I was speaking with a friend the other day and the issue of Google Adwords came up (the program where you bid on keywords and when someone clicks your ad, they are taken to your site and you pay that .10 cents or whatever your bid was). The talk turned to how expensive it can be, but after giving some general tips there was one more most people don’t think to do, that’s plan their campaigns geographically.

One of the features of Adwords is you can set it to just display your ad by country, state, or even a specific city. Only those people can see your ad and it’s a very powerful feature. If you’re selling tangible goods and don’t want to ship them to Europe or Asia then why display your ad (and pay for the clicks) to people there? Sure, if it’s an electronic product like an E-book or software, then you may as well sell to all comers, but otherwise you can save significant money by customizing your campaign by geographic area.

For a couple of examples, I spoke with one guy who was licensed to do mortgages in just one state, so he saved a bushel of money just displaying ads in that state. Kelly Felix (aka The Rich Jerk) uses it in a black hat way, by advertising a competitors trademarked keywords, but he excludes the companies state in those ads so they wouldn’t see it and wouldn’t complain to Google which would get the ad pulled.

One online Jewelry store owner checked a map of the worst hit by the housing bubble and excluded them in his jewelry ads, keeping to areas where real estate prices were more stable and less foreclosures. It all depends on what you’re offering as how to save the most money or maximize your target audience. There’s even places that for a fee, will show nationwide infomercial schedules so you can target say, exercise equipment ads in areas where they are playing lots of competing infomercials for those kinds of products. One guy who sold software got a lot of fraud orders from Nigeria and Africa.  I told him to turn that country off, and when he did the fraudulent credit card orders vanished.

It’s a very powerful tool, and most people just create a campaign without setting those options. If you sell high end goods, you can do a Google search of the “wealthiest cities in America” and really get down to business. There’s a mountain of statistics if you search, and finding out what areas buy the most of your products can really increase the effectiveness of your campaigns when you set those keywords just to display to people in those areas.

I hope this helps your campaigns, as always if you have any tips please shoot us a comment.

Nick

Buy or lease?

Whether to buy or lease office equipment  depends on several factors. Of course, it costs more to lease in the end, but the tax advantages can really take the sting off the interest in many cases. Here’s the factors involved: cash on hand, how many deductions your business is going to have for the year, and something most people don’t consider, security. You can sell a printer or a copy machine without too much worry, but if a computer has sensitive data, or a merchant terminal is keyed to your account, selling them to a stranger on EBay could be a disaster.

If you can afford it, or it’s a small purchase, always buy it outright. If you’re just starting up a business, or it’s a large purchase that’s going to put a strain on your finances, leasing can make more sense.  Also if it’s an item you’re going to want to upgrade in five years, or one you don’t feel comfortable selling for security reasons, it’s an option to consider.

Let’s talk numbers, if for example a terminal or cash register is going to cost $2,000  cash, and a lease of $90 a month for five years would $5,400, the tax break would be as follows. The following year,  assuming a 35% tax bracket, would be an initial $2,100 and depreciation being 20% a year would be $378 per year less you pay in taxes. Usually long life equipment can take 5-7 years to depreciate, but when it’s leased you can depreciate it over whatever term the lease is.

The numbers are: $1,890 in savings first year, and another $1890 over five years in depreciation for a total of $3780.  The final total is $1,620 for five years of use of a $2,000 device you probably wouldn’t want to resell on the open market with your security certificate and account information embedded in it. If you sell them without the SIM card, it’s going to typically cost the new owner about $500 to have their processor reprogram it. This is why it’s such a bad idea to buy a terminal that’s not programmed already for your merchant account. When you turn these back into a leasing company, they know how to wipe your information and reprogram it.

Overall, if you have to buy a lot of terminals to buy and want to keep it as an expense (off the balance sheet) or you want to accelerate the depreciation down to the life of the lease, it’s usually a cheaper way to keep the interest payments in line over other ways of funding. Cheaper than a credit card, but more expensive than a typical bank loan.

One word on warranties, the manufacturers of these devices always throw in a 12 month warranty on defects, but there’s only one I know of that includes lifetime warranties on all the terminals they sell or lease. Give my friend Charles a call at 800-715-8053 or drop him an email here here. He’s  an executive underwriter, so he writes accounts directly with the major banks (unlike middleman agents who have higher rates, because the company between them and the bank tack their residuals onto your rates). The last gentleman who called him was doing $215,000 a month in volume and Charles was able to permanently reduce his merchant fees by $2,600 a month over the major processor he was using. Yeah, I don’t mind recommending him

Antivirus programs can be a bit of a racket. Buy it the first time, then it’s good for a year of virus updates, then they hit you up for 80% of the retail purchase price every year. If you don’t pay for updates, and a new virus comes out, the program probably won’t be able to detect it.

The good news is there are several truly free antivirus programs out there that stay up to date, but without the annual fees. The biggest hurdle is finding them, even the places who offer it don’t make it easy (there’s no advertising budget for free products typically). They try their best to herd you into the pay-every-year version. Well I’m here to make it easy! Let’s go over the best ones. They’re either freeware or ad supported. These aren’t “trial” versions that expire, it’s the real thing.

Avira Antivir Personal This is a good one and it has a 4/5 rating over at Softpedia. I’ve had the best results with this over any of the others as far as detection and removal. I was working on someones system and it even got rid of a nasty rootkit trojan with no problem at all.

AVG Free is also good, but recently working on a relatives computer there was a trojan it just couldn’t get rid of (though it was able to identify it).

Avast! This ones been around for years and a lot of people use this.

Microsoft Security Essentials This is another solid choice.

PC Clear is another spyware/virus removal tool.

BitDefender is very similar to their commercial products, but freeware.

They have a lot more over at Softpedia, but there are the best truly free ones. I’d recommend stocking up before you get a virus or trojan. Some can hijack the system so you can’t even get on the Internet. I’m not cheap, but I don’t like a business model where you have to pay every year to use a product they already sold you.

VoiParty

VoiParty is a new MLM and how it works is you use your high speed Internet access with a router they send you along with a dedicated second phone line you provide. They route long distance calls through your system as an outgoing local call. The cost is between $228 to $277 to sign up, and $25 annually plus the cost of a second phone line you’ll need.

They estimate you’ll make $36 a month from doing this with your own line, and when you sign someone up you get a $40 commission and a small percentage of their call volume. It looks like VoiParty is a decent business if you’ve got the financial legs and marketing skills to run with it, but at $40 commissions, I wouldn’t recommend it to someone without a lot of resources (like a big existing downline or mailing list).

Just the dedicated second phone line you’ll need will probably break even from the estimated money your account will bring in. Also get ready for slower Internet speeds, when I had Vonage and made a call with downloads running they slowed considerably.

They’re going to just take 1.5 million people then close enrollment, so the people early on have a shot, but if/when that number approaches, I don’t know how you’ll get anyone excited about having a box in their house compensating them the cost of their extra phone line (unless they really want the free international long distance).

The VoiParty compensation plan is pretty complicated, with different levels being compensated at different rates. From what I could generally gather on it, you make about $1.08 a month from people you sign up. This is not a business for the lazy. One thing they offer is free domestic and international long distance, so that could be a key selling point for those who call out of the country a lot.

At $228 to $277 upfront, VoiParty is going to be a harder sell than Skype which is monthly, or the other Internet based alternatives for cheap long distance. Getting people to spend a few hundred dollars isn’t easy these days as you know.

For those doing it as a business, they better know what they’re doing, and have another source of income to sustain them over the long haul. With just a $40 commission, I doubt most people could break even using the pay per clicks like Adwords or Bing to recruit.  Keywords related to long distance are relatively expensive, so it’s something to keep in mind.

It’s sounds pretty good, but I ‘m, going to pass on this one. If you do it, be prepared to move mountains to get that residual income built up. It’s going to take a lot of people with that compensation plan. Like any MLM, it’s just not going to be as easy as they describe.

Nick

I get asked this a lot, how to build quality links so your site gets a higher Pagerank and then scores better. There’s a lot of bad advice on this subject in the different marketing courses I’ve read. These are some zero cost ways to improve your search engine rankings.

1. Make sure your domain has the most important keywords in it, preferably in the front of the name. Search engines like Google place a lot of value in this.

2. Only post original content. If it’s a cookie cutter site don’t bother. It’s called the duplicate content policy and Google knows you’re just one of 1,000 similar sites.

3. Register the domain for five years, two at the minimum. Google sees that you’re more committed to the project. Spammers register for just one year and the longer the better. If you’re going to register it year to year anyway, may as well get the discount for doing five years now.

4. Post comments on Dofollow blogs. These are blogs setup to give you a real link the search engines can find, and helps build your pagerank. Do a Google search for “Dofollow blogs” and you’ll see many directories of them.

5. Go through the archives of dofollow blogs and post only on older articles that have at least Pagerank 1. Download the Google Toolbar and it’ll show you the pagerank of any given site you’re on. Posting on a bunch of PR zero articles just won’t move you along as fast. Make sure your comments are REALLY good and research the article first if you don’t know enough to post an intelligent comment.

6. If they have keywordluv installed, use it. It’s where you can change the anchor text of your comment so it gives a better link. Don’t use the same text in every post though, mix it up a little.

7. Spread out your comments, limit them to five a day or so. Too many links too fast can get you penalized on the search engines.

8. If it’s a blog with “Top Commenter” installed and it’s similar to yours, I’d put some effort into getting into that even if it’s not a dofollow blog. The top commenter links on the home page are Dofollow links, and if they have good pagerank it can be well worth the effort. Just make sure it’s a blog with a topic you know something about, and the comments are very high quality, funny, or both.

9. Don’t always link to your home page, link to other articles or pages you’ve done. Especially if going for top commenter, you don’t want all the links from one site going to the same page on your site. Mix it up a little.

10. Don’t forget to use the alt text on every image on your site. This was originally for browsers that couldn’t do graphics, so there’s an alternative text to enter for image properties. Google image search uses these and one webmaster I spoke with was getting 30% of his traffic from people doing image searches and arriving on his site. Keep them accurate though, or keyword focused on what that page is about.

I’d go into how your choice of web hosting really affects this, but there’s a previous article I wrote explaing it all. If you have any tips of your own, I’d appreciate you dropping a comment.