I had a big hairy audacious goal for advertisement quality scoring, measurement and improvement here at QualityScores.com. The analytics side of the product was in the pre alpha stages and definitely showing promise. That product was housed here…and it is still here at QualityScores.com. It is simply under new ownership and management.

I couldn’t have asked for a more win/win/win situation than this. I’m incredibly blessed to be where I am right now but it is always hard to have to make the choice to cut a great project out in order to focus on other dreams.

That is why this is bittersweet. It is bitter because I don’t have the capacity for such a major undertaking when I am already on another project just as big, in my opinion. It is bitter because I finally came to the realization that to make the biggest impact in the space, I had to stop hanging on and let this go to a group who can make something big happen with it. It is sweet because I can now focus on my current project(s) without straying from those projects to push this along ever so slightly each time I touched it.

Quality can not wait a moment longer. Advertisers NEED the toolset behind QualityScores.com YESTERDAY!

The sweet part also comes in knowing that I am making the right choice for me, my family and my future. It also comes in knowing that the team I sold to is paying a fair price for the deal and I have wanted to work with Stuart Draper and his team for a long time. While I don’t get to work with them too much, I have committed to blogging a few times over the course of a year while striving to help them grow this asset by coaching a little here and there – and that is very exciting to me! It will be sweet to see this take off!

As for what I am doing now: I am focused on growing a business named Branded Holdings. We buy, build and brand million dollar exact-match domains (EMDs.) All of the domains are in-house and part of our portfolio. It’s a lot of fun!

I will be blogging more on my personal site and would love to connect with you there: jameszol.com.

Thank you & I’ll be catching up with ya’ll again soon!

The pre-alpha version of the app will be a “qualitative ppc management dashboard”.

Qualitative PPC Management Dashboard

At a glance, you should be able to visualize and drill down into your AdWords account from a quality score perspective. The goal is to help you identify quality problems in an account so you can address them as needed or according to your business goals.

Fine Tuning Reports and the pre-Alpha UI

We’re finalizing default dashboard views right now, fine tuning reports and navigation/drilldown ability, and striving to enhance the user interface so it is somewhat intuitive and useful out of the box.

I’m anxiously looking forward to releasing this and soliciting your feedback sometime in the next few weeks!

A lot has changed since I wrote those blog posts. One thing that hasn’t is my opinion that certain things should be largely automated by machines. We just aren’t as smart or as fast as machines can be when managing thousands of keywords…there’s no way around that. Your argument is already invalid.

A few of the changes that occurred since I promised to write but didn’t write, in no particular order:

- WebTrends partnered with Marin Software

- RKG acquired Audette Media

- Marin Software raises a lot of money and is the indisputable leader as far as annual ad spend managed by their software

- Optimine becomes a serious contender

- A lot of others join in the ppc software space, from those targeting small business to quality scores and more…

- Adobe acquires Omniture & Efficient Frontier

- Adobe’s Omniture Search Center partners with Optimine

- Acquisio acquires ClickEquations from, and a partnership with, Channel Intelligence who originally acquired Click Equations months before selling

- Acquisio joins the fully integrated paid media platform game

- SearchForce launches automated campaign builder

You get the idea that this is an active space for some reason. Could it be the billions in ad spend flowing all over the place online?

I know I’m missing a lot of influential and relevant players in my list…but these are the ones I have tried to keep up with and seem to recommend to agencies, advertisers and others more than any others. If I’m missing some, it is largely because I don’t know about them or haven’t experienced their products or don’t know who’s behind them like I do the companies listed above.

Without further ado, here are my personal recommendations to any advertiser or agency looking at automating or scaling bid management:

(Enterprise) If you’re looking for more of an agency style partnership and expert service, then I highly recommend RKG for their in-house custom engineering, attribution technology and raw truly-automated bidding power. If I had a budget when I was shopping for a truly automated solution, I would have picked RKG. As soon as I have the budget, I’m going to pick RKG.

(Enterprise) If you’re looking for supplemental software to handle bid automation, then I highly recommend Optimine or Marin Software (has a “Pro” solution in addition to Enterprise). I’m a subscriber at Marin and if it weren’t for them providing such stellar service through a few rough down trends, I would probably hop over to Optimine pretty quickly to give them a shot because the guys behind Optimine are undoubtedly just as caring as the people at Marin Software. The bottom line is that the technology at each are above par, I have no doubt about it. I have also been a subscriber to Acquisio (also has a Pro side to them in addition to Enterprise) and their team is amazing & caring, their technology is great too and I would stand behind their product as well. I have not experienced, nor do I know much about, SearchForce but an agency filled with people I trust and respect recommends or uses SearchForce on several of their clients and that’s good enough for me to put them in this recommendation list.

(Non-Enterprise mostly) If the above options are out of your budget at the moment, then take a good look at Trada for agency-like crowd-sourced manual ppc management ($3k/mo minimum ad spend required last time I checked), WordWatch for supplemental bid help, and Clickable (maybe…I thought their pricing was public a while ago, now it appears to be hidden.)

(Non-Enterprise and/or Enterprise) If you manage everything in-house, then you should take a look at these supplemental tools for analyzing a variety of aspects of any account no matter the software you currently use: CertifiedKnowledge (I’m a subscriber), WordStream, Gazel (Excel Plugin), AdWords Editor, Microsoft adCenter Desktop, Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (Excel Plugin), and so many more.

I know I’m forgetting a lot of highly valuable services in this list…

What do you recommend? Please tell us who the solution is for too…Enterprise, Pro, Small biz, Agency, etc.

1) Optimize for clicks: show ads expected to provide more clicks (this is the default setting for new campaigns)

2) Optimize for conversions: Show ads expected to provide more conversions

3) Rotate: Show ads more evenly

You can get to these settings in AdWords under any Campaign -> Settings -> Advanced Settings section -> Ad Delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping -> Ad rotation (click “Edit” and you should see something similar to the picture below. Click the picture for a bigger version.)

Why I Always Choose Optimize for Clicks or Optimize for Conversions (and NOT Rotate)

I have been running my campaigns on either Optimize for Clicks or Optimize for Conversions settings for years. It can be hard to simplify or strive to back business metrics into clicks or conversions but it’s well worth the effort, in my opinion.

Optimize for Clicks

Optimizing for clicks let’s Google automatically choose the ad that will produce the highest click-through rates (CTR) in the near term.

When uploading a new advertisement, Google will automatically test that ad with limited impressions over time to see if it will produce a better CTR than the current winning advertisement.

I love this option for rapidly testing ads; not to mention that it helps my quality scores and gives me a competitive edge.

Rapidly testing ads under this setting is easy – and this is my primary reason for NEVER using Rotate: Pause the current winning ad, clone it and unpause the clone – test your new ad against that clone and Google will give each ad a fair shot at producing a better CTR before choosing the most relevant ad as a winner. Google makes you more competitive in the marketplace by not having to wait on you to revisit the test to pick a winner by CTR. In other words, Google is giving an advertiser traffic that their competitors likely didn’t receive by automatically running the advertiser’s winning ad more heavily than other active ads in their ad group.

One should only choose this option if they are confident that the audience arriving through that campaign will satisfy the business goals of the advertiser regardless of the volume of traffic.

For example, I am confident that my landing pages for a specific niche should convert at 12% given a specific campaign’s existing keyword list, bids, ads and historical metrics. It is safe for me to drive as much traffic as I can to that website because the business metrics for this campaign are stable at any traffic volume the campaign can give me.

Optimize for Conversions

Optimizing for conversions let’s Google automatically choose the ad that will produce the highest conversion rate in the near term.

When uploading a new advertisement, Google will automatically test that ad with limited impressions over time to see if it will produce a better conversion rate than the current winning advertisement.

Testing ads under this setting is easy too – but depending on your conversion metrics or tracking, it may take a little bit longer to determine the winning ad: Pause the current winning ad, clone it and unpause the clone – test your new ad against that clone and Google will give each ad a fair shot at producing a better conversion rate before choosing a winner. Google can drive more converting traffic to your website quickly by driving traffic through an ad that is more likely to turn into a conversion. Letting Google do this automatically is smart because conversions are not lost in the hustle if an ad test is on Rotate and simply waiting for you to revisit and pick a winner yourself. Why would anybody want to lose conversions to a competitor?

One should only choose this option if they are able to prove value to the business for every conversion they are tracking through AdWords.

Rotate (Please do NOT choose this option!)

I don’t recommend this option unless you have the time or the technology to do this in a more efficient way than Google can with the above options, or you have a different business metric that you’re striving to optimize for – for example: a low bounce rate/higher engagement, profit per impression (PPI), or other metrics.

Most advertisers should NOT use this option for a few reasons:

- Waiting for a person to pick a winner is inefficient. One will either lose clicks or conversions if they are unable to pick a winner based on CTR or conversion rates.

- Most advertisers are not optimizing for PPI or other metrics. Even if one is optimizing toward PPI, money could be lost to costs due to lower quality scores on ads that might produce decent PPI but lower volume traffic and conversions. There’s almost always going to be an opportunity cost…but if you’re optimizing toward PPI on Search Campaigns, you likely already considered or tested the alternatives.

- AdWords recently decided to optimize this setting toward clicks automatically after 30 days. You might as well Optimize for Clicks now if you’re going to Rotate. Or you better carve out plenty of time in your routine to review hundreds, thousands or millions of ads each month – depending on how big your AdWords account(s) are.

You Have a Choice

It’s up to you as an advertiser or business owner to determine which metrics or settings will work best for your business model. Currently, AdWords gives us 3 options: Optimize for Clicks, Optimize for Conversions or Rotate.

I recommend running with Optimize for Clicks or Optimize for Conversions. Make either of those options work for your business and I’m confident that you will be on your way towards a high quality, highly relevant, and highly profitable Google AdWords account.

Thoughts?

Alan Bleiweiss gave me permission to put together an Epic Dinner at SMX West 2012 because he won’t make the show this season. We’ll miss him! We’ll try to make it EPIC w/out him!

Here are the details that I have so far:

We’re continuing the tradition started by Alan last year, holding the dinner at Morton’s The Steakhouse. 1.5 blocks away from the Convention Center.

Time: 6:30pm

Date: Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The price is $100. You get to choose 1 item from each section below included in that price:

Salad
Caesar Salad

Entree
Filet
Salmon
Chicken Christopher

Sides
Garlic Green beans
Mashed Potatoes

Dessert
New York Cheesecake
Chocolate Mousse

Please note: If you want Lobster, add $25 to the price for a total of $125.

If you’re attending, please send payments ($100 for regular menu, $125 if you’re going for the lobster – prices are per person) to james@qualityw00tscores.com with your full name & Twitter handle if you have one.

Alternative payment method: you can pay in cash at the dinner, but I highly recommend the PayPal option for tracking and security.

All proceeds go directly to the restaurant.

Price includes a generous gratuity for the restaurant servers and taxes for the food, it does not include drinks. Drinks are covered by you.

I currently only reserved for 20 people but can make changes up to 48 hours in advance for more people so spread the word!

Join a bunch of great web marketers for an Epic Dinner in San Jose!

If you invested in bid management software within the past few years, chances are high that you were probably duped in one key area: automation.

Now, before you think I’m about to split hairs here…let’s walk through a few basics to make sure we’re on the same page…and…wait…who am I kidding? This might make you mad – or it will make ppc software companies mad so I suppose it really might split a few hairs.

Define:automation. <— This link takes you to google’s indexed list of definitions for the word ‘automation’

The definition I think fits best for what I’m talking about is this one:

“the condition of being automatically operated or controlled; ‘automation increases productivity’”

My main argument in this post is simply this: One should have little to no adjustments to make themselves if a software solution claims to be ‘automated.’ One would simply have to provide any business metric (or combination of business metrics) – revenue, cpc, cpa, ROAS, margin or anything really…and the solution/software provider should customize their automated technology to meet or exceed those goals.

Myth: Most PPC Bid Management Software IS Automated

I spent a lot of time in Q1 this year researching over 2 dozen ppc software companies that provide bid management functionality within their software – or it’s the core to their solution.

Almost every single company claims to:

• Automate bid management entirely with pre-created rules that you choose to set per keyword/campaign/adgroup/whatever (in some cases calling them ‘algorithms’ that bid to position, cpc, etc)
• Give you full control to change bids or create custom rules for automated bid management
• Automated portfolio based bidding that is totally controlled by you

I dare you to go look at every ppc bid management solution out there and find one that does not claim ‘bid management automation’ in some way. I’m convinced that you won’t find a single one that is not claiming ‘automation’ as a feature/benefit to their solution…

A company that claims automation, while putting all of the control into a professional paid search manager’s hands, can’t really be considered automated at all!

WHY NOT?!?

Well…answer me a few questions…and you’ll get the idea…

Can a normal professional paid search manager understand the nuances behind advanced predictive statistical models and create/apply bid rules that match those models with any significant degree of confidence?

Can said paid search manager understand the algorithms and math behind the programming that manages the (custom or not) bid management rules/methods?

Can said paid search manager rapidly compare and model today’s results from yesterday’s results, same date/last year’s results, same date/last month’s results, and other date OR day specific results relevant to that day’s bids and adjust bid rules accordingly – even through sales, vacations, 24/7?

Now that you have answered those questions honestly…let’s run through a scenario on a very very small scale:

1 non-competitive (let’s say…5 advertising competitors), uber low search volume, location based keyword in an ad group

2 text advertisements in the ad group

$1 to $2 bid range

And we’ll have to agree on a few things:

Ad position is irrelevant to conversion rate

Each competitor has the same cpc range

Goals are different for each competitor

Each competitor tries to day part by day or week or whenever they feel like manually adjusting their bids

Ok, there are probably a few things I am leaving out…like the dynamic fluctuation of competitor’s bid patterns and consumer’s search patterns; but, I want to run through the basic math of the sheer number of variations to consider in this scenario where I believe manual bid managers can not accurately predict results and implement changes within a decent amount of time day in and day out:

1 keyword x 2 ads = 2 tests, right? You have one keyword with one ad…against the same keyword and the other ad. Of course you’re still following, because that’s easy!

Now…because we have 2 ad tests running in a non-competitive environment, it might take several weeks to accrue enough impressions/clicks/conversions/’x metric here’ to manually conclude an ad a winner and write another ad to test against the winning ad. Make sense?

Let’s make this problem a little more complex because you agreed that your competitors are probably changing their bids at regular increments via day parting to some degree. You will probably need to adjust your bids too when your competitors adjust theirs or vice versa. Remember your bid range is $1 to $2, or 100 pennies:

1 keyword x 2 ads x 100 penny bid range = 200 tests…a fairly large multivariate test, wouldn’t you agree?

I am confident that you, Mr/Ms manual ppc manager, will be adjusting bids every once in a while without much consideration to the bid change you made several months ago because you’re typically just concerned with the past day’s/week’s/month’s cpc/conversion performance and the last 4 or 5 bid adjustments you made. And some advertisers seem to get by with acceptable results that way.

Consider this: What if your competitor is using a real automated solution that uses an adaptive technique similar to that used on landing page MVTs. (I really like hi conversion’s illustrations when describing their testing technology. Please replace their word ‘conversions’ with other metrics that could be used in low volume spaces – maybe EPC or eCPC.)

With this adaptive/automated technology on their side, your competitors will beat you to writing new ads more consistently and frequently. And writing new ads should naturally lead to improving their target metrics more consistently and frequently.

If you agree with the above scenario, then why, as an industry in general, do we believe most bid management software companies are really automated? Is it because we have been conditioned to accept the definition of ‘automation’ to be “set and create your own bid rules or use ours and the bids manage themselves but you are always in control?”

These alleged ‘automated’ solutions typically don’t employ predictive/rapid statistical modeling in their algorithms. These ‘automations’ are almost always tied to an ad position, cpa, cpc or other easy to calculate average over a specific (or custom) date range!

Manual control is a common theme among these ‘automated’ solutions. This manual control negates automation given the definition I referenced earlier.

Too much human control of a robot creates a lot of room for errors…especially when one is relying simply on rules or portfolio based solutions that are easy to understand and normally consist of using rolling averages to make bid changes.

Bid management is way more complicated than rolling averages!

Fact: Truly Automated, Self-Learning PPC Bid Management Technology EXISTS Today and it Trumps Manual and Pseudo-automated PPC Bid Management Software 24 Hours/day, 7 Days/week!

In my research I found less than 5 companies offering truly automated, self-learning bid management technology across the major search engines (at the time of my research these were Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s properties.)

The case studies found at each of these companies are truly impressive and you get a great idea about the real scalability, efficiency, modeling and metrics that these companies can optimize toward successfully.

A few key characteristics of these companies that offer true, automated, self-learning technology are:

1. They employ or work closely with a well qualified team of PhD holding mathematicians and PhD holding statisticians.
2. They have to (or should) manage their complex technology with strategy direction from an advertiser’s in-house paid search team or agency. Remember, this technology is so complex that it requires PhDs to help program and develop and improve it…most pro paid search people aren’t even close to that caliber of math because we’re marketers!
3. They should NOT replace an advertiser’s team nor should they encourage it. The biggest mistake with bringing in these expensive, high cost automated companies is letting go of the pro team that can and should manage the automated tech company relationship/strategy/creative portion of search marketing.
4. The technology is so advanced that it should be highly adaptive/self-learning toward cycles, Holidays, trends, sales promotions, and more. In some cases – i.e. sales promotions – communication is going to be key between the advertiser and the technology company team.
5. They should have a fully functioning, transparent reporting system that may allow a very limited degree of control…for example, you might have a few branded terms or a campaign that you absolutely will never ever automate to custom metrics so you can keep it out of the pool of automated campaigns. (Yes, manual ppc management MAY be required at this point if you really really want to do it yourself…)
6. They should allow control in the sense that you can still go into your AdWords, Microsoft, Y!SM accounts and change things manually yourself…but they should adamantly request that you never ever do that because it will mess up the millions of constant tests and statistics running through the automated solution and that could lead to massive losses/big problems. If you must do it, provide adequate advance notice to the tech company so they can prepare and perhaps even withdraw certain data based on your manual adjustments…
7. Their sales copy is freaking annoying and as vague as possible because they have no clue how to describe their technology due to the dilution of the definition of ‘automation’ by all other pseudo-automated bid management software in the marketplace.
8. They’re cost prohibitive for advertisers spending <$100 thousand per month.

So what are advertisers spending less than $100,000/mo supposed to do to compete with this insanely awesome sounding technology?

I guess you’ll have to settle for pseudo-automated software…while I might argue that one should go manual to $100k and skip the pseudo-stuff if possible because pseudo-automation leaves so much room for error, bugs and misunderstanding. In my mind it is more risky to adopt pseudo-tech than it is to wait until you can scale to using real advanced tech.

I wanted to cover the solutions I might pick for advertisers spending under $100,000/mo in this post…but I’ll cover a few companies in my next post because this one is getting too long! Time to wrap it up!

What is Truly Automated, Adaptive PPC Bid Management Technology?

The only technology that should ever call itself automated is the one that puts the entire bid/testing/learning process into a position of largely “being automatically operated or controlled”…meaning little to no direct input (bid changes) from a human. One acceptable input would be sharing business strategies, promotions, etc with the technology manager who would ‘move a few levers’ to adjust the technology accordingly. Another might be keyword expansion, writing new ads (the software should auto-pause poorly performing ads based on your business strategy/metrics!), organizing new ad groups, and more.

True automated, adaptive ppc bid management technology does not need bid rules input by a human – it simply needs business metrics to optimize and scale toward. This technology learns and optimizes along the way by performing complex predictive analyses that humans can’t even come close to doing at the same speed.

What do you think? Am I making sense regarding the differences between what I call ‘real bid automation’ versus what most ppc management software companies are claiming as ‘real bid automation’? Do you agree or disagree? Why?

PS – In my next post I’ll cover a list of the truly automated solutions I found + the pseudo-stuff I might consider using and one or two manual ppc management solutions to think about while you’re scaling your way toward the truly automated stuff.

We used massive custom spreadsheets (customized for each client! no ‘rubber stamp’ approach!) with rules that would tell us to move a bid up or down or change the ad copy or revise the ad group…it was really quite an amazing ppc management tool and I would often brag that we had tested a handful of ppc management software in the space only to outperform it manually every time!

That was before most web-based or desktop based ppc management software had extensive, customizable bid rules to the extent we had in our spreadsheets.

A Little Challenge

Recently, I was challenged to manually manage $7,000+ ad spend in one day ($200,000+/mo) while striving to maintain somewhat strict average cpc and cpa goals.

My initial thought was “piece of cake, this won’t take too much time so I can focus on other campaign and business metrics that I think will make a bigger impact on future ROI and the business itself.”

I ended up spending most of the day downloading stats into all of the Desktop Editors and utilizing the regular user interfaces at the search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft only) to strive to project what would happen 2 to 4 hours in advance because I knew that most stats reported were going to be behind by at least that much.

Here’s how it worked: Basically, you would raise a bid by 150% for an hour or two and your average will definitely be much higher for those two hours than it was prior to that bid change. Therefore, it would make sense to have to lower it before you even see the stats update for those two hours while studying past metrics and analytics for day parts that you think should help the overall volume of conversions while striving to maintain better than average costs per click for that specific day. Then you would go back to adjust to 85% of the original starting bid to continue the semi-intelligent day part based on your studies and continue your way hour by hour at a minimum to end the day with a hope that the next day proved you reached your average cpc/cpa goals the prior day! Wow that is a mouthful to…say…in your head…as you read those words…

Are you still with me? If not, don’t worry! I’m basically saying that rather than spend my time on important business metrics and letting software help me manage the tedious bid management…I spent my day barely studying historical data in time to make day part adjustments not just on a campaign level but on a keyword by keyword level too!

The Results of the Challenge

It wasn’t a waste of time because I DID hit the cpa/cpc goals (/sarcasm)…but I would have achieved a lot more for this advertiser than I did in that single day challenge if I didn’t have to spend so much time adjusting bids and making tweaks and paying minute by minute attention to where my averages were.

If you are managing any decent volume of ad spend manually…then I can almost guarantee that you are wasting your time and your employer needs a wake up call. Is it really efficient to pay an expert to try to do what a robot does for most of your competitors? Humans aren’t supposed to be robots! We’re intelligent! You’re intelligent! Should you really spend most of your time changing bids day in and day out? What value are you really bringing to a company if you do that?

Sure, your value in producing decent profits might be there…and you will know the accounts better than anybody…and you will be susceptible to lack of experimentation and unrecoverable errors…and your competitors are probably running circles around you with their fancy schmancy software…but hey, at least you’re profitable and you can grow spend and profits manually with the best of them.

Wow, manual ppc bid management is glorious!

7 Reasons Why Manual PPC Bid Management is Dead

1. While you’re adjusting bids manually, your competitors are writing and testing creative ad copy.

2. While you’re adjusting bids manually, your competitors are creating new landing pages to test and driving incremental improvements in conversion rates on the website.

3. While you’re adjusting bids manually, your competitors are collaborating with their designers and programmers to improve landing page speed, usability, and solving other bottleneck problems in the conversion process…improving conversions even more!

4. While you’re adjusting bids manually, your competitors are developing a strategy and mapping out future promotions/offers with their sales and marketing teams.

5. While you’re adjusting bids manually, your competitors are utilizing ppc management software to change bids for them – and not only that…

6. While you’re still adjusting your bids, your most advanced competitors are utilizing truly automated algorithms that perform millions (and even BILLIONS) of mini-tests between keywords and ads in every ad group and every campaign at every hour of every single day…and THAT technology is learning with statistical prediction models that your brain (and my brain) could never comprehend or test fast enough to compete with…and what’s spooky is that they’re accurate most of the time!

7. While you’re adjusting bids manually…your most advanced competitors who are using self-learning technology to manage theirs are scaling much faster than you can dream of it!

Seriously, all is totally lost for the manual ppc bid manager. I honestly don’t know why I was successful with reaching my goals with the advertiser described in the challenge above. Perhaps it is because I have been in the space for quite some time…instinct…I would love to believe that. Realistically, I’m inclined to think it was luck mixed with a little skill. Skill can only take you so far when you’re up against a robot that performs thousands of tests each day and you can only get in a manual dozen on a good day…

If you’re currently managing pay per click advertising manually, I recommend you start looking at software immediately. Not just any software though – you will want to look for (and encourage your company to purchase) true self-learning ppc management technology.

What do I mean by ‘true self-learning ppc management technology’?

I would love to tell you right now…but I’m going to have to ask you to tune in next week for the answer to that question so DO NOT purchase ppc technology until then!

(Update: Here is the follow up post that answers the question “What is Truly Automated, Adaptive PPC Bid Management Technology?“)

*QualityScores is not an agency any more, it is simply a search engine marketing blog now.

I’m stoked to be going to Affiliate Summit West this year!

I’ll be getting in late Sunday night but I’ll be there all day Monday and Tuesday. I’ll probably be tweeting a bit – I’ll tweet out my location, etc sometimes so I’d love to chat!!

Ads on this blog

I will be experimenting with ads on this blog in the very near future. I’ll post my findings if they are interesting! I’ll also post my tactics on how I plan to monetize the blog, show screenshots of the results, etc.

This will be a fun adventure!

Oh, wait, why am I monetizing this blog? Because I love to share but I need to monetize my sharing a tiny bit since I do not take on clients anymore and QualityScores is no longer an agency but an educational resource for search marketers and affiliates everywhere. I truly want to ‘empower advertisers everywhere’ and I think two of the best ways to do it are 1) solid, real information and opinions from somebody in the trenches all the time and 2) products and services that help those of us striving to make a good living online!

Hope you don’t mind the ads!

And I’ll see you at ASW if you’re going!

Lately I have found myself getting less willing to share knowledge, insights and tricks in the ppc space or even some of the cool stuff I have learned in the SEO space…and to that end, I feel like I have chosen to hide underground for quite some time. This is clear by the amount I wrote last year…this year I would like to turn a new leaf, but we’ll see what I feel like I can share vs not.

I like sharing, but I have to admit that I’m not going to share super edgy secrets or expose any awesome loopholes that I find unless I’m physically with somebody and we’re chatting over lunch or if somebody has me in their IM list…I help as many people as I can via IM.

That’s where the ‘code’ comes into play. Lot’s of people know the code, but it needs to be repeated again and again, especially with so many awesome conferences just around the corner:

DO NOT SHARE anything “secret” that you learn from somebody else over lunch, via IM or email or at ALL without their explicit permission.

Why am I calling this the Code of the Underground Marketer? Because these secrets are supposed to stay on the down low – in the ground – so they can be exploited as long as possible without having search engine employees, engineers, algorithms, spiders or contracted reviewers learn about it or know about it.

I have been fortunate enough to be able to communicate with some awesome link builders, ppc rockstars and more over the past few years. I shared some secrets and not others. Of the secrets I haven’t shared because of ‘the code’, few of them have been found out by the sites themselves or the search engines as of yet – only a handful have been exposed.

The code has a hidden side to it…if somebody shares something golden with you and you blast it to the world via Twitter, Facebook, blog or any other medium where dozens of people find out about it at once…you get black listed and hated on for quite some time. It’s rare and difficult to get back into the ‘inner circle’ so to speak.

I wish I could truly call myself part of the ‘inner circle’…but I am far from it. Perhaps I am at the fringe. Maybe not though. I still have to find out a ton of so-called secrets on my own through rapid/vast/expensive experimentation. Buy a link to one website, wait and see what happens to that site before getting a similar link to another website in my portfolio that is more important. I have had a few websites penalized and banned in the past few years and the exercise of removing the bad and learning more about the good has been purely fascinating…at the same time, if I were part of the ‘inner circle’ or the ‘underground marketer’ I probably could have avoided all of the stupid tests I did.

Part of my experimentation, and what I think the real underground marketer is doing too – maybe to a MUCH MUCH greater scale, is managing a nice portfolio of several websites, bank accounts, adsense accounts, ebay accounts, servers, hosts, other affiliate network accounts and more. In my mind, one of the only ways to discover some of the most powerful techniques being used today is through sheer intelligence and a world of experience that came through testing and learning the hard way. Most places don’t allow multiple accounts (except banks, they’re always willing to open accounts for you) so you get creative and use relative’s names and account information if you can.

The bottom line, or what I want to call the Code of the Underground Marketer, is definitely that of not sharing what others share with you…and not sharing everything you learn…and always be testing.

Good luck in 2010 and have a Happy New Year living the Code!

I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything since June…well, I guess I can believe it.

Here is a quick summary of what I have been up to:

1. Growing the affiliate marketing side of my personal income…and have been doing quite well with it. In fact, I have launched or am in the process of launching 12 more websites in my personal portfolio. I must admit that affiliate marketing is very time consuming but I have effectively replaced my income from the agency so it is a full-time passion right now. I do not take on any clients anymore and haven’t for quite some time because of the affiliate side of things. Yay!

2. Playing around a lot more with the SEO side of things. Several of my sites are now in the top 3 for several competitive phrases…believe it or not, I do NOT do any ppc on my affiliate sites yet – although I am successfully moving into that side of the income stream given that it is something I think I’m great at. As far as SEO goes, I started practicing it quite a while ago…3 or 4 years I think. My very first ‘ranking’ was for ‘Internet Marketing Professional’ and the plural version too…that’s what got me hooked. Lol!

3. I was also recruited in-house for a couple different companies…they made offers that I didn’t want to refuse. I love both companies and the people there – so I’m still going strong with one in the home based business space (super competitive, i love it!) and the other helped me make a lot of great connections plus jump started me into the scrum engineering process and gave me major insights into growing a company really fast. It was and is really cool to have some ‘in-house’ experience…now I really can see and understand the benefits of agency AND in-house arrangements.

4. Thinking of all the people who are leaders and participators in the community. I can’t believe I ignored the urge to write so many times…but hundreds of you are still subscribed to my blog and I am honored to be in your company. There are so many genius people out there writing and sharing information freely! Don’t worry though, I have been lurking through over 100 blogs daily and 6 or 7 forums…I’m around, and appreciative of your work.

Other than that, I feel like it’s time for a vacation.

So, that’s what I have been up to! How about you? What have you been up to for the past few months?