Kameir

One scam that Google AdWords advertisers need to be aware of is ‘click-through arbitrage’. Webmasters use arbitrage to take advantage of a loophole in Google’s Adwords advertising system, using a combination of Google’s AdWords and AdSense system: Adwords allows bidding on the search terms beside which their advertisements will appear within Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). The more demand for the search term, the more advertisers pay for each click on the ad that appears when users search for that term.

The arbitrage scheme exploits that system using the basic buy low and sell high principle. A web site arbitrageur bids low amounts on keywords trusting that the used advertising copy will create click-throughs. The page that the search engine user will see upon click-through typically contains nothing else but more Google advertising in form of Google’s AdSense program, manipulating the presented ads to only show high priced keyword advertising. Since most users will more likely click on one of these ads than going back to the Google results page the webmaster hence makes more money from AdSense than he is paying for the AdWords click-through.

This kind of arbitrage is prohibited under Google’s AdWords terms and conditions. But although Google has put in measures to hunt down webmasters that engage in these king of scams, unethical webmasters seem always to be on step ahead of the search engine. Google’s latest attempt trying to fight this kind of AdWords misuse was the implementation of a “quality score” based on whether the landing pages appear to be content-less advertising pages or to have legitimate value. Pages with low quality scores are flagged by the spider and often must pay hundreds of times more for the same Adwords in Google’s auctions. And although Google has left the criteria for these scores a subject of mystery to prevent arbitrageurs simple identify Google’s bots and deliver a different page to the search engine – a process called ‘cloaking’. There are also voices which say that Google might not have a great deal of motivation to stop click-through arbitrage since the search engine in effect makes more money by scammers putting up additional advertising for Google.

Some of these criminals make an excess of $1,000,000 per year re-diverting traffic using these kind of arbitrage schemes. If you see pages that are just jam-packed with Google advertising and do not provide any information report them to Google.

What is Google Coop?
In short: it is the Google search engine with your personal twist to it. Here’s what you can do with it:

* Place a search box and search results on your website.
* Customize the look and feel to match your website.
* Specify the sites you want to include in searches.
* Invite others to contribute to the search engine.
* Make money from relevant ads in your search results.

Google’s Co-op is coming surprisingly late since Vertical search was hip almost two years ago. What Google has done is enabling specialized search while retaining ownership of the search traffic. Google Co-op allows site owners to choose which Web sources to crawl and let them leverage their community of users to improve that index and results. Web site owners can use the platform to launch specialized search engines focused on the areas of their expertise. Ads will be sold and served through AdSense for Search.

During the presentation for the product’s release, Google executives demonstrated several instances of vertical search sites created during the program’s testing phase. These included a custom search interface for Intuit’s small business portal JumpUp.com and one for a climate science research group, at RealClimate.org. The latter, because of its non-profit status, is not required to carry the AdSense ads that will enable Google to monetize the product. Universities and government organizations are also exempt from ads. All individuals and for-profit entities using the product, however, must accept the company’s trademark sponsored links, and will share in revenue generated by them. The revenue split is the same as that offered across the AdSense network.

Site that want to build a search engine can submit a name, description and list of sites to be crawled for results on their engine-to-be. They then will receive a chunk of code they can use to add the specialized engine to their site.

I agree with Google executives who called Google Co-op one of the company’s most important product releases in Q4. For marketers who buy keywords through AdWords, the vertical search product likely won’t bring short-term changes in the way search audience.

The technology is similar to another customized search product, Rollyo, which launched over year ago; though there are differences between the two. Mainly, Google Co-op is potentially collaborative, meaning site users can take part in creating and improving the engine. It also can be hosted on a Webmaster’s own site and doesn’t require users to navigate to a Google-owned domain. In addition, Google Co-opis monetized with Google’s sponsored links.

You can see a sample for a Google coop site at QUASEO.com.

The future of search will effect everybodys live in a much more powerful way then the appearance of the Internet or the search engines it brought with it. Most experts in the search industry agree that search as a working system is only 5% solved and that personalization is going to be the key driver to change the way search works today.
Assumptions about how to display search engine results pages to users are undergoing a constant transformation. Searching in the future will include self-learning software so that it would calculate the probability that a given user typing “apple” meant a company and not the fruit. And Google is using IP address identification to target user with country specific results.
But the future of search will influence much more than just the way we use text based computer searches. It will influence our daily live. Already we can see cars that are calling the manufacturer if they analyze a problem within the vehicle. We see Internet service provider partnering with cable companies (or buying them). Few realize that all of these seemingly unrelated events are all steps in the same direction: a world in which every medium will be connected in one way or the other to a network to exchange and store information.
Search your fridge content through the Internet? The refrigerator that knows what content it holds is almost old news. The next logical step is to make this information available to the owner through the Internet. And it is not Sci-Fi but a very realistic scenario that your refrigerator (and soon other household appliances) will send you an email about missing juice or expired mayonnaise. Or maybe you already signed up for the always full option at your local grocery store and the supplies you need, will be waiting in a cooler in front of your door.
Millions of people are already searching to endless libraries of other people’s stored audio and video files. How convenient would it be to have a personal search engine that knows my music taste and delivers just that (directly to my iPod)? And we may not have to zap through hundreds of television channels much longer to find the one show we really want to watch. The television set that  learns my user behavior and suggest only the programs that fit my taste are probably already realty in some lab over at SONY making Yahoo’s recent partnership with TIVO obsolete.
But the future of search will also need to keep the little guys in mind as well as the local communities. Whereas today most small companies are still not available online, clever services start to appear that helps even the smallest company to surface in Google and Yahoo searches. The best example is a new service called LOXTER. LOXTER is an interactive online directory that combines the power of local search and online community. Christian Kameir of San Diego’s Internet marketing company, Colizer Inc explains: Businesses that are listed in LOXTER are more likely to come up in searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN. The reason for this is that the unique structure of the LOXTER portals allows users to connect to the business for free, using a click-to-call feature and leave verified feedback about their experience  valuable information that is not available anywhere else on the Internet.
The future of search will also be in every single thing you come in contact with. It means if I need to loose weight I will not use Google to research diet plans but tell my car that I want to loose five pounds and it will email my refrigerator to replace regular Bud with the light version and throw out the salami.

Phone Survey ‘Pay-per-Call’ Marketing
We called 474 business of which 252 where willing to take part in the survey. 73% of businesses surveyed classified themselves as ‘providing manual labor’, 19% as retail businesses and 6% as service businesses.

Survey
The survey was comprised of seven main questions with a total of 9 possible follow up questions.

1. How much is your monthly marketing budget?
65% of businesses stated their monthly marketing budget is below $100. 5% of businesses said their monthly marketing budget is between $100 and $500. The rest of the businesses did not want to disclose this information.

2. Does your company location have Internet access? And if not: Are you planning to establish Internet access in the next twelve months?
69% of surveyed businesses stated that they currently have Internet access.

Of the 31% of businesses that did not have access to the Internet 5% expressed they would establish Internet connection within the next 12 months.

3. Does your business currently maintain a web site? If not: why?
27% of business owners said that they currently maintain a web site.

Of the 73% that said they did not own a web site 92% expressed they did not need one for their businesses, 2% expressed cost reasons and 6% did not provide a specific reason.

4. Are you currently paying for search engine traffic?
Of the businesses that maintain web sites 1.1% said they are currently paying for pay-per-click advertising. All these businesses used Google as pay-per-click provider.

5. Are you currently purchasing any online advertising?
Of the businesses that maintained web sites 7% currently purchase online advertising. All of these businesses purchased online advertising from their Yellow Page provider.

6. Are you currently paying commission for referrals?
Less than 1% of surveyed businesses currently pay for lead referrals.

7. Are you familiar with Pay-Per-Call referral systems?
2% of surveyed businesses were familiar with a pay-per-call referral system.

8. Would you be interested in participating in pay-per-call advertising? If so, how much would you be willing to invest per lead?
41% of businesses expressed interest in participating in a pay-per-call advertising concept.

32% of interested businesses said they would be willing to spend $1 per lead, 7% said they would be willing to spend $10 per lead and. 59% where not sure yet how much they wanted to invest.

9. Would you be interested in testing a pay-per-call service if you received a number of leads free of charge? Would you sign up for the service, if at least one of these leads became a client of yours? If so how much would you be willing to pay per lead?
42% of surveyed business expressed interest in testing a pay-per-call service if they received a number of leads for free. 100% of businesses said they would sign up for the service if at least one of the leads would become a paying customer.
41% of these businesses are willing to spend at least $1 per lead. 59% where undecided how much they were willing to spend per lead.

The Internet is the single most important marketing tool of our time. No other medium even comes close to its selling power. Think about it: what is the most expensive marketing you can purchase? Probably commercial airtime during Superbowl broadcasting: The average price for a 30 second commercial in 2005’s Superbowl was $2.4 million – that equates to $80,000 per second! Ok, the game was watched by 144.4 million viewers but how many do you think got up to buy the new three blade razor? My hunch is no-one. Everybody was still sipping beer and dipping guacamole.
Let’s say you only had one percent of these viewers (1.4 million) on your website with a call to action – a BUY NOW button – how many do you think would by the three blade razor now? Statistics suggest it would be 7,000.
A number of smart marketers have realized that marketing power and shifted all their efforts to online advertising with its multiple benefits: you don’t need a Nielsen family to find out what works and you get demographics about your customers that will make the Secret Service envious.

The Internet’s Reality
But there’s a catch: 80-90% of Internet users will use a search engine to find a service or a product and again 80-90% of these users will never check the second page of the one million or more search results that Google, Yahoo and MSN provide. Basically what that means is that your website has to be in one these 40-50 spots if you want to be seen. There are approximately 40,000 to 50,000 companies in industries, like web hosting, loans and real estate that pay web developers, search engine optimization experts and advertising companies to be in one of these premier spots. It is not unusual to pay $10,000 per month for these efforts without a guarantee to get a single new customer.

Internet Marketing for the Small Business
So, how can a small company compete? – In the past the dominating marketing tool for the small business was the Yellow Pages and other local printed directories. Surprisingly this industry is still going strong and is still used for marketing reasons by the majority of small businesses despite the fact that most consumers today will only look for the Yellow Pages if they can not find what they are looking for online.
But the printed Yellow Pages had one advantage for the user: he usually could rely on finding a list of the service providers for a certain job in his neighborhood.
Now Google and Yahoo both are trying to add more visibility to local markets by launching “Google Local” and “Yahoo local” intending to bring up smaller local companies. Although the search engines are trying to provide this service they fail to provide a similar completeness as the Yellow Pages did for the last 100 years.
One of the reasons for this is clearly lack of motivation and effort on the part of the major search engines. Let’s face it, would you put much effort into helping a company that does not even have Internet access (like the majority of small businesses in the US) when you offer an online service that makes money from large companies that buy click-through advertising for their websites?
Also, this approach faces the same drawbacks as all the other search engine results: it is benefiting those who have the Internet knowledge to ensure that their information is number one in local rankings even if their service is not necessarily what the search engine user was looking for.
However, there is some light on the horizon. A company in San Diego is offering a solution that does not require the small business owner to have Internet knowledge. In fact, the company’s solution does not even require the small business owner to have Internet Access. More importantly, it provides its customer with a guarantee of being found online.
COLIZER – Computerless Internet Services achieves visibility for small businesses by providing high-ranking portals for industries that are usually left behind. These companies often can not afford to hire a web designer and spend a couple hundred dollars on a web site let alone on optimizing it to be found be search engines.
At the current introductory price of only $7.99 per month, COLIZER certainly offers the most affordable Internet Marketing solution available to date. Even if their clients got only one new customer from this service, it will pay for itself.

Small Business Marketing Success
Two recent examples of COLIZER’s success are a portal for painters in Arizona (www.painterusa.com) and a portal for lawn care professionals in California (www.lawn-portal.com). “Right now these portals reach about 1,000 consumers a month that find the local painter or gardener in their own geographic area.” explains Christian Kameir, CEO of COLIZER INC. “By the end of 2005, these portals will get 1,000 hits per day.”
The company has more than 100 portals like these in the US and is about to expand to France, Germany and Greece.
Surprisingly, the cost of this unique service for the small business is only $96 for an entire year and this even includes a top level domain, web site and a contact form which the small business owner can receive as text message on their cell phone. COLIZER also offers the fastest website creator on the web. Companies that have Internet access can create their own website without any design knowledge in less than one Minute at http://www.colizer.com/buynow.php.
But COLIZER finds most of its customer’s offline through their lucrative affiliate program and is currently seeking more than 1,000 affiliates nationwide. “Some of our affiliates make more money working two hours a day than they were making working 40 hours a week at their old jobs”, says Melissa Kremer, COLIZER’s Vice President of Sales. Applicants for COLIZER’s affiliate program are asked to file a free application on the company’s website: http://www.colizer.com/affiliate.php.