Last week, PPC.biz’s Barman tweeted a Wired article about the video content creation strategy of Demand Media, which holds lessons for marketers: bank on the first mover advantage hard, especially if you want to grab market share and mind share.

That’s not to say that you should put out the poorest quality stuff you can just to get a campaign out the door. But on the internet, speed accounts for a lot, but not everything. (Just ask Windows about their Vista operating system or Apple about their Newton PDA).

The lesson here is if you’re the first in the space, whether it’s with FB ads, MySpace MyAds, or the recently launched Plenty of Fish (PoF) self-serve ad system, you’re going to have leeway and freedom to see a period of fat profits (together with a bout of accompanying frustration with broken features, tracking).

An affiliate has said of PoF’s ad “I could shit diarrhea more consistent than PoFs traffic” alluding to an ad which reported 3,000 impressions, 500 clicks, though the network stats reported 60 clicks.

At the same time, other affiliates are reporting Continue reading →

Unless you’ve been sleeping at the wheel, the last couple of weeks have been turbulent ones for many PPC affiliates, especially Adwords users. There’s been a spat of account bans (as discussed in my internet marketing forum), and even though Nick Fox told Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz that suspended Adwords advertisers can send an email to initiate an “appeals process”, the anecdotal evidence suggests that aside from canned email responses, affiliates suspended from Adwords can do little more than post a bitchy post on their blog, or create a complaint thread on one of a number of public and private marketing forums. So is this the beginning of the end of PPC?

It’s easy to go the Fox Mulder route and assume that they’re out to get you (which isn’t paranoia if someone is really out to get you…). I think it has to do with the natural process of evolution. Let’s look at search engine optimization (SEO) for a second.

Remember the old days (ie: the early 1990s) when SEO meant you stuffed Continue reading →

Seth Turin is developer of the UBot automation software, which enables you to compile internet marketing processes, such as niche/keyword/offer research, campaign setup, optimization, into executable scripts (also known as “bots”). While bots are most commonly associated with the search engine indexing GoogleBot and the blackhat SEO’s bot spamming/bot networks, savvy marketers will find lots of uses to enhance their business through the process of automation.

I invited Seth to come on the podcast to share his insights on how technology can be used to expand business activity and ultimately increase sales and profits.

During the course of our conversation, Seth also talked about:

• How he got started in the industry, including early spamming efforts
• How you can use technology effectively and a strategy to plan out the process
• What types of tasks you should automate
• How UBot was developed and how it works
• Ideas for creating your own bots

Check out the podcast below:

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Links:

• Ubot on Twitter
• Ubot secret coupon page [Use code “wiaw199ubot” to give yourself a  $46 discount).