Way back in August 2008, eBay took legal action against Shawn Hogan, owner of the popular webmaster forum, Digital Point Forums. You can see the full complaint here.

The original allegation was that Hogan had been stuffing cookies to collect eBay affiliate commission payments. From Revenews:

The short version is that eBay alleges that the affiliates named engaged in “cookie stuffing”, specifically generating hidden forced clicks of their Ebay affiliate links. Hidden forced clicks are when an affiliate link is invoked without a physical click by the end user. Various forms of technology and/or coding are used so that the merchant’s site is not actually seen by the end user. The alleged activities in question occurred between 2003 and mid 2007.  eBay claims measures were taken to hide the activity and that the defendants denied any wrongdoing when questioned by CJ, which at the time was still running  eBay’s program, regarding suspicious traffic.

On the 24th June 2010, a California grand jury handed down indictments again Hogan and an (alleged) partner in crime, Brian Dunning. You can read the Sean Hogan Indictment here, and the Brian Dunning Indictment here. Both have been charged with wire fraud and criminal forfeiture.  Both have since appeared in court and been released, having put up a $100k bond and surrendered their passports. Hogan and Dunning will next appear on th 9th September and August 19th respectively.

I don’t understand American law well enough to comment on the specifics so I’m again going to refer to the Revenews post:

Indictment Specifics

Several interesting specifics were outlined in both of the indictments:

• Between 2006 and June 2007, Shawn Hogan (Digital Point Solutions) earned approximately $15.5 million in commissions from eBay. Hogan was eBay’s number one affiliate.
• Between 2006 and June 2007, Dunning (Kessler’s Flying Circus) earned approximately $5.3 million in commissions from eBay. Dunning was eBay’s number two affiliate.
• Hogan and Dunning are accused of generating hidden forced clicks on both their own web sites as well as sites not connected with the defendants in order to increase the number of computers storing the eBay affiliate tracking cookie.
• The legal criteria for wire fraud was established not on money (commissions) being transferred over the wires, but because of transmission of the tracking cookie between states and internationally.
• The affiliates attempted to hide the activity from eBay and CJ by not engaging in the cookie stuffing on computers located in San Jose (eBay headquarters) or Santa Barbara (CJ’s headquarters). This is geo-targeting and is readily known to be used by affiliates engaging in questionable activity. Of course, not all geo-targeting activity in nefarious.
• Both Hogan (2005) and Dunning (2006) denied any cookie stuffing behavior when questioned by CJ.
• Each individual wire fraud account is related to a particular incident on an IP address outside California (location of eBay servers) where an affiliate cookie for the defendants was set.

There was significant amounts of money involved in this – they were paid more than $20m between them.  It will be interesting to see how this pans out when they next appear in court.

Demand Media currently run one of the largest spam mills on the web. It seems they have decided to push their spam even further and are now using dropped domains and 301′ing them to high earning internal pages.

From Gabriel Weinbergs blog:

fnboelwein.com redirects to www.ehow.com/apply-card-credit-online/. As does bankofelgin.com.

If you actually go to the link, you get this message at the top:

Hi There! bankofelgin.com isn’t available, but you’re still in a good place — ehow.com. We think we might have what you’re looking for.

Doubt it.

But like Aaron Wall said:

Not to fear, Demand Media is a trusted Google partner, so the algorithm and engineers are prohibited to take action against the same activity which would get your website removed from the search results.

As usual, its one rule for the big guys and another for the rest of us.

I would assume everyone reading this has at some point wished they had access to their competitors traffic and earnings stats. There are many reasons to want to know this – just this week I wanted to see the traffic a site in position 1 in Google was getting, so I could decide whether I wanted to invest time and money in overtaking him. I knew roughly that it would cost me £2000 to take his first place position from him and I needed to know if it was worth doing.

This method takes some planning and a little work, but the beauty of it is you only need to do most of this once, then you can repeatedly use the method over and over with only 5 minutes work each time.

This method does involve some lying and bending the truth, but if its good for the people running our country then I have no problems doing it too…

Of course if you email from your own business email address and ask for your competitors stats then he is going to tell you to go away (or something to those words!).

So firstly we need to set ourselves up as a 3rd party. I like to pretend to be a website broker, but a solicitor or marketing company works great also. You can take shortcuts, but every shortcut you take increases the chance of the plan failing. Bear in mind my point above in that you only need to do the hard work once, so in my opinion it is worth doing properly.

Firstly you should set up a quick website like this one. Use domain privacy! If you don’t then you are doomed to failure from the start. Moniker and Godaddy both offer domain privacy services. Once your website looks official, you need to create email addresses/phone numbers. I assume you know how to set up an email address at your domain, so lets look at phone numbers. Its extremely easy to set up a landline phone number that redirects to you via Skype, or you can use a company like Mail Boxes Etc to field incoming calls. Don’t just list a mobile phone number – it won’t look professional enough and will give the game away.

Don’t worry about the address – you will need to list one but you won’t need to receive anything in the post so you can use a made up one if you like.

Once this is done its time to make first contact with our victims. The trick here is make the victim think a large payday is around the corner. Its no secret why scams like the “you’ve won 65 millions” emails keep circulating – as soon as people see £ signs all rational thinking goes out of the window. I like to open with something like this (italics are my notes):

Hello,

My name is Sarah Jones (female names get a higher response rate!) and I work for fake company. We are currently looking to buy sites in your niche on behalf of one of the top 5 worldwide sportswear companies (Make them think you are acting on behalf of a major company, we need to get them thinking “big payday”).

I have been looking at your site today and I see you are ranking top 5 in Google for Blue Widgets (this should be a genuine thing they rank for, so they know it is a human writing an email and not spam). I also loved your article on Green Widgets – this is perfectly aligned with a new product launch our client intends to carry out this summer. (again, write about something on their site so they think you have spent time examining it.)

Would you be interested in selling whatever.com? We have already acquired several static sites in your niche but we are particularly interested in a blog such as yours. (Again, get them thinking there is big money in this).

If this is something you would like to consider, we would need a few preliminary statistics from you – primarily your number of uniques/pageviews and earnings figures. At this stage we would only require stats from the last month – we can then show them to our client and if they are happy we can sign NDA’s, reveal our clients identity and begin negotiations. My direct office line is listed below if you wish to speak to me regarding this.

Regards,

fake name
fake website
fake phone number

In reality, if I am considering entering a niche all I need is the last months stats. They will be happy to send these as they think it is just the beginnings of negotations. Unless the niche is Christmas decorations or Fireworks 1 months stats are more than enough! Don’t get greedy – the more you ask for, the more likely you will be uncovered. Of course once they give you something they can’t take it back – feel free to keep asking for more and more information in further emails until you have everything you require.

Heres some stats I picked up from a site ranking in number 1 for a keyword I am about to compete for. I’ve had this blog post written since last Wednesday, I was just waiting on these numbers coming in to publish it. I will always try and illustrate my posts with real life examples, or at least as close as I can get.

So now I have a good clear view of what the number 1 ranking site is getting in traffic. I also have full access to the exact traffic from all of his keywords. This is extremely important – I can see he got 200 visitors on Saturday but if I intend to compete largely on one keyword its useless to me if 180 of those came from long tail searches. In this site 85% of traffic is coming from a single phrase – which is absolutely perfect for my purpose. I’ve just shown the last weeks traffic above since his traffic has been consistent for the last month anyway.

Now lets take a look at a sample of the earnings: (click image to enlarge)

Again I’ve just taken a pic of a small selection to show as an example. This site is making on average $100 a day in yearly subscriptions. It takes in $36,500 a year in income – this is almost all profit since there is no physical product being shipped.

Even worst case if I outrank him on his main keyword only, 85% of his traffic and earnings is going to diverted straight to my bank account – over $30,000 per year.

I was extremely surprised at how much he was earning. He is converting traffic at a much higher rate than I thought he could.

There would have been longer ways to test this – you can use an Adwords campaign to test conversion rates, and you can use Adwords Estimator, Compete or Semrush to estimate traffic. But these are all only estimates – absolutely nothing beats factual data direct from the source.

With all the information I have to hand now, I realise if I buy the exact match domain from Sedo for £1000 and spend £2000 (estimate) on backlinks and content I am going to create a cash cow that takes 5 minutes work per week and gives me thousands of dollars a month in pure profit.

I liken this plan to looking at second hand cars – you will go see many, but a lot of them will have something wrong with them. Some sites might have their traffic spread across too many keywords, some might not be earning in the range you thought, or some might simply have poor traffic in comparison to what you anticipated. But the beauty is that once you are set up to extract information in this manner, you can send dozens of information requests extremely quickly – you only need to get one goldmine like I have shown above to make this worthwhile.

One final tip – I would concentrate on niches where you either already own an exact match domain, or you know that there is one available for sale. In this economy pretty much every domain that is parked is for sale – if there is no site on the .net, .org, .com or .co.uk you are good to go

I hope some of the people reading this can put it to good use. What do you think? Acceptable? Unethical? Good idea? Or am I going to hell?

I just added a new “linkbaits” category to the blog, which we will use to hopefully share great examples of link baits. If you’ve created one, or simply seen one, let us know and we’ll consider featuring it.

Jumping on something topical is often the key to success when it comes to link baits, and what could be more topical today than this awesome design BP a new logo competition?

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last month, you have surely heard about the BP Oil spill (also known as the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill or Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill), which has been one of the largest oil spills in history. Every newspaper and TV station has constantly been reporting on BP’s attempt to put a cap on the oil wellhead.

Before that competition link was shown to me, I’d never even heard of Logo My Way, the logo design company behind it. With more than 1200 competition entries and 343,000 competition views this has certainly been a home run from a getting exposure point of view – time will tell if it generates any backlinks. I’ve linked to it here I see Shoemoney also wrote about it, so its off to a start at least!

Some of the entries in the competition are brilliant – their brand name will definitely stick in my mind next time I’m looking to have a logo done, so from a publicity point of view this couldn’t really have been done any better.

The site owner must have put up the $200 prize for the competition, but outside of this there is no costs at all. $200 is going to work out to be an absolute bargain from the exposure the site gets – I’d tell you how much he’s already paid per competition view, but the calculator on my Windows laptop won’t even divide 200 by 343,000 so the number is that small

The beauty of a link bait like this  is the users themselves are providing the content. We’ve created some successful link baits that have taken us more than a week to put the post together from, and they have picked up a lot of links but they have cost us a fair amount to hire people to write all of the content.

If you can have your users do it for you, you save those costs as well as having the other massive benefit that some of those 1200 entrants will be tweeting their entries, leaving them as Facebook updates etc to try and pick up votes to win the cash prize.

So well done to Logomyway.com, if you are in need of logo design I’d check them out.

This is a guest post by a current DMOZ editor. The author has been paid by searchengineoptimisation.org for this content. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of searchengineoptimisation.org.

I am writing this post about the current state of DMOZ, or “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web” as they proclaim themselves to be. I believe time and technology has simply passed DMOZ by – its time to put it out to pasture, or drastically change the way in which it operates.

Outside of links for search engine spiders, the directory currently has zero use.  If you want to hire a painter in your home town, would you go look up a dmoz category? Or would you use Google? By their own admission dmoz is horrendously out of date, so how can they possibly expect human users to gain any value from it?

One potential dmoz listing has been complaining he’s waited 10 years and is still not listed.  Jimnoble (dmoz editor) says himself:

Visit the category where you believe your website should be listed and use the suggest URL link at the top of the page. Some volunteer will process your listing suggestion in time but we can’t predict who or when that might be. Elapsed times can range from a few days to a few years. There is no need to re-suggest your website and doing so could be counter-productive because a later suggestion overwrites any earlier one.

Pretty much an admission right there that the directory is a complete failure. How can they be of use to human users when great new sites can potentially take several years to get in, but can be in search engine results and showing in search queries within a day of launching?

As well as being a miserable failure when it comes to end users, the DMOZ staff also seem to want to create as poor a user experience as possible for people submitting websites too.

This quote from Mauri (who is a moderator on the forum) sums it up well:

No, because all submitters can easily know when their sites get listed, since they will appear on the public side of the directory.

If a site gets rejected, and this happens because our Guidelines say that’s not listable,
there is no valid or useful reason to inform the submitter of that decision.

The following reply by Cardchoices is perfectly correct:

Yes there is a useful reason for this. Lots of people out there will keep resubmitting their sites because they thought their sites had been turned down eventhough their sites have not yet been reviewed. Sequently, it’s a waste of time for both submitters and editors

Everything is already in place to send people an automated email saying they have been reviewed and rejected. What is there to gain (apart from lots of unwanted resubmissions) by making people wait and see?

With the current state of the DMOZ directory, pulling the plug on it and letting it die out might be the best thing for everyone concerned.

You can tell that the directory is a mess when a war veteran selling childs toys can’t get in after 6 months,  yet there is a Domain brokerage company listed who are running front page ads on their site… selling dmoz listed domains that have been dropped and caught!

From the dmoz about page:

The web continues to grow at staggering rates. Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can’t keep up with submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can’t keep pace with the growth of the Internet.

This is simply not true – Best of the Web are a paid directory and are doing a far better job of keeping up with things than dmoz could ever hope to do.

These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.

I don’t even know where to start on the quote above, its wrong in so many different ways.

The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on words through the efforts of volunteers, the Open Directory follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the Web.

Google is the only definitive catalog of the web in 2010. The only catalog dmoz is like is the 3 year old mail order catalog I’m currently propping up my old desk with – its about as out of date as it…

Given that the directory is useless for humans, the only possible reason to be an unpaid editor would be to either list your own sites, sabotage competitors, sell listings, or all of the above. With a pagerank 8 homepage and 7 million links pointing to it, its easy to see why listings are in demand from an seo perspective.  Heres a screen shot of 5 listings I sold today to one buyer (click it to see the full size):

I know from speaking to friends who have managed to get into more lucrative pages to edit than me that some links have been bought and sold for significantly more than I have charged.

The thing is, all is not completely lost with DMOZ if the owners were willing to turn it around. It would only take one small change – charging a fee to have your website reviewed like Yahoo Dir and BOTW do.

DMOZ admin made the following comment:

Charging a fee and passing that on to volunteers would invite abuse (and given how the volunteer system is structured would be difficult to manage). And with payment, much of the value the directory has would be lost.

This is complete bullshit, as right now there is a massive incentive for abuse. From an editors point of view, there is no reason whatsoever to stay aboard this sinking ship for any reason outside of taking bribes – corruption is rampant across the full directory with the current business model.

If the payments to review your site went via official channels, this would wipe out 99% of the corruption overnight.  If you were paying for a review that was guaranteed to be done within a week then the system would work perfectly. Right now if you submit a site, you don’t know if you just got a lazy editor, one who owns a competing site to you and will never give you the juicy link, a category owned by one of the many “pay to play” editors. Since you could potentially wait months/years there really isn’t any way to tell.

Nobody is going to pay for a link twice, so by charging officially it would completely kill the thriving black market for dmoz links. By guaranteeing a 3 or 7 day review, it would become obvious if someone wasn’t listing sites that they should be, and those editors could quickly be weeded out.

I cannot accept the argument of  “And with payment, much of the value the directory has would be lost”. I would say the value has already been lost since high quality sites cannot get in the directory due to corruption, lazyness and the fact that the small number of editors who are honest are massively over worked.

Look at how much business BOTW, Business.com and the Yahoo Directory are doing and tell me how that wouldn’t work perfectly with this dying behemoth of a directory…

I received an email from Tradedoubler, who run the Manchester United Credit Card program which is a credit card issued by MBNA.

I hope you had a good weekend.

Throughout the year we have had a number of conversations with MBNA about affiliates appearing on mbna and it?s endorsed partners brand terms. Although we appreciate in most cases this is due to broad matching, affiliates appearing on these terms can negatively affect the performance of mbna?s own brand bidding strategy.

We have finalised a list of negatives which you can download from here:
http://hst.tradedoubler.com/file/172823/mbnanegatives.xlsx This should be easy for you to add into your accounts. Please would you ensure these have been added as negatives across all engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) by end of play Wednesday 19th July?

We’re using tools to monitor coverage over a large number of these keywords so we have a map exactly who has been bidding on these brand terms. Any affiliates found appearing on these terms after Wednesday 19th July will have commission for the relevant card reversed until the problem is rectified.

I don’t want to sound heavy handed but hope you appreciate the business rational around this decision.

If you could please confirm when the full list has been added across all it would be appreciated.

Many thanks,

I was amazed that they would attempt this – it wipes out any chance of a PPC affiliate managing to run these campaigns profitably. These are the keywords they want blocking on a Broad, Negative match for the Manchester Utd Credit Card:

There is absolutely no way that we could run a profitable campaign promoting Manchester Utd credit cards, without bidding on terms related to Manchester United.  I think whoever is setting this up has no idea about the concept of football fans.

If I was forced to only bid on terms like “credit cards” I would be paying far too much and already be out of the game. But for talking sake, lets say I could buy traffic for “credit cards”.  Since I can’t bid on anything related to Man utd, Manchester, Red Devils etc,  these are all just going to be people searching for credit card related things etc.

From those, a massive proportion of them will have no interest in football whatsoever. Unless you are offering them a great APR or bonus for signing up, they are simply not going to be interested in having a football logo on their card and paying extra for it – which you’re doing here since the APR is 16.9%.

So we’ve already lost a massive portion of the traffic we bought, purely because they have no interest in football. But it only gets worse from here, since of all the football fans we have left, many of them are Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea and so on fans – offer them a Manchester Utd credit card with 0% APR for life, free balance transfers, no penalty for missing payments and the card personally delivered by a page 3 model of their choice and the conversion rate is still going to be horrendous.

The very concept of a (specific) football club credit card is polarising – the chances are someone is either going to absolutely love it, or completely detest it. There is no way you can make money buying expensive page views from the haters just to get a handful of prospects.

If anyone has any idea of how you go about profiting in this situation, I’d love to hear them in the comments and I’ll update the main post with your thoughts (and credit links).

Of course if you wanted to target Manchester United fans, you could use geo targeting only to show your adverts from any location south of London…

MBNA have cited brand issues for implementing this, but in this situation that is simply not correct in my opinion. For a start we’re not attempting to bid on MBNA terms, merely things related to Manchester.

Since this campaign can no longer possibly be profitable, we’re running ads like these:

If someone is searching for “manchester united credit card” I would far rather take the easiest path to an affiliate payment and sell them what they are looking for. Instead because of the restrictive terms, I need to actively trash what they are searching for to poison them to it, then sell them an alternative.

The one silver lining to something like this, is it drastically lowers the competition since all the people who choose to stay with the MBNA program can’t bid on the keywords that I can.  Sometimes its far more profitable to simply leave affiliate offers that are becoming too restrictive, bid on whatever you like, and send the traffic to a direct competitor.

Optimize.co.uk – Please stop it with the spam.

I’m not sure why you think its good business practice to repeatedly send this email:

Rajesh () wrote:
Home Contact Us
Contact Details

If you'd like to know more about Optimize and how we could help you then please
contact us at:

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8879 3180
Email: admindept@optimize.co.uk

Optimize Search Marketing
25 Crescent Road
London
SW20 8HA

You can view our Privacy Policy here.

IP:                 10.0.0.58
Referer 1:          Type-in or bookmark
Referer 2:          Type-in or bookmark
Referer 3:          Type-in or bookmark

Page visited 1:     http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org/
Page visited 2:     http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org/favicon.ico
Page visited 3:     http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org/contact-us/

If you want to send it, at least check where you are sending it to. Do you really think a high ranking seo blog is going to hire a fly by night spammer to do SEO for them? Dream on…

We’ve released this plugin to allow blog owners to reward regular posters with a backlink. You can see it in action by looking to the right, we’re displaying it under “contributors”.

You can choose in the options what it takes for a writer to appear, by selecting x posts in y days. Maybe you want 1 post in the last week, 3 in the last month, 12 in the last year – its completely up to you.

Everything is automated. When a writer qualifies, their link will appear without any input from you. If they ever no longer qualify, their link will simply vanish until they qualify again.

In the settings you can select any writers that you want to block from the list. You can also choose whether it displays sitewide or homepage only.

To install it, simply copy the php file to your “plugins” folder. Activate it as a plugin, then go to Widgets (under Appearance) and drag it to where it needs to go. You can change any settings under “WP Contributors” in Settings.

The “powered by” credit link is completely optional.  It is Off as standard, but if you’d like to help support us then feel free to tick the box to display the link

You can download the plugin here. I’ll leave comments on for this one, feel free to ask any questions or leave any feedback.

I just want to start with a quick note – as with every other review on my site, this has been paid with my own cash, and contains no affiliate links. Any site owners have no previous knowledge of what is going in the review. I want readers to be able to trust what I say and feel this is by far the best way to achieve this.

Aaron Wall (of Seobook.com), his wife Giovanna and Geordie Carswell have teamed up to create a comprehensive pay per click training program. I signed up a few weeks back but wanted to hold off on writing a review till I’d had time to go through more of the training modules.

The membership site primarily consists of 3 parts – a detailed section of training modules, a selection of ppc tools and a community forum. Lets take a look first at the training modules overview:

Pay per click training modules

• Choosing the Right PPC Platforms. Peruse the pros and cons of each of the major PPC platforms available.
• Keyword Research. Learn how to unearth the most profitable keywords for your campaigns.
• Google Adwords Essentials. Essential reading before starting ANY Google Adwords campaigns. A must read…
• Affiliates & Adwords. Google does allow affiliates to use the Adwords system, but they have to work considerably harder than in years’ past. Find out why.
• Google Adwords for Search. Walk-through the setup of your Adwords search campaign and get deep insight into the effects of each setting and approach.
• Google Content Network Advertising. Bone up on how to be successful on the Google Content Network, and avoid the landmines that strike unsuspecting advertisers.
• Microsoft Adcenter (Bing). Learn how to export and import your Google Adwords campaigns into MSN Adcenter and tweak them for best success.
• Facebook Ads. Study the nuances for success on this powerful new advertising platform. This is a MUST for local business advertisers.
• MyAds by MySpace.Don’t overlook this easy self-serve platform for reaching younger audiences inexpensively.
• Expert Audio Interviews & Video. Find out what the pros are up to!

When you are logged in, each section is further broken down. As usual I am on a small screen laptop so can’t even capture the full list, but this will give you an idea:

(click to enlarge)

I love the way everything is laid out – its extremely easy to find exactly what you are looking for, and having it broken down into neat sections makes it a simple process to work through all the modules in order.

When I started going through the modules I was amazed at the depth that each of them go into – it is simply on another level to any other PPC training info I have ever read. Too many other pay per click info products are far too vague (or simply out of date). Every section here is stuffed full of actual, actionable tips and tricks.

As I’m going through each module I find myself constantly logging into my Adwords account to make little tweaks. From what looked like apparently minor changes to me, we have managed to lower our costs by 24% on one Adwords campaign, whilst increasing the revenue by 15%.  That gain alone is paying for my monthly membership 10 times over. If I can keep refining my other campaigns like this one, my membership on PPCblog might end being worth 100 times what it actually cost me

I’ve not even made it through all of the modules yet so the gains we have made so far can only get better from this point in.  Even from what I have seen so far, there is massive value in this training program and I would highly recommend it.

Pay per click tools

The following tools are all included with membership:

• Google Adwords Mass Campaign Builder
  This tool combines everything you need to crank out Adwords PPC campaigns, adgroups, and ads in bulk and export them straight into Adwords Editor for upload.
• Keyword List Comparison Tool
  Use this tool to compare up to 10 different keyword lists to isolate the unique keywords in each list, scrub duplicates, and create a single master list.
• Competitive Research Tool
  Unearth the keywords your competitors are bidding on, get unlimited keyword and ad exports, and more – Powered by SEMrush
• Keyword List Generator
  Mix and match keyword permutations to create large, easily sortable keyword lists with a few clicks.
• Keyword List Cleaner & Number Stripper
  Stuck cleaning a scraped or bulk keyword list?  Use this tool to quickly scrub extra characters, numbers, unwanted words and more.
• Typo Generator
  “Fat Finger” searchers can be your best friend when it comes to low-competition keywords.  This tool takes your correctly-spelled keyword and creates a list of high probability typo keywords for bid.
• Keyword Match Type Wrapper
  Quickly wrap your keywords for use with the PPC engines’ different match type options, like phrase – “keyword” and exact – [keyword], then just cut and paste into your adgroups!
• PPC Mass Ad Generator
  Use this mix and match text ad creation tool to easily whip up dozens of ad variations at a time.  Export straight to Adwords Editor.
• A/B Split Test Validation Calculator
  Not so fast!  Before you decide on a winner in your A/B split test, be sure you have enough data to have reach a statistically valid result.  Enter your current test results into this validation calculator and find out if your test result is a go.
• PPC ROI Calculator
  How much will you have to bid, and how well will you have to convert your PPC traffic to make a profit?  Use this tool to play with the variables and see what it will take to succeed with your campaign.
• RoAS Calulator (Return on Impressions)
  Thinking of bidding on a CPM (Per-Thousand-Impressions) basis with display advertising?  See what your bids would have to look like to get a decent ROI

Some of these tools are simple but massively time saving ideas that probably should have been included in Adwords in the first place.  Being able to generate typos is excellent – we just dump them into a new campaign and set them as “exact match” and then we can track exactly how they perform.  For one ebook affiliate site, typos are actually converting at a higher percentage than the correct spellings, whilst costing half the price so another win at both ends.

Pay per click forums

Finally, we take a look at the forums. The forum is broken up into 17 sub sections covering all aspects of Pay per click advertising.  This was one feature I really loved on seobook.com – the fact that the site owner is responding to individual queries about your specific site. Where else can you have such high level people give you specific advice to your situation for such a small monthly membership fee? This trend has obviously continued over to ppcblog.com with Geordie personally answering hundreds of questions from members.

In conclusion

If you are already running pay per click campaigns, I am going to go out on a limb here and say it would be impossible for you not to find value in a ppcblog membership. There is simply no other place where you can find such a comprehensive collection of high level information all neatly bundled together.

In the short time I have been a member, I have used the training modules to massively increase my ROI on our ppc campaigns in extremely competitive niches.  But you don’t need to take my word for it – feel free to head over there and sign up for a free account to check it out. If you like what you see, you can sign up at the current discounted rate and lock in the cheap membership for as long as you want to stay, with no contracts whatsoever.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. I’m also happy to take suggestions of what anyone would like reviewed next. Perhaps something to do with keyword intelligence? Semrush? Something completely different?

Rae Hoffman posted an awesome interview with some of the top link builders in the industry. If you only read one link building post this year, make it this one.  The people interviewed are (list copied from original post):

• Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM
• Dave Snyder, Managing Partner of the Blueglass Agency
• Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel
• Eric Ward, Ericward.com Linking Strategies and Chief Link Evangelist at advertising intelligence firm AdGooroo.com
• Jim Boykin of We Build Pages
• Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for SEW and owner of Justilien.com
• Michael Gray of the Graywolf SEO blog
• Rae Hoffman, aka Sugarrae, CEO of MFE Interactive and Outspoken Media
• Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
• Roger Montti, the founder and owner of martinibuster.com
• Todd Malicoat, aka Stuntdubl, SEO faculty at MarketMotive.com

Keeping with prior format, this interview is very unique in my eyes as opposed to other interviews for two main reasons. The first being that the questions submitted are actually submitted by the interviewees (one each) so you’re not only getting answers from some of the best, but on topics that other advanced link builders want to hear about.

The second is that no one gets to see the answers of anyone else before the interview is published (I answer mine before sending them out to the interview panel). As I’ve said before, this isn’t about a single answer followed by ten head nods. Any agreements come from true beliefs and any contrary opinions come from the same. We’re all good at what we do, but it doesn’t mean we always agree or that any single one of us is the “be all, end all” on developing backlinks.

You can read the interview here.