I broke my RSS reader. How funny is that? It was so overloaded with sites and posts that it just pegged my CPU at 100% and croaked. So I spent a few hours last night finding a new reader. I chose rssBandit because I liked the features (I especially like the fact that you can flag individual posts for later review), it was free, and it reminded me of My Pal Bandit .

So while I spent several hours getting stuff set up I had a chance to re-visit some of the articles that had already come across my desk. There were some good ones there, including one from MoreBusiness about different kinds of PPC advertising.

MoreBusiness mentions Miva, the former FindWhat, as an innovative PPC program. MoreBusiness says that Miva clients supposedly ends up in the top search results on partner sites, including Ebay. That’s because that’s what their customers pay for, as Miva is a paid search engine of sorts.

Miva also has (or had) a fairly decent storefront product.

I was never all that impressed with Miva, as they don’t return emails (a cardinal sin in my book), and I find it difficult to trust any company that uses the words metamorphosis and paradigm in the first twenty words of their mission statement.

Miva’s CEO and founder Craig Pisaris-Henderson and President Phillip Thune resigned this past Wednesday, and Miva is supposedly on the block. So I’d probably stay away from Miva.

More PPC ideas include embedded text, where advertisers buy words on the pages of network participants. The words are underlined with two lines, and clicking on them brings up a small box with your ad in it. Here’s an example from investopedia.com:

It’s an interesting concept that’ s been around for a long time. In fact, Microsoft caused quite an uproar some years ago when they wanted to build these ads into Internet Exploder.

The biggest company in this space is IntelliTxt by Vibrant Media, with about 400 sites using their product.

There’s a risk in using this kind of media — some versions pop up automagically when you roll over the word with your mouse, which can be annoying. I think the version that pops up only when you click on it is kind of cool, and worth taking a second look at.

A bit less controversial are Double Qualified PPC ads. The leader here is HaveTraffic. Here’s how it works: HaveTraffic creates their own PPC ads for you using your keywords. Users who click on these ads go to a landing page that that contains relevant information.

If the information is what the visitor is looking for, they read it and leave. If it isn’t what they’re looking for, they can then click to your site. It’s essentially Pay Per Click with an intermediate qualifier in there. Most small businesses might resist the idea because it keeps traffic from your page, however it can increase the traffic that actually buys from you by pre-qualifying them in the first place. This idea is not for everyone but if you have a site with a huge amount of traffic and only a few buyers, it might help to reduce bandwidth and maybe even cut down on many of the emailed inquiries you get from people who will never buy.

Lastly, and probably the best one, is Grow Your Own PPC. Find complimentary (but not competing) sites and set up a PPC program with them. I think this is the best idea in the article, and worth trying.

Just make sure you agree in writing on what constitutes a click, how many clicks you’re going to pay for, and how much you are going to pay per click, so there are no misunderstandings or miscommunications.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 7th, 2006 at 11:00 pm.
Filed under Pay per click, Internet Marketing.
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