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You are here: Home / 2010 / Archives for May 2010

Archives for May 2010

WebEx Caltrain Station Takeover

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 26 4

I was having lunch with my old Stanford pal Alex today, fellow online marketer and owner of The Hamburger Phone, a website where you can buy that super cool Hamburger Phone featured in the movie Juno. Alex has some other sites, but this one is my favorite because I can’t get enough of the hamburger design. Maybe I just like hamburgers, but I digress…

WebEx Caltrain Station Takeover

We both agreed that the pay per click corporate world is hot right now. In fact it couldn’t be hotter. Despite an overall crazy economy, careers in SEM are recession proof. However, as with anything hot, it’s important to plan for the long run. What happens when search engines get really smart and start abstracting a lot of the day-to-day work? What happens when SEM becomes super easy and large teams are no longer needed to manage campaigns?

Simple! Search marketing professionals will need to rebrand themselves across marketing channels: offline, display, email, and others. The search marketing career path may become a well-rounded one. For this very reason, I’m a big proponent of diversifying one’s skill set. In fact, I joined my current company to learn all about television and radio advertising, disciplines none of my prior companies participated in.

With this very long introduction, I wanted to take some time today and share a very cool offline campaign that I recently noticed, one that took a lot of creativity: WebEx’s San Francisco Caltrain Station Takeover. While SEM in its current form is here to stay for a very long time, it’s never too early to start diversifying your skill set into the offline marketing world. This will not only round out your toolkit but will also make you Director or even VP material!

I Really Enjoy Taking Caltrain To Work

I spend the majority of my time in my company’s San Francisco office. It’s conveniently located near the San Francisco Caltrain station and I take Caltrain to work. For those of you new to Caltrain, it’s basically a train that goes all the way from the South Bay to San Francisco. It’s an amazingly convenient, cheap, and fast form of transportation, one that can save you thousands of dollars of wear and tear on your car while allowing you to relax (or work) on the way to your job.

The Demographics of Caltrain Are Top Notch

As marketers, we all know that demographics are important. Target the right group of individuals and your returns will be through the roof. Caltrain, in my opinion, offers amazing demographic targeting for savvy marketers. Most of the folks I see on the train going to and from work are very similar to myself: Decision makers and executives in the Bay Area corporate world. If you’re selling B2B solutions like WebEx, this is the group you’re after!

WebEx Completely Takes Over the San Francisco Caltrain Station

A month or so ago, I got off the train in San Francisco and noticed that WebEx took over the entire Caltrain station. Everywhere I looked, I saw ads for WebEx. It’s hard to miss them! You can view just a few photos below of the WebEx’s banners, clock, pillars, and even advertisements on the floor! For the reasons mentioned above, I personally feel like this offline campaign is pure genius. WebEx targets the right demographic audience at the right time! Not only are they targeting decision makers, but they are targeting these decision makers as they arrive at work in the morning.

So there you have it, one of the really cool and innovative offline marketing campaigns of the last few months. While the charter of my blog will always be online marketing, I’m looking forward to sharing other great offline campaigns as I come across them! As a closing tip, I encourage you to approach your CMO as you come up with great offline strategies. You don’t want to do this too frequently (you might dilute your brand as a PPC expert), but the right tempo can work wonders for your career.


WebEx Caltrain Station


WebEx Caltrain Pillars


WebEx Caltrain Ticket Window


WebEx Caltrain Floor


WebEx Caltrain Clock


WebEx Caltrain Pillars Outside

All Images In This Post Taken By PPCIan.com Exclusively For PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)

PPC Ian’s New FeedBurner Feed

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 23 5

Hey Everyone,
I’m pleased to announce that PPC Ian is now leveraging FeedBurner to syndicate my full posts! It really hit me when I was reading Make Money Online, John Chow’s new book. John clearly calls out that FeedBurner is important for two reasons.

PPC Ian FeedBurner Feed

  1. First and foremost, it gives all of you the opportunity to receive full PPC Ian posts right to your email inbox! This is a super convenient way to enjoy PPC Ian articles as soon as they are posted. Want to sign up? Simply visit PPC Ian’s Feed and click the option at the top of the page to receive email updates.
  2. Second, FeedBurner offers advanced RSS feed statistics. I’ll get a better picture of how many people are subscribed to my feed, a great way to understand the growth and success of this blog. Curious about my subscriber statistics? I’ll definitely post them on here in the future.

I sincerely thank you for visiting and supporting my blog! I encourage you to subscribe to PPC Ian’s FeedBurner RSS Feed as the best way to get up to the minute PPC Ian posts.

I wish you an awesome week of online marketing!
All the best,
PPC Ian (Ian Lopuch)

PS – Existing RSS subscribers, this should not change anything for you. If you notice any unexpected changes, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Of course, if you’d like to receive updates via email, that new option is now open to you. Simply visit the PPC Ian Feed and select the email option toward the top of the page. Thanks again!

PPS – In addition to my FeedBurner RSS Feed, I highly recommend signing up for PPC Ian’s eBook highlighting my top five secret PPC career strategies. When you sign up for my eBook, you will also receive my PowerPoint presentation from my recent Stanford GSB Presentation in addition to my exclusive newsletter. The newsletter and extras only go out to eBook subscribers!

Image of RSS Feed © iStockPhoto – DSGpro

PPC Ian Runs The 5K San Carlos Fun Run

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 23 5

Hey Everyone,
Hope you’re having a super weekend! I’m always talking about PPC and online marketing around here, a good thing considering the name of my blog is PPC Ian and online marketing is a fascinating topic. However, today I’d like to break things up a bit with a very exciting update from my personal life! Today my wife and I ran the 5K San Carlos Rotary Club Fun Run. We had an amazing time and thoroughly enjoyed the event. I’m looking forward to sharing my experience with you.

PPC Ian’s 2010 Goals

Ian Lopuch San Carlos Fun Run

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you probably know that I’m huge on goal setting. I’m really excited because I recently spoke about online marketing at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, one of my big 2010 goals.

In addition to participating in one major public speaking event, I also have the 2010 goal of getting six pack abs. In terms of achieving that goal, my wife and I have been diligently working out with our trainer, attending boot camp, and also working out on our own each and every week for months! I can definitely see results and am thrilled!

Taking the fitness goal to the next level, we decided to participate the in the San Carlos Fun Run. The 5K race sponsored by the Rotary Club spanned the beautiful foothills of San Carlos, a small city close to our home on the San Francisco Peninsula. The race spans all age groups and included several hundred participants. As someone who’s a bit out of practice in the world of competitive running and who has gained a lot of muscle, I went into the race with a goal of breaking 30 minutes. I’m thrilled to report that I came in at 28:19, well ahead of my goal!

We Plan To Participate In More Runs

After the event, my wife and I were thrilled. It brought back the sense of excitement I experienced during my high school varsity cross country and swim team days. In those days, I was able to finish 5K in the low 20s. However, I also had about 30 pounds less muscle to carry around and two hours per day to practice. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to pushing it and getting down to the 25 minute level by next year’s run! Moreover, we’re looking forward to participating in more 5K or even 10K runs in coming months. Another PPC Ian 2010 goal: Spend a lot of time with my wife. Running and training has been a great way for us to spend quality time together and I highly recommend it to anyone.

Fitness Brings Great Results In Pay Per Click

I wanted to close out with a quick tip: Take time to exercise regularly. PPC and online marketing in general is a crazy career. It’s incredibly rewarding and exciting, but also very time consuming and addictive. I’m often completely glued to the computer. However, it all comes down to productivity and longevity. I’ve personally found fitness to be an incredible driver in my long term happiness and also productivity. After today’s run, I’m definitely pumped up and excited to head into a productive work week tomorrow!

All the best,
PPC Ian (Ian Lopuch)

PS – It’s a crazy small world. I ran into one of the top executives of Inflection (formerly People Search Media) at the run today! As you may know from my about me, I worked at Inflection before my current gig. The moral of the story: Keep your eyes open, it’s a small world and great opportunities to network and run into friends are plentiful!


Right After The 2010 San Carlos Fun Run

All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)

Review: Make Money Online By John Chow

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 19 15

Today, it’s my absolute pleasure to review John Chow’s new book about blogging for money, Make Money Online. In the image below, you can see my very own autographed copy of Make Money Online. (Want your own? You can order your autographed copy of John Chow’s book directly from his blog for only $23.99. Of course, you can also purchase a non-autographed copy from all the normal venues.) At the end of this review, you can see an image of me proudly displaying John’s book. In short, I’m thrilled with this book and highly recommend you purchase a copy. It’s one of the best books I’ve read about blogging and I’m looking forward to sharing a few of my personal takeaways. First, however, I’ll start with a little background.

Who is John Chow?

John Chow Make Money Online Book

If you’ve been following PPC Ian for a while, you may know that I’m a huge fan of John Chow. Not only do I link to JohnChow.com in my blogroll, but I also enjoy commenting on his blog. Also of interest, PPC Ian was recently reviewed on John Chow dot com. The review was very positive and ended up driving a substantial amount of traffic to PPC Ian! More than anything, it was a milestone and honor in my career.

John Chow is one of the most celebrated Internet marketers around. In the circle of making money online, there are few bloggers that stand out as much as John, and I personally find quite a bit of inspiration in his blog. For that reason, I’m excited share with you some of my favorite takeaways from John’s new book! The following four takeaways are just a very small sample of the great knowledge I took away from John’s book.

Takeaway 1: A Non-Updated Blog Is A Dead Blog

I’m new to blogging. While I own a portfolio of domains and websites optimized toward affiliate cash generation, PPCIan.com is my very first blog! I launched PPC Ian back in October, 2009 and have been enthusiastically learning each and every day.

One of the trends I have observed with PPC Ian is a dramatic influx of traffic whenever I do a new post. As such, I always look forward to posting new, quality content. At the same time, it really hit home when John Chow pointed out (several times) that a non-updated blog is a dead blog. As someone with a very exciting and important PPC career, I find it essentially impossible to update my blog more than once a week. In terms of my blog’s growth, I know this is not ideal. As John also points out, it’s important to have a consistent schedule and to never compromise on quality – I’m definitely doing those two things right. However, I really do wish I could update at least twice per week.

In terms of solutions, I don’t see one just yet, but I must say this simple yet very powerful advice really struck home and got me thinking about how I can take my blog to the next level! After all, there will come a point when I hope to generate income from PPC Ian. I’m not at that point yet, but I do believe a faster-paced schedule will be critical in reaching my goal.

Takeaway 2: FeedBurner Is Essential

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you may also remember when I was interviewed by super affiliate Jonathan Volk. This was quite the honor! In my interview, Jonathan pointed out that I should install FeedBurner on my blog. Similarly, John Chow devoted several pages of his book to this very topic (RSS feeds and their power).

I’m personally not a huge RSS consumer myself. Because I’m a big commenter on the blogs I frequent, I go the old school route and visit blogs directly. However, I should not assume everyone is like this. In terms of taking PPC Ian to the next level, I have officially decided to make FeedBurner a priority thanks to John and Jonathan’s advice. Please keep an eye out for this in the coming weeks. I hope to make it as easy as possible for you to read PPC Ian in the format that’s most convenient for you! John points out that number of RSS readers is an incredibly important statistic.

Takeaway 3: John Chow Will Save You Time!

As mentioned earlier, I’m newer to blogging. I have learned a tremendous amount over the past year. Most of my lessons have come the hard way for sure. I don’t mind it at all, this is how the best lessons are learned. At the same time, I sure do wish I had John’s book when I started. John Chow describes in detail solutions to many common blogging dilemmas such as duplicate content (and htaccess), WordPress SEO (where some of my hard lessons were learned), content generation, essential WordPress plug-ins, and so much more!

Regardless of where you stand in the online marketing game, John’s book is the perfect combination of high level theory and lower level tactical tips. It will save you a tremendous amount of time.

Takeaway 4: I’m On The Right Path!

As my last takeaway, I felt really good reading John’s book. While I certainly jotted down dozens of notes on how to improve PPC Ian (just a few of which I share above), I also realized that I’m doing quite a bit right and am very consistent with the strategies John describes. I started blogging in October, 2009 knowing a lot about PPC, but very little about blogging. In less than a year, I have been able to accomplish a lot with PPC Ian. I owe my success to very hard work, passion for PPC, trial and error, and much more than anything all of you – my loyal PPC Ian readers! I sincerely thank you for your support, it means the world to me! I recommend John Chow’s book and hope it helps drive success in your personal online marketing career.


Ian Lopuch Holding John Chow Book

All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)

Video: Stanford Graduate School of Business

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 13 16

Hello Everyone,

In my last post, I highlighted my presentation at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The presentation went extremely well and spanned two action-packed hours of PPC, SEO, and more. I’m definitely proud of this milestone.

Stanford GSB Presentation

Today my friend David Rogier, VP of Stanford GSB’s Entrepreneur Club, uploaded the video of my presentation to the Entrepreneur Club’s website! You can check out my online marketing presentation by visiting the Entrepreneur Club’s website or by simply watching it below!

I sincerely hope you find it helpful. Also, I wanted to close out by sincerely thanking Stanford GSB, the amazing organizers of the event, everyone who attended, and of course everyone reading my blog!

All the best,
Ian Lopuch (PPC Ian)

PS – As mentioned in my last post, my PowerPoint presentation is available for free! Simply sign up for my free PPC newsletter by entering your first name and email address in the top right corner of this page or by visiting my PPC newsletter page. You’ll receive my Stanford GSB presentation in addition to my eBook featuring high leverage PPC career tips, all for free! I recommend following along with the PowerPoint as you watch the video. Don’t have enough time to watch the full two hour video? You may wish to scan the PowerPoint and then fast forward to the sections of the video that are most interesting to you! Thanks again!



Video "PPC Ian’s Stanford GSB Presentation" © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)

My Stanford Graduate School of Business Speech

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 12 7

Hello Everyone,

I couldn’t be more excited! I just got back from one of my best presentations ever! I spent two full hours at the Stanford Graduate School of Business educating students about online marketing. I specifically presented on PPC and SEO and couldn’t be more thrilled with the outcome. (Fast Forward: I provide info at the end of this post on how you can download my PPC and SEO PowerPoint presentation.)

Ian Lopuch Speaking

However, before we get into the details, I want to start out by sincerely thanking Stanford GSB’s Entrepreneur Club, Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Marketing Club, and the High Tech Club, the organizations that sponsored my event. In terms of people, I want to sincerely thank:

  • David Rogier – VP of the Entrepreneur Club and Resident at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. David organized my event and I can’t thank him enough!
  • Tia Gao – Co-President of the High Tech Club
  • Kate Gronso – VP of the Marketing Club
  • Brendan Marshall – Co-President of the Entrepreneur Club
  • Tony Hsieh – Co-President of the Entrepreneur Club
  • Ibrahim Elbouchikhi – Co-President of the Entrepreneur Club

I short, the folks mentioned above are none other than amazing. I was blown away by Stanford GSB’s leadership team. I’m very excited to have some new friends.

As you may know, I graduated from Stanford back in 2004 with my BS in Computer Science and Minor in Economics. In my opinion, Stanford is the best university out there! When VP of Stanford GSB’s Entrepreneur Club David Rogier invited me to speak at Stanford, I just couldn’t pass up the amazing opportunity. As you may know, I’m really big on goals and a big public speaking event is on my list of 2010 goals. I’m extremely excited that this event allowed me to complete my goal (and then some!). Over the past few weeks, I have been working very diligently on my presentation, one that provides actionable tips to optimize PPC and SEO online marketing campaigns. All of the students in the audience have businesses they are trying to launch. I hope that my PPC and SEO strategies help launch their dreams!

During my presentation, I was very thrilled to see an engaged audience for two full hours. How awesome is that! It really was amazing how fast time flew by. Moreover, I was floored with the awesome questions that the attendees asked. This level of interaction really made my presentation fun. It’s hard to find a sharper audience than Stanford GSB students, in my opinion.

For all PPC Ian readers out there, I want to make my PowerPoint presentation available for your viewing! As such, (in addition to my free eBook) my Stanford GSB PowerPoint is now free when you sign up for my newsletter! All you have to do is enter your first name and email in the box in the upper right corner of this page (or on my PPC eBook page). Already on my newsletter list? I will be sending you my presentation very shortly. Thanks again everyone, you are the best!

Sincerely,
Ian Lopuch (PPC Ian)
PS – Big thank you to my beautiful wife, Nicole, for designing my PowerPoint template and for making it look amazing!
PPS – The video of my presentation is now uploaded! Check out my Stanford GSB online marketing presentation video!


Stanford Business School


Stanford Entrepreneur Club


Stanford Entrepreneur Leaders


PPC Presentation


Talking About Online Marketing

All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)

Google Content Match Strategies

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 5 2

Last week, I discussed some advanced Google AdWords match type strategies. This week I’m looking forward to offering a few more tactical campaign tips that will help you improve your Google AdWords account immediately. While I focused on the search match side last week, I’ll focus on the content match today. Content match is often a confusing and tricky subject for many pay per clickers. I’m hoping to remove some of that confusion with this post inspired by a PPC Ian reader!

Content Match Strategy 1: Create Separate Search and Content Campaigns

Content Match

I’m going to start out with a very simple yet often overlooked strategy. Always create separate campaigns for search and content. I repeat: There is no good reason to ever mix the two. Search and content require very different strategies for success, both in terms of structure and also ad copy. Moreover, it’s very difficult to break out content match once you have something that works. In short, if you mix the two, you’re setting yourself up for long-term failure. Even if you create two identical campaigns in the short-run with the intent of tweaking them over time, this is a far better strategy than going with just one campaign.

Content Match Strategy 2: If It Works, Leave It Alone!

From my experience, content match is very sensitive. Any small change to ad copy, keyword composition, or bids can totally destroy a winning content match ad group. For that reason, I’m a huge proponent of leaving my content match ad groups alone. If it works, I make as few changes as possible. If I must make a change, I try to keep the changes minor. If I want to test something new, even if it’s just a minor variation on my existing ad group, I’ll go ahead and create a new ad group.

Content Match Strategy 3: Start With Realistic Bids

This tip ties directly into the last one. From my experience, bid changes can totally mess with your content match campaign. For that reason, I always start off with very realistic bids in content match, bids that are where they need to be in the long-term to ensure profitability. In my video about launching a new AdWords campaign I share my strategy of bidding 200 percent of your long term bid out the gate when launching search match campaigns. This is totally important in building a great quality score and click through rate from the beginning. However, the strategy is very different in content: Always start with your long-term bid and leave it alone.

Content Match Strategy 4: One Keyword Per Ad Group Works!

If you’ve worked with me in the past, you know that I’m a big fan of one keyword per ad group in search. In fact, I like to take credit for inventing the strategy back in 2005. The ClickEquations blog recently posted about The Myth of Single Keyword Ad Groups (thanks to another PPC Ian reader and friend for pointing this post out). I couldn’t disagree more in the world of search. I was leveraging the one keyword per ad group strategy all the way back in 2005 and it has worked consistently on the right set of keywords. It definitely doesn’t make sense for all keywords, but can work wonders for certain keywords. However, I’m here to say that it can also work well for content. It wasn’t always this way. Back in the day, content needed several keywords to form an opinion of your theme and match your ad group to a relevant webpage. These days, however, content is a lot smarter and if you’re trying to gain as many conversions as possible and have an offer that’s broadly appealing, the single keyword strategy may work wonders even in content match.

Content Match Strategy 5: Experiment With Combinations

I’d like to close out with a really cool tactic: Leveraging mathematical combinations. Let’s say you have a set of 10 high volume keywords. I’ll always start off with all the 1 combinations of this set (10 single keyword ad groups). Then, I’ll start experimenting with other combinations such as all the 3 combinations (120 ad groups). As you can see, the number of ad groups can quickly balloon out of control! For this very reason, I’ll often separate my combination experiments into their very own account. The beauty of this strategy is that you can sometimes strike gold. The vast majority of your ad groups will go nowhere and you’ll eventually end up pausing them. However, a few of them will often take off!

Another similar tip: Try repetition within keywords in content. You would never buy the word "mortgage mortgage mortgage" in search. In content, however, these repetitious keywords can really help out. A sample adgroup targeting mortgage refinance might include the following keywords:

  • refinance
  • refinance refinance
  • mortgage
  • mortgage refinance
  • refinance mortgage
  • mortgage refinance refinance

Image of Computer Screen Content © iStockPhoto – Petrovich9

About PPC Ian

Ian Lopuch (PPC Ian)Hi, I'm Ian Lopuch, also known as PPC Ian. I'm an Idaho-based real estate developer and investor, with an incredible passion for dividend stocks (and investments that provide true passive income for the long-term). In fact, I have built a portfolio of 37 positions that will one day pay for all of my living expenses. I enjoy blogging here about my passion for cash flow investing, while also sharing some other business and digital marketing insights from time-to-time.

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