Sometimes people get mad at Google ‘cuz they won’t just take their money and run the ads they write. Worse yet, they won’t even tell you WHY.

Maddening, isn’t it?

Dave Bullock explains why, like this:

“People should think of Google as being their first customer.

“People search Google because they trust it. Your ad on their search engine is an endorsement, and you’re borrowing their identity.”

The fact that the whole world trusts Google and the true meaning and cause of that trust is somewhat overlooked in all the hoopla about their juggernaut success.

People talk about Google’s skyrocketing stock values and Page Rank Formulas and the birth from fledgling lab project at Stanford, and the geek culture and the free 5-star lunches in the employee cafeteria.

But not too many people really ask, why does the world trust Google?

When someone wants to know something, why is the first place they think of looking, Google? Why is Google a verb?

Because Google is the most accurate available representation of what human beings consider important and valuable on the Internet.

Stop and think for a minute… what if there was no such thing as a search engine. How would you ever find anything? We’d all be sitting in our cubicles asking our friends what their favorite bookmarks are.

It’s not even possible to deal with the whole Internet as it is. It’s such a vast thing, you can only deal with some simplified map of it. Google has to present the Internet in a way to you that makes it tidy and comprehensible. So simple, even a six year old can use it.

It’s difficult to appreciate how hard a job this is.

Earlier this year I had a conversation with a brilliant guy who had, for his own reasons, developed his own search engine. You know, one that crawls the web and follows links and rummages through IP addresses and catalogues the pages.

He says to me, “Perry, it was a nightmare. Did you know that literally 90% of the content on the Internet is pure SPAM? You can’t believe the amount of computer resources it took just to explore it, much less sift and sort through it all.”

He wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest. It’s impossible to comprehend how much of the actual Internet is pure garbage. You would never want to deal with the Internet in its raw, unfiltered form.

The “real” World Wide Web, if you could actually look at it, is not much different from the swirling sea of chaos outside the Nebuchadnezzar spaceship in The Matrix.

It teems with viruses, rogue programs, hackers’ contrivances, incoherent pages of robotically generated “content” and excrement from the bowels of the information superhighway.

The most minimal job of a search engine is to make all that rubble invisible to you.

At the root of the world’s trust of Google is Google’s inability to be bought. I say this even though Google sells a billion plus dollars of clicks every month.

Because first of all, what makes Google valuable in the first place is the extreme difficulty in manipulating the organic (free) side of the engine. The editorial side has high standards and hundreds of millions of web surfers experience that every day.

Google is pretty good at recognizing what visitors do when they come to a site that they like, and rewarding likable sites with free listings.

And when you go over to the paid side of Google, they still have standards which continue to climb. A lot of people think, just because they’re showing up with money in hand, means Google ought to shut up and take it.

NOT!

This entitlement belief of “The customer is always right and the customer is me, because I’m putting up the money here” is actually backwards. It creates an instant adversarial relationship with THE gatekeeper you have to pass muster with before you get to be on the mainstream of the Internet.

The fallacy of that is, you are not the customer. Google is.

On the Internet, the customer is not the person who provides the advertising dollars. It’s the person who consumes the content and buys things from the advertisers. Google is the customer’s advocate.

The day they cease to be that is the day their flanks are wide open for a competitor to eat their lunch.

Though Google is mighty and has built up a huge lead over all their rivals, their place in the world is not eternally secure. They have to keep inflating their expectations of advertisers and content providers in order for the Internet to evolve.

Ask yourself the question:

“Google, what do you want? How can I serve your best customers?”

That’s how you get Google love, people love, link love, and traffic love.

Perry Marshall

Social Bookmarking

Source: info product marketing

If you’re trying to optimize a page for a popular keyword that has alot of competition, take a close look at the related keyword phrases.

For instance, let’s say you wanted to target the keyword “marketing”, that was searched for over 240,000 times on Overture alone in a month, there are 587,000,000 websites on Google competeing for that keyword, the keyword marketing is FAR too general and obviously has too much competition, sure if you got ranked #1 (would be very hard to do!) you’ll get a flood of traffic, but it wouldn’t be very targeted traffic.

Be more specific, target keyword PHRASES.

Let’s try “internet marketing” which was searched for 80,000 times on Overture in one month and has 62,800,000 sites on Google competing for the same phrase, that’s far better, not brilliant, but at least you’re more targeted now, but we need to drill down a little further to give us a fighting chance of getting good rankings on the search engines.

Now, under the keywords “internet marketing” over at Overture, searchers also used the following phrases:-

79764 internet marketing
6087 internet marketing online
4635 internet marketing strategy
2733 strategic internet marketing
2603 internet marketing consultant
2384 internet marketing consulting
2378 internet marketing service
2355 internet marketing tool
1929 internet marketing company
1855 internet web site marketing
1631 internet marketing san diego

There are many more phrases but I’m sure you get my point.

The keywords “marketing”, and “marketing online” are obviously going to have alot of rivalry, however, using research tools like KeywordElite will point you in the right direction on what you should target in your marketing strategy and show you the specific keyword phrases people are using to find products or information, and allow for you to see what the competition is for those phrases.

Did you notice the phrase “internet marketing san diego” from the list above? Well that’s a great phrase to target if you have a business there, and there are only 243,000 competing sites in Google, that’s quite targeted traffic, you won’t get as much traffic as being top ranked in Google as the other phrases but I can wager that you’ll make more sales!

What’s the competition like where you live? What specific products are people searching for to buy? What specific problems do people need solving? Alot of traffic is good, alot of targeted traffic is brilliant!

You can do all of the above and much more with KeywordElite, this tool is a must for any serious marketer! Not only will it find all the phrases that searchers are using for any niche, it will even tell you how much people are bidding on those terms in Adsense, which is great for PPC or if you want to build an Adsense website. 

Source: adsense

What is Click Fraud?

Click Fraud is the act of clicking on Google Adsense Ads, or causing such ads to be clicked, with the purpose of generating profit for the advertiser. It can be done manually, or automatically, with programs or scripts.

Click Fraud can be intentional, or not. Intentional Click Fraud occurs when the publisher (website owner) clicks on his own ads (or causes his ads to be clicked) to generate ill-gotten gains for himself. Unintentional Click Fraud occurs when unbeknownst to the website owner, his friends and family will repeatedly click on his or her ads in order to create revenue for the website owner.

Click Fraud is called Click Fraud for a reason: it is FRAUD, whether intentional or not.

Consequences of Click Fraud

There are two main consequences of Click Fraud. One of them affects directly the website owner, and the second reflects on the PPC system in General

Personal Consequence

Once Click Fraud is discovered by Google (or any other PPC provider), the website owner’s Adsense account will be banned, permanently. The publisher will therefore forfeit all earned income, whether generated through Click Fraud or not. This is especially difficulty for the publisher, in particular if he or she was unaware of the activities in his account.

System-wide Consequence

Click Fraud erodes the confidence of advertisers, period. Because of Click Fraud, honest advertisers are robbed of revenue, and since they advertise with Google Adwords, are given the bill for their robbery, adding insult to injury. In the long run, they will be unwilling to increase their bids for keywords, depriving publishers of honest revenue, and if the problem is severe, may drop out altogether and explore other advertising venues.

Click Fraud is a problem that affects all levels of the PPC chain. In the beginnings of the Internet, it might have been considered a “victimless” crime, but we must realize that thousands upon thousands of people rely on Adsense for revenue, and any erosion in the confidence of the system will affect them all.

Be wary of Click Fraud, and guard against it, whatever your position in the chain, because it is a problem that affects all of us.