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SWeCS NEWSLETTER - 18 April 2005
In this issue...
- Which PPC Engines To Use (And Not)
- This Fortnight's Question
- Have You Backed Up Your Website?
- Buyalink.net For Sale
- Resources For Small Business
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WHICH PPC ENGINES TO USE (AND NOT)
There are literally hundreds of Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines
out there to advertise your website on. But only a few are really
worth it.
- Google
Google's pay per click programme is one of the "Big Two"
(Google and Overture), and offers superior results and coverage,
and quite good prices. For some terms, it is still very possible
to be able to list your site on the first page of results for
only $0.10 per click.
The Google PPC program, called Adwords, is the ads that appear
down the right hand side of the page when you search for something
on Google. After years of using this program, we have found that
their results are fantastic, and we know that thousands of other
businesses have had similar experiences. So Google is definitely
an important search engine to advertise in.
- Overture (soon to be renamed Yahoo)
The PPC engine Overture (owned by Yahoo and soon to be renamed
Yahoo) provides results for other huge search engines such as
Yahoo, MSN (including NineMSN), Altavista, Optusnet, and many
others, so their reach is very wide. They claim to have the largest
distribution network in the search engine market.
Because of this, their PPC advertising programs usually gets very
good results too. On average however, their prices seem to be
a little higher than Google (simply due to competition for positions),
so often you'll pay a little more, but you'll still usually get
excellent results and it is worth being involved with.
Now, we could just about stop there, because if you take out advertisements
in these two big PPC engines, you'll be covering the majority of
the market. However, we do want to comment briefly on some of the
other larger ones around and our experience with them.
- Findwhat - these guys are actually pretty good. Our trials with
them have shown a decent level of traffic at very good prices.
The only thing to remember is that they are mainly USA focussed,
so your advertisements may not get a lot of reach into Australia,
if that's the market you're targetting. Definitely worth a go
however if you're advertising to the overseas market
- 7Search - not too bad either. They have quite a large reach
and still have quite low bidding amounts, so these guys are worth
a go too
- Enhance (formerly Ah-ha) - now, we need to be careful here that
we don't get ourselves into trouble, but what we're about to say
is true, so we should be OK. We tried Enhance, and found that,
suspiciously, they delivered around 20 times the traffic of Google
and Overture combined, so our money was all spent within hours.
However, it was all junk traffic (ie. not one sale). All our queries
to their support section went totally unanswered and unacknowledged.
So for us it was a complete waste of money. Furthermore, we did
a search on the Internet and found other businesses had experienced
exactly the same thing. So, even though Enhance claim to have
a big network, please be very careful about using them.
- Sensis - probably best if you read our article at http://www.southwestecommerce.com/newsletters/swecsnews291104.htm,
as it still holds true.
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THIS FORTNIGHT'S QUESTION
This fortnight's question comes from lots of people!!
"Can you help me with my assignment?"
You are welcome to take any information from our site, particularly
our Library, so long as it is referenced back to www.southwestecommerce.com.
If you provide this reference back to us, you don't even need to
check with us first.
However, unfortunately due to workload we cannot answer individual
questions for assignments or exams.
Got a question? Send it to us at admin@southwestecommerce.com
and we'll do our best to answer it, as well as publish one every
fortnight for everyone to see.
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HAVE YOU BACKED UP YOUR WEBSITE?
Any reputable hosting company will have a secure backup system in
place, so that if their server crashes, they'll have a backup copy
of everyone's website and can put it back online. However, there's
a few things you should note about these kinds of systems:
- These backup systems should NEVER fail, but of course we live
in an imperfect world where people make mistakes, so it's always
possible that the backup doesn't work for some reason. Therefore
it is really important that you keep your own backup copy of your
website somewhere, preferably on a CD so that if you're hard drive
crashes you've still got a copy
- Some people think that if you make a mistake while updating
your website you can simply ask the hosting company to restore
the backed up copy. This is not the case. A hosting company's
backup copy is set up for when the whole server goes down so that
they can restore the whole lot. They usually cannot restore single
files that you have accidently deleted. So that's another good
reason to keep your own backup copy.
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BUYALINK.NET FOR SALE
We are attempting to simplify our service mix, and as a result we
wish to sell one of our websites, www.buyalink.net.
Buyalink.net is a website that attracts people who wish to buy
and sell links for their website. The idea of the business is to
build a database of people willing to sell links or advertising
space on their website, and then when someone wants to buy such
a link, they buy from Buyalink.net. The business then keeps the
difference between the purchase price and the selling price. In
effect Buyalink.net is a "link broker".
We have not had time to invest enough energy into the website,
so the database and goodwill isn't very high, but the website is
all done and domain name purchased.
Genuinely interested buyers can email info@buyalink.net
for further details about what's included, or to make an offer.
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RESOURCES FOR SMALL BUSINESS
Ecommerce Library
Browse through the SWeCS Ecommerce Library,
full of FREE information about getting more out
of the Internet. Sections include Web Site
Development, Web Site Promotion & Internet
Marketing, Online Commerce, Computer &
Technical Issues, and Miscellaneous.
Newsletter Archives
The SWeCS Newsletter archives provides a
wealth of FREE information on small business and
the Internet. Browse through the main topics or
search for your particular query.
SWeCS Affiliate Program
Start up another income stream, by earning
commissions for each referral who signs up for
one of our services.
Affiliate Directory
Browse through a list of reviewed Affiliate
programs. Let us do the work of testing it out
for you!
Do you know of a resource that should be added
here? Email us and let us know. There is only one
condition - it must be free.
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OTHER EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
Here's some other email newsletters you might
like:
www.southwestlife.com.au
www.dunsboroughbayvillageresort.com/news/newsindex.htm
www.west-oz.com/newsletter/newsletter.asp
http://derekstockley.com/newsletters/news-index.html
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