If you understand Bahasa Malaysia, you will know that the ad is advertising prostitution, using Google’s content network. Yet the actual site itself is a rather dodgy MLM program, highly likely to be a scam.

How can an ad like this one not violate their terms of service? Don’t they actually have a support staff who understands BM doing quality control?

Perhaps the AdWords robot support team just haven’t been updated with the latest software patch and language module. They are full of so full of shit that they don’t even know they stink.

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So the word “ban” usually implies that I did something terribly wrong, right? Well actually, I really don’t understand exactly what I did, even till today. Let’s go back to that stupid anonymous email I got from Google AdWords:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality.  As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future.  Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling.  These types of sites include, but are not limited to:

1. Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
2. Sites that charge for “free” software
3. Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
4. Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
5. Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account.  In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies.  Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.

So that was it. After six bloody years using AdWords and trying to keep up with all their ever changing Terms and Conditions, and never getting ANY campaigned banned or slapped, I was just cut loose.

Banned for life. Email didn’t even contain my name.

The thing is, I wasn’t even promoting any affiliate stuff, just three of my own sites: Death of a Blogger, Host Commando and PLR WP Videos.

The “Death of a Blogger” site was getting a good 28% optin conversion from AdWords traffic. The PLR Videos site was getting a good overall sales conversion of 3%++ and it was very profitable too.

My ads were all getting good CTR, my landing page scores was between 7 to 10. I never got any ads disabled or any warning from Google previously, for six years.

So basically even though I wrote good ads and promoted stuff people wanted, with results to prove it, Google thinks otherwise.

Did I go against some of their terms and conditions? Well I don’t know because they are so vague and subjective.

And the worst part, they selectively applied their bans. Any product I was promoting when I got banned, you’ll still see a lot of people promoting similar ones via AdWords.

After trying to get in touch with a human being (with a name) and failing, I finally decided I’m done with AdWords. In fact I’m done with any Google product that required me to be in business with them. That’s why although I got approved for the Google Affiliate Network, I completely ignored it.

Won’t they just do the same thing to me later? Ban me for life, treat me like a rabid unwanted dog? All three responses I got from them were the same vague, canned answers that never really told me exactly what they found so offensive with my ads that they had to slap a lifetime ban.

Actually I’m not alone. Apparently more than 15,000 direct marketers got similar emails, all of them banned for life. If you’re not banned by AdWords yet, it’s probably just a matter of time.

Well, if Google prefers to treat human beings like machines with no human touch at all, sooner or later they will only be doing business with machines. Right now, I hate them.

Ok, rant is over. Life moves on. Screw Google.

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On their blog, Google says they are suing Google Money scammers, but some of those products mentioned like Google Cash were so revolutionary it actually helped a lot of people, me included, to start an online business.

It’s safe to say, Google with their almighty eye sees everyone as being cut from the same cloth. In other words, they don’t really understand anything so they just sue everyone.

Technically speaking though, those information marketers are using Google’s trademark and brand, which is wrong. However, in most such cases I’ve seen before (Ebay for example), a Cease-and-Desist letter will be more than enough to get these guys to scrambling to remove their products.

But hey when you have a lot of money and you view home based entrepreneurs as scum, you may as well do more (much more) that what’s required.

Great job by the Google robot. Kill the humans.

The hypocrites also banned my AdWords account although I wasn’t promoting any such product or any affiliate product for that matter. But that is perhaps better kept for another blog post.

If you’re promoting products or selling products with Google’s name in it, stop right now. You don’t stand a chance against the scumbags.

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Indeed, how much money you make in niche marketing is very directly influenced by Google’s ever changing policies for Google AdWords. It affects your Google AdSense earnings, your affiliate sales, and even your own product sales. Let me explain how.

Google’s AdWords program is where the advertisers pay lots of money to place ads on Google for their product. Some of these ads are displayed on the Google search engine itself, while an equally large portion is displayed on Google’s “content network”. The content network is made up of millions of websites belonging to the average Joe like you and me. We place a small code called “AdSense” on our websites so when our visitors click on our ads, we make money.

In summary, there will be no AdSense is there was no AdWords. The two are more related than you can think. Any policy change Google makes on either service effect the other. Sort of like twins.

Sometimes AdWords policy changes can mean that an entire niche market is effected and loses its profitability. An example below, where Google’s new policy disallows anyone selling “template sites for ad networks”.

This means that if you produce web templates or blog themes for AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network or similar programs, you can no longer pay for traffic and make sales. That means, your affiliates lose out of a huge traffic source too. That also means, if you have a website showcasing such templates but monetizing it with Google AdSense, all of a sudden your clicks count for way less money than it used to.

You get up one day wondering “What happened?”. Why was I getting $1.00 per click for AdSense last month and now it’s barely $0.10? Since the most profitable websites or merchants for your site have been disallowed by Google in AdWords, your AdSense ads now show less targeted merchants, and you earn much less.

The answer is, Google. What can you do about it? Nothing except move on to a new niche.

It’s not healthy that so much of online marketing revolves around a few companies like Google, PayPal, eBay and ClickBank. Historically these companies don’t really understand online marketing as much as you’d expect them to. They have the power to kill off niche markets, especially those they don’t like or just don’t understand.

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I know that serious PPC affiliates always recommend more tools to get even more keywords and get an advantage over everyone else who just relies on the “common” keywords. But I never seemed to find any that I could understand and use easily.

But in PPC Classroom, I found several simple but effective keyword tools:

Keyword List Cleaner - Enter your list of keywords, and you can remove duplicates, whitespace and even convert keywords from/to uppercase or lowercase.

Google Match Type Tools – Easily build Google "match type" keyword lists and negative keyword lists. Plus they have done all the hard work and listed tons of common negative keywords you can use for most campaigns. You can also generate exact / broad / phrase matching keywords.

You wonder why AdWords doesn’t allow you to do this easily within their system?

Key Phrase Multiplier – Enter your primary and secondary keywords, and it generates a whole lot more keywords based on possible combinations.

AdWords Ad Writing Tool – This is perhaps the most interesting tool of all – it helps you write AdWords ads easily. There’s a chose of Headlines, Ad Copy and “Power Words” that you can basically just select to create your ad, then fill in the blanks with your keywords.

The problem with writing AdWords copy is that the space is extremely limited. So you tend to settle for words other than what you really want to use. With this tool you are presented with many synonyms you can use. It also tells you how many characters are left.

Typo Generator – Misspelled keywords are a gold mine, and although my trusty Keyword Elite does give me typo keywords, this tool allows you to specify what type of typos you want, such as:

• "Missing Letter" will systemically delete letters from each keyword.
• "Double Letters" will systemically double letters within each keyword.
• "Reverse Letters" will systemically reverse letters within each keyword.
• "Skip Spaces" will remove space between multi-word key phrases.
• "Inserted Letter" will systemically add each letter of the alphabet within each keyword.
• "Missed Letter" will systemically replace one letter from each keyword with each letter of the alphabet.

PPC ROI Calculator – Enter your keyword cost data and your sale commissions as well as conversion rate, and it will basically tell you if the campaign is profitable or not. Good to roughly predict the profitability of affiliate programs you want to promote.

Long Tail Keyword Generator – Most keyword research tools will not give you massive long tail keyword data. For example using this tool you can add colors, city / area names and other words before or after the keyword to create long tail keywords easily.

Geo Keywords – Sometimes people go to Google but type in keywords to find information about their specific state or city only. This keywords lets you add those “geo” locations to your keywords.

The basic idea with all these keyword tools is to create a massive keyword list, hopefully uncovering keywords that are not used by too many people yet. Then you would have a lot of clicks with virtually no competition.

PPC Classroom also comes with a full guide to AdWords / Pay Per Click advertising designed by Amit Mehta, who made over $2.4 million dollar in affiliate commissions last year with no list, no products and no website. From what I see, the information in there is really good plug it’s an “ongoing education” thin which means that they will be adding webinars, teleseminars and additional content from time to time.

I highly recommend you check out PPC Classroom.

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He really goes to the most detail elements of it, including using a lot of tracking tools to test his results, and create a sales funnel for marketing products via Adwords.

I wonder if I will ever go to that extreme with my own Adwords campaigns? Currently I just use the Adwords conversion tool, a simple tracker and split testing for my campaigns.
You can read more here.

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I personally use only 4 traffic-generating methods:

PPC or Pay-Per-Click

I use this when I want to test a product idea or market profitability. I also use it on testing existing products because it’s fast, accurate, trackable and predictable. However, it’s also very expensive.

I only use Google Adwords when testing a new product, simply because there are not many better PPC services when you want traffic now, including Yahoo Search Marketing or formerly known as Overture. Overture is also more expensive than Adwords, slower and more complicated to use.

However, Adwords is not for beginners. What used to be simple “pay-and-play” with Adwords is now a intricate, complex system that takes a lot of trial-and-error to master. While you’re mastering Adwords, you generally lose a lot of money. If you do it right from the start, you may actually end-up making a slim profit in your learning stage.

So, go with Adwords but if you’re a beginner don’t pump all your money here. You may want to check out Perry Marshall’s Adwords book.

Email Marketing

All my marketing efforts go into building my own opt-in email marketing list. Some of the people on this list are customers, but the majority are prospects who for some reason of another have not bought anything from me yet.

With this list my formula is simple: 80% content and 20% selling. Sometimes I do both in a single email, where I give some content and direct them to an affiliate site for the entire package.

I use Aweber and Marketers Choice, and generally get open rates of 30%, with good click through rates as well.

When you’re using email marketing, remember that a certain percentage of people will opt-out of your newsletter or ezine. It’s unavoidable, so don’t get upset when they do. I get opt-out of about 12%.

How do you get opt-in subscribers? All you need to do is to make sure that:

• Your page is designed to capture your visitors details – single page, optin at the bottom, with an “offer” works the best
• You get traffic directly or indirectly to this page – direct ways will be to make it the main page, and indirect ways include putting a form on your blog, on your thank-you page etc.

Needless to say, email marketing tactics don’t work well if you page is too packed with all sorts of stuff that throw your visitors away to other affiliate sites. Go for the optin first, and promote later.

Blog, Tag, Ping

It sounds like three different things but for me it’s the integrated power and synergy of them, which I consider as ONE method. I use WordPress blogs to set-up my content websites to get more traffic to the products I am selling. WordPress is relatively easy to set-up and is highly customizable, so I know that no matter what I want to do in the future (add audio, video for example) there’s always a plugin somewhere that I can get for free to do the job.

By tagging and pinging, I can get my sites indexed in Search Engines in less than 72 hours. You may want to see Sean Wu’s Tag And Ping for more info. Don’t expect tag and ping to bring in thousands of visitors because it won’t. It will however play an important role in the overall search engine attractiveness factor of your blog or website.

I don’t care what others say – for me though, blogs are the easiest way to generate traffic to your website, and scalable enough to cater to a growing amount of pages and traffic. Over the past 5 months I have revamped most of my sites using WordPress.

Writing and Publishing Articles

One of the best ways to get long-term residual traffic to your websites, and more importantly, tons of “back links” that can improve your search engine rankings dramatically, is to write and publish articles related to your market.

The trick to writing articles is to write them constantly, which really sounds easier than it is. If you’re not outsourcing the articles, you need to write and publish at least one new articles every two weeks.

But writing the article is really just one part of the traffic building campaign. You still need to publish your article to as many sites as possible.

There’s one service I currently use to publish and syndicate all my articles, which is Article Marketer. The service will syndicate all your articles to other article directories, and depending on your niche, this could mean 20 – 300 instant back links to your website. Some of your articles, if they are good, will end up in other people’s ezines and blogs.

With a free account at Article Marketer, you will only get distribution on the “partial list”, but an upgrade for a reasonable amount of money will give you unlimited article submissions to a list of more than 5,000 websites.

Each article you submit comes with reporting features so you can check exactly how many sites have published your articles.

All your articles will be examined and approved by a human editor. If you don’t upgrade it takes up to two weeks, but upgrade authors can expect 24-hour approval of their articles. You can post as many articles as your want, using any name you want.

Some of you may have many websites and not comfortable with using your own name for some of the articles you publish, so this is the ideal service for you.

If you’re marketing a lot of content-based sites and you’re looking for long-term results, Article Marketer is the cure.

I hope these tips have helped you in some way ot another to find the missing pieces of your web traffic puzzle.

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I never thought I’d live to see the day when someone puts up an Adwords ad for the keyword Gobala Krishnan:

The again, Overture says that last month about 56 people searched for this term:

Since as a general rule of thumb it’s about 1/3 of actual searches on the Internet, about 168 people searched for the exact term “Gobala Krishnan”

So I’m now a micro-niche market…haha..

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Google Checkout is now available. It sounds much better than “Google Gbuy” as the media called it recently.

https://checkout.google.com/

According to Google, their new service called Google Checkout serves these purposes:

1. Stop creating multiple accounts and passwords. With Google Checkout™ you can quickly and easily buy from stores across the web and track all your orders and shipping in one place.
2. Shop with confidence. Our fraud protection policy covers you against unauthorized purchases made through Google Checkout, and we don’t share your purchase history or full credit card number with sellers.
3. Control commercial spam. You can keep your email address confidential, and easily turn off unwanted emails from stores where you use Google Checkout.

The first thing I found out when I signed-in to may account: Google Checkout is for US residents only.

What a shame. In fact, your address must be in the United States if you’re buying online. No other shipping addresses accepted.

For those in the United States, you can now add a little green shopping cart icon to your Adword ads which notified buyers that accept payment via Google Checkout.

Here’s what others are saying about Google Checkout:

On ZDNet: “Who knows, they could even offer a Google branded Mastercard “debit card” like PayPal’s ATM/Debit Card — after all, the domain googlemastercard.com is registered to Google too.”

On GoogleBlog: “..our immediate priority is to help more online stores join Jockey, Starbucks Store, Levi’s, Dockers, Buy.com, Timberland, Zales, and others to offer Checkout on their sites. To keep website integration simple, we’ve built a range of integration alternatives such as cut and paste buy buttons, pre-integrated ecommerce partner offerings, and an API that supports more advanced integration.”

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Cheryl mentioned something she calls “Fat Trimming” for Adwords. This is a useful strategy to basically increase your profits even though you may end up compromising some sales.

I guess at the end of the day, Adwords is about making profits, not sales. That’s why understanding conversion rates and cost per click is extremely important.

Before you even start promoting a product using Adwords here’s what you can do.

1. First, what’s the profit margin or commissions you get from each sale? Lets say you get $10 per sale.
2. Get the industry standard conversion rate, which is 1.0% if you’re selling Clickbank stuff. If you’re selling physical products without a proper sales page the figure is much lower.
3. Multiply the selling price / commissions with your conversion rate to get the maximum Cost Per Click

Here’s the calculation:

$10.00 X 0.01 = $0.10

This means that in order to make a profit, your cost per click for each keyword must be below $0.10.

You can see immediately that if you cannot get clicks like that, this will probably be an unprofitable Adwords campaign. The only way to make money from this example is if the actual conversion rate is much higher, or you manage to optimize your ads to reduce your cost-per-click.
That’s why it’s important to promote products with a higher profit margin / commissions. You should also ask the owner for advice on what his conversion rate is.

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