But in every problem there lies opportunity. Every issue I have to deal with reveals opportunities to do things better. Simple as that! No need to complicate it.

I find better ways to do things are easier to create when they arise after some problem. The problem lets me know “what is wrong now”. Then I start thinking about how can this problem be avoided and the task be done better.

See there is a silver lining in every cloud.

Happy New Year to our readers.

And all the best for 2010!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/fighting-fraud-online-taking-google.html

It’s important to thoroughly check the product, service or company you are promoting.

Here’s some names you might be familiar with that are in Google’s bad books:

Names to be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.
Source: The Official Google Blog

Another interesting article from Google Adwords Support about disabled accounts:

https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786

Specifically what Google doesn’t like include:

* Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to collect private information
* Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
* Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are designed to drive traffic to another site with a different domain
* “Get-rich quick” sites
* Malware sites that install software on a visitor’s computer
* Poor comparison shopping or travel sites whose primary purpose is to send users to other shopping/travel comparison sites, rather than to provide useful content or additional search functionality
Source: Google Adwords Support

In addition to this it is important that all internet marketers promoting their own products or products of others in the United States become familiar with the FTC’s guidelines for advertising.

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/guides/guides.shtm

In short Google and the FTC are making us internet marketers aware of our responsibilities, whether you like it or not, and ensure that any products or services you promote don’t infringe trademarks or copyrights, are not scams, and will not provide your website visitors with a poor or harmful user experience. That means do your due diligence first and check out any company and their products or services before you decide to promote them to others.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any other information to add to this.

I chose it because it not only post my latest Twitter updates in the sidebar, but I can also submit my Tweet from the sidebar, or Tweet a new blog post. This WordPress plugin is easily activated by adding the Twitter Tools widget to my sidebar, and updating the settings page.

This is my first test of trying to Tweet a blog post. So fingers crossed it works. Let’s see.

The domains cover some broad markets inclucing money/finance, fashion, education, food and property. This is in addition to similar purpose sites or blogs we have for travel, health, dating and entertainment.

Having fun setting them up. Importing WordPress themes, redesigning them, setting up the category structure, and so on. Some very nice and very practical and easy to use themes are available now. And the best thing is that they are all free. I just need to provide a good web host and WordPress does the rest.

Future sites that we need for promotions will cover markets like electronics (cameras, video, GPS etc).

To make our new domains SEO friendly as possible I decided that they are dot coms, not previuosly banned by Google or Yahoo. I also checked the webarchives to see if they had any prior history. If they did, a real website got a pass. But if the domain had been used for a spammy looking site I avoided it. Just in case.

Now with broadband, ADSL, and even ADSL 2+ connections we can enjoy picture and video rich web sites. But that won’t happen if the web site is hosted on a basic shared hosting account. And that was what this site was hosted on. So I decided to make my sites load quicker it was time to change hosting accounts.

I had my sites hosted for about three years with a budget reseller plan from Reseller Zoom. I’ve been very happy with their hosting plan, the features in my WHM and CPanel, and their fast and helpful support. But as I’m mainly running WordPress blogs on my sites that load up pages on the fly from a MySQL database, its important that things are running fast on the server.

So I got in contact with my helpful supportr guys at Reseller Zoom and they recommended I should upgrade to one of their Advanced Reseller plans. After all I was very happy with this hosting company so I didn’t want to leave them. And I didn’t want to jump out of the frying pan into the fire by having to find and trial anoher web host. Like they used to say in the old Mortein fly spray ad, “If you’re on a good thing stick to it.”

The upgrade to the new hosting account meant all my sites had to be transferred to a new server. Reseller Zoom did this for me. It took about a day. Also the nameservers had to be changed so I did that at my domain register, GoDaddy. However I had about three domains at an Australian domain registrar, Crazy Domains, but the nameserver changes didn’t go smoothly with them. In fact my sites were offline for a few days while I tried to deal with this registrar’s very slow support team. As their system said my new nameservers were invalid. Crap!

A spelling error on their part didn’t help either, along with no support over the weekend. In the end the only way I could get support was to call them. Emails went unanswered for days. This is not a good situation. So if you register any Australian domains with Crazy Domains and need support, call them.

I’m actually surprised that several advertising and CPA networks are hopeless with email support. It seems these guys just don’t bother checking their emails daily. So a phone call is always effective.

Have you had similar issues trying to get support?

Anyway we are back online now on a new faster server. So expect to see more useful online marketing information here soon.

Got signed up recently with TrafficVance CPV advertising network. They get their traffic via their gaming applications available from GamingVance.com. This is by using adware to display pop under landing pages when users look up domains or search terms on their browser. So what the visitor is looking for will be related to the offer being promoted.

Advertisers bid on “targets” which are keywords and domain names. So for a dating offer you could bid on “dating sites” and “true.com”.

TrafficVance state in their faq’s that their software is adware and not spyware. They say “We do not collect or monitor any of our user’s personal data through our software.” If the gamer uninstalls the software it also deletes the adware, making it 100% opt in and opt out.

So far it sounds like a good traffic source to earn revenue from CPA, PPC, and CPS offers. Well thats good for my business strategy anyway. Of course, you could also promote your own products or services either for sales and profit, or just traffic. The latter is ideal if your building a website to sell.

Have you tried TrafficVance yet? Or any other CPV networks? Let me know about your experiences.

Well when I found out what this super secret traffic source is I was surprised why they were going to great lengths to keep things hush hush (know what I mean?). After all many advertisers were using this medium and thousands, if not millions, of internet users were being exposed to the adevrtiser’s messages and spiels.

So what is this highly secretive (to some) source of traffic? It is Cost Per View (CPV) which is sometimes called Pay Per View (PPV). Basically advertisers pay per view or impression to display their ads instead of pay per click (PPC). Ads are shown to potential customers online after they install software like games that include 100% optin adware according to some of the CPV networks I’ve seen so far. Or via contextual links. I’m still learning about this and say more about it later next week once I have applied to some PPV networks and spoken to their account mangers. Yes, I will just a few questions about this.

However a far better feature is that landing page quality issues are not of a concern like it is when you advertise with the big PPC players like Google Adwords. So you can send visitors straight to a merchant’s landing page for CPA or affiliate marketing. Or an arbitrage page setup with PPC ads. Or to a simple lander designed specifically for high conversions.

Ah! Sounds to me like marketing in the good ol’ days online pre 2005.

Hey I’m not suggesting that anyone use devious tactics with their PPV ads, like bait and switching. But that you can get people to their desired solution a lot quicker than confusing and loosing them with a landing page full of navigational links and too much content. like the websites Google requires us to build to participate in Adwords.

Anyway my hitlist of CPV networks to apply to this week are:

TrafficVance

MediaTraffic

AdOnNetwork

Zango

Clicksor

I’ll keep you posted how easy they are to apply to for advertising. And let me know if you can suggest any good CPV networks by using the comment box below.

Gone are the days of hard coded html web pages. Now its far easier and quicker to setup blogs for our main sites.

I’ve personally been using WordPress with their self hosted blog solution for about three years. And with the regular updates, and plenty of Themes and Plugins, I’m sticking with WordPress. And also for another good reason too.

It’s so easy to change the appearance of a website with WordPress. To do that you only need to find a suitable Theme, download and unzip it, upload it to your server, then activate it. Then you’re done and dusted!

Good, simple and rustic website design. Just the way I like it.

And if you want extra features for your site there are 1,000′s of Plugins that can be found, downloaded, uploaded and activated. Too easy.

Ironically my kids are eating 2 Minute Noodles for lunch today. Nothing like a quick feed while dad has to work.

This domain which I started in May 1997, was used for my email contact for a number of advertising and publishing networks, and subscriptions for numerous mailing lists. So it would be a simple but time consuming task to change email details.

The old website also used for two businesses. One was for Biz Letters software and the other was the Australian dealer for Music2Hues royalty free production music sets. But over the last year they were basically discontinued. But as this site still had some Google Page Rank I also used it for landing pages for PPC campaigns.

Now that domain has been sold (they finally gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse), and I found a new domain for teh corporate home for First Wave Media.

I’ll have some insider marketing and traffic acquiring strategies and techniques to discuss. And would welcome any feedback and comments from you guys, the readers.