Archives for 2011

Internet Marketing Productivity: Start Small

It’s been a while since I blogged about SEM leverage and productivity. Internet marketing, especially in the corporate world, is a discipline where you can easily feel overwhelmed. Add on top of that your commitments outside of work – exercising, hobbies, family, friends, and blogging/affiliate marketing (if you’re like me) – and you could quite possibly lose your sanity! Today’s short post is for those times when you feel so overwhelmed that you don’t know where to start. It’s all about starting small and building momentum.

Prioritize Your Smallest Projects First

Man In Labyrinth

The header above really says it all. If you’re in one of those situations where you’re so overwhelmed you don’t know where to start, I highly recommend starting small. This is actually quite counter-intuitive. Small tasks are typically low leverage. Some small tasks are so small that you could theoretically cross them off the list. However, this tip is not really about getting leverage instantly. It’s not about adding a ton of value instantly. It’s about building up momentum so you can break out of the rut, feel a sense of accomplishment, and then later build up to the big, high value projects.

Of course, if you’re already very focused and already have momentum on your side, I don’t recommend this tip. If you’re in an empowered state of mind, it’s all about harnessing that power and going right after the big projects.

Some of My Favorite Small, Momentum-Building Tasks

In terms of making this advice actionable, here are some small projects I regularly tackle to build up my momentum:

Find one exciting blog article about Internet marketing and send it to my team at work, with my commentary on why it’s useful. (Of course, remember to send the email with a low priority flag).
Search Google (or Yahoo/Bing) and find one or two interesting paid ads within my vertical. Send the ads to my team to spark creativity in ad copy testing.
Search Google (or Yahoo/Bing), just like in the last tip, and find interesting landing page experiences within my vertical. Send the landing page experiences to my team to spark creativity in our own strategy.
Search all major search engines manually for trademark violations on our trademarked terms. Even if you have automated software that polices trademarks it’s good to double check it works once in a while!
Generate a few keywords manually (just a handful) based on my own industry knowledge and experience. Make sure the new keywords don’t cannibalize old ones (make sure we don’t broad match to the terms), and then deploy them.
Record the projects I’ve worked on recently (or plan on this week) in Sharepoint. Our world is moving fast and it’s essential to record completed projects so you remember everything when annual reviews come around.
Get routine stuff done such as expense reports, timesheet approvals, invoice approvals, and other similar tasks.
Find a project that someone on my team did particularly well and send out a short email to the entire team that celebrates success. I really like this strategy because it not only gets my momentum rolling, but it empowers my entire team.

So, there you have it! Just a few small tasks that can quickly build up my own momentum when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Want to push your productivity even further? I recommend checking out my post about controlling your PPC mind. Thanks for reading and I’d be super curious to see if this start really small strategy works for you?

Image of Man In Labyrinth © iStockPhoto – Petrovich9

Acquisio’s Free Facebook Advertising Webinar

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 22 13

I have some truly helpful tips for you today about Facebook advertising. As you may know from my recent post about three ways to drive more Facebook fans, I’m really into Facebook right now. Facebook is hot and whether you’re looking to drive more “likes” to your fan page, capture leads, or even drive conversions, it’s truly the beginning stages of the game when it comes to Facebook (think AdWords 4-5 years ago). My recommendation: Learn as much as you possibly can about Facebook and run with it! To help you follow this advice, it’s with great excitement that I highlight Acquisio’s Pre-Recorded Facebook Advertising Webinar in today’s post!

53 Minutes of Free Facebook Advertising Tips

This webinar truly delivers. I honestly can’t believe it’s free. Presented by Merry Morud, expert Facebook advertiser from aimClear, this pre-recorded webinar delivers 53 minutes of helpful tips. The first two thirds of the presentation cover a very well thought out agenda with the final third covering questions from attendees. I learned throughout the entire presentation! The questions from the audience were stellar. Some of my favorite parts of the presentation:

Ad Fatigue: This is a real issue with Facebook advertising. Ads will quickly achieve millions upon millions of impressions. Their useful lifespan can quickly end with click through rates plummeting (and CPAs accelerating). I’ve personally experienced this issue first hand running large campaigns on Facebook and couldn’t agree more with Merry’s tips for overcoming ad fatigue. Many of Merry’s points are tips I have employed first hand, and the rest are tips I will be trying soon!
Workflow Efficiency Tips: Let’s face it, Facebook is a new platform and lacks the overall efficiency of AdWords. It can take quite a bit of time to get campaigns live and sometimes things can feel a bit “backwards” for new advertisers. Merry steps in and provides a number of workflow efficiency tips that will save you hours.
Make Your Images Pop: The image component of your Facebook ads are of paramount importance. I’m thrilled to have learned of a new, nifty tool that will help me make my images “pop” even more.

Interested in the overall agenda? Check out the image at the bottom of this post (and then click it to watch the pre-recorded webinar).

Acquisio Is On An Amazing Roll

Have you heard of Acquisio? They’re an amazing performance marketing platform that helps agencies save time (and money), optimize campaigns across search engines, derive insights (and beautiful client reports) from advanced reporting, optimize bids via highly sophisticated algorithms, and so much more. I’m a huge fan and recently interviewed Marc Poirier, CEO of Acquisio, here on PPC Ian. I even met up with Marc at SMX West a few weeks ago.

In addition to providing an amazing platform, Acquisio has been leading our industry in terms of their free educational materials. They teamed up with Search Marketing Now and sponsored this Facebook advertising webinar, after all. In addition to this particular webinar, I highly recommend checking out their two recent whitepapers: Choosing a PPC Management Pricing Model and Why Display Matters To Search Marketers. I reviewed both of these whitepapers here on PPC Ian and both are totally free, just like the webinar.

So, there you have it! I’d love to hear from you guys. Have you been advertising on Facebook? Is it working for you?

All Images In This Post © Acquisio.com and SearchMarketingNow.com

I Changed My Post Background From Black To White

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 20 19

At the end of the day, it’s my readers (you guys) that make PPC Ian the blog that it is! As such, I take feedback from my readers extremely seriously. What’s been the most overwhelming feedback that I’ve gotten over and over again? Basically that I make the background color of my posts white (with black text) versus the black background (with white text) that I’ve had for the last year and half (since my blog launched in October, 2009). Well, I finally took everyone’s advice and made the change last night! In sincerely hope my change makes reading PPC Ian a lot easier on your eyes.

Please Let Me Know What You Think

Blueprint

For the next few weeks, I’m going to test the new white post background. I’m going to closely monitor my blog stats (to see if my visits go up), blog comments, and also emails. If you like (or dislike) the change, I highly encourage you to speak up. Your feedback will really help me out. Right now, I’m very much leaning on the side of keeping the new white post background because I personally like the change and am hopeful it will help take PPC Ian to the next level in terms of visitors. My friend Owen Frager who operates one of the most visited domaining blogs on the Internet and who’s featured me several times provided some really helpful info from his own testing that suggested the white background with black text should really help me drive more visits (and happy readers).

Aside from the posts themselves, everything else here on PPC Ian is staying the same. I’m a huge fan of my overall blog design. After all, PPC Ian sports a custom design from Unique Blog Designs (the same people that designed John Chow dot Com). In an effort to preserve my overall site feel, I left everything else the same (including the post comments). Thanks again everyone for the feedback and I can’t wait to hear what you think!

Image of blueprint © iStockPhoto – doram

SMX West 2011 Search Conference Rocked

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 9 10

It’s very apparent based on my wonderful experience at SMX West 2011 today that the search marketing industry is absolutely on fire. There is no time like the present, the SEM career path is the best career path in my opinion. Today, I’m looking forward to sharing with you some of my favorite SMX West 2011 conference highlights!

SMX West Had Some Great Advanced Content

PPC Ian, Marc Poirier, and the Amazing Acquisio Team

SMX West has historically been more of an introductory conference, one geared towards those newer to digital advertising. I consistently attend each year because it’s in San Jose, just a short half hour drive from my job. By contrast, SMX Advanced has been more advanced (as the name implies).

This year, however, I was pleasantly surprised. SMX West 2011 totally delivered and included great content both for beginners and seasoned industry veterans like myself. I was definitely at the edge of my seat, taking diligent notes! In terms of advanced content, it was especially exciting hearing all about Microsoft’s adCenter quality score algorithm directly from Microsoft product managers. Moreover, I was totally floored when a panelist on the Google AdWords Extensions seminar predicted that Google will be launching sitelinks on an adgroup level (they’re currently set on a campaign level). In my opinion, this would be a tremendous opportunity to fine tune ad copy to the next level, now that sitelinks are showing up on many generic queries.

PPC Ian and My Great Friends From Kenshoo

A few other exciting topics from SMX:

I learned all about Google product feeds. I used to be in retail back in 2004-2006 when I managed SEM at comparison shopping giant NexTag. Since then, however, I’ve been in services-oriented verticals. A lot has changed over the years and it was really great to pick up some product feed insights.
Efficient Frontier presented some truly amazing industry trends. Basically, they compiled data across all their clients and reported it on an aggregate level. An incredibly important part of our jobs as SEM professionals is answering questions about macro industry trends. Efficient Frontier helped me out quite a bit with their data points.

SMX Is Great For Networking

PPC Ian and My Great Friends From Marin Software

What’s my favorite part of search conferences? It really comes down to networking. Whether it’s catching up with old friends or making new friends, conferences like SMX West are ideal for networking. When it comes to your long term career within search engine marketing, a strong network is everything. It’s because of my strong network that I’ve made it this far in the world of SEM and I continue to invest in relationships each and every day.

As you can see throughout this post, I had the great opportunity to catch up with my close friends from Acquisio, Kenshoo, and Marin Software. If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you’ll know that I’m totally obsessed with SEM automation. Acquisio, Kenshoo, and Marin Software are three of the absolute top leaders when it comes to search marketing software, and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to establish close relationships with all of them. It was really great catching up with my friends!

I had a real blast chatting with Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO of Acquisio. I had the opportunity to chat with Marc at length about my personal career trajectory and truly enjoyed it! Also, I scored two of those amazing Acquisio t-shirts (one for myself and one for my wife). I will be highlighting them in a future post. Side note: Make sure to check out my exclusive interview with Marc Poirier.

As you can see in the image on the right, Marin Software really went all out this year. They had, in my opinion, the most impressive booth at SMX West. It was truly great catching up with Matt Lawson, VP of Marketing at Marin Software. Side note: Make sure to check out my exclusive interview with Matt Lawson. Making their booth even more enticing, they had an Xbox giveaway!

Last, I had an amazing experience chatting with Geoff Shenk, Managing Director of Kenshoo North America. Kenshoo has a new product called Watchdog that’s truly amazing and I’ll be blogging about it soon! While I don’t have a interview directly with Geoff here on PPC Ian, I recently interviewed Chad Baldwin – Kenshoo’s VP of Sales.

This Year, I Just Went To The First Day

SMX West 2011

This year, I decided to just attend day one of SMX West. Why? I’m in a leadership position and it’s my responsibility to balance conferences with my day-to-day responsibilities. As such, I decided to share the excitement and am having my team cover for me the rest of this conference. This will be a tremendous experience for my team, and I’m truly excited that I got an opportunity to enjoy day one of SMX West while still leaving myself time to get my important projects done! Did you attend SMX West this year? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com

10 Ways To Sabotage Your SEM Career

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 6 8

Sometimes it’s not about what you do. It’s about what you avoid doing! It’s all about being careful and consciously contemplating your every move. This especially rings true in the high stakes game of corporate search engine marketing. Today I’m going to present 10 quick, effective, and easy ways to sabotage your entire SEM career. Now, just to be super clear, you will want to avoid these bad ideas at all costs and in most cases employ the complete opposite strategy.

Bad Idea 1: Ask For a Raise Over and Over (and Over)

Here’s the great thing about careers in search engine marketing: You typically have free reign over your salary. The harder you work and the more results you deliver, the quicker you will get promoted (and earn a raise and/or bonus). It’s that easy. SEM is super measurable. It’s easy to instantly prove how much value you have added (in terms of raw dollar margin).

That said, I must caveat this in that promotions, raises, and bonuses typically happen within your company’s HR schedule. Most companies have a very set, strict schedule when employees will be evaluated. You want to be conscious about this and avoid asking for promotions off-schedule. Also, you want to avoid being the employee that constantly asks for a raise. If you’ve asked a few times and have not been able to secure the promotion (and/or raise) you’re looking for, it’s unlikely you’ll receive it by asking over, and over, and over. Rather, that’s a sure fire way to annoy your employer. As an alternative strategy, I recommend working harder and then revisiting six months later once you have some more results under your belt, even if you disagree with your employer’s short term decision.

Bad Idea 2: Ignore The Numbers on Nights and Weekends

I like to think of pay per click search engine marketing as a 24/7 Wall Street trading floor. SEM campaigns never sleep. Even worse, campaigns tend to tank on nights, weekends, and holidays (Murphy’s Law). Search marketing is a high powered career that carriers great responsibility with it. Don’t ignore the stats! Your worst fears will come true and you’ll look very bad if your campaigns tank while you’re not watching. As an alternative strategy, try to find a backup (another team member) to watch your campaigns if you absolutely must take some time off.

Bad Idea 3: Do Everything Manually

Time is money. If you go about doing everything manually, you won’t get one third of the tasks completed that you should. Your operations will grind to a halt and your competitors will pass you by. It’s absolutely imperative to investigate PPC automation platforms such as Marin Software and Acquisio. Confused about where to start? I highly recommend checking out my SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide.

Bad Idea 4: Invest Minimal Time In Your LinkedIn Profile

Ever since my first online marketing job, every single job has come passively via LinkedIn. I cannot say enough about the power of LinkedIn when it comes to growing your career in online marketing. When’s the best time to look for a new job, one with a better title, higher pay, and at a more promising company? Of course, when you already have one! That’s the power of entertaining passive job opportunities on LinkedIn. Want to learn more? Check out my post about growing your SEM career with LinkedIn.

Bad Idea 5: Stay Away From Affiliate Marketing

Jobs in search engine marketing are tough. We’re in a high powered career path with a ton of responsibility. When you come home, you just want to kick back, watch Jersey Shore, and then go to sleep. I’m here to say, however, that this is a mistake. Want to keep your edge? You need to learn new skills within other areas of online marketing. What’s the best way to do this? Invest at least a small percentage of your spare time learning all about affiliate marketing.

Want to learn more? Check out my post about how pay per click jobs are changing and then my review of EWA Private Network. Then, get out there and sign up for a great affiliate network, such as EWA.

Bad Idea 6: Avoid Challenging Yourself

Most people in the pay per click search engine marketing field have aggressive, “Type A” personalities. They want to get promoted quickly and grow within the industry. If you’re more of a steady player, this can become a real challenge because the world will pass you by. If you’re looking for a steady career path, SEM may not be your thing. Want to get ahead? Get out there and challenge yourself today! There are many ways to do this such as public speaking, learning new technologies, or simply diving head first into the most difficult analysis ever!

Bad Idea 7: Ignore The Latest Trends and News

I’m a huge fan of SEM careers because they provide a direct avenue to partner closely with your executive team. When you’re personally responsible for millions upon millions of dollars in marketing spend, you can bet your senior team is going to be involved. Now, what types of questions are you going to get from your senior executive team? Often, they’ll ask about the latest news and trends (and what you’re doing to react). If you don’t know this stuff, you’re not going to instill much confidence in your executive team. And, if your executive team doesn’t have much confidence in you, you’re well on your way to sabotaging your own SEM career!

Bad Idea 8: Avoid Working Long Hours

I’ve said it over and over: SEM is a high powered career path. You’re going to grow quickly and the sky is truly the limit. With the power comes responsibility. You need to be ready to work long hours and truly “own” the campaigns you’re managing. Now, I think there’s also a question of perception here. If you’re super efficient like myself and leverage SEM automation to the max (see idea 3 above), it’s totally possible to work 8-9 hour days if you’re quick to respond to emails after hours and you also keep close track of the numbers at all times (see idea 2 above).

Let’s look at this from another perspective. I recommend staying away from the SEM career unless you truly love this stuff. Now, if you truly love this stuff it will be really easy to work those long hours!

Bad Idea 9: Don’t Put Much Thought Into Picking Your Employer

I’ve been extremely careful about picking my employers, and made it big in online marketing because of stock options in really powerful companies such as NexTag, QuinStreet, and Inflection. This was all intentional – I exercised great precision in picking my employers and viewed them as investments. If you put a lot of thought into choosing the right employer you could be sitting on a gold mine of stock options!

Bad Idea 10: Be a Poor Team Player

To close out, I want to highlight the importance of being a team player. Search engine marketing is a team sport. Search engine marketing often presents the unique opportunity to manage teams at a very early age within your overall career. Be a team player and it will truly take you places. If you’re not a team player, I recommend avoiding this career. Want to learn more? I recommend checking out my online marketing people management tips.

Image of Banana Peel © iStockPhoto – LuisPortugal

Buy Keyword Winner & I’ll Review Your Blog

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 2 8

I just wrote my Keyword Winner Review yesterday and couldn’t be more excited about the launch of this amazing keyword research plugin. My personal friend and SEO guru Dan Lew poured everything he’s got into version 2.0 of Keyword Winner and it shows. Here’s the deal: I can’t thank all of you enough, my loyal readers. As a thank you for everything, I want to offer PPC Ian readers a special deal.

Keyword Winner

If you purchase Keyword Winner 2.0 through my affiliate link, I will review your blog (or website) for free. It’s that simple. You will be reviewed right here on PPC Ian with exposure of my thousands upon thousands of monthly visitors. I really enjoy these review posts because the sites I end up reviewing are always super interesting and relevant to PPC Ian readers!

Here’s the crazy part! My friend, Daniel Lew, stands behind his SEO WordPress plugin so much that he’s offering a 60 day money back guarantee. Let’s say you purchase Keyword Winner via my affiliate link, but then return the plugin. I will still review you, no questions asked! I’m that confident in Keyword Winner as the must-have SEO plugin of 2011!

Specifics Behind My Keyword Winner Offer

You may remember a while back, I ran a blog comment contest. The winners of the contest got their blogs reviewed here on PPC Ian for free. Check out my review of these awesome online marketing blogs. This time, I’m going to do the exact same thing. I’ll review everyone in the same post, with each blog (or website) getting its own section. That said, the reviews are going to be a bit shorter (probably one or two paragraphs each), depending on how many people take me up on this offer.

My offer this time will span the entire month of March! That’s right, you have between now and March 31st to purchase Keyword Winner. After this month is over, I will write the review post within the first week of April.

Let’s say you want to purchase Keyword Winner via my affiliate link but don’t want your blog reviewed. No worries at all, this is an optional bonus! Last, I will only be reviewing “family friendly” websites.

I want to sincerely thank you for following my blog and wish you all the best! Purchased Keyword Winner via my affiliate link and want your blog reviewed here on PPC Ian? Just shoot me an email with your blog’s URL and also your ClickBank order/receipt number.

Images in this post © KeywordWinner.com

Dan Lew’s Keyword Winner 2.0 Rocks!

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 1 20

Today’s an exciting day because Dan Lew’s Keyword Winner version 2.0 is officially available for purchase. I’m here to say that Keyword Winner is the #1 must have SEO WordPress plugin of 2011. I’ve been leveraging Keyword Winner 2.0 for about a week now (Dan Lew has graciously allowed me to be a pre-launch beta tester) and must say that I can’t live without this tool. Today, I’m going to review Keyword Winner, from the standpoint of someone that lives keywords each and every day (I’m a pay per click professional and buy keywords on search engines for a living).

Optimize Title Tags Instantly With Keyword Winner

Keyword Winner

If you’ve been in online marketing for a while, you probably know the extreme importance of keyword rich titles. When it comes to ranking blog posts in search engines, it’s all about targeting the right “winning” keywords in your page title (both the meta title and also the actual post title on your blog).

Back several years ago, you could just insert high volume keywords in your title and capture tons of traffic. However, these days there already exist hundreds (if not thousands) of pages that already have the high volume keywords. So, what’s the best strategy? Really, it comes down to finding the highest volume search terms that are relevant to your post, yet have the least amount of competition. When you leverage these keywords in your title, you will rank rapidly in search engines (usually within a matter of hours) and will receive great traffic. While this process may take hours if done manually, Keyword Winner automates it, for a one-time fee of only $47!

How Keyword Winner 2.0 Works

So, how does Keyword Winner work? It’s quite slick. After installation (which takes only 5 minutes), your WordPress post dashboard is transformed with new functionality. After you type in a few keywords in the title area and click “Get Keyword Winner Suggestions”, the plugin will return back possible keywords to leverage in your blog title. It looks at many factors including the:

Number of inbound links to rank on the suggested keyword (data gathered from Yahoo)
Overall popularity of the suggested phrase (returned by Google Insights)
Number of competing pages for the suggested phrase (returned by Google)
Monthly search volume trends (returned by Google)

Then, it ranks the suggested phrases with red, yellow, and green color codes. Green phrases are the best because they’re highly searched terms with little competition (meaning, you will rank right away and get some serious traffic). Red phrases are the worst because the competition is too high to easily rank. After you see all of the suggestions, it’s easy to pick the best one and then turn it into the perfect title for your post.

Keyword Winner 2.0 also offers many other great features. Two of my favorite are a little button that allows you to add the suggested keywords as tags, and also the fact that it color codes the posts on my the posts summary page so I instantly know which ones are keyword optimized and which ones are not.

Keyword Winner 2.0 Is Cheap

Now, theoretically I could do everything I just explained to you manually. But, that would involve opening multiple windows and spending hours upon hours contemplating post titles each time I want to blog. However, at only $47, Keyword Winner 2.0 saves hours of time and puts everything right there in my WordPress post dashboard. That’s why Keyword Winner 2.0 is my #1 rated SEO plugin for 2011.

Whether you’re in the corporate world of search engine marketing and manage blogs for your company (if you’re a direct advertiser) or manage blogs for clients (if you’re an agency), or if you’re an affiliate marketer/blogger, you cannot afford to miss out on this essential plugin. Your time is just too valuable.

Dan Lew Is a Great Guy

So, who’s behind this awesome WordPress SEO plugin? Dan Lew – a professional blogger, affiliate marketer, SEO champion, and personal friend. I’m here to say that Dan is a great guy and I’ve really enjoyed collaborating with him on SEO and paid search over the past year. He’s a true expert in our industry and his personal and professional reputation is at stake with this epic product release. That’s exactly why Dan is pleased to offer a 60 day money back guarantee! Like I said, there’s no good reason not to have this plugin if you’re trying to drive SEO results with your blog.

My Special Tip For Using Keyword Winner

To close out today, I want to offer my own special tip for leveraging Keyword Winner to the max. I recommend spending a good five minutes typing in different keyword phrases, scouring the Keyword Winner suggestions, and then picking your favorite phrase (and crafting a complete title around it). However, during all this time, your WordPress permalink will get set to the first keyword you type into the title field, even if it’s not the final post title (which it rarely will be). My suggestion is to update your permalink to match your final post title after you’ve done all your research and tweaking. Just as important as the post title itself, you will rank much better if your permalink is completely optimized to match the title (with dashes between the words).

Ready to start “winning” the game of SEO? Take it from someone that buys keywords for a living: There is nothing more important in online marketing than picking the best, most relevant keywords to complement the message you are trying to get across to your readers.

Link Building By Being Social

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 28 8

PPC Ian has been all over the press lately. In fact, I’ve been featured on three high profile blogs within the last week. I’ll get into the specific press mentions next, but first want to highlight my link building strategy. I’m a huge fan of this particular link building strategy because it’s a passive one. And, at the end of the day, there’s a real premium on my time (and I’m sure yours as well) so anything that can happen passively for me is truly rewarding.

My Passive Link Building Strategy

Basically, I’ve gone to all of the big online marketing blogs and have become personal friends with the bloggers. I’ve done this by sending direct emails to these high profile bloggers and also via my blog commentating strategy. As a result of being social, I have become part of the community. Because I’m part of the community and all these online marketing bloggers know me on a personal level, they’re happy to link back to me when I post something particularly noteworthy.

This is the real reason that Google values inbound links. They’re a measure of what others think of you and your blog. How can you get others to like you and your blog? Get out there, be social, and make friends! Want to learn more about this strategy? I recommend checking out my recent blog post about PR Driving Great SEO Results.

This Week’s Links

So, where did I get featured this week? It all started off with ZK’s Web Traffic ROI. I’m a huge fan of ZK and his blog. If you’re big on blog commentating like myself, there’s no doubt that you’ve run into ZK. He’s an absolute expert online marketer and one of the top commentators on the Internet. ZK discovered my recent series of six free videos from my Stanford GSB presentation and wrote a post all about my videos. (As a side note, you can view my free videos in the following posts: videos 1 and 2, videos 3 and 4, videos 5 and 6).

Now, just being featured on ZK’s Web Traffic ROI was a huge win on its own. However, my success did not stop there. Because I’m well connected on Facebook and posted a link to ZK’s post, my friend Owen Frager from The Frager Factor picked up and recapped ZK’s post on his own blog. This is a true honor, Owen is a true heavy hitter when it comes to online marketing and blogging. After all, his blog is one of the largest on the Internet.

My third success happened today! My friend Eric from My 4 Hour Workweek wrote a truly epic blog post about 142+ ways to make money online. I highly recommend checking out this blog post, it’s going to be one of the best of 2011 in my opinion. I have become friends with Eric and comment regularly on his blog, and Eric was kind enough to mention me as one of his favorite online marketing blogs in this truly epic blog post. Now, this gets even sweeter because Eric’s blog post went truly viral and made the first page of Delicious today. Cool stuff! An interesting fact: Eric won the blog commenting contest I ran on PPC Ian a while back and I reviewed his blog since he was one of the winners!

New Look & Feel For Google Sitelinks

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 27 10

I just searched for my brand name (PPC Ian) on Google and noticed that my organic sitelinks have a brand new look and feel! Check out the screenshot at the end of this post. I’m not sure if this is a beta test or a permanent change, but one thing’s for sure: the new sitelinks rock!

Google Organic Sitelinks: New Versus Old

You may remember from my post Happy Birthday To PPC Ian that I just started seeing sitelinks for PPC Ian around October, 2010. As you can see in the image in that post, the sitelinks were just links with no surrounding text. Moreover, I just had four of them.

More Brand Name Traffic

The new sitelinks that I just noticed today are much more pronounced. There are eight links in total and there is descriptive text below each of the links. My organic listing occupies a lot more space in general. Whenever someone types in my brand name, I’m going to capture a lot more traffic because this enhanced listing with the new style sitelinks really pops. Even better, many of my organic sites that never had sitelinks before now do. With this change, I believe Google is also displaying sitelinks for more sites.

Between the new AdSense formats, the new AdWords mega titles, and these new organic sitelinks, Google is making serious progress through testing. Awesome work, Google!

Pay Per Click Jobs Are Changing

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 19 12

I’ve been in the corporate world of pay per click search engine marketing since 2004. Back in those days, things were quite different. There was no SEM automation, no AdWords editor, and SEM overall was quite manual. In fact, back in those days it took new search marketing employees at least a month or so to start adding serious value to their employer. These days, however, things have advanced so much. New employees are adding value almost instantly and the leverage in our industry has advanced tremendously. As a result, PPC jobs are changing.

They’re changing in two main ways. First and foremost, advanced analytics, bidding, and testing are becoming mandatory. Second, it’s absolutely imperative these days to go beyond PPC and add value in other areas such as SEO, social media, and email marketing. Today, I’m going to share some quick win tips to embrace these exciting changes.

Tip 1: It’s All About SEM Automation

Change Ahead

I’ve talked about this point quite a bit here on PPC Ian so I’m going to keep my first tip relatively short. It’s important these days to bid more effectively than ever, take your analytics to the next level, and manage your campaigns with precision. Why? Back in 2004, the lack of competition created a scenario of somewhat easy money. These days, you not only have to fight to win the PPC game, but you need to prove to yourself, your team, and your company that you’re doing everything possible to optimize your PPC program to the highest possible degree.

How do you accomplish this? Easy! It’s all about getting the right systems and technologies in place. Want to learn about making the best possible purchase decisions for your SEM platforms? Check out my SEM automation buyer’s guide whitepaper. It’s automation like this that will free up your time to diversify your skillset into other areas such as SEO, social media, and email marketing.

Tip 2: Become An Affiliate Marketer, Today!

I wrote about this topic when I first launched PPC Ian with a post titled moonlighting will accelerate your SEM career. I’m more confident in this philosophy than ever. To be successful in affiliate marketing, you must be an incredibly savvy marketer. You must challenge your intelligence, test wild new strategies, and push the boundaries on online marketing. Simply put, affiliate marketing is the education of a lifetime. The education I have gained from my blogging and portfolio of over 80 SEO websites has been truly invaluable. I’ve been able to take this education back to the corporate environment and perfect PPC operations while taking on major responsibilities within other areas of online marketing.

So, how can you get started? I took the affiliate plunge back in 2007. I basically started from scratch and learned as I went. In this day and age, I’m a huge believer in the affiliate network route. A good affiliate network can truly jump start your affiliate marketing career. You want to make sure to have the best offers, the best payouts, and of course expert advice and mentorship. That’s precisely where industry leading affiliate networks such as EWA Private Network and Blam Ads step in! So, what are you waiting for? Go sign up today!

Tip 3: Read Everything You Can Get Your Hands On

To close out today, I want to underscore the amazing wealth of information out there. If you want to get ahead in the corporate world of SEM, it’s imperative to read all of cutting edge material about PPC, SEO, Facebook, social media, domaining, email marketing, display advertising, and more. These days all areas of online marketing are intersecting and you must become an expert in everything.

One thing that’s really important, in my opinion, is to purchase eBooks and online courses that will take your education to the next level. Sometimes, the best information costs a little money (not much, but some). The leverage on your investment, however, is so much that it’s a no-brainer. Two must-haves include Jonathan Volk’s Facebook Ads Guide and Chris Guthrie’s Niche Profit Course.