So here’s something interesting.  I recently did a search for ‘St Louis SEO‘ on Google.  For the first time I noticed that there are some PPC results on the page, and perhaps they always were.

What concerns me is ‘St Louis SEO’ isn’t really a very competitive term.  This isn’t exactly a hotbed for SEO services.  So why would an SEO company use PPC instead of just rank for something that is what they do?

I can hear the phone conversation with some of these companies..

“Do you rank for the services you provide?”

“Yes, look on the righthand side of the page - we are near the top”

Recently USA Today did an article on Gray Googlers - people in their older years making money with Google’s AdSense program.

The article profiles several older people who have started niche websites and have put AdSense on their sites to generate income. One man claims to be a handyman that now makes $250k/year in adsense revenue. True? Probably.

What’s the catch? Quality content often. You can’t think you can put up a site and it’ll start bringing in the dough. You’ve got to put new content up, and you’ve got to do it a lot. It’s a lot of work, don’t let the numbers fool you.

Got this offer in my mail from the Yahoo! Publisher Network:

Get a $50 credit to your account, or save $50 on assisted setup - our expert starter service.

Call (866) 318-8151 and mention promo code USDMO158 or visit searchmarketing.yahoo.com/enter.

Need more information? Write us at LearnMore@yahoo-inc.com

This offer is only for US sponsored search accounts. So if you haven’t started an account yet, here’s a chance to get a $50 head start!

When I first jumped into PPC, I was all excited to get clicks to my affiliate site. I was disillusioned to think that everyone that visited my site would click through and apply for whatever it was I was presenting them. Boy was I wrong.

Not only did they not click through, but I was paying a fortune for those no-good clicks.

So how can I get people to my site without paying so much?

Well, start by targeting the third or fourth spot in PPC. (more…)

If you’re one of millions who are watching their PPC rather closely, and you want to have full control over things, you really need to watch out for messages from the PPC companies about scheduled maintenance. (more…)

Do you have a product that people may search for in a particular state? Want to attract those people to your site?

• Save this state list text file to your PC. And this one too
• Open it up, then push CTRL-H
• Replace the word ’something’ with your keyword or keyphrase.
• Replace All, and then copy all the text to a spreadsheet.
• Rinse and Repeat until you’ve got a nice list of keywords with the states added.
• Submit that spreadsheet to your PPC program of choice

The nice thing about YPN is that instead of taking a cash payout, you can choose to roll that income right into your Yahoo! PPC account. Even if you only make five bucks during the whole month, you can roll that five bucks over and (hopefully) turn it into fifteen or twenty.

I’ve been playing around with some arbitrage using a second (or maybe third) tier PPC site. If you do it right, you can easily turn ten bucks into forty or fifty. Here’s in detail what I did:

• Pick a niche that you know pays decent. For my example, let’s choose student loans. I already have a financial website, even though it doesn’t target student loans in particular, the URL is generic enough that it looks like something that would be related. (If your first thought was mesothelioma, just go ahead and leave this page now.)
• Open up your favorite HTML editor and make a new page. Name it student-loans.htm.
• While we’re here, go ahead and do some basic SEO to the page (why not? we might accidentally rank for something and get free traffic). Add Student Loans to the title, description and meta tags. Also, put an h1 on the page saying Student Loans.
• Find a decent student loan article at one of the article sites such as EZineArticles or Articleonramp and copy/paste it to your site body.
• Remove all built-in or included files related to navigation. We want the visitor to have ‘no way out’ except to click an ad or the BACK button.
• Log into your Google AdSense account and make some new ads. For my layout, I’ve got a left sidebar so I’ll put a 160×600 over there first. Then I’ll put two 250×250 ads right next to each other (in a table with no border) right at the top of the page. These need to be after the h1 tag, but before the article content. We want it to be the first thing our visitor sees.
• Find yourself a good rss feed related to student loans. I suggest you use Yahoo’s custom RSS feed maker (about halfway down the page). Just type in your phrase, in our case ’student loans’ and you’ll get the feed link for that phrase. Copy it.
• Get your hands on a copy of rss2html, a spiffy little php program that pulls rss feeds and posts them to your site as HTML. Extract to your hard drive.
• Edit rss2html.php and paste your feed link into the variable.
  Our example: $XMLfilename=
  http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=student+loans&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt”;
• Upload those two files to your site. Put an include statement after the article you swiped.
  <?php include ‘rss2html.php’; ?>
• Sign up for an account at goClick or another cheap-ass second-tier PPC site. You can get into goClick for only $10 bucks.
• Log into WordTracker or another keyword generator and get a ton of keyphrases related to student loans.
• Copy and paste your keywords into your PPC program, and bid the lowest amount (usually 1cent for the second-tier PPCs). Use the page you just built as the landing page URL.

Assuming you did all of that correctly, there’s a good chance you’ll see a nice return on your investment.

I’d like to suggest a few more things:

• Set a budget per day, say $4 bucks. At a penny a click, thats a lot of clicks coming in, and you don’t blow your wad all in one day
• Bid low and bid often (lots of keywords/keyphrases).
• Name channels for each ad set you put up if you’re interested in seeing which does the best.
• Install the Adsense Notifier for Firefox Plugin if you want to keep an eye on your cashzilla.
• If you don’t have AdSense, you can of course use YPN ads, but I’m not sure your return will be as high
• Same goes for the PPC side. MSN’s AdCenter wants minimum 5 cents a click, Yahoo! wants 10c. I prefer 1c clicks.

Lastly, for those of you who have no clue what I’m trying to describe, I’ve created a screenshot for you. Good luck and make big money!