Happy Third Birthday To PPC Ian

Posted by: Comments: 6 comments so far

Oct. 31

It’s hard to believe, PPC Ian is officially three years old! Back on October 29, 2009, I launched PPC Ian with a post about my Passion For PPC and SEM. Since then, it’s been three amazing, action-packed years of blogging all about paid search, especially careers in PPC. Today, I wanted to take a few moments to summarize the past few years and especially some recent highlights. Also, I wanted to take this moment to sincerely thank you, my readers!

Some Fun Statistics

Happy Third Birthday PPC Ian

Last year I started my blog anniversary post with some fun statistics. This year, I thought it would be fun to do the same. Following are some fun facts about PPC Ian over the past year:

  • 293 posts (including this one) – Super excited that I’m posting more than ever before, one of my 2012 Goals
  • 2.35 posts/week during the past year – My best pace to-date, I plan to keep a strong pace over the next year
  • 2,311 comments – I cannot thank you guys enough for the valued questions, comments, and feedback
  • My top keywords: ppc interview questions, sem software, lending club strategy – I was especially surprised that my Lending Club posts gained so much traction and interest
  • My most-visited post: Quality Score Tips For PPC Landing Pages
  • A fun statistic in my personal career: I reached my lifelong goal of getting promoted to Vice President in March

Thanks To My Amazing Readers/Friends

PPC Ian has been an amazing vehicle to build long-lasting connections and friendships with my readers. Whether you are an occasional reader, and regular commentator, or the biggest PPC Ian fan around, I cannot thank you enough. I view the connections, networking, and friendships as one of the best byproducts of blogging. Some fun examples:

  • One of my top commentators became a personal friend. I was able to connect him with an SEM agency that was the perfect fit. My friend now works at that agency.
  • I developed friendships with a variety of SEM professionals shopping for the perfect SEM platform and/or the perfect SEM agency. I was able to provide sound advice and perspective to help fellow professionals make great decisions. At the same time, I got to learn all about a variety of different businesses and form long-lasting friendships. It’s a two way street!
  • Just in the last year, I spoke at Harrison Metal Capital, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and SV Forum’s CXO Forum. My blog has helped secure such opportunities by furthering my network.
  • PPC Ian helped me recently re-connect with some old friends who started an amazing SEM software company called InsideVault. Now, I have reconnected with my friends and they have decided to sponsor PPC Ian.
  • Friendships with big time domain name experts including Nima and Morgan Linton have given me strong expertise in the domain name industry. This has helped round out my online marketing toolkit.

Thanks To My Amazing Sponsors

I’m in a truly fortunate position with PPC Ian. I have personally hand-picked my sponsors and only work with companies I truly believe in. Whether we’re talking about one of my old-time sponsors like Kenshoo (one of the most amazing SEM platforms around) or one of my newer sponsors like AdMedia (your one-stop shop for all your online advertising needs), I have had the great fortune to work with truly amazing companies. These guys help pay for the costs of running PPC Ian and have provided a ton of the great content you find here.

I want to once again thank you! I truly appreciate your support and please don’t hesitate to reach out if I can ever be of assistance. If you have emailed me and I have not responded, please try again (sometimes I get super busy).

Want to learn more about the evolution of PPC Ian? Make sure to check out my first and second birthday posts.

Image of Happy Birthday © iStockPhoto – stuartbur
PPC Ian logo portion of image © PPCIan.com

Posted in: Blogging | Tags: , | Comments: 6 comments so far, join the discussion!

My Twitter Challenge Is A Success

Posted by: Comments: 7 comments so far

Feb. 24

PPC Ian Twitter FollowersAbout a month ago, I announced my Twitter Advertising Challenge. What was my challenge all about? In a nutshell, I decided to follow no more than 200 people, redesign my Twitter background, and start advertising. About a month ago, I was following 16,826 people, with 17,060 following me. I’m now following only 68 people, with 14,417 following me. The strategy worked! I did lose some followers, but that’s ok. I lost fewer than the 5,000 I projected and now it’s so much more fun to use Twitter.

I also got a really cool new background. Head on over to My Twitter and see for yourself! I’m super happy with how it turned out. It’s really consistent with my blog! I have not started advertising on Twitter yet, but that’s still in the pipeline.

I was so thrilled with how my Twitter challenge worked out, that I also did a mini-Facebook challenge. Basically, I went out and got a new Facebook banner and also landing page. The landing page is interactive. If you like me, you get to download my eBook for free. Head on over to the PPC Ian Facebook Fan Page and check it out. (I also have a screenshot of my new landing page below.)

Big thanks to Collabo for reaching out to me and inspiring today’s blog post. I’m more excited about social media than ever before and am glad my challenges helped me take my social profiles to the next level. I hope you challenge yourself to make your social media campaigns amazing!

PPC Ian Facebook Landing Page

Images in this post © PPCIan.com

Posted in: Blogging | Tags: , | Comments: 7 comments so far, join the discussion!

My Twitter Advertising Challenge

Posted by: Comments: 7 comments so far

Jan. 25

I got started with Twitter early on and leveraged smart strategies from day one. These strategies have propelled my following to over 17,000 on Twitter and have driven a significant amount of traffic to PPC Ian. That said, I’m always looking to improve and have set a challenge for myself. Twitter is hot right now so it’s the perfect time to revamp my Twitter account. Today, I’m going to outline the challenge I’m setting for myself and one month from now I’ll report back on the results!

Initiative One: Follow No More Than 200 People

PPC Ian Twitter

Right now, I have 17,060 followers but am following 16,826. My Twitter stream is basically unusable. I want to be able to log in to my Twitter account and make sense of things, only seeing tweets that are relevant and interesting to me. If I am following no more than 200 people, I’ll be able to use Twitter once again.

Why am I following so many people right now? It was actually part of my initial strategy. I went out there and followed a ton of people knowing that a certain portion would reciprocate and follow me back. I would then unfollow those who did not follow me back. I did this many times and was able to drive a significant number of followers with this strategy. It’s a great strategy I still recommend for building out your initial base of followers. More followers equals more social proof and brand equity.

How am I going to remove 16,500+ followers? I’m going to go through all my @ messages and find out who I’ve interacted with. Then, I’m going to put them on my Tweet Adder white list. (Tweet Adder is a really helpful Twitter utility that I recommend purchasing if you’re serious about advertising on Twitter.) After my white list is loaded with my favorite people, I’m going to remove 1,000 people each day (who are not on my white list) until I’m done. Sure, I’m going to remove some good people by accident, but I can always add them back later.

Will I lose followers with this strategy? Absolutely. That said, I don’t think I’m going to lose more than 5,000 followers. I’m ok with this, and believe that I’ll retain most followers.

Initiative Two: Redesign My Twitter Background

My Twitter background has not been updated in years. It still looks ok, but could be a lot better. I’ve decided to engage the same designer who designed and built IJL.net for me. I’m sure the results will be great. Also, I’m sure my new background will help drive even more followers in the future.

Initiative Three: Advertise and Gain More Followers

After I reduce the list of people I’m following, I’m sure to lose a few followers. I’m going to partially make up for this by running a paid advertising campaign on Twitter. I’ve had phenomenal results running Paid Like Campaigns on Facebook. I have not tried this yet on Twitter, but am quite excited. At the very least, I’ll get that cool “Verified Account” badge by signing up as an advertiser. Also, I hope to gain some serious experience that I can then leverage at my job. In my opinion, it’s critical for all PPC professionals to master Facebook and Twitter in addition to AdWords and adCenter.

Stay tuned, I’m hoping to have some interesting findings in my journey to optimize my Twitter account. Want to connect on Twitter? Please don’t hesitate to reach out, my Twitter handle is ianlopuch.

Image of PPC Ian’s Twitter Count © PPCIan.com and Twitter

Posted in: Blogging | Tags: , | Comments: 7 comments so far, join the discussion!

Blogs With Top Commentators Are Now Rare

Posted by: Comments: 38 comments so far

Jan. 05

One of the most popular posts on PPC Ian is my Blog Commenting Strategy. I’m a huge fan of blog commentating for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it’s fun! It’s great to be part of the conversation. Second, it’s a great source of traffic. Write an insightful comment and you will quickly gain new readers. Third, blog commentating can be a great source of SEO-optimized dofollow links. That is, if the blog you comment on has a top commentators widget (like the one I have here on PPC Ian in my footer).

Comment

I used to do a ton of commentating. I originally purchased my iPad so I could commentate on the go. I would write comments on the train to and from work. I would bring my iPad to lunch and would write comments during my meal. I would even commentate on my mobile phone while away from my computer. I got a little bit obsessed.

These days, I’m still commentating but not quite as much. Why? Many of the big bloggers such as John Chow and Jonathan Volk have done site redesigns and have removed their top commentators widgets. I used to comment on these blogs multiple times per day because I got my name in the top commentators lists. This gave me thousands of dofollow inbound links, from blogs closely related to mine by topic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a huge fan of both of these fine blogs, it’s just that I don’t comment quite as much since there is less of a reward.

So, you may be wondering, why are these big bloggers removing their top commentators widgets? If I had to guess, it probably comes down to preserving link juice (5-10 outbound links on each page of your blog can add up). It probably also comes down to comment quality. When you have as top commentators widget, the comments can sometimes be of lower quality. I particularly saw this happening on John Chow’s blog, although not anymore now that the widget has been removed.

As a blog owner, I’m a huge fan of having the top commentators widget. In addition to my top commentators widget, I even ran a Blog Commenting Contest. I feel passionately about rewarding those readers who support my blog by commenting. It takes time to write comments and I do my best to reward those supporting my blog.

The moral of the story: My blog commenting strategy is still very viable, but it’s more difficult finding blogs with top commentators lists. They still do exist, however, and I highly recommend seeking them out. You can even search on Google for directories of blogs that have dofollow top commentators lists. Moreover, don’t give up on blogs without top commentators. You may wish to throttle back your comments, but I still write many comments to this day on blogs without the widget.

Image of comment © iStockPhoto – pagadesign

Posted in: Blogging | Tags: , | Comments: 38 comments so far, join the discussion!

Happy 2nd Birthday To PPC Ian

Posted by: Comments: 18 comments so far

Oct. 31

I can’t believe it. It feels like I just wrote about PPC Ian’s First Anniversary yesterday. Today, it’s the second anniversary of PPC Ian! (Actually, it was on 10/29, but I’m a few days late to blog about it.) I wanted to take a moment today to reflect on the last two years, and of course thank you, my loyal readers.

Some Cool PPC Ian Statistics

PPC Ian 2nd Anniversary

I’m a paid search guy, so I can’t get enough statistics. Here are some cool ones about PPC Ian:

  • 171 posts (including this one), that’s an average of 1.64 per week
  • 1,698 valued comments from my awesome readers, that’s an average of 16.33 per week
  • 73,693 spam comments deleted thanks to Akismet
  • 1,302 average visitors per day (last 30 days)
  • My top referring keyword: "sem software"
  • My most popular post: Bluehost Add-On Domains and htaccess

I’m really thrilled with how far PPC Ian has come. My goal for the next year: Push my posts per week and get that 1.64 average up to 2. PPC Ian is just getting started.

Thank You For Reading

I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank you for reading PPC Ian. It takes a lot of persistence and dedication to keep blogging for two years. I truly love this stuff. I’m obsessed with pay per click and online marketing. That said, PPC Ian wouldn’t be at the level it is without my amazing readers. Thank you so much for your questions, comments, emails, and support. If you have a specific idea or wish list, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Also, a huge thank you to my amazing wife and my blog sponsors for your support. Here’s to an amazing third year and beyond!

Image of Birthday Cake © iStockPhoto – aluxum

Posted in: Blogging | Tags: | Comments: 18 comments so far, join the discussion!