I recently received my copy of the “Yellow Pages.” All I could think was “what a waste.”
I think a Yellow Pages ad is a waste of money and here’s why:
1. Most searches now begin online
When was the last time you scrambled around to find the yellow pages so you could find the phone number of a local business to call? I can’t remember the last time I did that.
Nowadays, people’s first reaction when they need information is to look online. If I need someone to work on my yard, I …

I learned a valuable lesson in adwords recently. The lesson was important enough for me to want to tell you about it in the hopes that you will not repeat my same mistake.
Even though I learned my lesson in adwords, the lesson applies to any and I do mean any advertising network known to exist.
Some background info
A key component of an effective pay per click campaign is to have multiple versions of an ad running so you can test different elements of the ad. Basically you want to test title …

A while back, I came across a picture of Shoemoney with this check from Google Adsense for $152,000+. According to the post that Shoe wrote to accompany his picture with the check, Shoe was doing some arbitrage from different ad networks so his “take home” was probably a lot less than the face value of the check, but I digress.
I myself have received my very own check from Adsense. I was ecstatic when I got it. No, it was not for $152,000 it was for significantly less than that. A …

I should win the Shoemoney CRS and ad:tech contest because I want to go to the next level.
I have a decent understanding of content based advertising. I’ve even earned a check from Adsense for my efforts, but it took me nearly 2 years to earn enough to have the check issued. I’ve read books on Adsense publishing, I have studied where to place the ads in the text for maximum efficiency etc. but there’s more to it than that. I want to know the “more to it” part.
I …

You know, this is one of the things that bothers me about Adwords/Adsense.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about Google’s advertising program.
I think that it’s against google rules to talk poorly about them, but this is just too much. In a nutshell, the program works like this: advertisers create ads that Google then pushes out to content producers/ providers so the ads can be displayed on relevant pages. As a content producer/ provider, I get a cut of the ad revenue whenever someone clicks …

Well, I’ve learned that in order to have good results with adwords, you must do your keyword research. More importantly, don’t rely on what google tells you are good keywords. You must, and I do mean must, go out and do your own research if you intend to get even a modicum of traffic from Adwords.

Over the weekend, something happened that reminded me of a TV show that I used to watch. In the show, this one guy, we’ll call him Greg, had left his stable job with a large organization to “strike it out on his own.” One of his co-workers, we’ll call him Fred, from his now previous job was talking to Greg’s girlfriend about how much he admired Greg for leaving the rat race. 
 
Fred was waxing poetic about Greg leaving and going to be his own man and go stand …