Note: I would like to thank you for sticking by while I had to take care of alot of issues in my personal life but now I’m back on a daily basis posting new topics on my experience with selling online.

Now, I would like to discuss a subject that cost me $1000′s of dollars and had only benefited me in the short term rather than making a cheaper investment for the long term. I used Google AdWords in the past and though I generated traffic, and sales, but I have also lost money in the process.

I am going to keep this post short and give you the short version of my experience with choosing Google AdWords over SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on my website. With Google AdWords, you are paying for each lead or visitor that lands on your website whether they make a sale , sign up or join any kind program you are offering.

I spent over $80K in 1 year and suspended the very next year due to the Google Money Tree Scam that was going around resulting in 100′s of innocent accounts being banned / suspended without any kind of explanation. You’d think with that kind of money being spent on Google  they would at least send me a warning if I were violating any of their policies, but this goes to show how much Google really cares for their advertisers.

After I lost my Google AdWords account, I had no other choice but to start investing in my own website and hired an SEO company to optimize my website and drive traffic to my website in the long run. I combined this with Google Base to at least compensate for the lack of Google AdWords. Google Base is a shopping search engine which is completely free and lets you upload products from your website which sometimes may appear on google’s homepage.

As for putting SEO work onto my website, I started with $500 a month which is nothing compared to what I spent on Google per month, which would fall into the $6K range monthly on clicks .  Several months later, I decided to add a bit more gas to the fire, so I added an additional $500 per month, totaling $1000 in SEO work on my website.

Though my sales were nowhere near what I generated through AdWords, I noticed my cost started to go down, sales were decent and I would not have to maintain my AdWords account for hours a day. Instead, now I was free to focus on investing into my own website which would benefit me in the long run. I used the extra money to buy custom banners for products I sold on my website and started to learn email marketing.

After 7-8 months my website started to generate around the same amount of traffic I was getting with Google AdWords and I wasn’t paying for each visitor and the conversion rate was higher. I notice when my website shows up in the organic search results (left Side), I tend to get much more sales than what I would get using Google AdWords.

The lesson learned here is “Invest in your own Business, not others”.

Please share your experiences with using Google AdWords and SEO and the differences you have seen with your business.

Microsoft has also announced new tools are available to be able to view facebook previews on its Bing network, and full page weather reports.

Google has also retaliated by now offering enhanced movie listings on their search page as well as new safer Safesearch.

What will Bing do next, and who will actually come out the winner of these 2 top search engines ?

The good thing about all of this is when 2 companies compete with each other, you will most likely see the best of both sides which at the end will only benefit us all.

We used adwords to bring in traffic to one of our retail websites since last year and never had an issue up until now. Google has been suspending and banning users accounts due to ” Promoting Google Tree ” and not giving them the right to explain or even question before revoking their account.

Unfortunately , we were one of the unlucky users who’ve gotten their account suspended when I emailed them to please give me an explanation, I was simply Auto-replied with ” For security purposes, we cannot reveal the reason for your suspended account” and that’s it! I’ve spent almost a 1/4 of a million this year and they could not at least give me an explanation or allow me to defend myself.

Basically they told me I had violated Google’s policies, or promoted Google money tree scam, which we had never heard of up until this happened to us. Well, rather than sit and cry about it, I decided to open a new account with Microsoft’s Bing network and Yahoo Search Marketing to promote my electronics products.

The traffic is not as much as Google, but at least I did not just sit and let me business fall since 80% of my traffic was through Google ads I have been using. Well, I’m happy to say I had moved on without Google, at least we still have some pretty strong SEO on our website, so we are not out of Google completely.

Sales have dropped a small percentage since my Google Adwords account was banned, but this is a lesson to all who have been a victim of the Google tree scam suspension, there are other alternatives to go, it does not have to end there.

Google Adwords can be very costly, but if done correctly, it can become very profitable for your business.

Last December I had spent over $30,000 alone in that 1 month due to the Christmas rush in 2008.

I used the power of  high CTR to lower my click cost and gain a higher conversion rate, resulting in a higher profit rate during December 2008.

I would like to show you an example of what can happened if you use adwords the correct way. Those of you who have started using adwords and have quit only because you were paying more on ads than what you were making in profit , are going to see how its done the correct way.

Below is a snapshot of my google adwords December 2008 reports so that you can see how much I paid during that month:

Although I had spent $33K during December 2008, I had made close to $150,000 in profit. It was not all that easy, as a good adwords campaign must be monitored daily, sometimes more than once a day in order to maintain a nice flow of clicks while cutting cost on clicks.

Below are 10 ways you can cut cost , get higher CTR and increase your conversion rates. Please note, although these methods worked for me, selling electronics, it may be different for other product categories:

Start off with $0.05 cents per keyword, then in 2 more days increase it to $0.10 cents if you are not seeing any clicks and impressions on your keywords

Use at least 3 different Ads for each campaign, and have them rotate to see which ad gives you the most clicks and a high CTR, then after 2 days start deleting the less profitable ones and create another Ad with a different Keyword position in the header, or the 2nd or 3rd header.

Use {KeyWord} in your Ad header. This is effective because when something types in a keyword that you have in your keyword list, the {KeyWord:} in your header will display in bold the users typed keyword which will increase your CTR.

Disable and Enable adword partner sites. I left mine enabled for 1 week, then another week disabled. I found 2 interesting things during the 2 weeks I have experimented with the two. I found that using only Google Search, without search partners will definitely increase my CTR, resulting in less ppc cost on my keywords and raised me to one of the 3 top positions on page  1.When I had the google partner option selected, I noticed my CTR went down , but I had more clicks and more conversions, due to the fact my ads were not only showing on Google.com, but on AOL, Ask.com, and other search comparison websites.

Use Google’s keyword tool to see which keyword had the most searches by the user during the previous month, and go for those. There were some keywords I would have never thought of alone, and most of them are the ones that converted very well.

Use Brackets []  and Phrase quotes ” “ for your keywords and determine which ones give you a higher ctr and conversion. I made 2 separate campaigns with both using the same keywords, only 1 had [] and the other had quotes ” “. The Brackets [] were getting higher ctr because its much more targeted when users search for a specific keyword. The [] means that which ever keyword you use it on, your ad will only show up if the user types exactly that specific keyword. Example, my keyword is [ipod nano] , someone who types in  ipod nano 8gb , my ad will not even show up unless the user types in ipod nano by itself. The “” quotes on keywords will be the same as [], only this time, your ads will show up if the user types in any phrase you are using whether its in the right order. Example, my keyword is “ipod nano” , my ad will show up regardless if the user types in ipod nano, or nano ipod.

Use Negative keywords in your campaign, always. Negative keywords is basically a filter of keywords you do not want your ad to appear when its typed in. Example, if my campaign is targeting people who are search for a phone to buy, its best to include a negative keyword such as, -free , -ringtones , -plan , -case etc…. This allows your ad to show up  for your keywords and not appear when a user includes any of those negative keywords in their search query. This definitely increase CTR and eliminated a waste of clicks.

Monitor your conversion rate everyday. You must always monitor your conversion rate no matter what, as this is the most important part of using google adwords. If you notice your conversions show $20 per sale , and your initial profit on that item is usually around $10, then you have not only lost that the profit on that item, but you have also lost yourself $10 on top of that. If your conversion rate is low, or conversion amount per sale is higher than your profit, then you are obviously doing something wrong. You need to go back into that campaign and adjust the click cost, change the Ads title and description, to get the best one that works and always try your best to lower the ppc cost on your keywords.  Remember, the more campaigns you have with different products, the less the cost per sale will come out to. I had 10 campaigns running, for 10 products, and 5 of them I had 1 conversion each. This made each conversion around $15 per sale, not bad, giving that my initial profit was supposed to be $30 , so I already had to deduct $15 from the $30 profit on all 5 of the items I sold. Now, later that day the other 5 campaigns started showing conversions as well, so now that $15 per sale from before, automatically turned into $5 per sale due to the other campaigns that helped my average conversion go up. you see , the cost per sale is usually calculated by the total cost of your clicks for the whole entire campaigns that are active.

Keep this in handy so that you wont go broke by google adwords, as I know people who have lost their business because of the high clicks they were paying google. If you use google adwords the correct way, you will make alot of money doing this.

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It looks like Google has finally decided to put some of their advertising dollars into a new user interface with google adwords. It looks pretty good, looks like the way yahoo search marketing has their interface.

Lets take a look at their new features and uses on this newly upgraded adwords interface.

Easier analysis Chart trends in two advertising metrics at once with custom graphs at every level of your account.

Quicker editing Make changes with just a few clicks, without waiting for a new page to load.

Broader insight See keywords, ads, or placements from all ad groups at once, then set filters to find your biggest ROI opportunities.

No changes to how ads run Don’t worry: Quality Score, bidding, budgeting, and other aspects of ad serving aren’t changing with the new interface.

Here is an image of how the new interface looks and displays. Keep in mind, this is only a beta version and the user still has the free choice of using the original interface or trying out the beta version.

Take a look at a video introduction of this new google adwords upgrade.

It looks to be an interesting feature from google, sure helps with editing the keywords and ads quicker.

Let me know what you think about this new feature, as I’m still playing with the bubble wrap.

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Then I heard many other people tell me that eBay is just a hobby and a place to move unwanted items and things you just want to get rid of.

I also proved them wrong when I built my business on top of eBay and made a living on it. Not too long ago, I’ve seen websites and ads claiming to help you make over $50,000 in 1 month. Well, at first I was just like the typical person who looked at this from the “yeah right” perspective. But it wasn’t until a few months ago, I once again proved it to be true, but this time i was to my own self.

It was last Christmas holiday where my life would change and never be the same again. I was selling electronics on my website , mostly mp3 players and cell phones, and was doing pretty well until after October where my sales exploded. Keep in mind, I only sold on my own website, since I was banned from eBay a few months before that time. I sold “iPod Clone MP3 Players” that resembled the 4th Generation iPod. They looked very identical to the original , expect a for the software in general.

Well, between this and popular cell phones, I managed to accomplished close to 45k in the month of October. By November, the sales started picking up, as I got more aggressive in my Google Adwords compaign and Yahoo Search Marketing. I decided to take a huge risk due to the potential of the holiday sales, I decided to make an iPod campaign on Google Adwords, and direct all of the traffic to my page where I had “iPod Clone” mp3 players in all colors and nearly 1/2 the price of the original iPod Nano.  Basically, people who were searching for an authentic iPod Nano, were finding my page full of the knockoff ipods or iPod clones I was selling very cheap. I was profiting an average of $40 per unit sold, and during the holiday season, people were usually buying in quantities.

I started this campaign the day before thanksgiving, so I took the next day off to celebrate thanks giving with my family.  The very next morning, I woke up and as usual I logged into my website and saw something I would have never imagined. It was around 10am, and I had already grossed more than 3K in sales and the numbers continued to climb.  I opened up my outlook express to check my emails, and my inbox had over 700 emails that were a mixture of customer questions and mostly order confirmation receipts from my website.

I did not know what to do or how to react, as I wasnt prepared for this. About 2 hours later my website had reached $5,000 in sales, while 85% of the products being sold were the iPod Knockoffs on my website from people who wre searching for iPod Nano. I started to get a bit scared becuase of the amount of orders I was getting from a product I was marketing,  that was not the real thing even though I listed it as a generic brand. Since I was too lazy to take pictures of my iPod clones, I decided to just copy and paste the original iPod pictures off of Apple.com and use them for my iPod clones.

By the end of that day, I reached a whooping $8,000 in sales, the all time record I had ever reached at the time. The next day was worst, as I reached $12,000 and every day it continued to grow. By the begining of december, is when it got really crazy, as I would make $14K – $18K in sales for that day. On December 15h, 2008, I beleive it was Cyber Monday, I did an all time record of $31,000 in sales for that 1 day.

Again I was only selling MP3 iPod Clones and cell phones. By the end of December, I had counted all of my gross , deductions and came up with the final profit. I had reached close to $150,000 for the month of December 2008.

I proved everyone wrong who said you cannot make money online, especially those who had laughed at me becuase I sold on eBay. Now I’m sitting here writing about it, ad I really hope this story will influence people to never give up no matter how tough it gets. My own experience has convinced me that anything is possible, and to never listen to people with a negative mind. Had I have listened to those people, I would not be sitting here writing about it.

Does anyone have any similiar experiences selling during the holidays, I’d love here your comments……

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Now, I am going to start off by listing the major players in the shopping comparison from the best to the worst that will give you some decent traffic and conversion. Remember, every niche is different, so I am speaking of my own experience selling electronics online and some computer accessories.

Shopping Comparison Websites:

1. Nextag -NexTag is a website for comparing online product prices. It started originally as a website where buyers and sellers could negotiate prices for Computers and Electronics products. The current business model with a focus on comparison shopping has existed since 2000. In June 2007, Providence Equity Partners purchased a two-thirds majority of the company. It was ranked by Time magazine as one of the fifty best websites of 2008.
2. Shopping.com - Shopping.com used to be called DealTime.com. It was founded in Israel in 1998 by Dr. Nahum Sharfman and Amir Ashkenaz, whose original idea was to create a downloadable client that would monitor changes in prices of products the user seeks to buy over time, notifying the user when the product price reached a predetermined level (hence the site’s original name, DealTime).Originally targeting American consumers, the basic concept was quickly modified from a downloadable client to a purely web-based service, a concept the company has kept ever since. The company went finally public in October 2004, and was acquired by eBay in June 2005. It is currently a semi-autonomous division within eBay and still runs the www.shopping.com website. eBay and Shopping.com functionalities are slowly being merged, for example eBay’s PayPal payment system in SDC’s offering to its advertising merchants.
3. Pricegrabber -PriceGrabber is a price comparison service. They’ve partnered with over 11,000 mechants and sellers. They also serve as the data source for numerous other shopping web sites.In addition to standard comparison shopping, PriceGrabber offers an election guide web site, allowing visitors to comparison shop the candidates, and a “green” site, helping visitors find environmentally friendly products.It was acquired by Experian in 2005 for $485 million.
4. Bizrate -Shopzilla is a price comparison service. Founded in June 1996 by Farhad Mohit and Henri Asseily as Binary Compass Enterprises, the company changed its name to BizRate.com in January 1999. The company launched the website Shopzilla in November 2004, which then became the company name too.The company’s mission is to enable shoppers to find, compare and buy anything, sold by virtually anyone, anywhere. In May 2006, Shopzilla attracted over 20 million unique visitors according to ComScore. Shopzilla also operates the BizRate.com consumer feedback network that collects millions of consumer reviews of stores and products each year.In June 2005, Shopzilla was acquired by The E. W. Scripps Company for $525 million and is now part of its interactive media division. Shopzilla operates websites serving consumers and retailers in the U.S., UK, French and German markets.

Other Smaller Shopping Comparison websites

1. Mysimon – mySimon is a comparison shopping website owned by CBS Interactive. The site offers shopping recommendations, buying advice, and side by side price comparisons for various products. The site directs users to other shopping sites such as Amazon.com when searching for products.
2. Yahoo Shopping -Yahoo! Shopping is Yahoo’s price comparison service.Yahoo uses the Kelkoo price comparison service it acquired in April 2004 to power Yahoo! Shopping in 6 countries.
3. Google Base – Google Base is an online database provided by Google into which any user can add almost any type of content, such as text, images, and structured information in formats like XML, PDF, Excel, RTF, Word Perfect. As of 2008, it is available to the public as a beta version. If Google finds it relevant it may appear on its shopping search engine, Google Maps or even the web search. The piece of content can then be labeled with attributes like the ingredients for a recipe or the camera model for stock photography. As of 2008, the user interface is available in English and German. Because information about the service was leaked before public release, it generated much interest in the information technology community prior to release.

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Today I’m going to discuss my own experiences using Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing to drive traffic to your website. So many people debate that yahoo is cheap and adwords is expensive. Well let me tell you, in my own experiences Yahoo is more expensive than google.

The reason is because the keywords you bid on through Yahoo all have its own minimum requirement, and will not become active until you change your bid to that specific minimum bid. Google Adwords also has a minimum bid requirement on keywords, however, you can bid as low as $0.10 and your keyword will still be active, although might not be on the first
page of Google.

When I used Yahoo to drive traffic onto my website, some keywords were a minimum of as low as $0.40 and as high as $1.50 per click. This was outstanding as the same keywords I compared using adwords showed me a minimum of $0.10 in order to be active. When I sold mp3 players, I had a nice eye catching ad which drove lots of traffic to my page while the bids
I had on top keywords were not even more than $0.25/click.

One good thing about Yahoo, you can know what bid it will take to get to a specific spot on the sponsor results whether its #5 or #1. Another thing about Yahoo I recently discovered, they are now partnered with eBay, so now your Yahoo ads will show up on eBay search results at the very bottom of the listing. But not all will appear, as eBay also list websites who list their ads on Shopping.com. The difference with this is, they will appear at the bottom of the page with an image, while Yahoo ads will only be in a form of text. It depends on what product or keyword whether eBay will display Yahoo text ads or Shopping.com listings at the bottom of the search results.

In conclusion, I favor Adwords over Yahoo, though Yahoo did get me pretty good ROI, but I’ve always done better with Google Adwords.

I would really love to hear other people’s experiences using the 2 pay per click services.

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I have had mixed results from using Google adwords and shopping comparison sites to promote my products on my website. In case you are not familiar with shopping comparison, these are websites that list products like (iPods, gps, cell phones, etc…) and compare different prices from different websites for the end user to find the best and lowest price.

These Shopping Comparison websites charge a pay per click (ppc) like Google adwords, however, in my own experience, most shopping comparison sites charge you a fixed minimum of $0.50 – $0.8 per click. So what are the differences of using search comparison websites vs. Google adwords?

Shopping Comparison website

• Less Click Fraud than Adwords
• Gives the customer a chance to see an image of what you are promoting before clicking
• Most shopping comparison websites have partnered websites in which your listed item will show up on their partnered websites and their partnered sites etc…
• People are starting to use these shopping comparison websites as their first place to find great deals on a product there’re looking for since they can easily compare prices with other
  websites.
• All shopping comparison websites have a feedback / review system on each merchant where the customer can check a website’s feedbacks from previous customers.
• Shopping.com will list your items on eBay’s website since they are now owned by eBay.

Google Adwords

• With Google Adwords, you can adjust your bid on keywords as low as you want, unless the keyword has a minimum requirement. When I sold iPods, the most I paid for “iPod nano” was$0.15, which got me over 300 clicks per day on that 1 keyword alone.
  
• Google also has many partnered websites in which your ad will appear, such as Amazon.com, Aol.com, ask.com etc…
• One of the best things about adwords is you can choose to appear only on google.com + all of their partnered sites, or just appear only on google.com
• Most of my Google ads will appear on search comparison websites anyway, mostly at the bottom of their listings.
• Google will reward you if your CTR (Click through Rate) is high, which will cost less on your keyword bids.
• Google Adwords has a broader place on the internet, so your ads will appear in much more websites than just listing in shopping comparison sites.
• Google Adwords gives you more control over your ads, cost, and placement.
• Most Search Comparison websites rely on showing up on the first page of Google, but you can appear on the first page with fewer bids on your keywords.

The Top Search Comparison Websites

• Shopping.com – expensive , less competition , high conversion, appears on eBay.com , and other partnered sites
• Pricegrabber.com – Average price, more competition, medium conversion, appears on msn shopping, dealnews.com….
• Nextag – Decent price, less competition, high conversion rate, easy feedback system….
• Bizrate / Shopzilla.com – Low Price, medium competition, and low conversion rate…..

In Conclusion of this subject

I have showed you the differences with adwords and shopping comparison websites. In my opinion, the better of the 2 would be adwords. I always had better conversion rates and high ROI (Return on Investment) using adwords.

My conversion rate on shopping comparison websites would usually be $20 -$30 per sale, on items I would normally profit $10 – $15 on. My best success comparison sites were Shopping.com and Nextag.com with Nextag resulting in a better ROI than shopping.com.

Please feel free to share your own experiences with Adwords and Shopping Comparison websites.

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Recently, I goggled an article which explained this secret technique some businesses use in order to get a higher click through rate on their ads, making their ads appear more higher with a low cost per click. I discovered by using the ” {KeyWord: title} ” in the title of the ad, dramatically increased my CTR and allowed me to decrease my cost per click, resulting in a more higher placement than I was when I used simply title in the header.

You see, if you use a normal title on the ad, people will type in any keyword, in which you have in your list, and though your listing may appear in the search results, they might click on another companies add if its in bold letters. When a user searches for a keyword, the eye will automatically look at any bold lettering, especially if the ad is telling them what they are looking for. By using the {Keyword: Name} technique, the title of the ad will display what ever
the user has typed in, as long as that keyword is in your keyword list.

Let me give you an example , while the adwords ad is currently : {KeyWord: Shoe
Making Money} for win

As you can see, ShoeMoney is in bold letters , when the user searched for Shoemoney. When the user typed in Shoemoney, everything within the { } was replaced by the users typed keyword, followed by the rest of the text in the title of the ad. This is a very powerful technique, and works with any keyword.

Now, if for some reason the user types in a long keyword, that may not even fit in the adwords title (as adwords doesn’t allow more than 25 characters) , the keyword is then replaced by what was placed after the ( {KeyWord: ) such as, if the user’s long keyword was “Buy Show Money and earn”, the title will instead display ” Shoe Making Money for win”.

Another way of getting a higher CTR is by disabling Google Content in the
campaign options.

We hope this article has been very helpful in achieving the best Google
results.