Friends of Logic Share Part 4

Real working online product growth model
We started our search engine promotion of Viper Mailer a real product by Viper Logic that is a web based email marketing software service on June 02, 2008 for the search engine keyword Email Marketing however if you missed or you are interested in where we started there are links at the bottom of this article.

Viper Mailer is not well known and we want and are going to change this so we are utilizing the power of the top three search engines to gain popularity and trust with web surfers when they type the keywords “Email Marketing” into their favorite search engine.

Please feel free to visit our Email Marketing Authority web site here email marketing

We are very pleased with the results we have achieved in just over one short month of time and will continue our goal of being on page one in the three top search engines as well we are going to share the importance of why a site must be on the first page for the keywords that a person would use when they are ready to buy from you, your product or service.

Search Engine visitor traffic behavioral patterns
We did some research into how humans go about searching the Internet looking for any and everything and the research we have uncovered shows us how important it is that a company not only be on page one for the keyword(s) they use but interesting enough and we did not know this to be a fact that the research also shows us how much a web surfer values a company as the industry authority in their field by where on the return results their company is placed.

We will use the keywords Email Marketing as our example and lets say you typed this into your favorite search engine the research shows that 23% of people click on the first few results at the top of the page and the biggest percentage 39% will find and click on a site only from the first page. When the visitor does not find what they are looking for on page one 19% will go to page 2 oif the search results leaving only 9% to look at page 3 and less then 10% will go past page 3.

The next very important fact that the research shows us is that 36% of web surfers trust a site that is in the top one or two on the search return page and they view the site located at the natural search top of the page as the authority in their field where as 39% remain neutral on this belief and 25% disagree with a sit at the top of the page as being the authority.

We think that this picture into a visitors search patterns and company placement trust factors shows how important it is not be at least on page one in the top search engines as well we can see that when it comes to a visitors trust it becomes still even more important to be at the top of page one.

Note also that this research is for natural search engine placement and is not showing the paid or sponsored page results that are usually in a boxed shaded area at the top of the search engine page or to the right hand side of the search results page.

Search results for mid July 2008
Yahoo reports we are on Page 3 number 30. a gain of 141.
We started at 171.
Google reports we are on Page 6 number 58. a gain of 196.
We started at 254.
MSN Live reports we are on Page 1 number 8. a gain of 87.
We started at 95.

The results shown here can and often do fluctuate because search engines are actively crawling the sites on their servers all of the time and if you are seeing these types of movements in your own sites you should not be alarmed but you should always be actively updating your site and its content and we recommend that keeping your site fresh is and ongoing effort just like running any business we all have to continually be looking for and applying what is best to keep our businesses and sites fresh.

Two week reports archives
If you happened to have missed the beginning or any of our every two week progress reports you can visit them here.
Email Marketing 2.0 Part 1
Email Marketing 2.0 Part 2
Email marketing 2.0 Part 3

PPC Our point of view

A company’s observation on Pay Per Click
Viper Logic takes a look into PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign operators, web sites that partner with PPC operators and their personal experiences when applying these campaigns to a services web site they own. We will share what we have found in regards to the temptations of clicking for income and techniques or tricks that we discovered to generate these click through for profit from web site owners. We will also discuss PPC operator’s accountability or lack there of.

PPC is everywhere
It is not often today while surfing around on the Internet looking at web sites, forums, social networks and blogs that we do not see these PPC advertisements and begin to wonder, if these are on every site we visit, are they effective anymore? Today there are also image display advertisements in addition to those text link advertisements.

What is PPC
PPC is short for Pay Per Click. How PPC works is a bidding and profit sharing system.

The Advertisers participation
This relationship begins when the advertiser opens an account as a PPC operator. They then bid on the keyword or keywords that best match their product or service. Depending on the demand or popularity for the keyword they want for their site, the bid per click price they will pay can range from a few cents to over $50.00 dollars per click. These are generally text link advertisements.

Search Engines participation
The search engines place the advertisements on their sites under the keywords the advertiser has bid for and successfully won. These ads appear at top or to the right of the returned search results page for the keyword displaying the advertiser text link advertisement. This area is usually titled “sponsored links” or “sponsor results”.

Search Engine Partner participation
This is where the problem in our opinion begins and is also where our look inside of PPC and fraud really escalates. PPC partners share in the revenue that each click directed though their sites generate. This can and does lead to very large amounts of money for both the PPC operators and the PPC partners.

Who offers these advertisements on their sites?
The search engines we described above offer paid PPC on every page under every keyword you can imagine. Then there are the search engine partner sites that also offer these advertisements.

Any site can literally sign up to offer PPC advertisements on their sites. There are rules and there is an approval process to be able to offer these advertisements. It is really easy to do and this can be done from anywhere on the planet.

Traffic wise, any owner that has a site can display PPC advertisements ranging from a few hits a day to over 100,000+ visitors per day. It becomes clear that the more traffic a site has, the higher the odds of a site visitor clicking on these display advertisements. When a site has less traffic in our opinion, it is when the click fraud begins. Low traffic equals low advertisement click rates.

Keywords Defined
A keyword is the word(s) a person searching the Internet would type into their favorite search engine to find the product or service they are seeking. An example of a keyword as in our case is “Email Marketing” because we are a web based email marketing software service provider.

Who offers PPC partnerships
Search Engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN Live and ASK are the more popular ones. There are also stand alone companies that offer PPC opportunities as well. There are way too many to list them like Bidvertiser.com and Miva.com but to see more of these PPC offers, you can go to your favorite search engine and type in “Pay Per Click Services” or even “Pay Per Click” and the list takes off from there.

We wonder how accountable the PPC operators are?
We understand that the ability to track a click is within the hands of the PPC operators but for some reason, they do not offer it clearly to the advertiser who is paying for these Pay Per Click Campaigns.

In our opinion they are not offering these details because the results or ROI (Return on Investment) is too low based on the bidding amount for the keywords that the advertiser is selecting to have their advertisements displayed under.

How honest are the partner site operators that offer PPC advertisements?
We are aware that we are all mostly on the Internet to make money. When you are the site owner, there is going to be a constant draw to get clicks though to those advertisements and make the owner some steady money/income. Remember that someone operating a site in a foreign country, even if the site is hosted in Europe or the United States can be a partner of a PPC operator. We believe a site owner that lives in a foreign country where small amounts of money are a lot of money in their country put this whole PPC concept at an even greater risk of trickery and ultimately fraud.

Viper Logic begins investigating
Viper Logic joins forums discussing PPC topics. We became members of web master forums with global membership and these forums have a large portion of their forums devoted to PPC campaigns, advertising, marketing and a lot of other information of interest to web masters. We began to look into the conversations of PPC partner operators on these forums and realized how much a few dollars a day is to some of these people and what they are willing to do to generate this money regularly.

We ran our PPC advertising campaign on two of the top four search engines and we tracked the campaigns with tools built by Viper Logic. We of course also used the common web site traffic tracking tools but we took it to another level to more clearly track the PPC campaign by building our own knowledge tracking tools.

Why did we wait one year to report our findings
Lately we are experiencing a very abnormally large amount of PPC trickery tactics and this led us to reopen our investigation into the PPC operator’s practices. Lets start out by explaining that to us, PPC campaigns are equal to ordering a sandwich filled with mystery meat as you never know what you are going to get. We do believe and are active advertisers online. We advertise daily so we understand the power of advertising. What we do not believe in is offering our advertising dollars out for anyone to click away on with no accountability as the PPC operator industry clearly and currently are not correctly offering in our opinion.

Media coverage of Pay Per Click Fraud
We realize that the subject of PPC fraud or suspicious activity by the media has produced plenty of articles about the subject. What is hard to understand is the lack of coverage into these practices considering the large amounts of annual revenue the PPC operator industry produces.

Viper Logic PPC campaign experiences
If you have not tried it and you have not experienced the use of applying PPC campaigns for your product or service, you may not know how these PPC campaigns work. Viper Logic has operated in the past, a PPC campaign over an extended period of time in 2007 for 3 and 4 months otherwise we would not be able to write this story. There are a lot of factors about using PPC campaigns and we wanted to see what we could uncover by utilizing our custom built IP and URL tracking tools.

What kinds of click through strategies or gimmicks has Viper Logic experienced.
We have exposed and will detail below some blog comment stuffing, 100% PPC no content sites that appear to be a blog, event calendar stuffing, and some abnormally high traffic from PPC provider partner sites.

Blog Comment Stuffing
In April 2008 Logic began this very Blog you are reading today and is one of the over 100 million blogs occupying the Internet today. We began getting SPAMMED in our comments section and these would be 5, 10, 20, even 30 outbound links that had a famous search engine in the URL with the .com ending followed by keywords in one case laptop, and computer some numbers and letters. Out of curiosity we clicked on a few of these links and they took us straight through a website PPC and directly to that advertisers web site. Today we are now blocking these posts as there was nothing going to be bought from the advertiser so the only one gaining is the PPC operator and the PPC partner.

100% PPC Sites
Logic now being a blog operator is a member of the top blog directories. In a search in these blog directories under marketing for example would click on a blog and in several cases for the little time spent looking at other blogs continuously came across and not to be confused with parked pages sites that looked like a blog format but there was only PPC links completely filling the entire page. This would be easy to have visitors click on these exciting advertisement titles only to be taken to a PPC advertiser’s web site. In all fairness the blog directories are filled with parked pages perhaps blogs with domain names that had expired and became parked pages.

SQL Injection Hacks
SQL Injection is a hacking method used by hackers to insert new data or corrupt existing data in the database used by a company’s website. In our past experience with some of our customer’s websites that we host, the hackers simply corrupted the database using this SQL Injection method. However in the past year, we have seen this hack method used for inserting scripts into the database so that when a user is viewing the infected website, the scripts get executed on their browser. We initially thought these scripts were very dangerous and were written to corrupt data, attack or gain access to the user’s computer but to our surprise, the script simply causes the user’s browser to execute a PPC advertisement. The process is more complex and beyond the scope of this document but the point is that these types of hacks that were once focused on corrupting data or gaining access to a user’s computer are now being used for monetary gain through PPC advertisements.

PPC Directories
We have seen PPC operator partner arrangements with directory owners where the site partner is operating as a full directory and not a web site. This would not be a big deal except the wording used on these directories and the amount of clicks generated by these directories is unrealistic. The results in our case received no orders not even for a free no risk or obligation trial sign up.

We reviewed our service product
We thought that perhaps our service which at the time was $19.95 per month was not calling to action or that we had a service that needed more features or glamour. However looking at the competition in our category of Email Marketing, they were not only doing very well but they were even going public so the service was good. Meanwhile we had been signing up new clients each week utilizing other online marketing strategies. This to us verified that the service product ViperMailer.com, is a good solution and you can see it here email marketing.

PPC Credibility
What we have begun to see is some attempts to provide deeper tracking by these PPC providers. We know that one is offering reports on click through to where these clicks are coming from and they are doing this domestically to start. One other PPC provider offers its clients the ability to block up to 100 or more partner web sites from your account as well. This sounds good but there are significantly more than 100 sites to take the place of these you block which in our opinion is like a cat and mouse game.

Pay Per Click verification system suggestion

Why do we accept no PPC accountability?
We wonder why the PPC campaigns do not offer an itemized billing statement that breaks down the IP (Internet Protocol) address and referral URL (the web site the click came from). We further wonder why this mystery is permitted by advertisers because we are living in a technological time that makes it fairly easy to provide us with these detailed itemized PPC billing statements.

PPC campaigns billing should work like phone bills
We are all familiar with our monthly phone bills that detail all the charges for that service period. The phone service provides also go to great length in itemizing all incoming and outgoing calls, long distance calls, services, etc. Why don’t we expect or demand the same from the PPC campaigns billings?

Viper Logic Note
We enjoy the ability to have a broad range of marketing tools to help build and grow our business including Pay Per Click. However it is in our opinion that PPC needs to bring out the reporting methods suggested above in the form of their billing statements for the good or the bad. We know from experience that when we buy advertisements that are on a flat monthly rate, these advertisements do not see the kind of click through rates that our PPC campaign received. We understand that the PPC operators have access to higher traffic sites through their partners and that this might in part be why the PPC advertisements bring us more clicks, however even this seems to be suspicious to us. There is also this finding in that a PPC partner site would bring more traffic to our product then the actual PPC operator being that the PPC operator is the highest traffic sites on the planet. Perhaps it is because the PPC partner site is more focused but we did not find that to be true.

What do you think?
We would value your input.

Blog building for a more informed tomorrow

The world of having your own blog
This having a blog is an E-Marketing a part of email marketing efforts to gain popularity in a web site you own.

Here goes Logic again. Blogs are a great tool and if you approach the blog the same way that you have approached your business or life with a plan, a well documented and thought-out plan then you are ready to be a blogger.

Your number one question to ask yourself
What to write about?
Actually this is harder then you or us thought it would be. Here are some things to ask yourself.

What are your interests
This even sound simple doesn’t it? You need to consider this.
Is your blog to promote your business or it for personal sharing? If yes to business then fine you are off and running the choice is made for you. Not yet because wile you can always add topics as you go it is like starting over though.

Here is why
Blogs are and ongoing log file about your topic and if you create a blog and you have like in our case 4 topics 3 relating to business for us and 1 relating to venting our thought on anything you might conjure up.

Blog Statistics
Your blog will need to compete with the estimated 100 million blogs on the Internet these days. The good news here is, because there are so many completely free blog software’s out there today and with people having and operating some 6, 12, even 20 of them they are beginning to fail. This is good news for us and you. The less there are the better odds of people finding our blogs.

What happens when things are easy to do and free
This is great. See Logic can remember a friend actually it was Catnip and Catnip got a job one summer during high-school at a dough nut shop folding boxes for the dough nut shop owner. See Catnip loves sweets beyond any person Logic has ever known. Catnip you might say had a sweet job. While Catnip was being paid to fold boxes he also was allowed to eat all of the dough nut he could eat. After the first couple of weeks Catnip did not want to even smell a dough nut yet alone eat them anymore.

Catnip Scenario
This Catnip scenario is similar to what is and has been happening to the FREE blog software and have all of the blogs you want concept.
These people that wanted to operate those 6, 12, or 20 or even more blogs like most of us started out like a “gunhoo willie” typing each day and night about all they knew on the subjects and could even dig up on the subject matter. Then instead of the daily posting to each blog they started to just add a subject to a topic each week, then after some more time each month they would write until they were not writing anymore or maybe just every 3 months. This was the death of their blogs.

What is the bottom line here
Nothing in life is free even a blog software is costing you, time and hello world time is money, because with each of us time is all we have. Logic knows this better then most in one aspect. Logic comes from actually being educated and raised in an aerospace manufacturing environment.

Writers Note:
Thank you Mom and Dad I actually have an advantage because of this great way of understanding how to sell anything into an economy by never basing the sale on price.

What makes a blog work
This is really a good time to share what happens if you are not updating your topics on a daily bases.

How many topics to write about
We in our case selected 4 topics. We believe that the more topics you have that are not related to one another deludes your blogs strengths.

How often to blog
We are not saying that you cannot take a day off once in the while say like not posting a topic on Sundays would more then likely be fine. This way you are adding topic content 6 days a week.
There is more to this however, your content needs to be informative, educational, tips and techniques, and be even breaking news.

How much to blog about each day
Next you will need to also write about 1000 to 2000 words (in our opinion) of content each day as well. This is why at the beginning of this article we encourage a lot of thought about your topic selections. If you try to write about a subject that you or us do not have a passion for then our blogs are destine to failure.

Accurate Information Sharing is critical
Accuracy is critical. Remember that you will over time gain a reader base even subscribers to your blog so besides just writing a lot of content each day you are going to become and excellent researcher into your topics so what you are writing about is the best most informative information you or us can provide our readers.

Selecting a blogging topic
The best way to approach this is to stay away from subjects that are over populated. One way to check out your blog theme and even by each topic is to go to one of the many blog directories, type in your topic and see how many there are already. Here is a Blog Directory or two to get you started Blog Directories or Blog Directories

Prevent dating your blog
Next stay clear of time or date sensitive topics like elections, game consoles, a single movie or music industry individual, or anything that is hot now but may not be tomorrow like and IPod for example. However you could be writing about electronic gadgets and this way you are covered as you are in the general overall electronics industry.
It is the best advise to select a theme for your blog then select the topics that blend with the theme. It is best to keep the topics as open as possible. This will allow you to maintain your topics while expanding your articles.

What hurts a blogs performance
Lets start off with the obvious like headline news that was reported already. If you did this you are then recognized as a follower writing literally yesterdays news today. The search engine spiders and bots are not going to show any concern for your content.
There is and even more important factor about writing about the past like this as well.

Excite your readers
Your readers are already going to be in the know about the old news no matter how you re-write it. What all blogs or for that fact all web sites (by the way they are the same) become popular for is all about the content. Not just any content, but rather on target content. The content needs to catch and hold onto the reader, be relevant and informative. Even educational, like those how to do this or that types of truly helpful stuff.

Maintain a posting regiment
We mentioned this under What makes a blog work.
Blogs need readers. These readers come in to your site in two ways. They are the actual readers that arrive to your blog because they are interested in your blogs topics and they are the search engine spiders and bots that are coming to crawl your site for new content or a person doing a search has typed in topic keywords that your blog best matches.

About the Logic Talk blog
We began blogging on April 11, 2008.
While blogs really began coming on the scene in 2005 Logic and Catnip held out until there was some stable purpose for the blog. Today we have a blog and writing, sharing, loving, and venting about what we do, are doing, and will be doing became the primary reason to launch the LogicsBlog.com under the title of Logic Talk.
We have 4 topics because we believe that having more (and we see blogs with 20 to 30 topic headings) topic heading would dilute the branding efforts that the blog is providing to our branding efforts and to our search engine SEO/SEM advancements (Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing) that is even though we have 4 topics is for our Email Marketing web based software services web site ViperMailer.com here if you are interested to what drives us to write as much per day as we do Email Marketing

Friends of Logic Share Part 3

Real working online product growth model
If happened to have missed the beginning or any of our every two week progress reports you can visit them here.
Email Marketing 2.0 Part 1
Email Marketing 2.0 Part 2

ViperMailer.com growth program
We continue to utilize our skills to gain the natural search results for our product under the main search keywords “Email Marketing”.
Realizing this is also an educational blog Logic wanted to get into some details about the various ways to gain the first page results under your favorite search engine.
Here is all the things that can be applied to a single web site, forum, social network, photo site, or blog.

1 Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.
This how your site is recognized and prioritized by the search engines. Search engines crawl sites all of the time so these things are called spiders or bots and they need to be explained what your site is offering so your site can be correctly placed in the search engine.

2 Buy those PPC advertisements for your site.
This is the Pay Per Click advertising usually at the top 2 or 3 sites on the top of the page when you do a search on your favorite search engine. Next there are also these advertisements located to the right hand side of your search return results as well.
How these work is you bid at a search engine for the key words like in our case ViperMailer.com needs the keywords Email Marketing and you would pay for each time a person clicks on your advertisement. Prices vary depending on the keywords you need that best fit your site.

3 Buy other sites advertising space.
If they offer it. Sites sale ad space to other sites all of the time usually at a fixed price. They can be text ads or an image ad. The prices again varies depending on the other sites traffic and the size and placement of the advertisement.

4 Press Releases.
If you are a really good writer and understand how to correctly submit a press release you can write articles about your web site and there are services that offer to submit them for you. Tip: Be sure that what you write is really news worthy.

5 Build a Blog.
This is if your site is not a blog already. If you have a forum, web site, social network, or photo site then you can build a blog devoted to the site and write great content that will also have links to drive people and search engines to your site. Warning these start off easy enough but over time most people do not stick to writing posts on a regular bases.

Search Results Status Report
To see where we started with ViperMailer.com in the search engines go to Part 1. What we have been working on since we gave ViperMailer.com an upgrade and enhanced email marketing features. We started this climb the search engine return results campaign on June 02 2008.

Search results for the end of June 2008
Yahoo reports we are on page 9 number 89 a gain of 110. We started at 171.
Google reports we are on page 10 number 94 a gain of 140. We started at 254.
MSN Live reports we are on page 10 number 91 a slip of 1. We started at 95.

What is next for ViperMailer.com
The next two weeks we will tweak our SEO/SEM and buy private web site and blog advertising spaces.

Our next reporting date
Our next report will be mid July 2008.
We are sharing this to show that any company that needs traffic that will convert to sales can do what we are doing for ViperMailer.com. See ViperMailer.com here Email Marketing