A good rule of thumb to determine your initial bid is as follows:

Assume average conversion rate: 1% = 0.01 (5%-10% for pay per lead)

Let’s say your commission payout is : $20

Then a good place for you to start bidding 1% x $20 = 0.01 x $20

This is because the conversion rate times the commission (affiliate payout) = EPC (earnings per click)

So if your bid = EPC you’re breaking even then you can optimise your campaign to hit profit…

Ideally you need to KNOW your EPC or your conversion rate for ppc traffic which you can get from your affiliate manager.

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Checkout Adcenter Labs here: MSN Adlab

Loads of cool tools here but one that looks very interesting is ‘Detecting Online Commercial Intention’

Microsoft adCenter can detect your customers’ intention to purchase products or acquire information. For example, if a customer searches for “canon digital camera”, it is likely that he or she wants to purchase a canon digital camera; therefore, the online commercial intention is strong, with a confidence level bigger than 0.5. Webpage searches display two levels of commercial intention: informational and transactional.

Check it out, from my keyword data / sales looks pretty accurate….

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A cruise operator has paid £560,000 for a domain name, blasting the previous British record sale out of the water.
Cruise.co.uk bought the domain Cruises.co.uk from German travel company Nees Reisen, adding just one letter to its existing domain.

The deal eclipses the previous British record which saw recycle.co.uk snapped up by City financiers ASAP Ventures for £150,000. However, the figure doesn’t even dent the global record held by Sex.com, which was purchased for a reported £7 million by Escom in 2006.

The new owner of Cruises.co.uk says it intends to turn the domain into a social networking site for enthusiasts.

“Cruises is consistently ranked first on Google, with cruise just behind,” claims Cruise.co.uk’s managing director, Seamus Conlon, bracing himself for the following pun.

“We wanted the top positions so that when internet users are searching for cruise deals, reviews or news we are the first port of call.”

Media Corp has acquired the domain name and website sport.co.uk for £135,000 as part of a continuing focus on expanding its digital properties.

Media Corp, which revealed it was overhauling Gambling.com last month, said it wanted to develop sport.co.uk as a key sports portal, with information, news and stats on global sports.

Justin Drummond, Media Corp CEO, said: “The value of a top-tier domain name combined with a profitable advertising-driven business model was recently illustrated by the Group’s successful sale of Casino.co.uk for up to £3.625m.

“We are aiming to replicate this success with Sport.co.uk as we continue to increase the scale and diversity of the Group’s Web Publishing business.”

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Send your clicks to this script to split test your landing pages.

if(rand(0,1) == 0) {
header("Location: http://www.example.com/split1");
} else {
header("Location: http://www.example.com/split2");
}
?>

After 15 / 20 conversions drop your worst peforming landing page & replace it with a new version.

Rinse & repeat and watch the $$$$ roll in………

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$cloaked_url = "http://www.google.com"; // devs go here
$normal_url = "http://www.yahoo.com"; // everyone else goes here

$tracking_ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

if(strpos($tracking_ref,"dev.facebook")){
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: " . $cloaked_url );
} else {
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: " . $normal_url );
}
?>

Youl see that mods from facebook flyers will see the page you WANT THEM TO SEE to get your flyers approved, everyone else will go to your highly tuned landing page…..

***Note: Make sure when using scripts that modify headers, to remove any whitespace outside the PHP tags or you will get an error.

Source & thanks to www.nickycakes.com

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Courtesy of a post on WickedFire posted here for my notes:

Preview your adwords ads from any country

https://adwords.google.com/select/Ad…ingPreviewTool

Local Adwords & Keyword Lists

Local PPC Adwords & Keyword List Creator @ 5minutesite.com

Google Keyword Metrics Tool

The New Google Keyword Metrics Tool

Research your KW

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool (Wordtracker Suggestion Tool & Overture Bid Tool
Combined) & Keyword Generator

Typos generator

Typo Generator

Clean your KW list here

Keyword Phrase Remover & Keyword List Cleaner

Got your KW list? Add (" ") and ( [ ] ) here

KW Template tool

——————————————————————–

Domain name suggestion tool

Domain Suggestions

Find expired domain

Find Expired and Expiring Domains by Keyword and PageRank | DeletedLIVE

Deleted Domain Names

Check Whois

Ip Tools, DNS tools, internet tools, WHOIS, traceroute, ping, domain name tools

Traceroute, Ping, Domain Name Server (DNS) Lookup, WHOIS, and DNS Records Lookup

———————————————————————–

Preview your adsense ads

Technobloggie: AdSense Preview Tool

Blogging? Good, these will help you

Blog and ping | Pingoat

Social bookmarking services poster and community websites submitter: digg.com
reddit.com netscape.com propeller.com Del.icio.us Stumbleupon.com etc.

Technobloggie: Trackback Maker

RSS Feed Generator

Rss Feeds Generator – Convert Keywords To Rss Feeds FREE

HTML code generator

HTML Basix – HTML tutorials and online webmaster tools

Free Graphics Generator

FlamingText: Free online tool for generating custom webpage graphics and
animations.

Cool Text: Logo and Graphics Generator

AAA Buttons – Free website buttons !!

Disclosure Policy Generator

DisclosurePolicy.org: Disclosure Policy, Disclosure Policy Generator

Privacy Policy Generator

Privacy Policy Generator

Web Analytics Tool

Website Analytics & Traffic Measurement Tools: SEO Book.com

FireStats

More SEO & Webmaster tools

Blue Hat SEO-Advanced SEO Tactics » QUIT- Quick Indexing Tool

RankQuest Search Engine Optimization Tools

Google position tool – check google position, google rank, google ranking, check
google rank, seo tools, serp

Keyword Rank Checking Software & Tools: SEO Book.com

More SEO & Webmaster Tools: SEO Book
 

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Website owners have been warned to keep their registration up to date because lapsed domain names are being snapped up within 10 seconds of becoming available.

Re-registration, which has to be done every two years, can cost as little as £5 but you can pay ten times as much to get an address back – and sometimes far more. Names are regularly sold for more than £100,000, and some for as much as £1m.

Registrants are warned by email to renew, but many do inform registrars that their addresses have changed. There is a 60-day grace period after the expiry date, which the name will no longer work but can still be renewed; but then the name is up for grabs.

A report from Nominet, the not-for-profit company that controls .co.uk registration, says there is a growing secondary market in domain names with some organisations hoarding large numbers of them.

Ownership is often split across a number of companies, so figures are hard to come by, but analysis has shown that around 50 individuals or organisations each own more than 3,000 domain names – between them accounting for five per cent of the .co.uk total.

Trading in domain names is one of two ways “domain warehousers” make money. The other, often done in parallel, is to attach the name to a rudimentary site with commercial links that can earn click-through revenues. Such sites get hits either by clever search-engine optimisation of by having names close to those of legitimate sites.

Phil Kingsland, marketing director of Nominet, said most lapsed names stem from people who have either ceased trading or never really used the addresses.

And he points out that warehousers do not have a completely free rein.

“There is a grey area around using names that people or organisations believe they have a right to,” he said.

Nominet has a dispute resolution system for companies who feel their brand is being ‘abused’ in a web address, though cases do sometimes reach the courts.

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Who was their target audience?
What offer were they pushing?
Where was that offer being offered/pushed/displayed?
When was that offer being presented?
Why was it succesful?

Advertising, who advertises what in commercial breaks in between football matches, kids TV, chat shows etc ?

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Are there already people doing this that are wildly successful?

Am I able to replicate their success? If not, why?

Am I spending time on something which I do not know whether it will make me money

Find an offer

Research demand for offer

Research supply for offer

Do keyword research

Write ad and get it up on Yahoo/MSN/Google

Test and track. If profitable, increase keyword list. Else, scrap and move on

Track keywords for profitability, adgroups for higher CTR%, and delete non-performing keywords and reword less CTR%

Repeat

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Christmas shoppers can bag substantial savings by going online rather than to the high street, research by consumer group Which? shows.

It found that savings of more than 1,000 pounds could be made on a shopping list of five popular gifts — a flat-screen television, camera, camcorder, hi-fi and DVD recorder.

Researchers compared prices on 72 products at 111 retailers and found that online savings ranged from 11 percent on digital camcorders to 29 percent on LCD and plasma televisions.

Savings could also be made on everything from books (14 percent) and MP3/MP4 players (11 percent) to CDs (7 percent) and champagne (2 percent).

But games consoles — such as the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 — were found to be similarly priced.

“The trick to bagging a bargain is to discover which stores offer the most extras,” Which? said in its November magazine.

“For example, while John Lewis sells the PS3 for 398 pounds, HMV sells it for 425 pounds, but with four games (which cost up to 50 pounds each) and an extra controller — which is the best deal we found.”

Consumers could be missing out on savings of up to 240 million pounds a year by not shopping online, recent research by the Office of Fair Trading shows.

People’s top 10 reasons for shopping over the Internet include ease of price comparison, avoiding crowds, price competitiveness and more choice, according to a poll of 2,343 Which? online panel members.

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Include the following PHP code at the top of each page:

// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.redirectmypage.com/");
exit();
?>

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Domain name speculators, open your wallets. Pharmacy.com is up for sale for the first time since 1994 and the domain name’s broker is looking to break a few records.

“Based on modeling, we’re putting it way over $50 million,” said Joshua Bourne, co-founder of FairWinds Partners, an Internet consultancy that is brokering the sale.

Dictionary.com was recently purchased for $100 million and Business.com fetched about $350 million, but those domains were already supporting multimillion-dollar businesses. Dictionary.com serves up banner and text ads and offers reference services, while Business.com also delivers ads and provides basic yellow page services.

By contrast, Pharmacy.com’s owner, Orlando, Florida-based medical equipment seller Rotech, is hoping to bring in tens of millions of dollars for a mere eight letters. The Website itself serves up little more than an enticing promotion pointing out that consumers last year made 100 million purchases through online pharmacies, which are expected to generate $12 billion in revenue this year.

FairWinds has sent out approximately 100 emails to potential buyers alerting them of the domain name’s availability. Mr. Bourne’s email list includes pharmacy chains, retailers such as Wal-Mart and Costco, and websites such as Drugstore.com.

“Imagine the opportunity… www.pharmacy.com,” reads the site’s promo page.

Domain Name Journal editor Ron Jackson said he doubts that a single, undeveloped domain name can command such a high price. He pointed out that Sex.com (~$12 million), Porn.com (~$9.5 million), and Diamond.com (~$7.5 million) are among the highest-selling domain names and none of those has broken the $15 million barrier. Mr. Jackson predicted Pharmacy.com will sell for between $5 and $10 million.

“No domain has ever sold for more than $15 million, so to think that it’s going to jump to $50 million, that’s not going to happen,” he said.

But Jay Westerdal, president and CEO at domain information and sales company Name Intelligence, said he has heard of domain names selling for $20 million or more in private transactions and can understand why Pharmacy.com might be as or more valuable.

“That would set all records. It would shatter them. It would be phenomenal. Really, that’s what domains of that caliber should be selling for,” Mr. Westerdal said.

The value of generic domain names such as Hotels.com and Travel.com lies in the fact that they describe entire categories of commerce. Those are the types of keywords consumers use when they begin a web search, and those terms as domain names rarely go up for sale. Mr. Westerdal said the owner of Travel.com has been hanging onto his domain name for years and refuses to sell until someone meets his $100 million price tag.

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Inside a midtown hotel, Larry Fischer is on his mobile phone with a financial backer as his partner Ari Goldberger does quick research on a laptop computer.

They are bidding furiously at this auction of Internet domain names, with hopes of snagging megayachts.com. The duo won’t be deterred. They want this name.

“$110,000 (euro79,693), yes or no? Quick,” Fischer barks at Eli, the investor at the end of the phone.

Someone else makes a bid for $120,000 (euro86,938). Fischer and Goldberger up the ante, and then again.

Going once, going twice … sold to Fischer and Goldberger for $150,000 (euro108,672).

“You got it,” a smiling Fischer tells Eli.

These are boom times in an estimated $2 billion (euro1.45 billion) industry that involves the buying and selling of domain names. When people type the generic names into their Web browser’s address field, sites that generate pay-per-click advertising revenue appear. Such “direct navigation” bypasses search engines.

“This industry is like the wild, wild West right now and people have no idea how fast it’s growing,” said Jerry Nolte, managing partner of Domainer’s Magazine, a new trade publication devoted to this little-known world.

Some believe the industry’s market value could reach $4 billion (euro2.9 billion) by 2010 as people continue to purchase approximately 90,000 names a day and the number of domain registrars swells.

At the end of first quarter 2007, at least 128 million domain names had been registered worldwide, a 31 percent increase over the previous year, according to VeriSign Inc., which runs some of the core domain name directories for the Internet.

“It’s not about words,” said Monte Cahn, founder and CEO of Moniker.com, a company that specializes in domain asset management and held the Manhattan auction. “It’s like real estate. This industry is only about a decade old. People looked at domain names as a commodity. It’s a piece of real estate on the Web that can’t be replaced. It’s your stake in the ground, your stake in the Internet.”

At the Manhattan auction, Fischer and Goldberger snatched up four names for more than $1.2 million (euro870,000) and a fifth for a client, representing only a handful of the names sold for a total of $12.4 million (euro9 million) during both the live and silent auction.

The auctions were held during a domain conference in June that attracts some of the biggest players in this niche business.

One name _ creditcheck.com _ went for $3 million (euro2.2 million) but paled in comparison to the sale of sex.com, which sold for $12 million (euro8.7 million) last year, according to Cahn, who knew the site’s buyer and seller.

Fischer, 44, and Goldberger, 46, figured there was money to be made early.

Goldberger’s entry into the business was unorthodox to say the least. In 1996, the Hearst Corp. sued him, alleging trademark infringement after Goldberger registered esqwire.com, which resembles one of the company’s magazines.

The two sides eventually settled and Goldberger, a lawyer, was allowed to keep the name. Word got out that Goldberger knew something about the thorny legal issues involving Internet domain names and people began approaching him for advice.

Goldberger’s fascination with the burgeoning industry was sealed.

“I was an entrepreneur strapped into this suit-and-tie job,” Goldberger said. “Kind of a square peg in a round whole and this lawsuit just kind of changed everything for me.”

He eventually left the respected Philadelphia law firm where he worked in 1997 and joined a small startup in Manhattan called mail.com, which was buying up domain names.

Goldberger began collaborating with Fischer in 2001, building their portfolio of domain names. Together, they became a formidable yet quirky team.

Two years later, they created a company called smartname.com, which they sold earlier this year. The company took names and provided content and links for owners, getting a cut of the advertising revenue. At one point, smartname.com represented 150 owners with about 150,000 domain names, generating 50 million unique visitors a month.

Most of the sites are lucrative for their advertising US dollars. For example, megayachts.com isn’t an actual yachting site, but it contains numerous ads and links for real yacht companies, boats and cruises. The owners of the site get paid each time a viewer clicks on one of those links.

Goldberger and Fischer declined to say how much money they make from pay-per-click advertising.

Bob Parsons, CEO and founder of domain registration company GoDaddy.com, says this type of business is fairly straightforward.

“They make their money in two ways,” Parsons said. “One way is through the traffic they get and the other is the appreciation of the name.”

Parson didn’t think there was anything wrong with the practice as long as those involved weren’t using names trademarked by others.

“Domain names are becoming 21st century real estate,” Parsons said. “Just owning a domain name as an investment, I don’t see a problem with that.”

Anthony Malutta, a lawyer who specializes in trademark law at a San Francisco law firm, sees fewer trademark infringement cases thanks to improved laws.

“Trademark law involving domain laws is much clearer and much easier to understand,” he said. “It’s pretty clear that registering a domain name that corresponds to somebody’s trademark is actionable. As to generics, they’re just hoping to capture traffic. You’re just counting on people typing in generic names instead of using a search engine like Google.”

Malutta said domainers like Goldberger and Fischer are not “gaming the system” which in his opinion would mean registering domain names and then cybersquatting _ driving revenue off somebody else’s trademarked name like Coca-Cola.

Over the years, Goldberger and Fischer have sharpened their formula for acquiring domain names and developing the sites using a fairly simple template, relying on research, savvy and plenty of instinct.

“You either know it or don’t by hearing the name,” Fischer says.

They look for names that hit the “sweet spot” _ short words that describe a high-value product or services related to it. Words that allow them to own a category such as bald.com and cardiology.com, two of the domain names they bought at the auction.

To help figure out a word’s potential value, they see how many hits it will produce using Google. They also troll lists of names with domain registrations set to expire, enabling them to get a jump on buying it.

They don’t bother with dot-nets or the others.

“Dot-com is king,” Goldberger said. “Dot-net is worthless.”

But there’s a big divide between thinking of a good name and getting it. There’s usually a chase, with Fischer trying to persuade owners to sell the names after he locates the owners unless it’s up for auction.

“He’s kind of like a rhinoceros,” Goldberger says about Fischer. “He chases them up a tree and waits them out. He has patience and determination. You got to be aggressive. It’s a tough game now. It’s like the gold rush. The first guys did really well then it became more difficult.”

And expensive. Five years ago, the duo could get a good name for $10,000 (euro7,245). Now the minimum is more like $100,000 (euro72,448) _ as the auction proved. The cheapest name they bought at the auction was blogging.com for $135,000 (euro97,805). Other names sold for considerably less like irishwhiskey.com ($8,000, euro5,796) and Jewishdeli.com ($9,000, euro6,520).

At the moment, Fischer, Goldberger and Eli are sitting on their names. They’ve recently turned down million-dollar offers for stocks.com and home.com.

But as white-hot as this business has been, it might not continue to mint millionaires.

“How long will this model last?” Malutta asked. “It’s definitely a temporal piece of real estate. As technology evolves, maybe direct navigation will fall off the charts and there goes your property.”

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‘Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, will take 90 percent of the market over the next decade through increased spending on research and development, analysts at Cowen & Co. said in a note Wednesday.

Google’s 2007 research-and-development budget of $1.5 billion is almost double that of its closest rival, Yahoo Inc., the analysts said. Google’s capital investments, estimated at $26 billion over the next five years, will finance development of the company’s own servers and data centers, the note said.’

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The annual value of pan-European online advertising is set to reach 16bn euros ($22bn; £10.8bn) by 2012, more than double that of 2006, says a study.
The report by research body Forrester said online adverts would leap to 18% of market share, up from 9% currently.

It said 52% of people were now regularly online, spending more time doing so than watching television.

The UK will continue to see the most online advertising in the next four years, ahead of Germany and France.

‘Valuable medium’

European internet users now spend 14.3 hours a week online, compared with 11.3 hours watching TV, and 4.4 hours reading newspapers or magazines, the research group said.

As a result of this increased internet usage, 36% of people who go online said they spent less time looking at the television as a result.

The report said search engines would continue to dominate online advertising spend, followed by display advertisements and e-mails.

“After five years of dipping their toes into the online marketing waters, firms have come to realise that the net is a valuable medium for client acquisition, retention and market expansion,” said the study.

Source: bbc.co.uk

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Matt Poepsel, vice-president of professional services at Gomez, said user-generated content and other Web 2.0 developments like blogs had “the power to destroy brands faster than ever.” “Consumers can find information, create information and share it in a way they never had before,” Poepsel added.

Online marketing activities must be based on robust and responsive technology, and draw on data and metrics that are shared by all stake-holders, according to experts at a recent roundtable hosted by Internet application performance specialist Gomez.
Participants argued that in today’s Web 2.0 environment, customer expectations are higher than ever and patience with intrusive advertising and marketing techniques is wearing increasingly thin. This is making the task of online marketers and the I.T. teams supporting them more difficult, they said.

Matt Poepsel, vice-president of professional services at Gomez, said user-generated content and other Web 2.0 developments like blogs had “the power to destroy brands faster than ever.”

“Consumers can find information, create information and share it in a way they never had before,” Poepsel added. “Your products must be popular and work, or you’ll lose your customers.”

Jacques van Niekerk, head of online marketing tools provider Acceleration, said firms often forget the basics when trying to run a Web business, such as “using the right technology and making sure you have a lot of people behind it.”

“The more the Internet grows, the more our customers struggle to adopt the right technology, and understand how to get the most out of it,” van Niekerk added.

Others warned that unless firms have Web sites that are reliable and always available, their marketing efforts will be in vain. Former chief marketing officer at lastminute.com, Niall McKinney, said, “It’s massively frustrating for any firm that’s made a big investment in marketing to have a site go down for two days. You’ve got to have technology that doesn’t break.”

Gomez’s Poepsel also argued that most I.T. and marketing teams are failing to share the same metrics and goals, which ultimately harms the business. “I.T. doesn’t care about conversion rates but there are metrics that it can use,” he explained. “We’re starting to see marketers develop personas [to segment the market], and most forward-thinking I.T. groups also use personas to segment how they deliver experiences to that audience.”

Source: newsfactor.com

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Broadband video advertising will eat into search advertising’s share of the online advertising market, research from analyst firm IDC has predicted.

Focusing on the US, the firm forecasts that search advertising will retain its No 1 position in the US market but will slip from the 40pc share it currently enjoys to 32pc by 2011.

Search advertising will grow in absolute terms in this period, however, as internet advertising is predicted to grow about three times as fast as advertising overall. Internet advertising was worth US$16.9bn in 2006, expected to rise to US$31.3bn in 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate of 13.5pc.

This poses a strategic challenge to Google, the market leader in search advertising, since more than 99pc of its income stems from this type of ad, IDC said. However, Google owns user-generated video site YouTube and will undoubtedly look to incorporate revenue-generating rich media ads onto the popular site.

“Broadband video commercials will experience their breakthrough in the coming years. This will create tremendous opportunities, but also threats, for old and new media companies,” said Karsten Weide, programme director, digital marketplace: new media and entertainment at IDC.

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ADVERTISEMENTGoogle’s network of sites captured 48.3 per cent of the US search market in March, gaining 0.2 share points on the previous month, according to the latest figures from measurement and analysis firm comScore.

The search giant led the pack with a total of 3.5 billion search queries performed during the month.

Yahoo maintained its second place ranking with 27.5 per cent of US searches, or two billion queries, followed by Microsoft with 10.9 per cent at 798 million queries.

The Ask network registered 5.2 per cent or 379 million queries, and Time Warner had five per cent or 368 million queries.

Americans conducted 7.3 billion online searches in March, up six per cent on February and 14 per cent on March 2006.

All search engines increased their US traffic, suggesting that either the internet population grew slightly in March, or US users are making more searches.

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