This video will give you a quick idea of the basis of the upcoming Jay Berkowitz presentation at eBay Live 2008. Our parent company, iBusinessLogic is very pleased to be working with Jay and proud that he has included our work in his upcoming eBay Live keynote speech.

Enjoy this preview, but don't mis the live show in Chicago!

My friends son, Keith Bloemendaal is the sales manager of a local fence building contractor company in Raleigh Durham, North Carolina.

Carolina Custom Fences builds high quality custom fences and they are proud of the fact that they have some of the best installers in the area.

Keith Bloemendaal called iBusinessLogic to ask our opinion of the current Carolina Custom Fences website (follow the link above).

As you can see, the current website is a bit bland and really does not engage the public. This is web 1.0 at its best and is about 6-8 years out of date for website design. The owner of the company, Scott, did the best job he could with the tools his web builder gave him, but the results just do not compare with the state of the art today.

Scott, the owner of the company has access to the website and can update it, but since this site does not have an easy to use content management system (CMS) the owner rarely makes any changes to the site. It is just too difficult to even change an employees name or add a photo, and he does not have the time to worry about these things. If it were a simple process, he might get more involved, but as it is... he would rather just stick with the basics.

In my conversation with Keith we discussed what they had done as a company to promote their current website.

• Web Address on Business Cards
• PPC advertising

What else? Well, nothing much really, The Pay Per Click expenditure is enough... They buy Google Adwords until the budget runs out each day, the hits these adwords bring only last a few hours per 24 hour period. This is why Google adwords may not be the best long term strategy for a small business. Content rich constantly updated websites perform better at the end of the day.

Most small businesses build a website in the following manner:

• They get a standard low cost package from one of the big providers (Yahoo, GoDaddy etc)
• Fill in basic information about the company, what they do, where they do it, add a couple of photos and a telephone number and wait for the calls to roll in...
• When the calls do not roll in, the next call is to the same provider who sold them a substandard website. They are advised to advertise... (Hint - who sells the advertising?)

My advise to Keith and his company was to not only start a blog but to actually base their entire website on WordPress as a CMS platform. Keith did not understand all of the advantages of WordPress as a content management system but he had heard of blogs before. I explained the built in advantages of blog platforms like WordPress.

• Built in SEO Optimization
• Tagging and Category Links
• Constantly updated content is king for organic web search engine results
• Easy to use interface - no HTML required for basic tasks like adding an article or image
  
• Thousands of available "Themes" Make your website look exactly as you like
• If the need arises to update the look - Lose no content information, just install a new theme
• Every page is generated with CSS so all of the pages are consistent
• Every CMS website ultimately includes unlimited pages
• Sidebar widgets - bring incredible functionality
• Easy to insert images, video, and links

During this conversation, Keith revealed Carolina Custom Fences largest fence contacting competitor in the Raleigh area consistently ranks number one in Google organic search, no matter what search terms are used. (Google Organic search = results on the left side of a Google search results page).

I pointed out that this same competitor has a blog attached to his website and he updates that blog consistently with keyword rich content related to the local market and his specialty - fences. The interesting thing is in those same search results, very few of the other competitors in town were ranking on the first page of the Google organic search results. We determined that there was a great deal of room available for Carolina Custom Fences to find a way onto that same first page or organic results.

Helps Small Business build web relationships.

Part of what we do at iBusinessLogic.com is help companies develop content management system websites and blogs with systems like WordPress and Joomla. Of course my first instinct was to recommend a blog platform for Carolina Custom Fences...

Keith Bloemendaal & Carolina Custom Fences were impressed with our ideas and they gave us the contract.

Then Keith followed my advise and got his blogging feet wet by signing up for a WordPress.com account for his own personal use...

Keith started his own WordPress.com blog and I think he did a great job! (Click the photo to go to the site)

After Keith set up his account with WordPress.com we helped him with some of the basics of setting up the blog.

Some guidance was helpful so he could pick a good theme and I made a nice header image for the new Fence Post Blog he created.

After that we helped him with the basics of widgets and sidebars. Keith jumped right in with the writing though and has put together some really good blog posts right out of the gate!

This blog is meant as a trial, a form of training, a dry run... When we get the real hosted version of the new website installed all of the data Keith entered here will be easily imported into the new hosted company website.

Keith says that this simple blog is already outperforming the existing Carolina Custom Fence website for traffic and it is showing up better in organic search than the old website ever has... And this blog is only a few days old. (With some keyword searches, Keith has found the Raleigh Fence Post blog appearing on the first page of results in Google - in organic search).

The hosted website will provide an opportunity to add many features not available on WordPress.com blogs. The new site will look more like a standard Web 2.0 website but it will have the same content rich features of any WordPress blog. We know that Carolina Custom Fence will find a lot of value in the new installation and they will be more involved with their own website because they will have control over the content and they will not need an IT professional or a webmaster to insert a photo or change an employee's name in the about section.

Stay tuned here to see the progress of Carolina Custom Fences new website/blog...

Or call us to get one of these marvelous content management websites for your company or organization!

While the SEO work that you must do as a seller is minimal for your eBay listings. There are very good reasons for you to learn more about SEO and Keyword tools. Relying on eBay to do all of the work for you may not always be the wisest course of action even though it does work most of the time. With the proper understanding and use of keywords and keyword tools you can increase your sales and get your products seen by the people who are searching for them everyday. In addition, if you want to drive traffic to your eBay store or off eBay eCommerce website a proper understanding of SEO and search based marketing is a basic requirement for your business.

I found the keyword tool comparison listed below to be quite interesting and helpful. It has been written by Aaron Wall of the blog SEOTools. While Aaron offers one of these tools on his website, I find it refreshing and encouraging that he spent the time to write this article and gave his honest opinion of a great deal of the keyword tools available today in the marketplace.

Take a look at Aaron Walls rundown of keyword tools and give a couple a try. They will help you with your blog, your eBay listings and your website.

Scott Pooler - All Business Auctions

Posted in: seo tools

by Aaron Wall

Google Keyword Tool
try Google's Keyword Tool free

Benefits:

• shows 12 months historical search trends
• can analyze a page or site for automatically recommending keywords
• they have the largest search userbase, and thus can offer great keyword depth
• gives estimated cost, competition level, and suggests potential negative keywords
• easy to export your list as an XLS spreadsheet

Negatives:

• this tool is well integrated into the AdWords system, so if your competitors have half a clue they should be bidding on these terms
• search engines may desire to show you terms which offer the highest prices instead of the highest search volumes
• the estimates are exceptionally rough

Google Suggest:
try Google Suggest free or try our Google Suggest scraper free

Benefits:

• Free, quick, & easy to use.
• Google has a huge database of search activity to grab this data from.
• Google's Toolbar auto updates and they added Google Suggest as a function directly to the toolbar in Google Toolbar 4 beta. They also have created a FireFox Google Suggest extension.
• Google updating their toolbar and potentially their main site to add this feature could cause the terms listed to increase in search volume

Negatives:

• It only shows up to 10 terms for any search term and does not give any sort of search volume estimate.
• Only shows terms that specifically start with the letter sequence you type it. This will not help you find related searches that have modifiers before the core term. On a positive note this does make it easy to see what are the most common ending modifiers for plural and singular versions of search terms.
• Like most Google products they are not particularly clear how this data is organized.

ABC Tires:
For my ABC Tires example Google Suggest recommended 10 different terms, (and a few more for A B C tires) and about 75% of their suggestions led to conversions.

Google Keyword Sandbox:
try Google Keyword Sandbox free

Benefits:

• Free, quick, & easy to use.
• In addition to showing exact search terms it also shows many related search terms and potential modifiers.
• Google is the largest search engine and has access to more search data than any other company. (They also bought Urchin web analytics, so they can even track some data from other engines.)

Negatives:

• Since Google is the largest engine many people may use this tool and bid up these terms.
• Like all things Google, they do not share specifics on how they gather this data or what it means to you.

ABC Tires:
For my ABC Tires example Google Keyword Sandbox recommended 4 different terms, and all of them have converted for me. It also listed a wide variety of semantically related search terms and modifiers, which can be used to help extend out a keyword list.

Google also has a highly useful keyword research tool within their AdWords interface when you log in. It automates keyword research based on entering a URL or site. It also allows you to find related keywords based on words you enter or words that are already in your account. The biggest downsides to the Google tools are that their search volume estimates suck and you can be fairly certain that some of your competitors will also be using the tools built into the AdWords system. Based on using all of these tools I believe that combining that tool with the SEO Book keyword research tool is just about all you need to use.

Overture (which is being rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing) Keyword Suggestion Tool:
try the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool free

Benefits:

• It is quick, free, and easy to use.
• Overture has a large partner network to gather data from.
• Overture also offers a view bid price tool
• Overture offers search research by geographic region

Negatives:

• Many bid management tools and rank checkers scour the Yahoo! network, causing traffic numbers to be heavily skewed toward high value search terms.
• Overture does not seperate out plural and singular versions of keywords.
• Does not show related terms, only terms containing the exact phrase you search for.
• This was the original free search term suggestion tool, so everyone and their dog who does keyword research looks at this data.

ABC Tires:
For my ABC Tires example Overture only showed the four most common terms, all of which lead to many conversions, but were some of the most expensive terms.

SEO Book Keyword Research Tool:
try the SEO Book Keyword Research Tool for free

Benefits:

• Free.
• Easy to switch between markets.
• The results cross references many keyword research tools (almost every tool listed on this page - and a few that are not) so you can mix and match using them quickly and easily.
• Also links to different information systems (news search, directories, blog search, tagging sites, etc.) to help you find useful resources and things people are discussing in your marketplace.

Negatives:

• Driven off of Overture, so any problems with Overture's data occur in my tool as well.

WordTracker:
subscribe to WordTracker

Benefits:

• Helps you find or think of related terms by offering a built in thesaurus and lateral search. The lateral search looks at page details such as keywords of pages which are thought to be competing or related to your topic.
• WordTracker allows API keyword research access.
• Has more features than most other keyword research tools.
• The added features, such as showing the lateral terms, saves me a ton of time by showing me many related terms and useful modifiers I could or should be using.
• In the grand scheme of things the cost is not that expensive. It also has flexible pricing which allows you to subscribe for about $8 for a day or $250 for a year.
• Since it grabs it's data from Dogpile and MetaCrawler (a couple meta search engines) it's data is usually more clean than data from systems which collect data from networks that rank checkers and bid management tools work on.
• WordTracker offers a free trial, which the free Digital Point Keyword Suggestion tool queries.

Negatives:

• It is easy for competitors to spam the WordTracker database.
• Only grabs data from a couple meta search engines.
• Last time I checked it they had 305,005,525 queries in their database from 95 days, which is probably less queries than Google serves in a day.
• I do not think WordTracker sorts information into regional databases.
• Since they only gather data from a small sector of the web their data sampeling errors are magnified. Sometimes they will make low volume terms seem more important than they are, and other times some terms will not show up.

ABC Tires:
For my ABC Tires example they offered a ton of modifier words and about a dozen search terms (including the modifiers I was able to make many additional keywords). A couple of the terms they showed me were obvious random one off type searches that a random surfer searched for twice, but many of the terms lead to conversions. The lateral search and thesaurus make WordTracker great.

Digital Point Keyword Research Tool:
try Digital Point's Free Keyword Research Tool free

Digital Point's keyword tool compares Overture and WordTracker data side by side.

Benefits:

• It is quick, free, & easy to use.
• It gives multiple suggestions side by side.
• It is the sum of the pieces of WordTracker and Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool.

Negatives:

• It lacks some of WordTrackers more advanced features.

Keyword Intelligence:
subscribe to Keyword Intelligence ($89 to $189 per geographic market)

Benefits:

• It costs ($89 to $189 per market), so not everyone has access to the data.
• Offers 3 months historical data.
• They claim to track 25 million actual web users. Most marketers do not have direct access to spamming this data.
• Shows keyword research data by geographic market.
• Tracks actual traffic.
• Tracks keyword success rates, which shows what percent of clicks ended up in people clicking a result.
• Breaks results down by market.
• They made the industry data a downloadable spreadsheet & the industry data keywords allow you to click on them to pull up the deeper terms containing that search term.
• Viewing the success rates for a good number of terms gives you access to how people search and helps you better understand the psychology of search.

Negatives:

• Considering that Google.com has hundreds of millions of searches daily, the market data from only 25 million web users is a bit limited.
• It has a monthly cost of $89 to $189 per market.
• It offers industry specific keyword terms, but in most cases I found many of the terms overtly generic, and they need to offer additional filtering options from within those industries to make the data more useful. Plus they only list 100 terms per page, which makes some of data not as easy to work with.
• Some of the industry terms are mistargeted. Foo Fighters is not a web development term.
• I did not notice a related terms function. Surely with the data they have access to and some of the company they have partnerships with they could help recommend related terms, and not just terms having the exact words you enter in them. If you are just giving me terms that are extensions of what I am typing in then why don't I just grab more terms by running a Google AdWords account and tracking the keyword data in referal strings?

ABC Tires:
For my ABC Tires example Keyword Intelligence only showed me 3 term variations. All 3 variations were terms that converted, but only giving me three of the most broad variations does not allow me to get cheaper and hypertargeted clicks. In the end that still leaves me focused on the most broad and overpriced terms.

I am still a bit new to the Keyword Intelligence tool, but Mikkel deMib Svendsen recently posted a similar view on ThreadWatch:

My problem with the HitWise data has always been that it seems to only cover the "top" of the keyword pile. As an example, I had a seles rep from HitWise run a report for a client I work for in a very competitive market. The report showed that the competitors got more search traffic than my client but not one single of the approx 35-40,000 keyword my client gets their 300k monthly search visitors from was listed!

So actually I was quite happy - at least if our competitors buy this because they look at it and think: We are doing pretty good, when in fact they are not

Random:
When I searched for my own name Keyword Intelligence did bring up that people are searching for my name and military discharge status and code (searches like oth navy re-4 aaron wall). Sorta feels weird knowing that I can see that other people are researching my past. Overture, WordTracker, etc did not show that particular search.

I have not tried HitWise's competitive intelligence stuff yet (where you see what search terms and websites drive traffic at competing sites) but it might have value for large corporate accounts. I believe HitWise starts out at about $10,000's / year. With that kind of price I would have thought that their keyword research segment within the HitWise service (I believe it heavily overlaps with Keyword Intelligence) would have many more features than it does.

Gavin Appel stated Keyword Intelligence includes a limited sub set of data and search term analysis features that are available within the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence service and sent this comparison URL: http://www.keywordintelligence.com/differences.php

Keyword Discovery:
subscribe to Keyword Discovery ($49.95 per month)

Benefits:

• Since it costs not everyone has access to the Keyword Discovery research database. They do not state which engines they have partnerships with. That combined with the limited exposure means that Keyword Discovery is less likely to be spammed than other SEO related keyword research products.
• If you buy the $300 per month version Keyword Discovery allows API keyword research access.
• Shows keyword search trend throughout the year.
• Has many interesting syntaxes and features, allowing you to:
  • compare a keyword list to a URL and find what terms occur in that page
  • allows you to search for common spelling errors associated with your keyword
  • subtract out certain terms from your search query

Negatives:

• Since they do not state where their data comes from it is hard to know exactly how pure it is. If a bunch of it comes from affilate traffic from small pay per click search providers then the traffic will be naturally biased toward the most expensive and frequently searched terms.
• I still like WordTracker a bit better, but part of that might be that I am more used to using WordTracker.

ABC Tires:
For my ABC Tires example they had 6 examples, 4 of which converted. I believe their database is larger than WordTracker's, but I think at the 2005 NYC SES conference Dan Thies stated that WordTracker's database is typically cleaner data.

Keyword Discovery also has a free keyword directory which shows some of the terms that drive traffic at DMOZ category listed websites, and allows access to the top 10 results free via search. Since their data seems to be a bit top heavy you might be able to get all the useful info by just glancing at the free trial information.

MSN Submit It / B Central Keyword Research Tool:
no try now link, reasons explained below...

Benefits:

• not everyone has access to it
• shows related terms, for example seo and search engine optimization return things like internet marketing, but some of them are at least a bit off base. seo and search engine optimization also returned gay search engine.
• uses data from MSN Search, which gives them access to how people actually search, although they do not specify exactly how they use the data and how it is ordered.

Negatives:

• requires you to sign up for the Submit It / Bcentral URL submission service ($49)
• takes at least 20 minutes to find it and how to use it. I probably would not recommend using this tool much unless you like frustration.
• many of the steps in the Bcentral optimization process might be a waste of time and effort

ABC Tires:
Their tool only listed a couple useful direct terms, but also listed about 30 good related phrases or modifiers and about 50 useless ones. Their keyword research tool has a 90 result limit.

Search Engines See Also Search Results:
Many search engines including Snap, Clusty, Gigablast, Teoma, and Yahoo! Search offer alternate search suggesitions which may help you find related keyword phrases.

Good Keywords is a free downloadable keyword software tool which accesses the Overture search term suggestion tool and a few of the search engine see also searches.

Search Spy:
A variety of search engines allow you to see what people are currently searching for or buying. A few examples are Froogle, SearchHippo, Yahoo! Shopper, Kanoodle, MetaCrawler and a variety of others are listed on SearchEnginez.com.

Hot Searches, Google Zeigest, & Yahoo Buzz!

• Yahoo! Buzz Index - shows top movers and top searches in a variety of categories
• Google Zeitgeist - shows top news searches, image searches, and a variety of queries. Also shows top gaining and declining search queries.
• AOL Search: Hot Searches - browsable searches popular by generic category or amongst AOL members right now, in the past hour, or in the past day
• Ask Jeeves Interesting Queries - shows hot searches for the week
• Lycos Hot 50
• WordTracker also offers a hot search terms list
• Technorati offers top searches for the last hour
• TrendWatching is a popular site related to...watching trends

Word Relationships:

• WordNet lexical database
• WordNet search
• Lexical Freenet
• Thesaurus.com

Logfiles:
By tracking where your visitors came from you can extract more keyword combinations to focus on. Of course this only shows you where you already are, not what you are missing.

Internal Site Search:
If you have a large site you may want to use an internal site search to help people navigate your site. It also can help you find what you are not offering that you should be offering and what terms you should be targeting.

Run a Test Google AdWords Account:
It may be a bit more expensive, but the quickest and easiest way to get a bunch of keyword research data for a new site is to start an AdWords campaign for some broad matched generic terms in your industry and see what type of queries people are searching for. You can quickly add negative keywords if you are getting many untargeted visitors and harvest the referal data for more specific keyword phrases.

Why Deep Keyword Research is Important:
The specific terms have been changed, but the math comes from a live campaign. Here is some of the data from my ad groups related to ABC Tires:

Keyword Phrase	Cost Per Click	Clickthrough Rate	Conversion Rate	Cost Per Conversion
abc tires	$0.77	7.8%	1.86%	$41.37
abc car tires	$0.64	10.9%	1.92%	$32.96
[abc tires]	$0.75	10.1%	2.32%	$32.01
abc sports tire	$0.74	12.4%	2.91%	$25.29
abc tire co	$0.59	15.1%	2.70%	$21.73
[a b c tire company]	$0.56	38.2%	11.11%	$5.03
abc tire products	$0.74	17.3%	22.22%	$3.30
misspellings	$0.21	3.6%	1.82%	$11.37
abc	$0.05	0.3%	16.67%	$0.30

Notice that as you add modifiers to target the search queries better the following occurs:

• the clickthrough rate increases (since the search and ad copy is more targeted to exactly what you offer)
• this higher clickthrough rate is seen by Google as increased ad relevancy, and helps lower the cost per click
• the conversion rate increases
• cost per conversion decreases

Deeper Terms are Usually Cheaper:
If you rely on only a few of the most generic terms for your traffic then competitors with deep pockets can easily wipe you out. Due to the clickthrough rate factoring into the click price only smart competitors who research their keywords well will be able to compete with a deep focused account full of hundreds or thousands of valuable search terms.

If a Term is too Generic:
The search term abc was hard to keep running, even with a ton of negative keywords Google did not deem the term relevant (due to low clickthrough rate) and disabled it after 6 clicks. They would prefer not to sell generic cheap clicks. If people search too generically they want them to refine the search so Google can make more money selling higher priced more targeted leads.

Google just stated that in a few weeks they are updating the AdWords system to accept less relevant search terms if people pay a higher minimum price for the ad. As a result I was able to bid on ABC, but in spite of little competition the premium for lack of relevancy meant that my bid price for it went up nearly as high as the bids for the more competitive terms.

Keyword Targeting: Exact, Phrase, Broad:

• Exact: [term one] only shows up when people search exactly for term one. Thus it has the highest relevancy, lowest reach, and sometimes a lower cost per click than the broad terms since it has a higher relevancy score.
• Phrase: "term two" shows up when people search for anything containing "term two" in the query
• Broad: term three shows up when people search for anything containing term and three and many terms that are semantically similar. due to it's broad reach it typically has the lowest clickthrough rate and may end up costing you more per click and drive up ad costs by charging you for some irrelevant traffic. It can also be used to help you mine keyword data though.

Keyword List Generators:
If you know common modifiers that people might use when searching for your products you can use a keyword list generator to help build thousands of keyword phrases in a matter of minutes.

I recently created a free open sourced keyword phrase generator. Before creating it my old favorite was The Permutator, which is downloadable software that costs $50, but I also think GoogEdit (free download) and this one (free web based tool) are also useful.

Misspelled Keyword Phrases:
This free keyword typo generator makes it easy to quickly generate misspelled related keyword phrases for your most common search terms.

Make sure you place misspelled words in their own ad groups / ad campaigns to make them easy to manage. Do not enable Google's dynamic keyword insertion ad copy with misspelled terms since Google does not want misspellings in their search result pages.

Even though I only recently added a bunch of misspelled terms to my clients account so far it has already converted and has a fairly low cost per conversion. It does not get a ton of traffic, but if almost all of the search result listings is irrelevant to the searchers needs and you are dead on target there stands a good chance of them clicking on your ad.

Keyword Research Tool Search Volume Accuracy:
I did not post about the accuracy of the predicted search volumes for the various tools for a variety of reasons.

• Even if there are many searches it does not tell you how related the searches are to what you sell.
• The tools will have volume errors, and the data is more for qualitative than quantitative research.
• If you are using the tools to build terms for pay per click campaigns usually the longer terms have lower prices and greater value. If you use ad group and campaign functions correctly it adds negligable time to expand out you keyword lists to thousands of more targeted terms instead of overspending on the top few generic terms.
• If you are unsure whether or not it is worth the effort to do SEO for a specific term you can always get a peak at traffic quantity and quality by running a test PPC campaign.

Hiring Keyword Help:
Dan Thies sells keyword research reports for $90, and also gives away a free keyword worksheet download and has a free video offering keyword research tips.

Pay Per Click Search Related Keyword Competitive Analysis:
Software such as AdWords Analyzer ($67) or Keyword Locator ($87) help you quickly get an estimate of how many competing AdWords advertisers there are for a given set of keywords, but do not offer deep analytical information the way some of the other tools listed below do.

HitWise starts at about $20,000 a month if you can afford it. It shows you what sites are sending traffic at competing sites and what search terms from each engine are driving traffic at competing sites from monitoring the internet traffic of 25 million web users. I was not too impressed with their Keyword Intelligence offering, but I imagine there is much greater value to the competitive analysis data. Some competitive analysis data can be had free or cheap though.

GoogSpy is a free keyword research tool which shows you a small sample of terms that competing sites are ranking for in the search results and buying ads for. It cross references sites and keywords and top competing sites. It is not exceptionally in depth, but I might soon use it to add a few thousand contextually relevant terms to some campaigns.

AdArchiver starts at $20 a month and offers daily tracking report for up to 50 keywords (more keywords if you pay for more), including analysis of competing URLs and update emails.

AdGooRoo creates graphs of with frequency of Google AdWords display and ad position. They also monitor new competitors going into your keyword markets. Their service costs $2 per keyword per month, and they also give you 10 keywords that competitors are bidding on that are not yet in your account if you subscribe at the $99 per month level. They have a free PDF guide describing their services here. I believe Adgooroo is also adding features to track organic search results as well.

SEM Phonic is a new competitive research tool being beta tested right now which allows you to compare your URL to a few competing sites and industry related sites.

I just started playing with some of the competitive analysis tools, so pretty soon I will probably do a more in depth post on those.

Posted in: seo tools

I started to think about all of the businesses in the world who could benefit by blogging. I came to the conclusion that there is not a single business I am familiar with which could not benefit by establishing a company blog...

Blogs are simply an amazing way to get your name and information recognized throughout the world. There are many reasons why blogs are beneficial...

• Fastest way to get your site indexed by the search engines
• Best way to increase your rankings in the search engines - fresh content is king
• Gives your audience (customers) a feel for what you do and how you do it. Write your blog as though you were talking directly to your customers.
• Quickest way to get your new information, idea, products known in the world.

If you have not really caught on to the "blogosphere" thing yet, don't think your too late because blogging is still in it's infancy and your company still has time to get in to the mix.

While our blog story here at All Business Auctions may not be typical... and I can not promise your company will have the same experience when establishing a blog... I would like to share a quick run down or the positive results we have experienced since starting this free wordpress.com blog less than 90 days ago.

1. Learned volumes about the blogosphere and how a single post in a wordpress blog can be indexed by google in less than 12 hours.
2. Gained recognition among like minded business owners in our field.
3. Became known as a source of information by major news organizations. (blog post: Quoted in the New York Times technology section).
4. Gained international business inquiries through blogging about relevant news in our field. (Inquiry about eBay Stores design work from Romania)
5. Won a small blogging award - first place SEOLogs blog contest
6. Broadened our company appeal by detailing just a few of the services we can provide and simply writing about the benefits of those services.
7. With the move to our own hosting and attaching the blog to our AllBusinessAuctions.com website we will increase the exposure for our company and increase the traffic on our Joomla based website. Fresh relevant content is indexed quickly in the search engines and is the most powerful for SEO tool in the toolbox.

I could increase the list above but after only 90 days online with a "free" wordpress.com blog, I think these are significant points.

Should you look into blogging for your business? While some people blog as a business your company or small business could benefit greatly by blogging for business.

It's a whole lot less expensive than pay per click advertising, or the yellow pages and may not replace either for your business needs... But unlimited indexed content with your company name attached, could not hurt!

Or Insert your eBay listings in another blog or website with simple text links which look as benign as this?
See Our New eBay Store Design Here

And make money as an eBay and Auction Ads Affiliate?

You can make money from eBay without listing a single item yourself!

Just sign up with Auction Ads to create custom widgets and banners for your blog or website. (Withthe most popular eBay items in those ads!)

Sign up with Commission Junction to become an eBay affiliate and make money simply by posting links to eBay or your own store or listings.

Why would you want to direct traffic back to eBay from your website or blog?

Because eBay pays well, thats why... And because driving traffic back into eBay is a good thing for every eBay seller.

Try out Auction Ads and see if your traffic is interested in eBay listings. The clicks you send could pay!

ShoppingAds allows you to make money by displaying relevant merchant ads on your website. When your visitors click on the ads you can make money on a CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per acquisition) basis. You simply tell us the relevant keywords of merchant ads you want displayed and we will display a matching ad.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Can I run ShoppingAds along with Google AdSense?

Yes, ShoppingAds is not a contextually based ad product and is compatible with all other ad systems.

Is ShoppingAds a Cost Per Click ad program?

Yes! You will be paid for every valid click on the ads you display.

What are examples of potential invalid clicks?

• More than two (2) clicks from same IP address on the same merchant link within sixty (60) seconds.
• More than two (2) clicks from the same IP address in one (1) second
• Flag specific IP and/or user agents that have been determined to be fraud or bots, all clicks from these flagged IP or user agents are filtered.

When do you send out payments and how?

We send out payments the first of every month via PayPal. The payment is for all revenue generated the previous month. There is a $50 minimum for earnings.

Do you have an affiliate program?

Yes! All ShoppingAds units contain a referral link. Anyone who signs up through that link will be credited to the affiliate running the ads. See more program details on our affiliate page.

Why aren't ads for my keywords showing?

If you're loading a page for the first time with a new keyword, relevant ads won't be cached in the system. Rest assured that in less than a few seconds, ads for your keywords will be displayed. In the mean time, some of the most popular items from the top shopping comparison engines are displayed. These ads will only appear on the first load of a new keyword ad, or on extremely low-traffic sites. Even though it only takes a few seconds, please allow for a few minutes before assuming that non-relevant ads are being displayed.

Can I use the same account for multiple sites?

Yes. You can use the same ShoppingAds account on as many sites as you want. You can use the flexibility of the campaign feature to keep track of statistics for different sites, or different areas of different sites.

How many ad units can I run on a page?

There is no limit.