Using Adwords for fun

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A little game I have been playing for the past 3 or 4 years has been using Adwords for fun.
I first started back in the days when I entered the various search engine optimisation competitions and have been doing it ever since.
I normally keep an eye on news stories, announcements etc. and then create a little satirical landing page and a number of Adwords ads targeting the news story.
One of my better campaigns was when the London Olympics logo was announced. I set 4 or 5 pages up and then set 4 or 5 rotating adwords ads.
I left it running for the 2 weeks whilst all the talk about it was on, and in that time my add was displayed over 1.4 million times.
I have run similar ads for SEO competitions, The Queens Christmas Speech, Blair’s resignation, many other announcements, and my most recent for Peter Hain.
I never make anything out of this and probably spent in excess of £300 in 2007 but it is fun

 

This mornings earthquake in The UK was the perfect opportunity to set up another little AdWords campaign ;o)
I didn’t bother creating a landing page for it as the subject wasn’t really suitable, all I did was send the traffic to my PodLine site, and just used 1 AdWords ad.
I set it up at about 12:00 set a low daily budget and set keyphrases with very low click costs. It’s 17:20 now and a search for the phrasesis no longer returning my ads which probably means I’ve used up all my budget, stats haven’t cone through in AdWords yet, so I don’t know how many times my ad was shown or clicked on, but my statcounter is showing I had over 240 unique visitors in the past 5 hours.
£10.00 spent and nothing back for it, but I will analysize stats when they come through and then decide whether to switch the ads back on tomorrow.

Set up another little campaign for the budget, but because it wasn’t as niche as usual, my ads were only displaying for a few hours. In that time I had just under 40,000 page impressions with an ad that said
Budget 2008 Please be gentle with me Darling This is my first time.
I set it up pointing to a page at Podline again, but didn’t bother setting up a specific landing page.

Eureka moments

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I’ve spent the last few weeks working on a new database which will eventually be used accross 3 or 4 different websites. I’ve switched from using Access to MySql and it is all a bit of a learning curve at the moment.
The last couple of days has been quite a strain whilst trying things and not getting the real results I was after, but earlier today I had a Eureka moment.
I suddenly had an idea about trying it a different way, spent 20 or so minutes coding hit the enter button and everything worked perfectly
Going to make the next stage of the project so much easier now, until I reach the next hurdle.

Business Broadband

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A couple of years ago I used to do a lot of work on a comparison site for Business Broadband It was another of those little projects I started but never got around to finishing of.
Searching through my site today I came accross some of the old pages and had a look at some of the business broadband offers now available.
This got me thinking and I checked how much I am currently paying for my business broadband to find I am paying at least 10% over the odds for a service not as good as those currently advertised.
This should be a lesson to us all, when taking out a contract, be it mobile phone, broadband, insrance etc. don’t just forget about it.
When you get to the end of the contract don’t just take the easy option and let it auto-renew, shop around, or even speak to your current provider to ensure you receive the best offers available.

The scammers getting quicker

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Spent all day today building a new website, finaly got it finished at about 5:15 and proceded to add it to my business directory.
5:20 I had finished submitting it and was reading through it to check for spelling mistakes. Whilst doing this the phone rang, and it was our old friend again Lewis who says he is from Warwickshire Police.
I’m surprised that by now he doesn’t recognise my telephone number, he normally rings after I place honeypot listings, but this has to be a new record. From placing my listing to the phone ringing must have been under 5 minutes.
It was the same old line,
“Hello, Lewis here from Warwickshire Police, nothing to worry about! we are just contacting local businesses to make them aware of the work we are doing”
I never gave him chance to talk about the wall charts they produce

Has everyone become too skeptical?

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I know there is the old saying “you get what you pay for” but it amazes me just how few small business owners make the most of genuine business opportunities.
Is it because of all the internet scams, deceptive marketing offers and general misinformation that small business owners have become so cynical, or is it just general apathy?
I have been providing Free advertising opportunites to UK based small businesses for over 2 years now, in that time the number of businesses registered has risen from 3,000 to just over 30,000, but why aren’t more small business owners taking advantage of this opportunity?
I recenty joined a local business network in my own town, was amazed to discover there is in excess of 600 small business within a 10 mile radius (this only being a very small town).
A google search puts my site at the top for the “county business directory” and the “town business directory” and it also ranks high for the few businesses that are registered.
But that’s the point, just how few businesses from my own home town have even bothered to list, are most small business owners still not savvy enough to make the most of online opportunities or are they just too cynical?
After all, there is another saying, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”
UK Small Business Directory Free Online Advertising

Latest T Mobile Pay as you Go & Pay Monthly handsets

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How to Make Money Online

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We’ve all seen those traditional how to make money online web sites, you probably know the ones I mean, where you keep scrolling down and down and keep seeing the stats, the testimonials, the special offers, the ebooks, the 90 day guarantees and the big buy today at a special price buttons.

I won’t bore you with all that, here are my very simple top 10 tips on how to make money online.

  • Sell the right product in the right place at the right time
  • Lead generation
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Google AdSense
  • Google AdWords
  • Optimised mini-sites
  • Email capture
  • Sell the dream
  • Automation
  • Mass quantity

mangeur de cigogne competition 7 years today

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OK, so the content may have changed a bit but my old mangeur de cigogne competition page is still up.

mangeur de cigogne was one of the early search engine optimization competitions where the object  was to rank highest for a made up phrase.

The phrase mangeur de cigogne (Stork eater in English) was chosen and the timeframe was 2 months and ended on 15th June 2004

My memory is a little rusty but I seem to remember the finishing order was;

  1. Jan  – Actulab
  2. Jerome - NoName
  3. Laurent - Thickparasite

Mangeur de cicogne

Image courtesy of NoName

As the name suggests, Mangeur de Cigogne was a French Search engine optimisation competition organised by promoweb

List of participants here: http://concours.promo-web.org/participants.htm

The others I remember;

apologies to anyone I have missed.

How do I remember the day so well? I missed the last few hours because I was in the maternity ward holding my wifes hand as little TJ was born :o )

Hope all competitors are well and still doing battles with Google ;o)

TJ    Sim64   Serps