Our new SEO/PPC book (fully revised, 2006 edition, 268 pages) went off to the publisher. Visit the book's website at Insider-SEO.com. 0 comments

We are beta users of MSN adCenter, the new, upcoming Microsoft PPC tool that will compete against Google AdWords. adCenter has new features that go beyond AdWords. Because MS Passport and other MS tools require registration and demographic information, adCenter allows you to see the demographics for a keyword. You can enter a keyword and, before you run a PPC campaign, you can see age (in five brackets), sex, and location.

For example, a Very Large Consumer products company wanted to bid on the keyword "bleach". They knew their market was middle-aged women. However, by using adCenter's research tools, they found that 70% of the search traffic for bleach was 18-25 year old males. Young guys? Why? It turns out that Bleach is the name of a Japanese anime character.

If the corp had invested a major ad campaign into bleach, they would have gotten very high ad displays, abysmally low clicks, poor ROI, and concluded that online advertising doesn't work. You can't do this kind of research in Google. Not possible.

Once you've done the research, you can then buy on those demographics. You can set bids on age, sex, or location. If we find that it's women, 35-50, in ten top markets, then we can bid high on bleach there. As for the young guys, we can either not bid or place a low bid.

We've been testing top keywords for our clients. We've found a number of surprises. Some cities can be 30-40% of the US market. Why waste ad money in cities which are 4%? We've retargeted Google ads by using geotargeting to those cities.

MSN adCenter works along with Google and Yahoo PPC. You do the research in adCenter and use that research in Google/Yahoo.

The tool is very beta right now; things are broken, things often don't show up for several days. They are testing, developing, and fixing. I expect it'll be functional in 3-4 months. When it rolls out, a very significant number of Adwords and Yahoo Overture will sign up in order to use the research tools. If Google has perhaps 400,000 AdWords accts, MSN adCenter could pick up a few hundred thousand in six months. If Google has $6B in PPC revenues, adCenter could pick up several billion in 2006 alone.

Yes, there's a war between Google and Microsoft. But both combined will have only perhaps $10B in ad revenues for 2006. The real target is Madison Avenue's $400B in annual revenues, and they are fat sitting ducks, totally unprepared to compete or even defend themselves against Google/Microsoft, those two velociraptors. 1 comments

Google upgraded our status to Agency Certification. Our company CCG is now certified an Adwords service provider.

The heater thermostat died a few days ago, so I replaced it. Instead of getting the same kind, I bought a digital thermostat that has a built-in clock. This can set the temperature for four different parts of the day: warm in the morning, normal during the day, warm in evening, and cool at night. For example, if you're gone during the day, there's no sense in heating the house. It can also set individual settings for each of the seven days of the week, so the house is warm all day on Saturday and Sunday. This is only $50. In the first month alone, it'll save you more than that. These are far better than the one-temperature-all-the-time thermostats. To replace, it's very easy. You only need a screw driver and about ten minutes. Disconnect the old thermostat. There are two wires. Note the wires: use a bit of tape or a marker pen to mark one of the wires. Mount the new heater and reconnect the wires. That's it. (BTW, I bought a Lux TX9000 thermostat.) 0 comments

Added a new FAQ on wireless laptops and wireless routers for the home. If you have kids, give them $500 laptops, add a wireless router, and they can use their computers in any room of the house, even the backyard. (Note: this is a draft in progress. If you have comments or additions to the FAQ, let me know.) faq-laptop.html 0 comments