There’s an interesting article on the value of domain names for pay-per-click marketers. It basically goes on to say that domain names are still a great investment, even when the economy everywhere is tumbling down right now. Read it for yourself: Are domain names recession-proof? By Paul Sloan

If you want to start a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign one of the first things to do is to check out how many advertisers are bidding on that search term. The fastest way to do that is to just search for that phrase in google.

Some keywords have almost a hundred advertisers - just type in “affiliate marketing” and see how many ads show up (per page there is an 8 ad maximum, but then the ads show up on other pages too).

Other keywords might have only two advertisers - when I typed in “pencil” there were just two results showing up.

Guess which campaign will be easier to compete in? Usually everything below 15 ads per searchphrase is an easy game, and every searchphrase that has more than 50 ads will be a tough one.

But again: this is just a rule of thumb, and some search-terms will be just too hard to monetize even if you are the only one. The key to higher profits is as always: testing, testing, testing.

Want a way to explode your CTR (Click-Through-Rate) through the roof? If you haven’t incorporated misspellings, there is definitely a lot of room for improving your profitability.

When you launch a Pay-Per-Click campaign you also want to include misspellings. Because most advertisers DON’T include misspellings, the CTRs are higher and the prices you pay per impression are lower.

Example: if you sell gold jewelry you don’t just want to use the keyword [gold jewelry] but also [gold jewelery] - because many people spell the word jewelry wrong and slide in an extra “e”. If they search for “gold jewelery” many of your competitors who just show up for “gold jewelry” won’t show up for - which results in both lower listing prices and higher CTR!

Resources:

• Dumbtionary.com - Dictionary of commonly misspelled words in English language.
• YourDictionary’s list of the 100 most often misspelled words in English.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is changing the whole marketplace. Remember the Dot-com bubble in 1999, when it all came down? Multi-Million Dollar companies that all of the sudden where worth next to nothing?

Some people say that’s what’s happening right now, with billions of dollars being spend on online advertising every year. But it’s not. It’s very different. Back in 1999 very few people had a real idea how to make money online - nowadays, there are pretty big companies with pretty sophisticated business systems that generate real revenue.

The biggest players in the field are companies like Google Adsense, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, AdBrite and others.