Bill McIntosh

I posted this YouTube video just before leaving town to go on a trip with my family.  The video is about how I earned $3.5 Million in revenue from Google AdSense which I intended to use for an upcoming blog post when I got home.

While out of town with my family I talked to a friend of mine and he told me about all the activity surrounding the video.  I had asked some friends and employees to go check out the video before I left and some of them had bookmarked it. This apparently started an avalanche.  It’s gotten an amazing number of video plays, more than 10 YouTube honors so far, made the top of its category, lot’s of people started talking about it online and then people began linking to it.

A little while ago, Aweber announced their integration with Feedburner, which was quickly reported by problogger.net. Somehow, easywordpress knew about it even before aweber released it.

Although this is a very cool change for Aweber, I don’t usually use Feedburner. This is because the rss feed it generates has all the links to posts as redirects. So if you show the Feedburner RSS button, any spiders that usually crawl and scrape the posts will send the link juice to the Feedburner redirect and not my site. Plus, displaying a Feedburner image showing “0 readers” for any length of time isn’t very encouraging.

Last week Google accidentally let slip that they will be penalizing AdWords advertisers for slow loading times of landing pages. You can view the Google’s FAQ on this topic here.

(For those not intimately familiar with AdWords, if you are bidding $.05 for the keyword phrase “best keyword ever”, you may have to increase your bid anywhere from $.20 to as much as $10.00 if Google thinks your landing page is too slow.)

Wow. This brings up a bunch of questions. What is “slow”? How will I know if I am penalized? How do I fix it? How much will this cost me!?

For those of you who don’t know: Google periodically cleans house in their AdWords program. They single out websites and assign them a poor “quality score”. These sites hit by this bad score have their minimum bid prices skyrocket to $5 or $10 per click. This effectively bans you from AdWords since most webmasters cannot afford to pay $10 for every click Google sends their way.

Today I was shocked to find Google testing YouTube listings and additional Google products to their regular AdWords area. This could signal big changes ahead for AdWords and possible losses of traffic for AdWords advertisers.

This one change could cost you your online business!

In my video below, I’ll show you what I found and explain what Google has been testing and what these new search results could mean for Google AdWords advertisers:

Just a quick note…

I’m off tonight for San Diego to Howie Schwartz’s online marketing seminar this weekend December 14th & 15th.

The event is titled: “Two Sides Of Traffic Workshop: Adwords Meets Organic”

There are two seminars:

Friday’s event is regarding two ways of driving online web traffic. The first is covering expert level use of AdWords to drive paid online visitors to your website. The second, about using search engine optimization and other traffic “tricks” to bring visitors to your site. So it’s a covering both the free and paid side of traffic generation.

Normally a new website will stick up a default page titled “Hello World!”. It does this to prove that the site is installed and everything is working, only to be manually deleted immediately after. As I hovered over the “delete” button to send this very post to the trash - I paused. After hundreds - maybe thousands - of “Hello World!” posts I have slain in my life, I realized that this title summed up exactly what I wanted to write about.