Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a method of bringing visitors to your website by using an advertisement that you only pay for when someone clicks through to visit your site. Made popular by Google.com’s AdWords system which allows advertisers to place context sensitive advertisements on the search results of the Google search engine and on other websites that choose to display Google AdWords content in return for income. Another example is the Yahoo! owned Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing) that also offer sponsored search results on a PPC basis. These two services are the largest PPC systems available however many individual sites also offer similar sponsorship opportunities.

One of the main appeals of PPC is the level of targeting available to advertisers. By placing advertisements that only appear when specific search terms are used or on websites that have a specific type of readership, advertisers can market to a reasonably well matched audience to their business and bring through quality traffic - visitors that are more likely to be interested in what they offer. Add to this the benefit of only paying for clicks and detailed real-time statistics on advertisement performance, and you have an unparalleled advertising medium.

PPC has consequently become a very popular option to market for both purely online enterprises and traditional bricks-and-mortar (real world) operations wishing to benefit from a better advertising solution. This has resulted in a decline in the use of older established advertising media such as television and print (magazines/newspapers) that don’t offer the highly trackable and targetable benefits of PPC.

PPC evolved as a better option to CPM (cost per thousand impressions) advertising that was the original metric used to sell advertising on websites. CPM charges advertisers for displaying their advert regardless of whether it is clicked or not. While beneficial for branding purposes the often low click-through rates suffered by CPM campaigns in the early days (often due to poor targeting and visitors mentally “screening out” banners) made the enhancements provided by PPC a much more effective option in most cases. With Google commanding the lion share of the search industry the AdWords system quickly became the most popular method to advertise online and now represents 95% of the income earned by the search giant.

AdWords For Content

From the user point of view PPC advertising is not easy to comes to grips with initially but will reward those marketers that spend the time learning to use the system and optimize their campaigns. Google’s system has been widely touted as ingenious, offering highly customisable campaigns manipulated via a reasonably simple interface. Results can be attained within hours of placing an advertisement and offer businesses of any size an affordable and effective means to promote online.

If you are interested in PPC advertising start by familiarising yourself with the Google AdWords step-by-step guide.

Make sure you don’t spend any money until you know what you are doing. Get some education, try Perry Marshall’s free AdWords e-course.

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This one is for the newbies that have no idea what RSS, XML and syndication are…whoa, confusing already isn’t it!

Start with this video by my friend, Gideon Shalwick taken from our website, BecomeABlogger.com.

Definitions

It wasn’t much longer then six months ago that I had no idea what these terms were. I understood what XML was because I had read a book about it but I had no idea how it all worked with syndication of content. Just as I learnt how trackbacks work by actually using them I did the same with syndication. I also took the time to read the definitions of the terms and as usual the Wikipedia entries on XML, RSS, Web Syndication and Web Feed are a good place to start.

The Basics

In a nutshell you use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to syndicate or subscribe to the feed of a website, blog or almost any media content online (not just articles, it can be music, video or almost any digital media). By syndicating you subscribe to the feed of the site which means you do not have to go visit the website to read the latest content. Instead you use feed reading software or a website to read the latest articles. Instead of going to each of your favourite sites individually you can collect all the feeds of the sites (provided they make them available) in one place. The purpose of syndication is to therefore make it more efficient for you to consume your favourite content.

If you are not into the technical side of the Internet your don’t need to know much about XML. It’s basically the formatting language that software and websites use to distribute the content to your feed reader. If you know nothing about HTML then you probably don’t really need to know much about XML either. Just understand that behind syndication is the language XML.

The best way to learn is by practice and example so let me tell you exactly how I use RSS.

Feed Reading Software

At the moment I use RSSOwl which is software you install on to your computer. Like all software there is a learning curve to using RSSOwl however once you have subscribed to your first feed it becomes very easy. If you get really stuck try the help menu or check the website out for guidelines.

There are other feed reading software programs out there and a Google search for RSS reader will bring up many options. I tried three different programs and stuck with RSSOwl because it was free, light weight and functional for what I wanted. There are prettier and more functional feed readers out there and I’ll leave it up to you to choose your favourite.

Web Based Feed Reading

With a standalone software feed reader like RSSOwl you have to be on the computer you installed the software to in order to have access to your feeds. Because of this limitation many people choose to use a web based feed reader and the most popular is Bloglines. Bloglines works much like feed reading software except because it is entirely based on the Internet you can access your syndicated feeds online from any computer connected to the web. You can also share your feeds with other people or search other people’s feed lists to see what is popular.

Subscribing to a Blog

To continue with my example…of course I subscribe to my own feed, the RSS of this blog. At the top right corner you will see an orange RSS link button. To subscribe to my feed all you do is copy and paste that link into feed reading software or a web based reader like bloglines. You may also have to name the feed and strangely enough this feed is called “Entrepreneur’s Journey”. The RSS feed link for this site looks like this - http://feeds.feedburner.com/EntrepreneursJourney - and if you click it you will get the XML output of this blog. That’s the stuff I told you about that you don’t really need to understand, but take a look by clicking the link if you are interested. Note that I use a special third party service called FeedBurner that adds extra features to my feed output and most importantly it provides me with statistics on how many people subscribe to my blog.

All blogs will have a link which you can subscribe to. It might be called Atom, or RSS, or simply Syndicate, but they all do the same thing. The reason there are so many names is because there are different standards to create web syndication services (much like the old BETA vs VHS video format competition). At the moment it appears that RSS is certainly winning the standards war so you will mostly see the orange RSS links everywhere.

Syndication is for More than Just Blogs

Blogs certainly started the syndication craze but it is well and truly breaking out now. I wouldn’t call it mainstream just yet since not many people know how to use it but most of the big web companies are making subscription feeds available for almost any content. Chances are if you are reading an article from a big site you can subscribe to a feed that distributes those articles. Just look for that RSS symbol.

Besides article distribution a new craze has launched called Podcasting. I’m not going to go into Podcasting in this article since it is a subject that deserves its own article. For the purposes of understanding how Podcasting is related to syndication all you need to know is that a Podcast is an audio show, like radio but usually focused on voice because music is copyrighted. Unless you have the rights to the music you may get into trouble if you broadcast it in a podcast. People use syndication to subscribe to a Podcast audio show which they can listen to on their computer or download to an mp3 player.

Update: If you want to learn about podcasts please read - What is a Podcast and How Can I Use One?

The Future

RSS is designed to make your Internet life easier. At the moment it’s worthwhile to become familiar with this technology simply because you are going to be seeing a lot more of it. If you can keep abreast of the technology wave you will have less frustration when using the Internet.

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