I have some good news for those of you who use Google Checkout. Google has decided to extend its offer for free processing with Google Checkout through the end of 2007.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Checkout, it’s a service similar to PayPal. Like PayPal you can integrate Google Checkout into your online store and allow customers to make purchases using their credit cards. Admittedly, Google Checkout does not have the sophistication and features of PayPal, yet, but with their continued development, competitive rates, name recognition and promotional offers like this, they could very well give PayPal a run for its money in the not-too-distant future.

I personally have not tried Google Checkout, yet, because of its current limitations, but I’m glad Google is throwing its weight into the online payment business. Competition is good. At the very least Google Checkout will give PayPal something to consider whenever it thinks about raising its fees.

For more info, see:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/12/save-even-more-with-google-checkout.html

Google had recently come out with its Custom Search Engine (CSE), which allows you to harness the power of Google’s search engine while enhancing the relevancy and integration of search for your visitors.

Custom Search Engine allows you to:

• Specify the sites you want to include in searches.
• Place a search box and search results on your website.
• Customize the look and feel to match your website.
• Invite your community to contribute to the search engine.
• Make money from relevant ads in your search results.

That you can customize the look and feel of this tool can greatly enhance your Adsense earnings by attracting more visitors to the search engine on your site.

I know this feature has been on the wish lists of many webmasters, including myself, but I’m not sure how many have implemented it on their site.

For more info, visit:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-search-engine-your-way.html

By Jim Pretin

Promoting your internet business can be a tough task. The costs of traditional advertising are prohibitive. It can cost as much as $50,000 to run a print advertisement in a prominent publication. It can cost much more than that to produce and run a TV commercial, especially if the commercial airs during peak viewing hours. Online marketing is a problem too, because it is extremely difficult and takes a long time to climb to the top of the search engine rankings.

So, what should you do? Well, you will need to do rely on the same thing all internet businesses do when they first start out. Of course, we are talking about pay-per-click (PPC). By advertising with pay-per-click, you pay a certain price per click to be listed near the top of the first page of the search engines for your chosen keyword or phrase. Every time someone clicks on your PPC ad, you pay for that click.

If you have never used PPC before or do not know what it is, perform a search on any search engine and you will notice that at the top or to the side of the search results you will see a section called “sponsored links.” These are websites that are paying a certain amount per click to be listed there.

PPC can be very expensive depending upon what keyword you want to receive clicks for, but there are ways to budget your money wisely so you can maximize the effectiveness of your PPC marketing campaign without having a ton of money to spend. Some of the companies at the top of the sponsored links section might be bidding up to $20 per click for certain keywords. Insurance companies such as Geico and Progressive often bid up to $25 per click for the keyword “auto insurance.”

However, for most keywords, you can bid relatively low and still get a lot of clicks. Each PPC service has a traffic calculator that tells you how many clicks you will receive given a certain bid price and daily budget. So, if you want to spend $0.50 per click, you can put that bid into their traffic calculator and it will tell you how many clicks you can expect to receive at $0.50 per click and how much that will cost per day. The traffic calculator will also tell you what your position will be (the higher your bid price, the higher your position will be within the sponsored links section for that keyword).

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By Jerry Bader

In The Beginning There Was Marketing

Anyone in business who has any interest in using the Web to further his or her business is well aware of “search engine optimization.” Not a day goes by that my email in-box isn’t loaded with information on how to get the best search engine results, and not a week goes by that a client or potential client doesn’t request that their website be not just search friendly but search engine fanatical.

For some time we have been preaching the importance of delivering the marketing message and that your message should not be corrupted or distorted by techniques aimed at attracting search engine robots while driving away real people who may actually be potential customers.

Now I realize that in many circles this attitude is considered outright heresy, but hopefully there are a few marketing types around that understand websites have to deliver more than miscellaneous random eyeballs; websites have to deliver a message that is memorable, understandable, useable, and if you’re really good at your job, information that can be incorporated into your audiences’ belief system.

With that in mind we were pleasantly surprised when Google the primary target of this SEO obsessive compulsive frenzy of technical slight-of-hand announced that they were instituting Google Video Ads and to add a little icing on the cake, they purchased YouTube adding to their already considerable ínvestment in Google Video. Somebody at the big “G” thinks video is a viable Web-medium even if the purveyors of search engine fool’s gold would have you believe otherwise.

The list of companies, including Forbes, Amazon, Wyeth, and Ford, delivering Web-audio and Web-video grows daily and we are not just talking about major corporations. Small companies are using multimedia to get the edge on their largër competitors who still have their heads buried in the search engine optimization sand.

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Here is some bad news for publishers hoping improve click-through rates by placing images next to Google ads.

Google is setting the record straight on positioning Google ads with thumbnail images. In brief, they do not want publishers to place images next to ads in a way that might mislead visitors to associate the ads with the image.

Below is an example of a violation:

I’ve seen an Adsense “beautifier” plugin for Wordpress that separates the images from the ads with a dotted line. According to Google, and as apparent from the figure above, the dotted lines are not going to cut it. The idea is to avoid confusion in the minds of visitors. So long as the juxtaposition can mislead the visitor to associate the images with the ads, it’s a violation.

Although Google has been warning publishers against this practice for some time, this is the first time they’ve spelled out their policy in such clear and specific language.

Some For more details, see: Google’s Adsense blog