But just now I put up a new landing page, targeting a keyword that I know is converting for the product.  Lo & Behold, I now have some “great” keywords!  Not all of them, but a handful…a step in the right direction.

It may be a small success, but its a success nonetheless, and you deserve to know about it.

1. Jim creates a WordPress website, with a blog about concerns that Small Business Owners have, and of course, how he can help them. Here’s a great example about an entrepreneurial startup.
2. Jim notes that he’s started getting search engine hits on “etides”, an online tax payment system.
3. Jim creates a landing page for “etides”, and adds this to his AdSense ads as a landing page. This clever trick is a great way to get a search engine “ranking” in the first page of hits via AdWords advertising as opposed to hoping & waiting that his blog will actually be ranked in the top 10 on Google’s Search Engine. With his new landing page making judicious use of his keyword “e-tides”, he may in fact get there soon enough.

After discussing his “etides” hits with me, Jim created a great post that acts as his landing page. As a small business owner, wouldn’t you be reassured to read something like this? The fact that he understands the fear small business owners face and is able to communicate effectively develops trust between Jim & his clients.

I speak to many Small Business Owners who are consistently late on their state taxes. Many times, it is simply the cognitive friction and emotional turmoil of interfacing with the E-tides system that leads to the chronically missed payments.

The Padgett Business Services Blog is doing a lot of things right, and we could all take some lessons from him including:

• Unique and informative content
• Targeted towards his clients
• Easy to use interface
• Ample opportunity for interaction with his visitors

But the most important thing that Jim is doing right now, is analyzing his site, reviewing traffic, following leads, and creating responsive content to grab targeted leads for his business.

You can see his full landing page here, From Apprehension to Assurance

Suppose you have a blog about finance in which you regularly give your readers tips on investing, stock picks, options strategies and other wealth building strategies. But it’s your blog, you can post whatever you want, right? Maybe you also ride bikes and frequently post little ride reports.

Since you want google to specifically pay attention to your finance and wealth building posts, you can add this little code snippet to your posts to help target your ads appearing in your blog:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

and at the end of your amazing, insightful advice, just put the end tag:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

This technique is called “Section Targeting” and the online Help Section for it is found at the AdSense Help Center.

It is a niche medical blog and I anticipated some interesting AdSense ads showing up on my site attracting the attention of my visitors. But after a few days I noticed something very strange happening with the earnings.

I went from about $2.00 per day, more than enough to pay hosting fees and a month’s worth of coffee (OK, maybe 10 days of coffee) to about 3 cents per day. Viewing my blog several times on my own computer, I noticed several CPM ads, or Cost Per Mil (Mil=1000 impressions). My 50 hits a day were getting me only 3 cents in revenue. Not to mention that the CPM ads were not targeted, or only loosely associated with healthcare (things like sleep medicines on a blog that discusses blood & gore & traumatic injuries!).

SInce the previous ads, which were targted, were much more interesting to my readers-and thus resulted in more clicks-I have decided to block these CPM ads, which do not seem of interest at all. An AdSense income of $2.00 doesn’t sound like much, but a drop in advertising revenue of nearly 99% certainly is a big deal regardless of your blogging income.

In come the Competitive Ad Filter . By logging into my AdSense account, clicking on the Setup tab, then selecting the link from the horizontal row below called the Competitive Ad Filter, I’m able to enter the URLs of the offending advertisers.

It seems that large pharma, or at least the makers of Ambien, are preying on the small medical blogs…an advertiser has to pre-select the content sites on which their ads appear. I’m sure this is an automated process, but the end result of them selecting my blog was a monopoly of untargeted ads appearing on my site.

I’ll update you on the progress of successfully blocking www.ambiencr.com from my ads. Oh, and I’ve also blocked out these last two paragraphs from the content search of this post so that their ads do not appear on this blog, either! This technique is called “section targeting” and I’ll post about it tomorrow.

Traffic Report

Total site visits after exactly one week: 209

I’m tickled pink with that number. Here’s what I did in my first week to gain readership on a brand new blog.

1) Posted original Content

2) Submitted orginal content to online contests (ProBlogger’s 31 Days of Blogging)

3) Commented on a few other blogs

4) Continued to post on content that was interesting to me, not what I thought would be interesting to others

Money Report

Total income after exactly one week: $1.84 via Google Adsense.

I’m thrilled with that, too! I am utilizing the AdSense Channels with very specific channel names (ad/pixel size, blog name and site placement). Here is some information on Channel use in Google Adsense.

And a referral link if you want to sign up for yourself. It’s free…

I plan to just keep it up with my blogging, linking, commenting and see where we go. I’m learning a lot and hope to continue my discoveries with you.

Naturally he is analytically inclined. I hired him not only because he has the patience to climb mountains of receipts and separate the important from unimportant, But also because he gets me a good (and ethical) refund on my taxes.

His inclination, however, is not just with dollar figures. He recently started a blog for his business services. How many clients can he service? Right now he’s a one man show. Twelve to twenty-four clients is probably a lot for him. So why does he need a blog for less than twenty clients?

Well, my accountant does more than just crunch numbers. He’s a “small business evangelist.” He works solely with small business owners who face unique and challenging situations compared to the corporate world. Impossibilities are overcome daily when you are a small business owner, and you can never have too much pertinant advice when it comes to managing business affairs.

“Is Every Dollar Pulling it’s Weight?”

In comes my accountant…

Jim writes articles that help small business owners make sure every dollar is working for them. His Articles re-frame common problems business owners face and offer solutions for solving them. He’s not just trying to win clients, he’s trying to evangelize to small business owners.

He describes a sense of peace that overcomes him when he has the opportunity to explain to a small business owner how to overcome payroll obstacles, how to face the IRS and how to save time & money when filing paperwork. By blogging, he reaches scores more people than his current clients.

The Ebb and Flow of “E-Tides”

Being the astute statistician that he is, he noticed that he was getting a lot of blog visits from Google searches on the word “etides”, which is an online sales tax payment system in his state. While he has only mentioned etides once or twice on his blog, it’s clear that people–likely small business owners in his state–are searching for information on the subject.

Instead of ignoring the hits and trying to force his blog in a different direction, he’s recognized this as an opportunity to reach even more people. a chance to make his blog #1 when a small business owner searches on information on “ETides”.

He told me tonight that he was going to write an article on ETides, make it a subpage of his “sales tax” section, and then create a new Ad Words ad, using his “ETides” page is the landing page for the Ad.

Brilliant!

He thought of it all himself, without any input from me or any internet marketing gurus.

Maybe it’s time for him to switch careers!

I suggest you take these action steps for your own blog:

1. If you haven’t already, sign up for Google Analytics to track information about hits to your blog, landing pages, exit pages and track campaign statistics.
2. Find out what search engine queries are resulting in hits to your blog.
3. If you haven’t already, create a dedicated article that is linked to from your homepage on these specific search queries.
4. Create a new AdWords campaign that uses the keywords in your article, and uses that article as your landing page.
5. Within that article, create cross-links within your own site to other related pages, especially if you can send someone to a sales page on your site.
6. Remove AdSense accounts from your article page so that navigation choices are limited to other pags within your site (don’t give the visitor an easy out)
7. Create a way, either on the article page or the sales page, to grab that visitors email address for your e-newsletter service. While the visitor is there, you want to capture their information so you can reach them instead of them finding you again.

By following the above steps, you will create:

• unique and useful content for your web visitors,
• increase targeted search engine hits to your site,
• increase your click through ratio of your Google AdWords, (and in turn increasing your quality score & lowering your click through price),

and most importantly,

• increase actual sales on your website of either your product or your service.

Here are some direct links to products and services that may help you with teh above action steps (some are affiliate sites…if you sign up through these links, I’ll make a little commission.)

Google AdWords -

Google AdSense –

Google Analytics – track visitors, campaigns, ads, search engine keywords and more on your website
AWeber - Email list service with auto-responder follow up messages – great way to convert more sales to your visitors. 30 day free trial.
WordPress – Open source (free) blogging software. Free hosting available on word press.
LunarPages – Great hosting services with auto-installation of word press,

Do you have any brilliant implementations of what to do with your search engine hits? If so, let’s hear them!

If I buy a product that advertises a commission for reselling it, and the product itself is advertising how to make money by selling that very product, then it becomes nothing more than a large pyramid scheme. However, after having purchased a few of these, the best ones contain legitimate information about marketing regardless of the product.

Using some of these tips, I recently recommended to my accountant that he create a “Free Report” to offer subscribers detailing the Seven Most Common Mistakes Small Business Owners Make. Now if I had made that title a hyperlink, would you have clicked on it? Would you be interested in this Free Report?

I promise you that won’t link to any affiliate reselling programs that are unscrupulous or immoral. Anything I promote is something that I have used and found useful, and would hope that you can do the same. Of course, I hope that you find this blog useful as well, and spread news of it to all your friends as well!

Let me know what your thoughts are!

later), but I had no idea that Internet advertising Revenue in 2006 was $16.9 Billion. Yes, that’s right, nearly Seventeen Billion Dollars. That’s seventeen, with nine zeroes at the end. In Dollars.

Who is the online leader in this field? I bet you can guess. It’s Google. Google receives one of every two dollars spent on internet advertising. So how did they do it?

Their first key factor is importance. According to the Investors Business Daily:

“Google invented a better way to find and index Web pages…Google took a new approach that factored in how popuar a page was among other sites. The formula assumed that if lots of peole linked ot the same site, it must be important.”

IBD, July 16th, 2007

So be sure you add New Affiliate Discoveries to your blogroll!

But creating a better search engine was only the first step, a foundation that established Google as the King of Internet advertising.

Stay tuned for the second step that Google took in ascending the throne of internet advertising, Relevancy.

The cornerstone of Google’s success has to do with being Relevant. Google has developed a search algorithm that makes sure that when users type a search query, the pages and ads delivered are relevant to the search. IN the olden days, webmasters could foil search engines by hiding keywords on a webpage hoping to fool the search engines and raise the page’s search ranking. But Google is smarter.

Google’s AdWords forces advertisers to create focused ads with copy text that is direcly relevant to the “landing page” of the ad. In other words, if the ad text does not directly correlate to the page a user goes to when clicking on the ad, Google’s algorithm inactivates that keyword from the advertisers list of search words. In order to activate it again, an advertiser can simply increase their bid for the keyword (more money for google), they can increase the relevancy of the ad OR they can create a more targeted landing page for the ad.

Increased relevance of ads creates a more targeted experience for internet users, creates pre-qualified sales leads for the advertiser, and results in more sales from the landing page of the ad. A win-win-win situation for all involved- Google, Surfer & Advertiser.

Is it any wonder that Google is the King of Internet Advertising?

Next, I’ll discuss what I’ve been learning about how you and I can take part in this amazing revolution in advertising and how you can keep a small part of the Seventeen Billion Dollar Advertising Pie.