For lack of time I can’t dig up more in depth questions which we’ve posed for people with mid-size+ pay per click spends but for most people, small business owners or people just trying to market something who are using a PPC agency the following questionnaire template will often bring to light some surprising information. Give it a try; you’ll either find out A)Your PPC Guru really is a fucking guru! (ugh, that word twice in one sentence… gross), B) He or She doesn’t know his or her arse from her earhole, or C) They’re dicks and blow you off or get defensive about t. Regardless of the outcome I’d want to know it.

Dear Dark Master of the Pay for Clicks Art, Please provide me the following:

List of keywords you are targeting, the cost per click/bids, number of clicks, and the number of impressions, average position , and individual as well as overall conversion rate – on a monthly breakdown for [3 months ago], [2 months ago], [last month] and a daily breakdown for  [3 months ago], [2 months ago], [last month].

Please also include which ad groups and campaigns these keywords belong to and the match types.

What pages of the site you are sending visitors to and what keywords are taking them to those pages?

Provide all of the ad copy that is currently running in the campaign and its performance data.

Are you running any site targeting campaigns? If so, please provide a list of websites that are being targeted.

Are you running the ads on content networks? If so what sites have you filtered out, if any? What percentage of the campaign is spent on the content network and what keywords are you running in it and what are the match types?

Are you doing any geographical targeting, limiting ads by time of day/day of week, language, etc? If so, please specify on an ad group level.

Have you made any strides to improve our Quality Score for Google Adwords? If so, what are they?

What have you cut eliminated, cut down on, or increased as a result of your analysis and campaign measurements during the course of the [# of months] we’ve been working together?

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Lifeline Screenshots

Lifeline is apparently the only web based, open source web site uptime monitoring tool around.

It may or may not be as fancy as some of the web site monitoring services you can find everywhere, but it has the essential features:

• Add unlimited URLs to ping
• Group URLs into Ping Jobs
• Set ping intervals as low as 1 minute
• Get reports of downtimes based on Ping Jobs
• Send, CC, and BCC email notifications to any number of emails

Installation requires executing SQL queries and setting up a Cron task, so if you’ve had trouble trying to setup something like Wordpress, you may want to get someone to help you. Other than those technical barriers, you should have Lifeline up and running in minutes.

After installation, you essentially just create Ping Jobs then add URLs to ping to those Ping Jobs and you’re set. Sorry, but there’s no guide here. At most, you are going to get a FAQs page out of me if I find that people are having the same issues.

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They look something like this:

I love the site, and i would love to buy an ad on it for a company that helps people find luvvv <3 get back to me if interested! Thanks,

Lauren K.

Ninja’s weapon of choice? Love! (p.s. if you had said “Love, Lauren K.” instead of “Thanks,” we’d have sold you the link.

Love,
The Link Nazi

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What It Does

Wordpress allows a very flexible way for users to specify how they want their post URLs to look like. However, Wordpress only allows this level of customization with post URLs! For your category sections the URLs are forced to be in the form of http://www.example.com/container/category-name/.

This is where the Dot HTML plugin takes care of things. It simply adds the .html extension to all your pages.

But Why?

I DON’T know! Loren, our “Web Strategist” pays me to make this crap! Supposedly it helps with indexing–or prevents some indexing problems–or helps eliminate inbound link issues–it’s always something annoying like that. Total BS from a programmer’s viewpoint. I could have spent the time to write a cool Facebook Widget or something. So I hope someone else might find this plugin useful.

Installation

Step 1: Upload and activate the plugin.

Step 2: Make sure your Permalink structure is set to /%postname%.html

Step 3: Implement the dot_html_next_posts_link() and dot_html_previous_posts_link() functions for your paging links.

Step 4: Post a comment below complaining that something broke.

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So, after a couple of questions posed to me by J, my left-coast buddy, he told me he’d email me in the morning.

Three hours later, 2:30am PST, he did just that. And to my surprise he said to expect a domain push in the morning, as he’d found the perfect domain for me to start a blog on. Perhaps it was an omen, perhaps not, but after a day or two of technical difficulties he made me the proud owner of “positionacquisition.com“. While that may sound somewhat wordy to most, he (J’s a brand development guy) actually hit it head on considering the questions he originally had asked me.

Without rehashing exactly what questions he posed and my answers I can basically say that what I told him I’d blog about was:

• My opinions on SEO and Internet marketing
• Branding, brand reputation, mindshare
• Barriers to entry
• Market presence
• Tools and tips
• Interesting strategies for beating the system (a breadth of topics, not just search by any means)

But, the reason he found this domain suitable was simply because I’ve always made my philosophy clear. It’s not the exact antithesis of his position, as he’s much more polarized to the whiter side of the hat spectrum, but it is quite different and so I’m pleased he interpreted it so well in hunting down a suitable domain. So what’s my philosophy? Well, basically I’m a firm believer in being aggressive and stampeding your way into markets/industries and effectively leveraging your resources to dominate.

No punches pulled, no-holds barred. I seldom waste time and I’m not afraid to buy my way to the top. I like to surround myself with sharks and find that it helps me maintain an acute pulse on new practices and identifying market inefficiencies being exploited. While the line may be grey and blurry, I steer clear of outright guile, and expect the same from those I deal with. This will be a multi-author blog and hopefully I and the other editors will help open some eyes.

So, thank you J for finding an eloquent name for the practice I employ and believe in. I’ve got my flame-retardant suit zipped up and I’m now, officially, ready to blog.

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