A long time ago I discovered this fundamental rule of the net — People come back to places that send them away. Places like Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Youtube, even Twitter. These are the mainstays. You go there to get somewhere else. Sites that try to suck you in and hold you there, no matter how cleverly, go away. While it may seem like a good approach at first, long-term it’s a losing strategy. ~Dave Winer

I spent most of last week in NYC for Affiliate Summit East and in D.C. for HostingCon. I attended a few sessions and saw what I consider the good the bad and the ugly of presenting. In fact, I took some notes on the different presentation styles so I thought I'd share some tips on how not to suck at presenting: Don't brag about your hangover- yes, many people drink heavily at conferences but when speakers consistently talk about how hungover they are from the night before, it makes me feel like they aren't serious about their responsibility to impart wisdom. Be...

The only session I ended up attending at Affiliate Summit East was the Facebook advertising panel that Dennis spoke on with Alex Schultz, Zac Johnson and Shoemoney.  I thought the panel went well overall but they essentially covered most of the same topics from other Facebook advertising panels I've seen or read. Here's a few takeaways: Use Facebook's demographic reports- see who is clicking on your ads, target them, then take it a step further by using different ads with subids to look at who is converting. Create "new" accounts for demographic research-...

I’ve got to share a little quirk in AdWords conversion tracker that eats at me because it stares me in the face all day when I’m working in GAW. A lot of websites have more than one conversion configured- lead, sale, signup, pageview, etc to help track website goals. What kills me is that you have to run a performance report and break out conversions separately to know the numbers for each of these conversions. On top of this, the campaign/ ad group/ keyword summary screens in the AdWords interface doesn’t separate the conversion types so you see an...

I just read on TechCrunch (through my Facebook feed) about Google connecting its Local Business Center with AdWords to form local ads. This new feature is called Location Extensions and is available to select advertisers today but will be rolling out in the next few weeks. Local businesses can now attach a physical address with their AdWords ads that will be shown dynamically depending on the location of the searcher. If Google is unable to determine a searcher's location or if there are no relevant addresses to show, they'll simply show your ad without an...

This is a tip for anyone just starting out in PPC advertising. Maybe you're learning Google AdWords because your boss told you to, maybe you want to make money online with affiliate marketing, or perhaps you don't even know what AdWords is, you were actually looking for pictures of purple unicorns! I just want you to know that if you're diving into the ocean that is Google AdWords, you should use G's AdWords Editor to create and edit campaigns. I just remember when I started out messing around with AdWords, I was doing everything online, it was intimidating...

“How much do I spend to test an ad?” I’m guilty of asking this question at some point regarding PPC advertising and I see the question asked a lot on affiliate marketing forums and super affiliate blog post comments. I’ve also seen ridiculous answers like 30 clicks (wtf?) and $100 in spend (WTF!?)- are you serious? If we were optimizing a campaign and in a single ad group we had two ads running, one at 1.74% CTR (43 clicks) and the other at 1.58% CTR (38 clicks), which is doing better? If we’re playing “winner stays on,” which should be replaced?...