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I have a couple of quick updates for you today as I have to run away from the house with the cleaning lady here.

Help! My Business Sucks!

Andrew Lock who I refer to as the eBay expert with the cool British accent, has recently started producing a web based television show called Help! My Business Sucks!.

The show focuses on entrepreneurship and Internet marketing, with Andrew as the host. If you are looking for another example of a new way to use Video online to spread your message, educate and entertain, take a look at what Andrew is up to.

The show can be found at - http://helpmybusiness.com/

Perry Marshall AdWords Update

Next, some important advice from Perry Marshall - the only AdWords expert I follow. I’ve been on his newsletter for years now, it was one of the very first I subscribed to and one of the only ones I remain a subscriber.

Perry sends out actual advice to his newsletter and rarely promotes any other products than his own. I’ve never seen him participate in an Internet marketing product launch, so if you are sick of “launch emails” and you are looking for a great newsletter covering Google AdWords, general Internet business, lead generation and conversion advice, you can’t go wrong with Perry’s Newsletter.

You can join his free AdWords e-course, which is great, and that will get you on to his newsletter too.

Google AdWords New Feature: Automatic Matching

Perry recently sent through something I thought was critical for anyone currently running a Google AdWords campaign, regarding a new feature called Automatic Matching. Perry presented a warning regarding this feature, so if you have never heard of Automatic Matching, here’s some advice you need to read…

Google is phasing a MAJOR feature into the AdWords
program. If you log into your account you’ll see a notice
that says,

“New! Automatic matching has been enabled in your
account. Your ads will now show for additional relevant
search queries based on the keywords, ad text, and landing
pages in your ad groups. You can opt out by visiting a
keyword-targeted campaign, and then clicking on edit
campaign settings.”

If you edit your campaign settings, you’ll see a check box
that says:

“Automatic matching: Show ads on more search queries
without adding keywords.”

And in your ad groups at the bottom of your keyword list,
you’ll see a new column labeled “Automatic matching total.”

What this means is, if you’re bidding on a keyword like
“dog grooming”, Google may show your ad for a keyword
like “pet grooming brush” even though you’re not bidding
on it at all.

The question is, do you want this?

First of all, there’s no way to know for sure unless you’re
using conversion tracking.

In fact, you should disable this feature immediately unless
you have conversion tracking enabled and hold Google
accountable for the quality of traffic they’re sending you.

***DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE UNLESS YOU TRACK
THE CONVERSIONS FROM ‘AUTOMATIC MATCHING’
TRAFFIC.***

Automatic Matching traffic will seldom be better traffic,
except maybe for people who simply do not know what
they’re doing in AdWords.

AdWords advertisers who learn this game from me are
always control freaks. They don’t want to just take what Google
gives ‘em. (Hey, that’s how you gain an advantage that Google
doesn’t have.) The ideal way to do this would be to use
the bootstrapping technique I’ve taught for years, which is:

-Campaign 1 has bids set at, say, $1.00 with Automatic Matching OFF
-Campaign 2 has bids set at, say, $0.75, with Automatic Matching ON

This will shift all the Automatic Matching traffic into Campaign
2 and you’ll have complete control of it.

Source: Perry Marshall Newsletter

Perry went into more detail than the above excerpt, but I don’t feel right publishing his entire newsletter here (although I almost did!).

Unfortunately I’m not sure if you can get back-issues of Perry’s newsletter, but if you want more info along the lines of the above, take his free e-course and you will never miss another newsletter.

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Continuing the lessons I’m learning from the Stompernet Orlando presentation DVDs, this time I have some tips for all you eBay sellers or would be eBay sellers (and you will want to be one after reading this!).

I have to admit I was quite blown away by the eBay presentation by Andrew Lock. I’m not sure if everything he presented is accurate, but it sounds like it could be, and here’s the most startling fact - eBay currently does more daily searches than Google does. Let me say that again. EBay currently does more daily searches than Google does.

What that means is people go to eBay and type in more searches for auctions than the number of searches conducted at Google. I can’t verify that with any accuracy and I don’t know where Andrew is pulling his figures from, but even if it’s not spot-on true, the fact that eBay gets a stupid amount of traffic is what we need to take notice of.

Here’s another good reason to consider the opportunity on eBay. All those searches are product related. Not only does eBay potentially do more searches a day than Google, every eBay search is a product related search by someone looking to buy something - Google certainly can’t lay claim to the same thing. As popular as eBay is already, given this information, I believe it’s the most under realized opportunity on the web for Internet entrepreneurs.

It’s amazing as Internet marketers we spend so much time finding ways to convince Google to send us traffic, while a huge monster source of leads is sitting inside eBay, if we just take the time to learn how to tap it.

Capturing Emails Using eBay

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