So quite a while back, I found myself bitching about AdWords again when chatting with Aaron Wall, of SEOBook.com fame. And he "casually" dropped that he was working on ppcblog.com, and they were starting an AdWords training program. I ignored it, as I do most every mention of PPC. Recently however, I've had to dive into PPC a bit to support one of my "original" clients: my mother's Relatietherapie (relation therapy) practice. She was suffering badly from a few Google organic updates (which has since been fixed), and I wanted to make sure I knew what I needed to know to keep her practice going on AdWords should I need to.

I then remembered this AdWords training course Aaron mentioned, and got myself access. It's the smartest thing I've done in a while, I think. I've not learned this much about PPC, ever, and I learned it in an enjoyable and, I must say, pretty easy way. Going from the fundamentals, to keyword research, campaign structure to the Quality Score and just basically everything you need to know about it...

Anyway, I'm not getting paid for this "ad", nor if any of you sign up. I just wanted to share it with all of you, and make sure you start subscribing to the PPC Blog. Just see it as my way to make up for the lack of posts about that topic here :)

Just because I suck at PPC doesn’t mean you have to! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

A very happy "birthday" to Todd and the crew at BuySellAds, thanks for helping me and those other great sites out there make money so we can continue to serve the community!

Happy Birthday BuySellAds! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Imagine this: you are buying a bread in the supermarket which has discount passes. That means they know what you bought. You payed with your bank card, so the bank now knows where you spent your money. Meanwhile you get gas outside of the supermarket so the bank now knows you came with the car, bought the bread and had gas. The gas station also knows which kind of gas and the fact that you decided to buy that candy-bar which was staring at you next to the counter. All bits of information which are separately not that important. But now here’s one company which allows you to say whether or not you liked the services. In return, they store every bit of information, so the bread, the candybar, the gas, all of it. And then they sell, or give away, that data to a third party, lets say a gym.

I guess now you get why it scares me? Luckily, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party (*cough* nice name *cough*) said in their letter:

Social networks needed to have a default setting in which access to profile information and information about users' connections were "limited to self-selected contacts".

There's no word not to be misunderstood there, and I fully agree. Especially in the light of recent developments, allowing people to search for updates from outside Facebook. Weird thing is, I actually only started to use Facebook a bit better a couple of weeks back, on the day of the F8 developer conference where they announced these changes. I see the possibilities for marketing on & with Facebook a bit better now, and understand the power it has for advertisers. Those advertisers get that as well, it turns out, comScore says Facebook served up 176.3 billion ads to U.S. customers in Q1, being 16.2% of the market.

So I hope they get this fixed. I don't want to do away with Facebook, not just yet, I do want them to change their way of thinking about and dealing with privacy though, and not just now, but for all eternity.

Facebook & (the lack of) Privacy is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The Yoast.com Reader Survey: help us improve! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It's rare that we get these types of conferences in Holland, that are of world class quality. This is one of them. My buddy Karl Blanks of Conversion Rate Experts is one of the keynotes, but the other ones are not in any way less interesting. What to think of Hannah Donovan, the creative director of Last.fm?

There are more, go to the site to read all about it. But: don't forget this: when you register, you are allowed to set the "Chi Member" button to "yes", just because you're a reader of Yoast.com, which will save you € 25,- on the already quite low registration price of € 250. I hope to see you there!

Design for Conversion is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The vacancies are listed here, in Dutch. Please pass it on to any of your friends who might find it interesting!

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Registration is free, so register now! I'll be there, so let me know in the comments when you're coming too and we can meet up!

A4U RoadShow Amsterdam is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So, to introduce you to the company and to Todd Garland, who runs the company, has been kind enough to answer a series of questions for me. If you've got advertising on your blog and it's either taking up too much time or you're not selling enough, you might want to give them a try! But don't do that before you read on and see how incredibly passionate and smart Todd is about all of this.

Hi Todd, could you introduce yourself and buysellads.com to the readers of yoast.com?

Sure thing, my name is Todd Garland, I live in Boston, MA with my lovely wife and smelly dog and I run BuySellAds.com. BuySellAds.com is a self-funded startup (so far) advertising network targeting the design and development community. We've been around now for almost a year and we are doing very well. Selling a ton of ads, helping publishers make money, and helping advertisers create killer campaigns to target the web design and development niche. I'm young, 27, and have been building websites for what seems like forever now (10 years) and was most recently employed at another hot startup, HubSpot where I was their designer/front-end engineer/SEO guru (one of many SEO guru's in the company I might add).

Why did you start BuySellAds.com?

I started BuySellAds.com because I was frustrated. I was operating two
hobby websites (csselite.com and 13styles.com) and selling ads directly to advertisers. I also bought ads to help promote and grow those sites too -so I was solving a frustration that I experience both as an advertiser and a publisher. None of the well known ad networks could solve my problem... they are a pain to deal with, they don't give publishers enough control, and they take too high of a commission.

You've won me over as a publisher for BuySellAds by providing me with excellent service, and allowing me to do the transition with old advertisers on my own pace. Is that something you try to do for everyone?

Well, yes, everyone gets great service - regardless of how big/small the
publishers/advertiser is. Great service is something none of the other ad networks had (in my experience). It is important to me and I want people to feel like they're getting that great service every time they have a question or need a hand. In terms of helping with transitions, of course... we have transitioned many blogs over to our system who are already selling ads direct and I can proudly say that it's happened seamlessly every time.

What is, in your opinion, your added value to advertisers?

1. Our system is very simple. Fixed 30-day rates on a subscription basis. No other ad network does this, and I can't figure out why - it just makes sense.
2. They can trust us. We always do what is right and we're very reliable. When you buy direct from publishers who are not in a network you never know what you will get.
3. You can manage all of your ads in one central location. Many of our
   advertisers previously had to manage these ad buys individually, site by
   site, publisher by publisher. This was very time consuming. It's now very efficient. You don't have to contact anyone, you don't have to go back and forth on pricing, size, payment, etc. - it's all here in one place and when you are ready to pull the trigger it's done, the
   ads go live, that's it.
4. You no longer need to "discover" new placements. New sites that are
   worth advertising on are always coming into the marketplace and we're always recruiting new publishers. We keep our eyes out for advertisers and make good recommendations to them all the time.
5. We know our inventory. Too often advertisers are stuck dealing with
   people who have no clue where they should be advertising. We know our
   inventory very well and make honest recommendations vs. just trying to spend their money.

And to publishers?

1. Automated. They don't need to waste their time dealing with advertisers, remembering when to put up and take down ads, figure out how to get paid, etc. You install the ad code and you're up and running - it takes only a few minutes to get setup.
2. We don't get in the way. Our ad code is unobtrusive, flexible, and we don't plaster our brand all over your site like the other networks. We just blend in nicely - I bet visitors to your site didn't even notice a change when you switched over to BuySellAds.com.
3. We help you find advertisers. Like I said above, we know our inventory, and when an advertiser comes to us or when we seek out great advertisers we know exactly where their ads should be in our network. We are always sending out proposals, making recommendations, etc. Publishers in this niche NOT in our inventory are missing out these days. You, Joost, went from 4-8 advertisers in how many weeks? A couple I believe... ;) 3 weeks indeed, quite an achievement
4. You can trust us. We do what is right and we're always willing to help and give advice on pricing, placement, etc.
5. Highest payouts of any ad network on the planet. We pay out at 75%,
   which is unheard of and includes credit card processing fees (usually up to 5%), publisher payment fees, ad serving fees, support for the publisher and their advertisers, etc.

How is the online ad market doing at the moment, is it suffering from the recession?

Well, I think we're different. All of the ad networks you see that are
struggling right now are struggling for two main reasons:

1. They rely on targeting to produce results and their targeting is awful.
2. Their prices are inflated and they have been robbing clueless advertisersfor a long time and now it is catching up with them.

BuySellAds.com is very different. We don't do any targeting, the advertisers do this themselves by self-selecting the placements they wish to buy. Our prices are good - they're not inflated or anything, they make sense and are cost effective.

My best take away from all of this? Even in a market that might be shrinking, those who provide excellent service and a good added value will always prevail.

Interview with Todd Garland of BuySellAds is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Tweetbacks for WordPress is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

If you decide to go on, you'll either go directly to another article, or you'll most probably hit one of two links: the blogs about page, or its homepage. This time, you pick the homepage. If the site you're visiting has a "default" theme, you'll see a listing of the last 10 posts and the same sidebar you already saw on the article you just read. That's it.

Isn't that a blatant misuse of the trust you've just given that site? Wouldn't it be way more appropriate if the site showed you the very best content it can offer you, and gave you a sample of what kind of content you can find on it?

That is your homepage! It's a showcase of your blog. Whether people went to it because they heard from someone "you should go to *****.com, it's cool" or because they've just read an article and want to learn more about your site, that page is probably your best chance of getting a new subscriber.

So what should be on your homepage? This is the bare minimum I'd say:

• An about text about yourself / about text about the blog.
• A big call to action, the action being subscribing, either through email or RSS.
• A listing of your latest posts.
• Your "taxonomies", either your category structure, your tag structure or both.

After that it's all about personal preferences. I like to show off some of my best content by having featured posts and plugins, and of course I show off my Twitter.

So, how does your blogs homepage do on these criteria? What would you do differently?

Your homepage: your blogs showcase is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• My buddies at Conversion Rate Experts released an article on their blog today which really rocks: Understanding your visitors.
• Bloglines apparently fixed their "Crawler problem", according to their news page, and that boosted the RSS readership for this site from 4,000 something to 4,637!
• I'll be on Dutch Business News Radio this thursday, talking about the online marketing methods used in the American elections. For you Dutchies: read more about the show here.
• Bryan Eisenberg did a great round up of Google Analytics plugins, hacks & tricks.
• Aaron did an incredibly thorough roundup of all the issues around SEOmoz's Linkscape, and gives an incredible load of advice in the process.

Btw, check out this screenshot I made of Google Analytics with the first tool mentioned in the article on grokdotcom: the Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin For Google Analytics.

Useful Link Roundup is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

"Us" is a group of highly experienced web marketing consultants. Some of you, especially the Dutch people, might know Ton Wesseling, and of course you know me.

Now you'll ask: what can we offer you?

• An expert review of your site
• Workshops in online marketing (given by Ton and me together)

In both cases, you've got the rare chance of getting not one but two (!!) online marketing experts helping you to make (more) money online.

Expert review

In the expert review we will review your entire site: starting with usability and functionality, up to how you are persuading your customers to buy, and whether your online presence outside of your site needs improving. And best of all, we can do it not only for your site, but your competitors too, revealing your strengths and weaknesses.

Whether you have an e-commerce site, a subscription based site (newspaper, blog, etc.) or a service site, our expert review is sure to give you hands-on tips for improvements.

Workshop more conversions on a lower budget

In the workshop, we'll tell you how to do online marketing in times of recession: more conversions on a lower budget. And we will not only tell you, we will, interactively, create an improved online strategy for you and with you.

Act now!

Both of these are on a first come first serve basis, and since our time is limited, we might be sold out as soon as today, so be sure to react soon by emailing me for pricing & availability details.

More conversions on a lower budget is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The last few days have been an absolute blast, speaking wise, I enjoyed both my WordPress session and the Extreme SEO panel on tuesday, and the Affiliate doctors panel on wednesday.

I actually wasn't supposed to be on that last panel, but had to fill in because Bob Rains went (and still is) missing. That last panel could have used someone like Ciaran to moderate too btw, that would have made it a whole lot better.

The new presentation Karl & Ben from Conversion Rate Experts did was one of the other highlights, content wise, as were the SEO howlers session and "Practical PPC Strategies for Better ROI" session.

In that last session Dixon gave a new presentation I'd never seen before, which was good, and both Mel and Tor from Microsoft showed why at some point in time Microsoft will own this market too. The fact that both Yahoo! and Google didn't even bother to show up for sessions like that only shows me that they're not at all interested in the people who are using their products.

Then, next to all the great content and the very well organized expo hall, there were the parties. The opening party was fun, the Thames cruise on the second night was great even though we could have used a bit more food, and the party yesterday was great as well. Before we joined that party though, we first had dinner with a couple of friends.

Dave had blogged asking who wanted to come for dinner, and picked Anthony Shapley, who turned out to be a nice guy! We had a load of fun and some good discussions with next to Anthony, Dave and his lovely wife Becky, these other great guys: Mel Carson, Todd Crawford, Marcus "Mediadonis" Tandler, Patrick Altoft, Al Carlton and myself.

So, the 28th and 29th of April next year A4UExpo will be coming to Amsterdam, and I can only say one thing: be there.

If you want to read some other reviews, check these out:

• Dixon Jones
• Roy Huiskes
• One Little Duck
• Affiliate Marketing Blog
• Codswallop
• Keith Bond
• Lammo
• Affiliate Stuff
• Befuddled Me?
• MediaWeek
• Peter Wanderson
• Peter Coles
• Blogstorm
• Self Made Minds
• Chris Bishop

PS the guys from Sunshine.co.uk released a pretty cool WordPress plugin to easily make vacation sites. I'll look at that a bit more and write about as I think it's a fantastic idea.

A4UExpo was great, yet again. is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• I use a lot of links, and these were breaking up even a simple text layout, and I figured HTML email would increase the readability of the whole thing.
• With HTML emails, because you're seeing normal link text, it doesn't look so bad when you're tracking clicks, which you are of course doing to improve your newsletter.
• HTML email plain looks better, and gives a better opportunity to brand yourself.

In the process of switching to HTML, I've learned a couple of things. I must say the first thing I've learned is that people don't really seem to mind getting HTML email, I've had 1 serious complaint and about 5 dozen positive reactions of people saying this hugely improved the newsletter.

The funny thing is that the 1 serious complaint taught me something new: my newsletter wasn't showing up very nicely in Yahoo! Mail, and the guy was right on to complain to me. Turns out, a lot of web based email readers don't like external style sheets. The solution is simple: use only inline styles.

Now that might seem like a lot of work, but it isn't because of this great tool called Premailer. That absolutely great tool allows you to make up your newsletter in HTML, and then it parses it and moves it all to inline styles. In the same process, it'll also created a decently looking text version!

So I based my design on one of these templates provided by Campaign Monitor, and got my buddy Christian to design this header image for me:

So what I've done now that I've got a finished template is perhaps a bit geeky, but I love it: I've set up a special WordPress blog, with the email template as it's template. I've reversed the post order in it, which you can do by simply doing this:

// Reverse post order
query_posts($query_string . "&order=ASC");
while (have_posts()) : the_post();

And now I can use my favorite external editor, MarsEdit, to write posts for my mailing list. I tag each post with it's edition number, and when I've got enough stuff for a new edition, I open up that tags page, save the HTML, put it through Premailer and then copy the parsed HTML from Premailer into my Aweber broadcast. As Premailer also provides the plain text version, I copy that in too, and I'm done!

By the way people have asked me why I use Aweber, and to be honest I haven't tried anything else. This is what most pro's I know use, it's pretty cheap, it's very good, and it gives me everything I need, so why go look somewhere else?

All in all, this has been a pretty smooth experience, and my newsletter has gotten better from it, so I would advice any of you who sent out text only emails to start doing HTML too!

Switching from plain text to HTML emails is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I'll show you what that means. I went to Bol.com and searched for a nice camera, and hit the "Add to wish list" bookmarklet, and got this (click for full picture):

Then I added it to my wish list, by selecting the proper photo and inserting the price, and bam, there it was:

This is truly smart stuff. It gives Amazon the chance of seeing what is popular elsewhere on the web as well as on their own stores, (with the possible chance of starting to sell just that product) and it makes them a hub for everyone's wish list... Truly smart marketing!

[cb type="company"]Amazon[/cb]
[cb type="person"]Jeremy Schoemaker[/cb]
[cb type="financial"]Alliance Capital[/cb]
[cb]Google[/cb]

Amazon Universal Wish List is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Detect ad-blocking software is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Their "handle" online is Conversion Rate Experts, and that's just what they are. I've helped them turn their beautiful new design into a WordPress site, and I must say, it looks absolutely awesome!

When you check out the site, be sure to check out their Google Website Optimizer 101, and their excellent list of online marketing resources. Lastly, their homepage contains a list of "common mistakes to avoid" which is definitely worth a read too!

Conversion Rate Optimization? is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

But this isn't really new is it? And it's not only about the display URL policy either... It's about hijacking a good page / domain to get a good quality score, and using that quality score to make sure you get cheap clicks on your bad landing pages (with high CTR's, I bet)...

Trust me, this has been going on for quite a while, and it's done for all sorts of reasons outside of this one: cloaking to be able to use flash landing pages, to serve high quality pages to Google and high converting pages to customer's, etc. etc. You'd think Google was aware of this by now...

Cloaking for AdWords is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

They send you an email every time that happens, apologizing and telling you they're trying to get the book to you as fast as they can. That's fine the first time, a bit annoying but still fine the second time, and becomes really annoying (as in: blog-post worthy annoying), when it happens 3 times within 4-5 months...

These emails are automated, and if I were working at bol.com, I'd start doing something extra for my clients when stuff like this happens. If you know it's happened a few times, and trust me, they keep track of everything there, why not give me a coupon for my next purchase? How would you handle situations like these?

Unreliable delivery times at Bol.com is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I will be speaking there myself too, talking about affiliate management and the moves we're making at Onetomarket to work together with our client's affiliate networks. Without revealing too much yet I can honestly say that I think we've found a way to make both our clients, their networks, their affiliates and ourselves more money!

Only 9 days after that, my good friend Avinash Kaushik will be coming to this side of the world to speak at the Web Analytics Congres! I'm really looking forward to seeing both guys again, and of course I hope to meet you too if you're at either of the events!

Heroes coming to Holland is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!