Yesterday morning I noticed that one of my campaigns took a severe dive in Quality Score.  This campaign had been running well for nearly three years and had 100-200 keywords that were 10/10 quality score.

So imagine my surprise when I noticed it didn’t receive any traffic over the weekend.  When I looked into it I noticed that all of my keywords were a 1/10 quality score.  Anyone who’s fairly experienced with Google AdWords will tell you that a 1/10 quality score means your site is breaking one of Google’s policies.  Knowing that this site wasn’t breaking any policies (since it had been running for 30+ months without any problems) I contacted Google and they told me someone would review my account.

Normally when you contact Google because of a drop in quality score, they usually send you an email saying “Our review staff has indicated that there is no problem with your account and the drop in quality score is justifiable…”.  But this time, I got a different response:

Whoops, Google Made a Mistake

Anyway, when I read the email, two things came to my mind:

1. Thank goodness I wasn’t out of town.
2. This site is on a private server that never goes down!?

Luckily, I have an account with Pingdom where they check all my sites every minute each day to make sure they’re not down.  So I decided to check the uptime report of that particular website for this month.

Yup, just as I had expected.  The website was up 100% of the time, meaning Google simply made a mistake.  Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

Well as many of you may already know, I’m a certified Advertising Professional by Google.  Unfortunately, to keep this certification, you have to take and re-take an advertising professional’s exam every two years.

This is my third time to take the exam in the past 4 years (as each exam expires after two years).  I’m happy to say that not only did I pass, but I did fairly well with a 94% score!

Passed Google's Advertising Exam

For those who don’t know, here are some details about the exam:

• It costs $50 to take, and if you fail it, you have to pay $50 again to re-take it
• It’s 120 questions
• You have 2 hours to complete the test
• You take it online, but Google forces you to take it in a “Special Browser” that prevents you from surfing the web, reading files on your computer, or do anything but take the exam (this prevents people from cheating).
• The exam covers every aspect of Google AdWords (which is a lot of stuff!)
• You have to make 85% or higher to pass!  So if you make an 84%, you fail and have to re-take it.

Anyway, I’ve passed the exam the first time I took it every year I’ve taken it…so you can rest assured that I know my stuff!

So long story short, I’m now re-certified as an Advertising Professional for Google for another two years.

I’ve finally finished my new blog, which i feel will bring me closer to everyone who follows what i do every day.   My old blog was so 2004, so i feel this new design should help make it easier for me to not only make more frequent posts, but also keep everyone informed on new products, tips, and strategies for making money online!

With internet marketing, it’s always important to know what’s going on with other affiliates so you can learn tips, tricks, and things to avoid. But the question is, where do you find this information?

You need to be careful where you get some of your information, because there are a lot of websites out there that give “false information” to scare people into listening to them rather than listening to their competitors. These websites include certain ezine articles, blogs, and other personal pages where amateurs can easily create an article without knowing what they’re talking about or just to persuade people to listen to them and buy the products they recommend.

So where should you go to find the best free information about making money online? There’s one place that never fails…the forums. Internet Marketing forums are often the best places to go to get information on what’s going on in the internet world. Since hundreds or more people participate in forums, there’s no risk of getting false information because other members will correct false statements.
There are a few internet marketing forums that I recommend:

• The ClickBank Success Forum
• WebMaster World (requires a paid subscription for some articles)
• Warrior Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums

The four forums above are the ones I go to the most frequently to browse and see any new techniques, strategies, or internet marketing news is available.I recommend participating in at least one forum…just don’t devote several hours per day to it because there are more important things such as making money.

Most people only think there’s one way to make money with a website and that’s by selling a product on it. While this is probably the most lucrative way to make money online with a website, there are many other ways to make money for your website to help offset the costs of advertising and hosting fees. Here are the ways below:

Adsense Ads and other advertisements. You can earn a fairly decent amount of money by placing AdSense advertisements on your website. Depending on the subject matter you can make as much as $1 each time someone clicks on one of these advertisements.

Developing a site newsletter. By having a site newsletter you can legally email people new products and/or promotions to products they would be interested in. You do need to make sure that whatever you’re emailing them is relevant to what they signed up for (you cant email people dog training guides who signed up to receive movie reviews). I’ve seen people make $1,000 per month just by sending out a few emails to several thousand subscribers.

Give away free coupons which make you money. This may not make sense, but there are several companies that give out coupon incentives for affiliates to use to get people to purchase their products. An example is Yahoo Search Marketing. Lets say Yahoo pays $50 each time you get someone to signup with them. If they offer a $50 coupon for you to give away for free, you can promote that coupon on your site and get paid each time someone uses it and signs up to join Yahoo. Commission Junction is usually full of these type coupons which range from online advertising to pet supplies.
There are of course other ways that you can use to make more money from your website, but they require you receive a lot of traffic each day and therefore would be a waste of time to implement for most people. Remember, the more streams of income you have coming from your website, the higher you can bid to receive more traffic which will make you more money.

One question I get asked frequently is “should I have a website of my own?”. For those of you who are asking yourself this question, here’s an article that will show you the advantages and disadvantages of having your own website.

Advantages:
Helps with advertising – If you have your own website that you’re advertising with, you don’t need to worry when other affiliates are promoting the same website as you. This is because you have your own website address that you’re using, and Google will always allow your website’s advertisements to be displayed.

Can cut advertising costs – If you have a website of your own, you can use it to help cut your advertising costs by putting advertisements on your website such as AdSense or paid banners. So if your advertisements pay you $1.00 for every 100 visitors you send to your website, that’s a $0.01 deduction per visitor on your advertising costs.

Can promote multiple products – With your own website, you have the ability to advertise multiple products on your site. This way you can show more products to your visitors so they can easily compare two or more similar products and sometimes they may even buy both products.

Can start a newsletter – You have the ability to start your own newsletter with a website of your own. A newsletter can be as simply as emailing your subscribers once a month to tell them about new tips or products available. Many people use newsletters to generate a new source of income.
There are, however, some disadvantages with having a website of your own.

Disadvantages:
Maintenance – Although most websites don’t require too much maintenance, you’ll still need to be able to make a few changes every now and then. So some basic web programming skills are required.

Costs – With nearly all websites you’re required to pay for website hosting and a domain name (sometimes the domain name is free).

Responsibility – You’ll also be responsible for your website. You’ll need to answer emails people ask or they’ll lose trust in you and you’ll also need to make sure your site is relevant and true, otherwise your site won’t seem legitimate.

If you’re thinking about getting a website of your own, use this information to help you make your decision. Of course, if you don’t know how to design/manage a website of your own there are ways to get around this. If you want a website you can get one of the templates that we’ve built by going to http://www.stevensites.com.

Some of you have been internet marketing long enough to realize this (it took me two years), but the Holiday sales season is approaching. This means higher conversion rates, more sales, and way more traffic for 90% of the sites out there.

In my experience, sales start picking up in early to mid November and peak around late January to early February. Usually the products that receive the highest sales volume increases are fun and entertainment as well as home and family type products.

So what does this mean? It means that beginning in November you should start to try to get more traffic to the products you’re promoting. It also means that it’s a good time to find new products to promote that you feel would sell well during the holiday season. Also, remember that the holiday season is different if you’re advertising internationally. For example, not every country celebrates Christmas and the southern hemisphere is experiencing Summer while the Northern Hemisphere is in Winter. So it’s important to target your advertisements wisely.

Many of you are probably wondering how an internet marketing job does in a weaker economy. Some of you may think that internet marketing is for suckers, unless the economy is booming. Well, those of you who feel this way couldn’t be any more wrong.

Unlike most local businesses, internet marketing is world wide and international. So what happens if one country’s economy isn’t doing as well for a certain time period? Well, you might not get as many sales from that country as usual, but the sales from the other countries keep rolling in as usual.

So, if the product you’re selling is in English and is applicable to people in other countries and you’re only selling it in one country…you will be losing money. Off the top of my head, here are some of the best English speaking countries to advertise in: The United States, Canada, Great Britain, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Guam, and there are a few more that I use.

Like I always say, whether the economy is booming or in a slump – there’s no better time to start internet marketing than today. Don’t wait until it’s too difficult to get your foot in the door.

If there was one thing I could change in the past, it would be that I wish I had started internet marketing sooner, knew the information I know now, and had initially taken it more seriously.

In case you haven’t already noticed, internet marketing is completely different from regular jobs. The only similarity between the two is that they are both ways to make a living.

One major difference is timing. Internet marketing is moving forward by leaps and bounds. I’ve heard comparisons that say one year in the internet business is the equivalent to five years in the regular business world. That’s how fast internet marketing is moving. It also shows that there’s no better time to start internet marketing than today, not tomorrow.

By starting today you’re already one-step ahead of everyone who starts internet marketing tomorrow or later. If you can’t start today, think of when you can start then look at that date on a calendar and think of how much information you would know by that time if you started today.

If internet marketing has taught me one thing, it is to jump on an opportunity as soon as I see it. Here’s my view: If I know of an opportunity and I decide to delay it for a month, when I do get started, I see myself as being a month behind. That’s a month’s worth of income lost, not to mention the possible ideas I would have missed by not starting sooner.

So if you’re teeter-tottering with starting today or tomorrow, do yourself a huge favor and start today. You might see it as eating dinner 30 minutes later, missing your favorite tv show, or skipping the trip to the grocery store; but I see it as you missing out on an opportunity that could change your life forever because you were hungry, bored, or in a rush.

Ok, I know we have all seen them. You go to a website, look at the product, hit the back button and you get two windows that popup. The first window is an alert window telling you to stay on the page and the second window is a pop-up chat with automated text offering you a discounted offer.

I’m not saying that all pop-up chats are bad, just the ones that pop-up/appear when you’re attempting to leave the site.

Here’s a picture of one of these pop-up chats:

So why are these pop-up chats a bad thing? Don’t they save the sale?

There are a couple of reasons why I don’t recommend these chat windows, and just so you know…I’ve actually used them in the past so I’m speaking from both a user and a visitor’s experience (I don’t use them anymore).

1) They may save the sale for the merchant, but not for you. When I had this service they asked me how I wanted to give credit for the sale. They gave me three options:

1. They would remove the affiliate cookie so I would get full commission
2. They would replace the affiliate cookie with their own so they would get the sale (and I wouldn’t be required to pay for their service…they would be paid in saved sales commissions)
3. They would leave the cookie alone and would give the sale(s) to the affiliate that earned it.

So the first reason is, depending on the merchant you’re dealing with…you may or may not get credit for the sale. I know of several merchants who have used this software and had the affiliate cookie removed.

2) These popup windows are annoying. When you attempt to leave a website, it’s annoying to be prevented from doing so. It would be one thing if it just prompted you to stay, but it’s another thing to make you read their alert windows so you can actually leave their site.

3) They are strictly against Google and MSN’s terms of service. If you’re an affiliate an you promote a site that has these popup windows, then your advertisement is against their terms of service and it will be disabled as soon as they realize this. These popup chat windows break the following terms – No popup windows on site and the visitor must be able to easily get back to the original search page from the destination page in one click.
So, these are some of the reasons why I don’t recommend promoting websites that use these popup windows.

In case you’re wondering, I told them to give credit to the Affiliates and I also only had the popup window activate when people exited from the “Download” page this way the website wasn’t breaking any search engine terms since the popup wasn’t activated on the destination page.