March 24, 2008

How to generate exhaustive keyword combinations?

When creating an exhaustive keyword list for your AdWords / PPC campaigns, you might face a tedious job of creating all possible combinations by joining two words / phrases to cover the keyword that your prospect might key in. This can be a very frustrating experience.

Recently, I sumbled upon this website: http://www.imscripts.com/keywords

It can generate these keyword combinations in less than a second.

So if the keywords are:

And the cities are:

  • kolkata
  • chennai
  • delhi

This tool will create these keywords:
 
web design kolkata
kolkata web design
web design company kolkata
kolkata web design company
web design chennai
chennai web design
web design company chennai
chennai web design company
web design chennai
chennai web design
web design company chennai
chennai web design company
 
So you could get valid and useful combinations!

Now think how much time this tool can save when you have to make a combination of 100s of keywords with 10-20 different "add on words" or "cities". So use this tool whenever you need to create the combinations!
 
This tool can also help by adding the {} and " " operators of Google Adwords if you want.

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Sky-high bids on Adwords! Do they work?

The bids on AdWords are soaring to new heights everyday. Some advertisers are even shelling out up to $10 per click. So, naturally the question arises - Is this complete madness or is there any logic behind such aggressive advertising?

To me, it does make some sense to bid aggressively if you have the right strategy in place. These are two scenarios you can consider:

1) Every client you acquire, on an average spends $12000 with you in a year. In this case, you do not mind spending 10% of the revenue as customer acquisition cost. Therefore you can comfortably bid $10 per click (provided you have a site which can convert 1 out of 120 visitors). Thus, looking at a lifetime value of a customer makes it a good investment.

2) If you have mastered the art of persuasion (or have hired a master of persuasion), and have come up with a website with converts well (visitor > customer conversion), every visitor you are driving to your website is equivalent to revenue :) . So go ahead, rock the boat and bid out all your competitors. You will get more customers and will also have lower customer acquisition cost. What more do you want?

So, expensive keywords bidding do work, if they are backed with high lifetime customer value and/or higher conversion on the website. And yes, those Internet marketing experts are not insane! In fact most of them are very smart.

So bid smartly!

 

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March 21, 2008

New kind of website spam

I just made a blog post - Buying and selling websites.

Within minutes, I got a trackback. I was a bit puzzled at the lightening speed. I thought - how can someone read my entire article and blogged about it in less than a minute! I followed the link and found a new kind of spam, which is spreading rapidly on Internet, making life difficult for Internet users, Google and Adwords advertisers.

Here is the site which automatically picked up the post (courtsey - aggregators), modified the author to some ‘Wesley Warren’ and snapped up few lines from the post to link it to my blog for further reading. A smart blackhat SEO tactic for sure. This is a new technique to create keyword dense pages to attract better rankings and make "free money" by inserting Adwords everywhere as the only exit route from the page. These spam sites are bound to get high click-through rates because we all are lazy to type in a seperate web address in the browser address bar.

Google has to get rid of this new spam to throw up quality results, as these spam sites does not provide any valuable (or unique) content, but still escape the duplicate content filter of Google. I think it should not be very complicated for the Google experts since this time the duplicate content is in "organized data" i.e. blogs instead of "unorganized data".

I hope this nuisance is sorted out ASAP!

 

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December 20, 2006

Knowledge capsules - Fast start kits

In this age of information overload, it is nice to see some “read it - implement it” kind of quick start guides at http://www.faststartkits.com/

These guides are easy-to-read and are only 2-3 pages long. Most of them do not need you to have any background knowledge of the subject it covers as they are targeted towards newbie.

I personally used the Press Release Fast Start Kit and was able to come up with a professional press release within few hours on our “dedicated hiring model”.

And yes, they are all free to download without any registration.

Keep it up - Arun!

 

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