But, what I meant is that I took and passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GA IQ) exam – 91%, Woohoo!

What can I tell you about the exam? Let’s see…

First of all, go through all the Conversion University’s presentations. Twice if you have time.

You will have 90 minutes for completing 70 multiple choice questions, many of them having multiple right answers that you have to mark, or choose the best of the rights. Passing mark is 80%.

Go through E-commerce tracking and filters presentations twice. If you’re not familiar with Adwords, read about GA-Adwords integration. There are multiple questions about those.

Some of the questions will be dry theory, based on what you’ve learned in the presentations, but some will be questions where you will have to think a bit.

It really helps if you had GA installed on some of your sites and you had a go at creating filters, goals, funnels, use the reports to draw conclusions…

Don’t freak out when you first see the questions! I just sat there, open mouthed, during the first 5. It seems that Google threw the most difficult ones as starters. Ha!

You can mark questions for review later, or, you can also pause the exam altogether, take a break and do it later, as long as it’s within 120 hours of beginning the exam.

Go ahead and ask questions! I hope I can help you with something…

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Minding the GAIQ… Eh?

Well, last week I finally had the time to do it and I passed the Search Advertising Advanced Exam. Now I’m GAP qualified and, whoohoo!, I now have the big G accreditation.

This exam is by far more difficult than the Fundamentals exam, and my advice to anyone who’s going to take it is to study and memorize everything the learning center has to offer. Experience helps a lot, but there are questions about issues you don’t often face in your ongoing work, so STUDY!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Minding the GAP 2

I did. For almost an hour I tried to find a reason for this annoying thing and finally decided to google for it.

The most helpful solution was at bestwpthemez.com where it says the reason for this is there’s a tag with the same wording. Once I removed that tag, the category updated with no problems! Hurray.

Once again, I wanted to say thanks to the author, but the comments were for logged-in users only. WTF?!

So I preferred to spend the same time I would have spent registering on writing this quick post. And, thanks to the author!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Category Not Updated – Annoying WP Error

An Idea Is Born

We were having dinner at my relatives the other night, and their kid appears to have a huge potential in affiliate marketing. Though he knows nothing about this field, all the dots are in place, you just have to connect everything. I mean, he’s smart, business oriented, practically lives inside his PC. Why let him waste this potential?

Several times I thought that I should just push him in the right direction. But it is not as easy as it sounds.

If I just tell him about affiliate marketing and send him to the internet to find answers, he’s going to waste a year going through all the crap that’s going to be thrown at his direction.

If I give him a good ebook to read, he’s going to learn one, maybe two aspects of affiliate marketing, not getting the whole picture.

And I sure didn’t know how to start teaching him myself. Heck, where do you start? “Hey dude, I make money online.. wanna learn how?”. HAHA…

Eureka!

Anyway, not knowing how to start telling people about it got me thinking. What if I come up with an ebook (!!!) that would teach people affiliate marketing. Crazy idea, I know. But wait, what if it’s a series of ebooks, or even a newsletter that you join and get weekly lessons.

Yea I know, people have done that and probably this as well. But, their main purpose was to make money off the newcomers, right?

What if I create a truly educational piece of information that is going to start at the basics? Treat it as a study guide for someone close, someone that I DON’T want to make money off…

Anyway, the wheels are turning, I’m not a guy to put away ideas without trying. Let’s see how this works out over time.

I’ll keep you posted.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Affiliate Marketing Study Guide

The GAP is a program designed for professionals managing multiple Adwords accounts, granting them official Google recognition and other benefits that are helpful in this field.

To become a qualified member you have to pass two exams:

The first one is Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam, a two hour long exam that contains 120 questions. This is a new version of the exam, designed to be more rigorous and strategy-oriented and covers all current products and best practices to help run and manage AdWords campaigns.

And the second one is a choice between the Search Advertising Advanced Exam, which is available and other two, which are in production.

Hurray!!

[patting myself on the back]- Today I passed the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam, with a score of 98% (85% is required to pass)

This puts me half way to being qualified and joining the club!
I will update as soon as I take the second exam in the beginning of March.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Minding the GAP

Internet marketing is hard work. Look for freebies and shortcuts and you are destined to fail. Treat it as a business and succeed!

Learn how to treat this as a business from reliable sources, not hype infested egomaniacs that brag about their income or promise you immediate profits if you purchase this or that.

Put everything into practice immediately. Reading will not get you anywhere. Try, test, loose a bit of money. Get the feeling of things.

Another year had past and now this is my third year online. Man, did a lot of things change since that winter 2007…

If you were expecting an income report of some sort you won’t find one here, if you were following me for a while you would know that.

What I am going to tell you is that I have evolved into a different kind of marketer, one that looks at the big picture and makes strategies instead of having small projects to make a quick buck.

To brake things up, these are the stuff that I didn’t have 3 years ago:

• I no longer celebrate and not excited by sales and commissions. Funny, I used to be on the top of the world when the first dozen of sales came through.
• I became proficient in html and css, picked up a bit of php, and now I am able to use the full potential of Wordpress, my CMS of choice.
• I’m building content rich sites, instead of single landing pages.
• I realize that going after a one-time customer is not economical, I’m using Aweber autoresponder to market to my lists over and over again.
• I own my own products, which I either give away for “free” (for an email), or sell, and leverage the power of affiliates.
• I outsource the work that I don’t want or unable to do myself.
• I am comfortable with paying providers, investing in my upcoming projects.
• I am comfortable with paying for tools that will help my efforts.
• PayPal is my friend.
• Google is my mistress.
• I’m keeping up to date by reading a few pro blogs and news feeds.
• By a few I mean 4… It used to be 20
• I market internationally. US is not the only market in the game.
• I contact and get to know other affiliates. There’s a common interest we all share, and there’s no reason to restrict ourselves to avatars and pen-names.

So, there you go. It’s not ordered in any way and I probably missed a point or two since it’s already late and I’m tired. But you got the general direction, I hope.

You’re welcome to ask questions, comment, or do whatever below…

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Another Year Online

I just found out about a cool online, free, SEO tool. I’m amazed that I didn’t know anything about it before, but whatcha gonna do, right? I guess I was never into SEO before.

This tool is the LinkDiagnosis, which will help you tremendously if you’re doing any kind of SEO for your sites, but haven’t yet purchased any of tools that I did hear about (*cough* seo elite *uncough*).

First of all, there’s a FireFox extension, so that’s cool , you gotta love those…

With this service you can run analysis on

1. Links:
   

   This tool can show you all the important information about your competitor’s links. The report includes PageRank, anchor texts, no-follow information and more.

2. Sites:
   

   Having your site indexed is first step in getting traffic from search engines. This tool goes through every url in your XML Sitemaps file and reports if its indexed properly.

3. and Pages:
   

   See when the page was first indexed. Just right-click on any page and click “Get Page Age” and you will see when the page was indexed by Google for a first time. This information can help you to evaluate e.g. if pagerank is accurate or if its worth getting a link from that page.

Other than that is seems that there’s some link trading action going on over there. You can signup to be a publisher and sell ad-space on your site, or become an advertiser and buy ad-space on other sites.

One thing I can tell you right now is that I’m not going to sign up to be a publisher… no sir, not after the good ole Google slapped the shite out of this blog following my attempts to do business on TNX.

That’s right, despite their claims of being invisible to G… yea right, invisible.. what a joke. Took me months to get any rank back, still haven’t got to where I was. Brr…

So, try that LinkDiagnosis tool and be good.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

SEO This Time: A Cool Service To Help Your Efforts

So, to keep this place fresh, I found this hilarious video that I want to share with you. It is a business meeting of internet commentators and, boy can I relate.

FIRST!

Share you thoughts about this video below. Comment intelligently please…

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Internet Commentators Business Meeting – a Must See!

PPC-Coach is celebrating its 2nd year anniversary and letting you sign up for only $22 for the first month. My offer for a 50% discount still stands, so you are getting an exclusive price of $11.11!!!

If you’ve been waiting this long, this is definitely the time to sign up. Head over to this link and grab my offer and all the bonuses: PPC-Coach Discount

If this is your first time to hear about PPC-Coach, you are welcome to read my Review of PPC-Coach

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Huge PPC-Coach Discount During September

Well, you’ll be surprised to hear that many internet marketers really think that that’s where it ends. But, the truth is that there is much more to it.

Makes sense too.

Think about it: how much time do you spend on a search engine result page (SERP)? A couple of seconds till you click through? That’s right…

According to research, only 5% of the surfing time is spent on SERPs. The other 95% is browsing content pages.

Content Network

Google, as well as the other PPC platforms, provides you with a choice.

1. Advertise on their Search Network, and appear on the SERPs.
2. Or, advertise on the content network, and appear on websites (AdSense blocks, in case of Google).

So, it is true that advertising on the Search Network will get you ninja-precision targeting — using the right keyword you literally grab someone with a credit card in his hand and sell him your product.

But, keeping in mind that you get noticed only during those 5% of the time spent on the SERPs, you are missing out on a huge potential if you are not advertising on content.

Let me ask you another one…

What is the first thing you think about when you hear the term Content Network / AdSense Ads?
It’s those sponsored text-ads that appear on many sites all over the web, isn’t it?

Yea, that’s another one. Many marketers, even those that have been around for a while and done some PPC, still think that the Content Network is just about those text ads on websites.

But, did you know that you can place Image Ads and Video Ads too?

That’s really cool when you want to create brand awareness and draw attention during a launch of a product!

So, what’s the secret you ask?

The secret is to be open minded, and to try all of the available tools that are offered to you.

There is a huge potential that is not being used. Take a Content Network campaign for a spin. Test some text-ads. Throw in some image-ads. You’ll be surprised how well it can turn out to work for you…

Don’t take the most popular / the easiest route, or what you’ve read once in an ebook.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

PPC Marketing Secrets 2