The pay per action beta test for Google AdWords recently debuted, and spurred plenty of advertiser interest.

Need more traffic for very specific niche keywords. One way to appeal to a very niche audience is to set up a separate blog apart from your main company site or blog. 

This is part 6 of a 10 part series.

This is the sure sign of an analytical person: a person who just flat refuses to make a decision no matter how compelling the evidence is in favor of doing so. People like this are always the hardest to sell to, and they are often decision makers. Making a sale to such a person is completely different from making a sale to anybody else, and it is the trickiest process I know: but it can be done:

The rate of innovation within software development is a constant source of inspiration that modern marketeers can tap into. 

For example, today Yahoo has announced a move that (in English) invites programmers anywhere to use the company’s technology to build things that might encourage Yahoo’s gazillion customers to spend a bit more time Yahooing.  And they will pay hard cash for the ones that are popular.  For non-techies, the only thing to remember is that this is all made possible by the advances in a technology called Application Programming Interfaces, thankfully known as APIs. 

The SEM Industry is rapidly changing, this includes the search engines (their SERP algorithms and spiders), SEO Tactics, and SEM Strategies. Off the top of my head I have come up with 5 things that WILL NOT matter in SEM in the future and 5 things that marketers should stay on top of.

If you do not have programming skills, but you have excellent business skills and a burning idea for a web 2.0 company? Outsourcing your code development might just be for you.

Recently I was reading a book that a friend sent me (thanks Greg) and although it has absolutely nothing to do with the internet or marketing, it grabbed an open piece of mental Velcro.

The interesting bit of information was:

In my last article I wrote about how search marketing is currently like a giant popularity contest. This begs the question of what’s going to come next as Google’s and the other engines’ algorithms keep evolving and take into account more and more data. What will this mean for search marketers?

While the average spent on online advertising in the U.S. hovers around 5% of total ad budgets, the U.K. is blazing a trail with 11.4%.

Online advertising grew by more than 41% in 2006, overtaking national newspaper ads (10.7% share) and about half the amount spent on TV ads (which actually dropped 4.7%).

A post on Google Webmaster Central blog increases users awareness regarding webmaster practices that do or do not conform to Google’s standards. This post was translated from their recently launched German blog.

I read an interesting post from Bill McCloskey on the need for specialization. Bill has a point, but I think there’s a counterpoint, too, when specialization gets out of control.

Bill makes the case for specialization in a straightforward way: "I submit that the über marketer who is expert in all the various forms of interactive marketing is someone who just doesn’t exist, or is very bad at a lot of things. An interactive jack of all trades, master of none, is not the person you want heading up your email marketing efforts."

There are three basic brands of funding for your new shiny web 2.0 company. Bootstrap, Angel and Venture Capitol. Which one you use really relies on your personality (how well you tolerate risk) and how deep your pockets are.

Bootstrapping