows how to use it to generate really readable articles that look like they were written by one person.

I would like to make a suggestion both to anyone intending to use it and maybe to the great Jon himself: modify every sentence slightly rather than using it verbatim. Maybe the software should only let you retrieve the content after it’s been modified a small amount. Nothing too onerous but change a few nouns, insert superlatives, do something to each sentence.

Why?

Because good as this is, Google could easily detect these articles. Not saying it would now. But if Google didn’t like this concept, it could detect them. I may be wrong but if I’m right, you read it here first.

What are the odds of two people writing the exact same 10 word sentence? OK, if it’s on a specific topic it’s of course feasible. What if 3 or 4 or 5 people have that exact same sentence? Now while the article may well look extremely unique taken as a whole, if (and it is a very presumptive if) Google finds the exact same sentence used in multiple sites, Google can now simply look for that sentence and any site with the exact same sentence will be penalised because it’s a near certainty it was scraped.

Will Google care? Maybe not. There is some value in an article that ‘summarises’ lots of other articles. But if the big G does care, I’m guessing it could switch on detection in a heartbeat.

Change a couple of words in each sentence and it would dramatically reduce the chance of big G spotting it.

This is not to knock the product, far from it. It’s great and I would recommend it. But if it’s overused and if people are too lazy, it may lead to lots of sites getting slapped.

So be smart. Like any tool, use it wisely, not lazily – you might thank me one day. Then again, I could be talking rubbish.

What do you think?

Here’s the video