I’m now officially ending the Adsense experiment, and will report the results. I’m limited in what I can report by the Adsense TOC, but here are some general results.

Click Through Rate

The Internet Marketing crowd is very ad resistant, at least when it comes to Adsense ads. Click through rate (CTR) was very poor, well under what I’d consider to be worthwhile. As a comparison, my best performing Neglected Niche Site (instructions for creating those will be in my upcoming free ebook) had a CTR 10 times that of this blog.

Earnings

The earnings per ad for Internet Marketing related ads isn’t bad, but the poor CTR makes it not really worth the real estate on the blog to show the ads. Total earnings over the same time frame put this blog at about half of what my best performing Neglected Niche Site earned.

Total earnings certainly more than paid for the effort of adding Adsense to the blog, but wasn’t really enough to justify keeping it, in my opinion.

Other Options

Better options for advertising on an IM related blog would be specific IM products. For me, though, I would only do that for products I’ve tried and could honestly recommend…and frankly, there really aren’t all that many of them that I consider to be worthwhile.

So, if you’re looking to create a blog to make money, I’ll repeat my usual advice: don’t create a blog about making money. Create a blog on another topic you enjoy, and you’ll see much better CTR on your ads, and probably better affiliate sales, too.

4 Comments

• At November 24, 2009, Ev Miles- Online Business Cookbook wrote:

  Adsense is nowhere near what you can make compared to offering your own product. On our first website our product ended up being 16 times more profitable than the ads. It's allot more overall though.

• At December 2, 2009, Tom Lindstrom wrote:

  [quote comment=""]Adsense is nowhere near what you can make compared to offering your own product. On our first website our product ended up being 16 times more profitable than the ads. It's allot more overall though.[/quote]

  There is a lot more to Adsense than just placing an ad on the blog.You need to choose the right ad block size, the right colors, and know exactly where to out the ad.A lot of testing is required.Here is more information:

  http://ask.joelcomm.com/selecting_the_right_adsense_bl.shtml

• At December 21, 2009, Ian wrote:

  I agree that it's much more important to focus on your own products than on ads. For me it's much more profitable.

• At March 3, 2010, Make Money Online wrote:

  I agree that it’s much more important to focus on your own products than on ads. For me it’s much more profitable.

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Which keywords to you choose?

There are two aspects to that question. One is what keywords will get you good placement for low cost (e.g. low competition keywords). I’ve written about that before. Another aspect is what keywords Google thinks your page is about.

We can use Google’s keyword tool to get some insight into that last part of the question, and a start on good keywords to check for the first part.

Go to the tool and you’ll see the initial opening screen, something like this:

This is what I’ve shown before, to do keyword research on possible keywords to determine competition. This time, though, we want to click the radio button labeled “Website Content” (circled in red above).

This allows us to type in the URL of a web page instead of a keyword. Google then goes out to that web page and examines it to figure out what keywords it’s about, and then shows you the statistics for those and related keywords.

This is most beneficial when done on specific landing pages, as a start to identifying good keywords to target for PPC. If you find that the keywords you thought you were targeting don’t come up, then you might need to look at your on-page SEO a bit more closely.

Using the keyword tool in this way is a nice shortcut for identifying secondary keywords to bid on when using PPC to drive traffic to a mini-site. I’m sure you’ve already identified your primary keyword using other means, but secondary keywords can often have lower competition and drive a significant amount of new traffic to your site.

3 Comments

• At August 6, 2008, Nicole Price wrote:

  Thanks for reminding me about Google's keyword tool and explaining the whole thing in simple terms.

• At August 7, 2008, Magnesium wrote:

  [quote comment=""]Thanks for reminding me about Google's keyword tool and explaining the whole thing in simple terms.[/quote]

  This tool is really useful, BIG THANK for this useful post

• At August 13, 2008, Christmas wrote:

  What a useful post for me. Your simple and comprehensive explanation about the Google keyword tool is the very thing I needed. Thank you for your good job!

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I’ve always thought that the PPC model, paying for clicks and converting those clicks into higher margin sales, was a good one. But I’d never before invested the time to figure it out. Well, a few months after I started, and I feel like I have a good handle on the Adwords side of the equation. Sure, there’s still more to be done there to improve the click through rate of my ads, but I’m getting low priced clicks.

And still losing money.

So for anyone else who wants to get into Adwords, I figured I’d share what I’ve discovered about creating a winning Adwords campaign. Some of this is still to be done for me, but this is what it takes.

Target Low Competition, Low Traffic Keywords

You’ll see some people who argue this point, and with good cause. After all, if you make $1,000 off a sale, you can afford to bid high on clicks. I’m writing this with the assumption that you’re like me, and not selling products with huge price tags.

Shoot for keywords with low to average traffic. Most people go for the higher traffic keywords, and that’s where the bidding wars are found. Stick with lower traffic keywords, and if you do everything else right you’ll get clicks for low cost.

Your ideal keyword will only have a few other ads already on it. This allows you to place well at your minimum bid.

Write Good Ads

There’s a lot of help out there for this. I can’t claim to have figured it out myself, but I am getting clicks, so I’m not totally hopeless at it, either. Mention the pain that your ideal customer is feeling, and how your product can avoid that pain. If they identify with that, they’ll click.

Write Good Landing Pages

The key to getting low minimum bids in Adwords is to target one landing page to one keyword. Optimize that page the exact same way you would as if you were trying to attract search engine traffic for that keyword.

You’ll regularly end up with minimum bids in Adwords of $0.05 and $0.10.

Write Good Copy

The landing pages themselves must do the job of preselling the product. The entire job of the landing page is to get a visitor interested enough to click through to the product page and buy.

This is the part I’m terrible at. I write well for blog posts and articles, but not for preselling. Paying for traffic doesn’t do you any good if you can’t convert that traffic into sales!

My action item for the next month is to go through the Make Your Words Sell book (a free download over at SBI!), and it’s companion, Make Your Content PreSell (also a free download), and see if I can’t beef up the landing pages I’ve created.

I’ll report back here sometime during the summer with updated results.

3 Comments

• At May 12, 2008, On Stage Lighting wrote:

  Jay,

  While you are right about the idea of empathy with your potential customers when it comes to pre selling, you haven't mentioned the main ingredient for a high CTR ( and lower CPC) for your Adwords - keywords.

  One Keyphrase, One Ad, One Landing Page.

  With two different instances of your keyphrase highlighted in bold, your ad will jump off the page. When it comes to creating clickable ads, keyword stuffing is alive and well and doesn't get penalised.

  Got another keyphrase? Make another ad.

  The prospect of finding a choice of blue widgets, is also hard to resist by the average Adwords clicker.

  Oh, get value for money and opt out of Content. Shh, don't tell.

• At May 13, 2008, Jay wrote:

  [quote post="562"]With two different instances of your keyphrase highlighted in bold, your ad will jump off the page. When it comes to creating clickable ads, keyword stuffing is alive and well and doesn’t get penalised.[/quote]

  You're right, of course. I do this, but for some reason it didn't pop to mind when I was writing the post.

  It's a challenge at times, to write ads in the ultra-limited space provided by Adwords and get anything meaningful in there. Individual words become quite powerful, including the keywords.

• At July 26, 2008, Paul J. wrote:

  It's finding the right keywords that convert that is extremely important, this along with bid management. My advice is maybe to start with Yahoo or MSN before using adwords, as it is the most competitive :)

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But how do you make a mini-site?

Search around for information, and you’ll see some software programs that are supposed to create the sites for you, and some graphics, and some templates. Unfortunately, a lot of the templates are nothing more than single page sales letter templates, not mini-sites. A mini-site is a small collection of pages hooked together with navigation links, not just a single page.

The software programs sound better, after all you fill out the information, click a button, and the mini-site is made for you. How much easier could it be? What the sales letters for those programs typically leave out is that it’s up to you to provide the graphics for the site. So if you’re doing a mini-site about dog grooming, you need to provide relevant graphics of dogs looking like they’ve just been to a spa.

And even if you do that, you still have to upload the files to your hosting account via FTP, insert Google Analytics code for tracking, etc.

Personally, I find it much easier to just create my mini-sites with Wordpress.

Sure, Wordpress is a terrific overkill for managing such a small web site, but if you’re already using Wordpress for your blog then you have a base of experience to draw from to slap up a small web site quickly.

Here are the steps I go through to use Wordpress in this way.

Install Wordpress

If you haven’t done this before, do a Google search for help. I’m assuming you’re probably already running a Wordpress blog, and can manage this step. Install using a different database than you use for your regular blog.

Install Sticky Menu Plugin

The sticky menu plugin is a terrific plugin that lets you specify exactly what should be in a listing of links. Many Wordpress themes default to the main navigation links showing all the pages in your site. You often don’t want all the pages to show, so the sticky menu plugin lets you control this.

Install Google Analyticator

The Google Analyticator plugin takes care of adding your Google Analytics tracking code to all the pages on the site. I recommend not tracking admin visits.

Install Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin creates a sitemap.xml file in the format expected by Google and Yahoo. This makes your site seem more professional, and will help to get the content indexed.

Install Psychic Search Plugin

I’ve mentioned the Psychic Search plugin before. It lets you know what people are using the search box on your site to look for, and not finding. That may indicate new pages you should create.

Install A Contact Form Plugin

There are a few good ones of these. Lately I like to use the secure form mailer plugin. A contact form is important for your mini-site to improve your Adwords quality score.

Install a Caching Plugin

I use WP-Super Cache. A caching plugin will help reduce server load, and you’ll hardly ever be changing the site, so it can benefit from caching quite a bit.

Create A Landing Page For Each Keyword

Create a content filled landing page for each Adwords keyword you want to target. The content must be unique, and helpful. Do not try to sell a product! Provide useful information that will start to condition the visitor to want the product when they finally click through to the sales page.

Making a landing page for each keyword allows you to get the best quality score possible for that keyword in Adwords.

Miscellaneous Pages

Include an About page and a Privacy Policy to boost your Adwords quality score, and a Disclosure page (if required by the affiliate program). For example any Clickbank related product requires a disclosure page.

Install A Niche Appropriate Theme

One of the great things about Wordpress is that there are tons of free themes available, for a wide variety of niches. Pick one that fits your niche and install it, and your site automatically looks good.

I recommend not putting Adsense or other ads on the site. This will boost your quality score, and helps to keep from losing visitors to competing affiliates. Also, don’t bother with plugins that deal with posts, because you won’t have any posts on this blog.

Using Wordpress to create your mini-site can take a frustrating process and make it into an hour’s worth or work or less.

10 Comments

• At April 26, 2008, Digital Products Review wrote:

  I have try telling peole the exact same thing. You would be surprised how many argue with me. They say it's too much work. But if you go with a good host that has a button you click to install a Wordpress blog, you can build a Wordpress mini site quickly.

• At April 26, 2008, kris wrote:

  all i can say is thank you thank you thank you! i dont think wordpress is overkill at all. i think its great for this application. plus it makes it much easier with all the plugins. you rock!

• At April 27, 2008, Jay wrote:

  [quote post="528"]all i can say is thank you thank you thank you![/quote]

  You're welcome! I'm glad you found the article helpful. I'd thought about doing a video tutorial about setting it all up, too, but never did get around to it.

• At April 30, 2008, links for 2008-05-01 « Motherduce - Daily Links wrote:

  [...] Wordpress Mini Sites (tags: wordpress webdesign) [...]

• At July 11, 2008, Mike wrote:

  Thanks a lot, very useful and helpful advise.

• At July 12, 2008, Kamal Talib wrote:

  Thanks for the complete and honest tutorials.

• At June 6, 2010, Eileen Aderholt wrote:

  Thanks for the info about some plug ins that I was not aware of like Psychic Search or WP-Super cache. I do agree that a mini website is a good way to test out a market.

• At October 16, 2010, Paul@epson perfection v300 wrote:

  Thanks for the information on how to build mini sites using WP. I think people get discourage because the amount of work and time they have to spend on installing plugins and creating landing pages.

• At October 16, 2010, Paul@epson perfection v300 wrote:

  The 2 links to the Google analyticator, and the sticky menu plugin are not working properly. Please fix them up!

• At December 3, 2010, Jay wrote:

  Should be fixed now (at least, for now)

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Let’s expand on landing pages today, because they’re important for more than just boosting your Adwords quality score. Basically, what’s good for your quality score is good for your campaign.

So what’s the purpose of a landing page outside of quality score issues?

Think about marketing a particular product through an affiliate link. You aren’t the only one marketing that product, and the chances are good that all the best keywords already have players with money to toss around. Breaking into those keywords would be expensive. So we target long-tail keywords. How do we come up with the long-tail keywords to target?

We brainstorm unique reasons why someone might want to buy the product.

Let me use the product from the first advertising exercise over at The Advisory Panel as an example. The product was the Liar Card, a calling card that can tell you if the person you’re talking to on the phone is lying. Advisory Panel members brainstormed that people might want to use this if they don’t trust their car mechanic, if they think their spouse is lying to them, if they think their children are lying to them, etc. There are lots of reasons why someone might want to use this card.

But, if you send someone who doesn’t trust their mechanic to the Liar Card landing page, you’re relying on that person to put two and two together and realize they can use the card to double check what their mechanic is saying. Most people won’t do that.

A landing page is your opportunity to get between your Adwords ad and the product sales page, and explain how your visitor’s need and the product match up. A landing page for people who don’t trust their mechanic would walk them through the process of getting a Liar Card, calling their mechanic, and would suggest specific questions to ask the mechanic. Take as much independent thought out of the process as possible, and you’ll have higher conversions.

So while a nicely targeted landing page will increase your Adwords quality score and make it cheaper to get clicks, the real purpose is to bridge the gap between the problem your visitor has and the solution you’re offering.

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photo credit: ogimogi

I haven’t made nearly the progress I had planned to make going through the Adwords training. What I have gone through, though, shows me that I understood more than I thought I did about how it all works. I’m still missing the trial and error practice that goes into getting good at it, but that’ll come in time.

One of the things that I realized I already know lately is something I see a lot of people on forums ignoring, and that’s the importance of the Adwords quality score.

The quality score for an ad is used to calculate the amount you’ll pay per click for a given ad position (or even if your ad will appear at all). The lower your quality score, the more you’ll have to pay to have your ad even show, let alone be in a high position. Gone are the days when it was a simple bidding war to get the top position. Now, the top position may be paying less than you are for position 10, depending on the quality scores of the ads.

So how is the quality score for an ad calculated?

Google uses some historical data for the keywords you’re targeting. That’s the same for everyone. They’ll also use the overall click through rate (CTR) of all your past campaigns (this is what bites me all the time, since I started using Adwords without knowing what I was doing, so my average CTR is very low).

Also important is the relevance of your ad text and keyword to the search query the user typed in. For example, if your ad is targeting the keyword “blue shoes”, and the ad text is relevant to buying blue shoes, and someone types in “Elvis blue suede shoes”, your ad isn’t particularly relevant. So it’ll show in a lower rank for that search query than if someone had typed in “buy blue shoes”.

The meat of the quality score, and what you have the most control over, is how relevant your destination page is to the keyword and ad text you’re using. This is really what kills most people.

Let’s say that you link to a merchant page listing all the shoes they sell, and you bid on the keyword “new work shoes”, thinking that anyone typing that in is prime for buying a nice pair of new shoes. But the merchant’s shoe page doesn’t have the term “work shoes” anywhere, so it isn’t particularly relevant for the keyword or the ad text. So you’ll have to bid higher to get your ad to show and rank well.

This is the reason that linking to merchant sites directly isn’t such a great idea. Instead, link to a landing page that you create that is highly relevant to the keyword and ad text you are using. That way your bids will be lower.

Single page landing pages are not enough, though. Google looks for the quality of the site itself, not just the landing page. You’ll need to create a full mini-site, complete with privacy policy, contact form, navigation menus, etc. That will boost the quality score for your ads, too, further lowering your cost per click and raising your ad rank. Basically, create a mini-site the same way you would a regular web site, and optimize it for your ad keywords in the same way that you would optimize it for those keywords in SEO terms.

So with all this extra work, how do you make the quality score work for you? Well, if you put in the extra work, all of a sudden you can bid less to maintain your ad’s rank, which means more profit for you.

As I experiment with mini-sites, I’ll report on the results and include any tips I come up with for optimizing them.

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When you’re paying per click for your advertising, you have to make sure that you can show a profit after paying for the clicks. So there are some calculations you can do up front to give you a good idea how much you can pay per click. Let’s look first at a statistic that most merchants give you.

EPC is the average earnings per hundred clicks. This is the dollar amount you can expect to make when you send one hundred people to the merchant’s page. This is usually reported by the merchant as an average across all the traffic they’re sent. You may also get it reported for your specifically after you have enough traffic being sent.

Keep in mind that since the merchant’s EPC is an average over all their traffic, you might be able to do better than that if you’re sending well-targeted traffic to them. You might also do worse, if the traffic you send isn’t very targeted.

So, let’s say that we know the EPC for a particular product is $54.07 (this is the actual EPC for a particular product you can market through Commission Junction). So what do this number tell us? Well, nothing exactly, but we can use it to come to some first guesses about what we can afford to pay per click.

If we think we’ll make $54.07 per hundred visitors, that means our income per visitor is $0.54. Remember that each visitor is a click we had to pay for, so we have to pay less than $0.54 to make any profit.

Now, you cannot rely totally on merchant’s EPC figures. Those include a wide variety of traffic, and no doubt include some traffic sent by marketing superstars. But as a rough guess for planning out a PPC campaign, you can use EPC to come up with an initial keyword bid.

Given the numbers above, we could look at various targeted keywords and decide if they could be profitable, based on whether we could get our ad at position 3 or 4 for under $0.54. Ideally we’d be far enough under that we make a decent profit.

This is most definitely not the entire story! You also have to track your own results, and adjust based on what you’re actually earning once you start getting enough traffic. Traffic must be well targeted, or you’ll be wasting money.

But it gives you a rough idea of how to evaluate keywords to see if you might be able to earn from them.

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This is useful, for example, if you have two different niche sites and you want to know how much each makes. Without using different channels, the stats for each site would be lumped together.

Up until fairly recently, I’ve been using custom channels, where you’re given a bit of custom code to put in your web page. I understood how to use custom channels, and just stuck with them.

Another sort of channel you can use is a URL channel. With a URL channel, you put the standard Adsense code on multiple pages in a site, and then Adsense itself splits out any stats that come from the given URL. Useful if you have a lot of pages on a given site, and don’t care which page specifically gets the clicks.

But I still used custom channels, because you could do the same thing with them. Then I discovered a situation in which URL channels are the only possibility.

Sites like Hub Pages and Quassia are Adsense sharing sites. They allow you to input your Adsense id, and then they run ads using it so you get paid by Adsense directly.

But neither allows you to enter a custom channel id, so you cannot use custom channels to separate the stats for the sites. You can, however, enter URL channels for each and Adsense will separate out the stats for you.

Entering a URL channel is easy. You click on the link to add a new URL channel, and then enter the domain name of the site (e.g. quassia.com).

After that, the stats are properly separated automatically.

I hope this has been of use to anyone who, like me, wasn’t sure what URL channels were good for. While you can use either URL or custom channels for most things, in this particular situation URL channels are the only solution.

3 Comments

• At February 13, 2008, Blog Enhancing Tips wrote:

  I have never really been able to understand the whole channels thing. This is a really good explanation and it is good that it separates your different web sites so you can understand the stats that you are getting. I'm not a big fan of this type of moneymaking what is really good considering it is easy to get statistics for.

• At February 14, 2008, Gaje Master wrote:

  I have been blogging for a while and just now figured this one out. It is funny to think that I could have been doing this all along and saved myself a lot of hassle.

• At February 26, 2008, Tom Lindstrom wrote:

  Thanks for explaining how the channels work in Google Adsense.

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Perry’s workshops have a reputation for helping people to take their PPC efforts to the next level, greatly increasing their profits. Both by reducing their cost per click, and by ensuring a greater conversion rate on their existing traffic. The work is done not only at the Adwords level, but also at the sales page level.

The catch is that the workshops are only for people who already have a substantial online business. You can’t just be starting out, or you won’t be accepted. Your business doesn’t have to be doing well, but you have to have one. If you qualify, the workshop comes with a great guarantee. You’ll recoup the costs of the workshop in either additional sales or in cost savings, by the time the workshop is over. And in a year, you’ll make at least $25,000 more than you would have otherwise.

So, yeah, I tend to salivate a bit when I hear about another one starting out. The problem is, I don’t have an online business, I work the affiliate angle. I also don’t use PPC as part of it, because (as I’ve mentioned before) I’m a PPC moron. When I get to the point of having my own products I sell, you can bet I’ll sign up for the first of Perry’s workshops that I can afford.

If you do have an online business, and are doing PPC as part of that business, take a look at Perry’s latest workshop, the bobsled run.

5 Comments

• At January 29, 2008, Tom Lindstrom wrote:

  I have also heard only good things about Perry Marshall.It would be nice to attend one of his workshops, I bet it would have a huge impact on my income.

• At January 29, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Yes, my long-term goal is to make it into of Perry's workshops or coaching sessions. I think he'd have his hands full trying to get me up to speed on PPC!

• At January 30, 2008, Ernesto wrote:

  I would love to attent Perry Marshall's workshop if only because I am bent on getting the best boost for my money making online.

• At January 31, 2008, Trendy Money wrote:

  [quote comment=""]I would love to attent Perry Marshall's workshop if only because I am bent on getting the best boost for my money making online.[/quote]

  Hadn't heard of Perry before, but will definitely have a look at his AdWords guide - never really had a go at using AdWords before...

• At March 26, 2010, Klauzer wrote:

  Perry Marshall is the man.

  Thanks for this post

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I originally got into Internet Marketing via the Google Cash ebook way back when, and gave Adwords marketing of affiliate products a try. I had about twenty campaigns, and only one of them made any money. I think it made about $5 a month. Sure, if I could have banged out another fifty of those campaigns, I’d have been in good shape, but I never managed another.

In fact, the click through rate of my existing campaigns was so bad, it started affecting new campaigns I’d start, increasing the amount I’d need to bid to rank highly for a keyword.

Yeah, I’m a PPC moron. So what am I doing writing a post about becoming a Qualified Google Advertising Professional?

For anyone who doesn’t know the details, the Qualified Google Advertising Professional certification means that you’ve spent $1,000 in Adwords over a three month period, and passed an exam. To help you succeed at the exam, and at Adwords in general, Google provides quite a bit of training material.

I wanted to see if this training could help even a PPC moron like myself become successful with Adwords. Further, I’m in no position to simply spend $1,000 to get the certification, since we just moved and our old house hasn’t sold (and isn’t likely to until February, because of the holidays).

So I wanted to see if it was possible to not only complete the training and pass the exam if you knew nothing about PPC marketing (or worse, had bad habits to unlearn), but also if it was possible to do on a limited budget. Remember, you have to spend $1,000 on Adwords ads over a three month period…if you make more than that using those ads, you’re not permanently out any money at all.

So, this is a bit of a personal challenge for myself. A sort of “learn Adwords or bust” sort of challenge.

I’m writing this as I have just completed the registration for the program, and viewed the first training video (the “What is Google and what is Adwords” video). I have no idea whether I’ll succeed or fail, but for anyone else who wants to get into PPC but isn’t sure how to begin, I’ll give it my best shot and you can follow my progress as I go.

Wish me luck!

4 Comments

• At December 6, 2007, Rosa wrote:

  Here to wish you luck Jay. By the way, my Yuwie is skyrocketing with referrals. It happened slowely but surely and now I am trying to get my referrals some referrals. If this works for you, I am soooooo going to try it out and see if I can become a genious in Google since I too, am a moron(well, figuritively speaking)

• At December 6, 2007, Cyn`s Online Home Based Business Ideas wrote:

  Good luck with the program and I look forward to following your progress as I have never had success with Adwords.

• At December 6, 2007, Jay wrote:

  Thanks, Rosa & Cyn! We'll see how it goes. The early parts of the training are pretty basic, but my head will be swimming, soon, I think.

• At March 21, 2008, jim mcginnis wrote:

  "I myself am an idiot as well. I was a ppc guy but then I got angry and drank a lot of energy drinks and started link campaigns and optimizing my pages constantly. I got top 10 placement on all my sites and little or no sleep

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