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Paying for Clicks with MIVA

08 2008 Thursday

By Merle in Featured

While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft may be the pay-per-click heavyweight contenders, another strong player is Miva. Offering pay-per-click in the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, Miva is an independent search network (formerly known as Findwhat) powering over 2 billion search queries a month. You only pay for clicks on your ads, just as with the other pay-per-click networks. It’s highly targeted traffic at an inexpensive price.

Miva works with hundreds of network partners, including portals, search engine directories and vertical niches. Some of their partners include: Infospace, Serchfeed, Memolink.com, Search.com, CNet.com, Reunion.com, Webcrawler, Excite, Metacrawler, Lycos, Dogpile and more.

The cost for setting up a new advertiser account is only $25.00, and will take about 25 minutes of your time. It will take Miva 1 to 2 business days to verify and activate your account. All ads are reviewed and approved by their editorial staff. If you already have a pay-per-click search marketing account with someone else, you can send Miva your keywords in spreadsheet format to adsupport.usATmiva.com.

You can fund your account with credit card, money order, checks or wire transfer. Clicks on your ads are automatically deducted, and when your account is down to a 5.00 balance you’ll be notified to add more funds. If you fail to add more money to your account, your ads will be taken offline until you do. If you don’t want to be bothered with adding more cash to your account, you can elect to use “AutoReplenish” which will add any amount you set when your account reaches a minimum of $0.50. You can set a daily or monthly budget.

When setting up your account, you’ll need to create your ads, pick your keywords, place bids and create your campaigns. You can choose for your ads to run in the “Core Network”, “Precision Network” or both.

The “Precision Network” focuses on select markets (verticals, which are specific markets or industries that come with a set of suggested keywords to bid on). It consists of distribution partners that may merge Miva ads with other third party ads based upon pricing and some other “considerations”. The minimum bid on the “Precision Network” is only five cents. You’ll receive the most traffic when participating in both networks.

Your campaigns can include both core and precision ads. A campaign can contain multiple ads, must have at least one ad and be named. You can have up to 1,000 campaigns per account. But remember, an ad in the Precision Network can only include precision keywords. Precision ads are easily identified in your account setup by the bulls-eye icon appearing next to them.

The format for your ads is as follows: Title up to 50 characters, including spaces. Your description and display URL up to 250 characters, and finally your destination URL up to 1,000 characters.

Your ads can also be set to run on only certain days of the week. The minimum bid for all your keywords can be set individually or all at once. Your maximum bid is the highest amount you want to pay per click.

“Miva Match” is the expanded keyword search feature. It’s automatically turned on for both precision and core keywords, but can be turned on or off for individual keywords. When turned on for your entire account, you’ll receive more ad impressions. The bid price is whatever you have set for the keyword. Example: you bid 10 cents on “dog food”. When someone searches for that term and clicks on your ad, that is what you will be charged. Similar to “broad keyword” matching with the other networks, your ads will also be shown for searches like “gourmet dog food” and “natural dog food”.

When placing your bids you have three options:

Autobid: Helps you to achieve the best ad position while staying within your budget. Miva determines if your bids need to be increased in order to retain your position, and increases by one penny more than the next bidder who’s bid is closest to yours.
Manual Bid: You set each bid amount individually. Minimum is five cents.
Bid Optimizer: Will automatically change your bid to keep the ad position you want at the lowest possible cost.

There’s no secret about what is being bid on by others. The top five positions for each keyword along with the bid amounts are shown. If two bidders have bid the exact same amount, the one who placed the bid first will be given the higher position.

The keywords you bid on must be relevant to your website. Each of your ads can have up to 500 keywords/phrases. If you have a lot of keywords you can use Miva’s Excel spreadsheet to upload up to 500 at once.

Bids for the “Precision Network” can be placed manually or with “Auto Bid”. The “BidOptimzer” is not available with their Precision network.

As with the other pay-per-click networks, you can set up “Negative Miva Match”, which is a list of single keywords (not phrases) you don’t want your ads displayed for if a searcher were to type them in.

You can use “AdAnalyser” to track click-throughs and conversions. You’ll be given tracking code to place on your websites. Another tool called the “Keyword Identifier” allows you to track specific keywords so you’ll know which ones are performing best. Again, it’s a simple matter of cutting and pasting some code onto your web pages.

Detailed reporting is available so you can quickly view “keyword costs”, “ad overviews”, match and position overview, and more. Reports can be sent monthly, weekly or daily so you can see at a glance how much you’re spending on traffic and exactly how much traffic you’re getting.

Make no mistake about it - when setting up your pay-per-click strategy, Miva is a strong contender and one you’ll want to include in your website marketing mix. For more information
see: http://www.Miva.com

Merle “The Tricks to Paying for Clicks” Learn everything you need to know about pay-per-click search engines at: http://www.PayPerClickResearch.com

Why You Should Host Your Own Blog

08 2008 Thursday

By Martin Malden in Featured

Q: With all the big, easy-to-use, well established free blogging services that are available why should you go to the trouble of hosting your own blog..?

A: Better SEO, total control, more traffic and more sales - although those reasons won’t apply if you’re not blogging for business!

When I started out blogging I opened a blogger.com account. That worked fine for me at the time because I was new to blogging. In fact, I knew so little about it at the time that I didn’t even realise that I could host my own.

Even if I had realized that, it’s not something I would have given a moment’s thought to. I was too new to working online. I was (still am) totally non-techie and it would have been too daunting a task.

So I happily blogged away on my blogger account until I logged on one day to find that Google had translated all the admin pages into Chinese. I live in Hong Kong so Google, thinking they were being smart, used my IP address as the basis on which to make the decision to translate it.

Not being able to find the help link (because I can’t read Chinese) I logged into my Google account (Adwords, Gmail, etc,) to raise a request for them to translate my blog back to English.

After a week nothing had happened. I hadn’t received a reply, I still couldn’t read my admin screens, and I was seriously frustrated that Google should unilaterally decide to translate my blog, so I kissed the big G goodbye and shifted my blog over to Wordpress.com.

By this time I had learned enough about blogging to have heard that Wordpress was the place to be. So with some anticipation of great things to come, I imported all my blogger posts and set about learning the new admin screens.

One thing I noticed immediately was that my posts were suddenly figuring much more quickly in the natural search results, so it looked as though at least some of what I’d heard was correct.

And I happily blogged away until…

…one day I tried to log on to be met with a notice telling me my blog had been suspended for infringing Wordpress’ terms and conditions.

DAMN..!! Twice inside a month I’d been blind-sided by my blogging platform and the second occasion was even more damaging than the first. (It doesn’t give a great message about your professionalism when your visitors are met with a message that you’ve infringed T’s & C’s and had your blog suspended).

So, finally, I was pushed into the realization that I had no option but to set up my own blog and host it myself.

So off I clicked to Wordpress.org to see what I could find out. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Firstly - the instructions they’ve set out for downloading and installing a WP blog are delightfully clear and easy to follow.

There are a few minimum requirements set out, which pretty much every hosting provider meets. You can always check with your provider if you’re not sure. Mine does, so I printed off the instructions and got going.

First step is to set up the database. Easy to do - the instructions are very clear, include screen shots for every step of the way and are written in simple, non-techie language.

I then downloaded and unzipped the blog files, entered my newly created database details into the config file, (just followed the instructions), uploaded the files and accessed the installation screen via my browser (the URL is provided in the instructions). That kicked off the installation script and I was all done.

It was, literally, a 5-minute exercise.

However, the majority of hosting providers now give you an even easier method than that:

One click installation.

I’ve never done a 1-click installation so I can’t confirm whether it really is one click or whether a few more are involved - but it’s definitely very easy and it doesn’t involve any downloading, unzipping and uploading of files.

So what are the benefits of running your own blog on your own server?

You have total control. You can write what you like, you can drive traffic to affiliate programs, no one is going to translate it into Chinese, and no one is going to lose your database.

You can customize it as much as you like. Customization is done through plug-ins, and there are plug-ins for just about anything you can think of. You decide what you want to do with your blog, then you can either go to the Wordpress plug-in directory or do a Google search for a plug-in for the function you want.

Download the plug-in, unzip it, upload it and activate it through the blog admin screens. It’s that simple. Really.

But of all the sexy things you can do with your self-hosted blog, probably the biggest benefit of all comes from the SEO elements.

This really turns your blog into an incredibly effective way of figuring strongly in the natural search results.

Optimizing your blog for the search engines is simply a question of installing and activating the appropriate SEO related plug-ins. And you can find probably the best list of these in Jack Humphrey’s Authority Blackbook.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up your own, self-hosted blog then you should absolutely download this book and follow the guidelines in there for optimizing it properly for the search engines.

Firstly, it’s free and secondly, if you don’t set up your blog properly you’re wasting an enormous portion of its SEO potential.

It would be like buying a Ferrari but never taking it out of the city centre.

I’m now using my blog as my primary means of drawing in traffic. I haven’t (and will not) spend a single penny on promoting it.

And yet my blog is now attracting a little over 50% of the total traffic I’m getting on a weekly basis - that’s traffic to my blog plus traffic to all my other sites - and that’s almost totally due to the SEO effectiveness of my plugin-rich, self-hosted blog.

Within the next year I’m aiming for that to be well over 80%.

Martin Malden writes a blog covering tips, techniques and resources for small- or home-business owners. For more information check out his blog here:http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/

Promo Dashboard Review - List Building That Converts

08 2008 Thursday

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

List building is one of the most important elements of online marketing. Often it will determine the success or failure of your site or online business. Now there’s a handy product from well-known Internet Marketer Marlon Sanders which will help you build your list: Promo Dashboard.

Since list building is one of my favorite subjects Marlon Sanders’ Promo Dashboard held special interest for me. I am always eager to learn new ways to improve my list building methods and techniques. This product does not disappoint.

Promo Dashboard is a very detailed “point & click” solution to all your list building tasks. Easy to use and simple to implement - Marlon has gone out of his way to make list building something even the most novice marketer or webmaster can accomplish. Unlike many list building products, courses, ebooks, etc., there is no fluff or filler, just straight practical steps that take you from A to Z.

Promo Dashboard in a nutshell is all about building your list and converting your subscribers into buyers. It takes you Step-by-Step thru everything you need to do to build your opt-in list or lists and to get those prospects to check-out or buy your product.

But this is not just about building your list; it is also about promoting your products and business. This is direct, no-nonsense marketing advice on how to find your targeted audience, how to get these interested customers onto your list and how to convert these people into buyers. You get an online interface or site where you click on the icons on the DashBoard to get all the information you need to accomplish each task.

Marlon gives you an “audio overview” of the six Major Steps you need to do:

targeting your market
creating your offer
building your squeeze page
setting up your autoresponder
promoting your offer
turbo charging with Web 2.0

All these major steps are further divided into 6 sub-topics or things you need to do to “turbo charge” your promotions.

If all this sounds complicated, it isn’t.

Marlon always does a great job of breaking all these marketing steps and processes down into easy tasks even the beginning marketer can accomplish without too much sweat.

This is the main reason I like Promo Dashboard - it takes a rather complicated marketing process such as list building and breaks it down into simple steps anyone can do. That is also why I like all of Marlon Sanders’ Dashboard products which include Marketing Dashboard, Info-product Dashboard and Design Dashboard.

These Dashboards are practical “Point & Click” guides that break down rather complex marketing processes into simple, easy tasks anyone can do regardless of your own marketing background or experience. Besides, these products come from one of the legends of Internet Marketing… Marlon Sanders is a solid marketer who produces solid products that work.

Having done extensive work on list building myself, (I offer an online course and list building is one of my targeted keywords in Google - just check it!) I thought I knew everything about list building. However, PromoDashboard opened my eyes to many areas where I can fine-tune and improve my methods. It also offers excellent resources which I never thought of using before now… this is worth the price alone for me.

If you want a product that will give you ways to increase and improve your list or prospect building abilities, I would strongly recommend you consider Promo Dashboard. It is a simple “point & click” solution to all your list building problems. Moreover, it is a simple way for anyone to promote their site, business or products. Promo Dashboard delivers the goods and then some.

Titus Hoskins - Get a Step-by-Step Guide that will show you How to Start, Build & Manage your OWN HUGE Opt-In List. Click Here: http://www.bizwaremagic.com/opt-in.htm Or try other online marketing strategy.