Besides being an ecommerce entrepreneur, I sometimes provide consultation for business friends for their internet marketing like SEO and Google adwords management.

One of the first questions I get the most is - do I need an Adwords consultant?

The answer is yes.

Many business owners with a new online presence thought Google adwords is simply straight forward bidding on some keywords, writting some ads, and put it on Google. This cannot be farther away from the truth.

The truth is, a successful Google Adwords campaign require detail research of prospects’ search behavior, careful planning of adgroups, thorough copywriting of ads, choosing of landing page and conversion funnel, plus ongoing monitoring and split testing.

I recommend that if you’re serious about expanding your online business or using internet marketing to grow your company - go get an Adwords Consultant and outsource your PPC!

(Am I taking on new client? Not really at the moment, but you can email me to see when I’ll be available.)

Technorati Tags: Google, PPC, adwords consultant, adwords, internet marketing, adwords consultant

Ok here’s a breaking news, I just found out from my adwords account that Google is changing its formula for top a placement on adwords. Here’re the details from Google:

In the coming weeks, we’re improving how high quality ads are selected for top positions above Google search results. This change is designed to improve the quality of our ad results, and to give you more control over achieving top ad placement.

We anticipate that most of your ads will continue to perform as they have in the past. In some cases, you may see that ads previously shown alongside search results are now shown in top spots, and vice versa. As a result, you may see a change in the average number of clicks and average CPCs for impacted ads.

I think this is a great move by Google and will further ensure higher quality ads to achieve the top placement. The problem, however is, do you REALLY want top placement - which typically attracts tons of low quality click?

Let me know what you think about this new change in the comment section!

Technorati Tags: Google, PPC, adwords, internet marketing, adwords consultant

One of the first thing new online business owners consider is how to get traffic. So they spend all their time reading about SEO, PPC, email marketing, banner ads… spend resource implementing what they learned - and then to find out they’re not making enough money from all the traffic they got.

Now what?

As important as traffic is to an online business, the ability to monetize those traffic is an even more important skill to possess. Monetizing your website traffic is not JUST about increasing your conversion rate by split testing and website redesign. Its about engaging with your visitors, find out what they’re REALLY looking for, and providing it to them.

For example, one of our ecommerce site www.wholesalecollegetextbooks.com recently experienced a 200% increase in net profit overnight just because I thought of a way to monetize lost traffic. Realizing that many visitors exit our website because they cannot find the book they need - instead of showing “no results” when visitors search for a book we do not have, we show them results from Amazon and redirect them so we monetize through Amazon’s affiliate program.

This is just one of MANY possible ways to enhance the monetization of your visitors. Remember, online profit is a formula of traffic*conversion*monetization - while traffic and conversion can be improved through repetitive work such as link building and split testing - monetization requires paying attention to what your customer want and creatively providing them with that.

Be creative.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, ecommerce, monetization, Amazon affiliate program, Affiliate marketing

My textbooks company was recently a victim of a credit card fraud, causing us to lose around $4000 USD. It is somewhat typical, someone bought a whole bunch of textbooks from our site, and then suddenly email us to have the address change to Niger, Africa. It is quite obvious that it is a fraud, but my staff who processed the order was inexperienced and shipped out the books - causing us to lose $4000.

To make matter worse, we initially send them an invoice through Google checkout and Google cancelled the transaction because it is associated with “suspicious activity”; so my staff send the scammers an invoice through Paypal AND it went through!

You would think if Google checkout can detect a fraud, paypal should be able to - but NO!!

Not only was Paypal not able to detect the fraud, after we lost the chargeback, we even have to pay ANOTHER fee to compensate for the loss of chargeback!

Lets see how Google checkout is BETTER than Paypal:

1. Fraud Detection

How does Google Checkout protect me from fraud?

Chargeback resolution
All merchants are covered by our Chargeback Resolution Policy: our specialists will evaluate all chargebacks you receive through Google Checkout and, whenever possible, dispute them on your behalf. As an additional benefit under our Chargeback Resolution Policy, we also guarantee payment for all transactions that are eligible for Google’s Payment Guarantee Policy: If you receive a chargeback on an eligible transaction and provide Google with sufficient supporting documentation within ten business days after receiving a request from Google, Google will reimburse you within a week of receiving and reviewing the information.

Paypal? None of these stuff.

2. Chargeback Protection

The Payment Guarantee Policy is an unique benefit under the Chargeback Resolution Policy that offers you even more protection from unwarranted chargebacks. Here’s how it works:

Paypal? None of these stuff.

Conclusion? Google checkout is WAY cooler than Paypal.

Technorati Tags: Google, ecommerce, paypal, Google checkout

Here’s the latest blog post on the Google Adwords Blog, announcing the global expanstion of PPA Beta.

In March, we launched the pay-per-action (PPA) beta in the United States. Today, we’re pleased to announce the worldwide expansion of the PPA beta. Here’s a note from Rob Kniaz, the product manager for PPA:

PPA ads will appear on publisher sites in the Google content network. Publishers are free to choose the PPA ads most relevant to their site and run them in new ad units.

I have been using PPA since it launched for one of my lead generation site and has generated pretty good results, how would it expanstion affect YOUR business. Leave us a comment and let us know!

Technorati Tags: Google, ecommerce, pay-per-action, PPA, Google adwords

I just read an interesting report today saying that an astonishing 25 percent of all products sold from Zappos.com were returned.

Are they happy? For Zappos, that answer is yes.

In case you don’t know, Zappos is the largest online retailer for shoes and apparels (mainly shoes), and is the pioneer in offering free returns for their products.

Lesson of the story: if it makes sense for your business, encourage contrarian behavior that creates a larger amount of comfort.

For Zappos, that means encouraging returns with free shipping. NPR says this has helped Zappos grow by 6x from $100MM to $600MM a year.

“Some of our best customers are people who return a lot of shoes,” said Craig Adkins, vice president of operations at Shepherdsville, Ky.-based Zappos.com.

Technorati Tags: Zappos, ecommerce, adwords consultant

One of our ecommerce website www.mypopcornmachine.com - which sells concession equipment & supplies - got a new look yesterday!

We redesigned the site base on the testings we have conducted in the past couple months regarding our customer’s behaviour and research we did on internet’s top 500 retailers - we expect our conversion rate to increase by 70-80% and the cart abandon rate to lower by 30%.

There’re still a few glitches here and there and will be fixed in this couple days. We’ve stopped all our ads at the meantime until the site is fully functional again.

Anyhow, go check it out and give me your feedback!

Technorati Tags: yahoo store, Popcorn Machines, ecommerce, Internet Marketing consultant

Ok, I’m talking about link exchange.

It used to be the case that you can just do 2 way link exchanges with other websites and achieve high ranking. Since 2006, Google has catched on to that and devalued the links generated from 2-way link exchanges.

As a result, I’ve seen lately a lot more link exchange schemes that involve 3 way exchanges. In essence, instead of website A linking to B and B to A (2-way) - website A will link to B, B to C, and C back to A. This way, it is much harder for the search engine to detect so all 3 parties will get a lot of quality links.

To add on to that, a lot of these link exchange schemes encourage the exchange of articles with link embedded in them to take advantage of the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) of Google. I wonder how long it’ll take for Google to catch on this time. For now, I’ll be taking advantage of this and advice you to do so too.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Optimization, Link Building, Google, Marketing consultant

So eBay live - an annual conference for eBayers have concluded on Friday - after all those Google eBay drama (you can look up details about this yourself, its all over the internet). I’m here to inform you couple of the more exciting announcements they made during eBay Live which I believe would change your business tremendously. (I know it’ll change mine) Of all the changes, I’m most excited about the extra protection eBay will provide us powersellers against non-paying bidders. eBay is finally waking up and know that they need us powersellers to make eBay continue to be a vibrant marketplace.

Price + Shipping Sort
Bill also mentioned an important test underway. We’ve all been frustrated by excessive shipping and handling charges. Price + Shipping Sort is a new search option that sorts search results according to the total cost of the item, including shipping and handling charges. That way, buyers can choose to have the full price picture sorted by either highest total cost or lowest total cost.

Summer discount
And on that note — before I close — I’m pleased to offer our sellers a little summer relief to your selling costs. Starting June 19th and continuing through August 5th, we will LOWER the first tranche of Final Value Fees from 5.25% to 4.5%. This applies to auction, auction BIN, or pure fixed price format listings. Consider it a little eBay Live! gift to our fantastic community.

Technorati Tags: eBay live 2007, ebay, google, Internet Marketing consultant

Many of my clients know that I personally use and recommend you to use Channel Advisor as your inventory management system to manage your multi-marketplace sales as well as sales on your own website. I love how robust the CA system is and their customer support is excellent.

While I was looking into expanding my company’s marketing channel to Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE), I stumbled upon the news that they just launched a feed management system called the ShoppingAdvisor.

Here’s the excerpt from their blog:

Yesterday we took the wraps off ShoppingAdvisor, a product that allows retail marketers full control over their comparison shopping business.

Of course the release ships and everything’s OK, but I thought that was pretty funny at the time. I won’t relay the joke I told at launch time internally about the difference between a death march and a death sprint. I really prefer the term rapid development - isn’t it more positive?

I personally cannot wait to try it out and will certainly compare it with Feedperfect by Solid Cactus. More on that later and I’ll give you some exciting updates from eBay live 2007 in my next post.

Technorati Tags: channel advisor, shopping advisor, Feed Perfect, comparison shopping engine, PPC consultant