We’ve made a couple posts in the past about the $75 in free adCenter credits available to all AppliedI.net hosting customers:

• http://www.appliedi.net/blog/2007/08/08/appliedinet-offers-75-free-adcenter-credit/
• http://www.appliedi.net/blog/2007/08/29/did-someone-say-a-free-webhosting-rebate-325-worth/

and this is but one of the special offers and promotions available to each customer in the appliedi.net marketplace.  Getting $75 in free search engine pay per click ads that show on such sites as MSN and live.com and their affiliated sites translates to your ads in front of 99 million search users and that’s GREAT! But, if you don’t effectively use it, it’s pretty much $75 of free money wasted.  Fortunately, Microsoft adCenter recently released a new tool that will help you pick your keywords and better target your adCenter campaign, the new tool is called “The adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007” and details on it can be found here. In addition on January 23rd they’ll have a free webinar on the Add-in. From a little research, the tool appears to have been developed by adSage and then acquired by Microsoft (yeah, like that never happens).

About the adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007

Based on the Microsoft Keyword Services Platform (KSP) the product has several features including:

• Keyword Expansion – we have included 3 different expansion algorithms: campaign association, fast contained, and category simulation
• Keyword Search Volume Historical and Forecast – we have included daily and monthly keyword traffic data, including forecasting
• Keyword Buzz – you can find buzz keywords in our 300+ verticals
• Keyword Demographic analysis
• Keyword Geographic analysis
• Keyword Categorization
• Keyword Monetization – you can find all monetization information (CPC, CTR, etc.) for your keyword list

Getting started with the adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007

Before we get started let’s make sure you’ve redeemed your $75 in credits from adCenter by following this link. 

In order to get the most out of this article/tutorial I decided to come up with a fictional example. For this example we’re going to pretend we’re a small bed and breakfast in Key West, Florida and we have a very limited budget (let’s say $75 of free PPC because we just followed this link.). We haven’t done any PPC advertising yet so we’re going to launch excel 2007 and use the keyword wizard (you’ve already installed it right?).

Decide how we’re going to generate our keywords

Using the keyword wizard option we have 3 options on how to generate our initial list of keywords. We can extract keywords from a list of websites, pull keywords from one of our existing adCenter campaigns or we could have selected a particular market vertical and picked keywords based on that.

Extracting Keywords

Since our site is brand new, I’m going to extract keywords from some of my competitors websites.   I’m going to launch a browser and go to live.com and do a search for our main keyword “Key West Bed and Breakfast” then get the top 3 or 4 urls for that keyword and put in the textbox for urls.

The reason I’m doing it this way is that these sites already rank very well for organic searches for the main keyword and it’s pretty likely that they have already optimized their keywords on their site for other key keywords in this area. I’m going to then click through the wizard to have it pull the keywords.

Expanding Keywords

Once I’ve extracted my keywords I’m going to expand the list of keywords. This will allow to generate even more keywords based on:

1. an existing PPC campaign
2. other keywords that contain the original keyword
3. similar keywords

For my test I’m going to say other keywords that contain the original keyword and similar keywords. I’m going to limit it to a maximum of 10 (for speed and ease of use you’ll want to play with the confidence factor too to rule out junk keywords (you’ll see what I mean after your first couple runs)).

Keyword KPIs

Once we have these keywords established we’re going to review the Keyword KPIs, the add-in is going to provide us Monthly traffic numbers based on historical and forecasted queries and also let us know how much the cost per click (CPC), click through rate (CTR), impressions and etc are for each of these keywords.

For the traffic reports, we’re going to get the past 12 months of historic data (the maximum is 24 months) and the forecast for the next 3 months (the maximum is 12 months).

For the monetization reports we’ll get the last 30 days.

(Don’t worry we’re almost to the pay-off )

The Wizard’s Results

After stepping through the wizard we’re presented with a pretty comprehensive report detailing the estimated number of impressions, the number of clicks, the click through rate and the cost per click for each keyword.

Some of the really interesting features you’ll find:

• CTR and CPC are both tagged with RED, YELLOW and GREEN images to help you quickly identify which ones are good.
• You’ll see that the clicks and impressions have a little background bar helping to identify which keywords get more traffic than others and more clicks.

All of this information will help us to find keywords that are generating traffic and clicks and give us a good idea of how much each of these keywords will cost per click.

JESS’S TIP: I’m a firm believer in not bidding on the most popular keywords (and thus most expensive) and instead going after the keywords that the other guys are most likely not going after (and thus less expensive)). Looking at the CPC you can get an idea of this. You want to find keywords that have some traffic and a low CPC.

I also like to sort the keywords based on traffic for the previous month and then pick keywords accordingly.

JESS’S TIP: You’ll notice that although we used “key west bed and breakfast” as our main keyword, we got words like fax, photo, location, etc in our results. You can adjust the settings in the wizard to tune these results better through a little trial and error.

Using the Add-in with your existing keyword list.

In the earlier example I showed how you could generate a keyword list using the wizard and the screen captures weren’t all that exciting, I know. If you already have a list of keywords your work is going to be much easier and the functionality of this tool is really going to come alive.

Let’s stick with the keywords for a “Key West Bed and Breakfast” but just use our keywords that contain key west in them:

We’re going to highlight all our words go to monthly traffic and generate a traffic report for monthly traffic for these keywords:

So know we know what kind of traffic to expect for these words each month. Then we’ll run a separate report for monetization to get an idea of how much our clicks are going to cost.

From this report it looks like key west bed and breakfast isn’t a too bad of a word, it’s a little expensive at $0.82 per click but with a 7.6% click through rate it’s a winner. For comparison it looks like key west hotels gets alot more traffic and has an marginal click through rate. A bad keyword seems to be key west inn with a click through of only 0.09% at $1.45 a keyword.

What else can we learn?

But we can get dig in even further than that. Thanks to the new tools we have we can also look at the geographic landscape of where our searches are coming from and also the demographic landscape of who’s searching for these keywords. With this information we can use the geographic information to target where our ads are going to show and we can use the demographic information to tailor our landing pages for the proper gender and age group (and for the keyword “key west boats”, it looks like 60% of searchers are males and majority are in the age group 50-65).

Conclusion

Hopefully the screen shots and little tutorial have shown you just what value the adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007 can provide for your pay per click search engine campaigns. With $75 free adwords credit, it’s a great opportunity to begin experimenting with PPC advertising and see for yourself just why it’s such a popular form of online advertising today.

Andre recently blogged about how many people are using wordpress as more than just a blog engine, they’re using it as a full blown content management system (CMS). I’m pretty well versed in Wordpress and what’s available for it and today I was looking around today for new themes and plug-ins we could integrate with the AppliedI One-Click Wordpress installer and came across a couple items that caught my attention, Mimbo an online magazine theme by Darren Hoyt and WP e-Commerce, an e-commerce solution for wordpress by Instinct Entertainment.

Creating your online magazine with Wordpress

Mimbo is a magazine-style Wordpress theme that makes use of the WP template tag system to create a very non-traditional layout. You can see a live demo of mimbo here to get a feel for just what it does out of the box.

On Darren’s blog you’ll see many posts of sites that are based on the Mimbo design. Here’s a few links to some of the sites that are mimbo powered:

• http://idahoforronpaul.com/
• http://tricvoice.medianewsonline.com/
• http://www.sakejournal.com/
• http://www.douglasturner.com/

So with wordpress, a theme like mimbo and a little creativity you should be able to launch a pretty impressive online magazine yourself.  Mimbo isn’t the only magazine style wordpress theme out there as there are a number of commercial solutions available too:

• http://www.wpremix.com ($$$)
• http://hyalineskies.com/wordpress/gridlock/ (FREE)
• http://sandbox.limpag.com/ (FREE)
• http://news.revolutiontheme.com/ ($$$)
• http://www.wp-magazine.com/ ($$$)

And that’s just a sampling of the vast number of magazine style themes out there for wordpress. Not to mention the thousands of other themes available.

Creating your Wordpress powered online store with WP e-Commerce

Let’s face it, the Internet has completely changed the way today’s consumer shops and has made virtually every brick and mortar store with an online store an International business.  E-Commerce is here to stay and as technology changes and evolves so does E-Commerce.  Enter, the Web 2.0 era of E-Commerce, blogs/CMS applications merging with shopping carts.

WP e-Commerce is a new plugin for wordpress that allows you to e-commerce enable your wordpress powered website.  WP e-Commerce is available as both a free version (for personal use), an upgraded version (GOLD version, $15) and a business class solution ($250).  For the features you get, even at $250, it’s a reasonably priced product.

Here’s a quick run down of the features:

• New - Search Engine Friendly URLs / Permalinks (latest RC)
• New - Marketing options under shop options (latest RC)
• New - Members Only Module
• Customizable pagination for product listing
• Unlimited products & categories
• AJAX powered Sliding Shopping Cart
• Shop front highlighting for newly added products
• AJAX powered Web 2.0 DropShop - additional gold module
• Grid View - additional gold module
• Fancy AJAX Alerts on Add to Cart
• Purchase history for logged in users
• New and improved Audio Player Module for selling MP3 files
• Chinese Language file
• Share this / Digg Product social networking promo tools
• Downloadable CSV files
• Detailed Purchase Log & Filters
• Configurable Tax settings including USA & Canada
• PayPal IPN
• URL linking to products and images
• – Next version
• RSS product feed widget
• Google Cart

Best of all, WP e-Commerce can integrate into your wordpress based site as either separate pages or widgets and the available widgets currently include:

• AJAX Shopping Cart Widget
• Categories & Brands Widget
• Donations Widget
• Product Specials Widget

A few sites based off of WP e-Commerce include (this list was taken from their website and may change at any time):

• www.orangutan-appeal.org.uk
• www.tabletalk.com
• www.imagecubes.com
• www.koloroo.com
• Eden Ripley
• Ochblog
• Crafty Designs
• Standard Electronics

Best of all, the installation of WP e-Commerce couldn’t be easier, upload the plug-in, enable it and configure it. That’s it.

I can see WP e-Commerce being used by people selling online e-books or audio files, subscription based services, donations, merchandise (it includes the ability to assign attributes like size, color, etc to products) and any number of simple e-commerce needs. So if you’re looking for a low cost, easy to use e-commerce solution and already have a wordpress enabled site or plan to use wordpress, give WP e-Commerce a peek. It may not have the features and functionality of the larger, more expensive solutions but for the price, it packs a pretty nice punch.

I encourage you to visit the WP e-Commerce site and experiment with it today.

Each year it seems we see a prediction for a new record in online spending for the holiday season and 2007 is no exception, the predicted numbers have been all over the place. With Cyber-Monday officially over we’re able to see these predictions are pretty accurate.  If you’re not familiar with what Cyber-Monday is, it’s a term coined in 2005 by an online retail group (official website is www.cybermonday.com) and basically it’s that first work day after the Thanksgiving holiday and is usually a large online sales day for the holiday season (afterall who wants to work after feasting on a 4 day weekend of turkey and stuffing).

According to CNN.com’s report (this year’s cyber-monday) was definitely setting records:

By 2 p.m. ET, more than 300 retailing Web sites tracked by Internet monitoring firm Akamai were drawing 4.6 million visitors per minute - a three-year record for most traffic in a single day to retail Web sites.

Akamai said that its Net Usage Index - which monitors North American visitors to sites such as jcpenney.com, Bestbuy.com and Circuitcity.com - said traffic was up more than 80 percent compared to a normal Monday.

In addition, ComScore Networks estimates that Cyber Monday sales will surpass $700 million, which would make it the heaviest online spending day on record.

So this year is starting to shape up nicely for online retailers of all size. If you’ve been waiting to start your online store or if you’re own online store is off to a slow start here’s a few tips to help you along the way.

My Top 5 Tips For Online Merchants This Holiday Season

1. Everyone wants to be #1 in the search engines!

Everyone wants to be #1 in the search engines but only a few have mastered that black magic of search engine optimization. For those of us that aren’t search engine experts we buy pay per click advertising (PPC). If you haven’t already taken advantage of the free PPC offers we have in the AppliedI marketplace, now is the time to do so. We currently have the following special offers from our search engine partners:

1. MSN.COM/ LIVE.COM - $75 FREE ad clicks
2. Yahoo.com - $50 FREE ad clicks
3. PayPal.com / Yahoo.com - $100 FREE ad clicks from Yahoo, FREE payment processing until April 30th as well as special icon recognition in Yahoo.com with a shopping cart icon next to your ads
4. Miva.com - $25 FREE ad clicks
5. Enhance Interactive - $25 Free ad clicks

That’s $275 of free pay-per-click advertising available to you as an AppliedI.net hosted e-commerce merchant. 

Now when bidding on keywords, take this advice: "DONT BE STUPID!". Everyone when first starting out will bid on very general keywords and typically these don’t convert very well at all. An example is if you’re a jewelry store, don’t bid on "Gold Jewelry" or perhaps you sell women’s perfume you’ll want to bid on "Perfume".  You’ll find out quickly that your adwords budget just got gobbled up by a handful of clicks that didn’t convert. Instead be very specific about what you bid on and it’s generally a good idea to put bids on items that already convert well for you. If you sell perfume and your top selling perfume is "Celine Dion Eau De Toilette" then bid on that and link DIRECTLY to it. The other big mistake we see time and time again is that merchants bid on good keywords but link directly to their homepage. You’ll have better luck linking directly to either the product page or another landing page that’s product specific.

Something else that’s interesting is that #1 in the PPC doesn’t always convert the best so don’t be afraid to come in #2 or #3 (you’ll save money and probably do just as good if not better than the #1 guy and did I mention you’ll save some money? ).

2. They’re your customers, market to them!

Bidding on keywords can be really expensive and many smaller merchants have slim profit margins that they can’t afford to place large PPC bids, instead market to your existing customers. As an AppliedI merchant you most likely have our e-commerce enabled hosting plan, the VS-1 or higher and as such you can have a free mailing list manager account for up to 10,000 messages a month. Our mailing list manager allows you to email HTML or Text email messages to your customers and track how many times your message was read, how many times your links in your message were clicked and who actually clicked on these links and how many times! This is without question valuable information and it too is available FREE as an AppliedI.net hosted merchant.

3. Get affiliated!

You should be looking for merchants, blogs, forums, communities and other sites that either sell related products or market to the same target market as you and then become affiliates with them. Get them to promote your products and in return you’ll promote theirs. Suddenly your customer base grows and best of all when these prospective customers see someone they already trust promoting your products and brands you’ll gain reputation and credibility that will more than likely result in increased sales.  Many of our dedicated hosting clients actually make enough through google adsense on their site that it pays for their dedicated hosting each month. It may seem odd to promote your competitors on your site but it does pay when done correctly.

Also, if you’re not aware Appliedi.net has it’s own affiliate program and pays $25 for any new hosting accounts that signup by linking through one of your affiliate links. Now’s a good time to put a link on your site to appliedi.net using our hosting affiliate program.

4. Clean up your own search engine ranking.

Organic search engine traffic is the best traffic, it’s free, targeted and usually converts well well. We partnered with web CEO so that our customers can have one of the best search engine optimization and analysis programs available at a discount. What many don’t know is that they also offer a free version that is comparable to most paid SEO tools. Through our marketplace you can save as much as $230 when you purchase a license for web CEO.

In addition to using a tool like webCEO, check your site and make sure you’re linking throughout your site with keywords, have proper title tags on your pages and are making good use of meta keywords and descriptions. using proper alt image tags and most all make sure your content is not spammy using the same words over and over (it makes for a bad read and may get you penalized in the engines).

5. Accept online payments and boost sales.

You already accept Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Discover, right? What about PayPal and Google Checkout? If you don’t accept these as payment options you should. I recently saw on PayPal that most merchants see a 14% increase when they accept PayPal as a payment choice and I’m sure Google has a similar metric available. Both offer free payment processing as well.

The Bonus Tip: Get Secure!

Consider using fraud screening services. Many payment processors today offer a fraud screening service and many of today’s shopping carts tie into services such as MaxMind.com’s minFraud credit card fraud screening web service. These services all help to provide an extra layer of security. It’s also highly recommended you perform regular PCI security scanning of your website using a service like ScanAlert.com’s HackerSafe service. As an appliedi.net hosted online merchant you’re eligible for FREE PCI Security scans and special discounts on hackersafe certification. I would highly encourage you to consider making use of this special offer. In addition you should verify that you’re site is doing the following:

• Make sure you’re using strong passwords for all your users (FTP, FrontPage, web admin, control panel, email the works). None of this username janie and password janie, or default usernames and passwords. Make sure you change them all.
• Make sure your application does not have any blatant security holes in it, like SQL injection, you can check this easiest by visiting www.secunia.org and searching their vulnerability database.
• If you have to store credit cards make sure you’re not storing credit cards or user data in an unencrypted format.
• Use SSL! SSL certificates are really affordable now and can be purchased directly from appliedi.net as low as $39.95/year. You should purchase an SSL certificate today for your site if you’re doing online transactions or accepting customer information.

Website security is everyone’s responsibility. As a webhost that specializes in e-commerce hosting, we utilize many different layers of security at the network and machine level but you too have a responsibility to your shoppers and users to make sure their information is secured and protected both online and offline.

Last piece of advice for a profitable holiday season.

Hopefully, you’ll have picked up a few nuggets of information from this blog post that will help with making your 2007 online shopping season a little more of a success and although I already included the bonus tip, I’m going to add one last piece of advice. Consider upgrading your account, it’s never too late to upgrade your account and it can usually be done seamlessly with little to no downtime at all. Today’s web applications require a large amount of memory and an ever increasing amount of database storage and we provide a full portfolio of options and choices for your site be it shared hosting, vps hosting, dedicated or even a managed cluster of webservers. Too often online merchants will skimp on their webhosting going with discounted or low cost hosting solutions to save $10 - $20 a month on their webhosting bill but this decision may be costing them hundreds if not thousands of dollars in lost sales and revenue. Don’t let yourself make that mistake, upgrade now.

Everyone has heard that e-commerce sites require SSL Encryption in order to be successful.  But what about the differences between all of them? What about getting a final explanation for their general purpose? This is why I sat down to write this article today.

Basic comparison between all the certificates we offer: »» Positive SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption and 99.3% browser compatibility rate. No warranty, no trust logo and no EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
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»» Instant SSL Pro: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $100,000.00 warranty and corner trust logo. No EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
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»» SGC SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $250,000.00 warranty and corner trust logo. No EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
——
»» EV SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $1,000,000.00 warranty, corner trust logo and EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
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»» EV SGC SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $1,000,000.00 warranty, corner trust logo and EV Auto-Enhancer™ included. This certificate also includes the patent-pending SGC technology (we’ll cover this further in this article).
——

Alright, so now all the features are exposed. You might be wondering “aren’t they all just certificates anyway?”. I do understand your concern for spending a little bit more. But the answer is no, they aren’t exactly the same product.

In terms of functionality, I’m pretty sure you won’t notice any major difference between all of them (probably with the exception of both SGC and Auto-Enhancer technologies), but the most important aspect of them all and what you should wonder is:

“What kind of impact will a certificate have on my sales and how will they help me to convert a prospect into a customer?”

As a concerned and responsible businessman/woman, this is the right thing to do.
In fact I cannot emphasize this enough. It’s the most important aspect of them all - your business image and position on your prospects’ minds. Remember: first impressions are everything, and most of the online consumers will buy on impulse. In a simple sentence, this means you won’t have any competitors if you do things right. Doing things right would mean to analyze your competitors web sites and writing down what you can do better then them.

One of the things you can do is to transmit more trust to your customers. More then your competitors do. If they don’t pay attention to this, then you just found a way to stand out from the crowded market you’re in. You’ll be the “secure” vendor.

Let your prospects feel safe, let them know they are providing their financial information to a responsible company. Your company. This is why I have to praise Comodo’s SGC and EV Auto-Enhancer™  technologies. They will help you to do this; and here’s how:

EV Auto-Enhancer™
This technology will actually turn your prospects’ browser address bar to green. They will know they’re on a safe place, and that you invested on this technology exactly to remind them of this fact.

“Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates are the next generation SSL Certificate because they help protect against phishing attacks. They work with high security Web browsers (e.g. Microsoft IE) so that visitors to Websites with an EV SSL Certificate will see a “Green Address Bar”. EV SSL Certificates represent a new industry standard for e-merchant identity verification developed by the CA/B Forum.“

Source: Comodo’s Official Web site

Here’s an example of this technology in action:

SGC™
This technology will actually force the certificate to rely on our server’s Cryptography capabilities, rather then just using what your clients’ browsers are able to support. With Sever Gated Cryptography (SGC), you will actually be able to guarantee a high level of encryption during critical data transmission like you have never been able to do before.

“128/256 bit SSL Certificates designed for securing leading web sites. Server Gated Cryptography (SGC) enabled certificates upgrade the encryption capabilities of older browsers from 40-bit encryption into full 128/256 bit encryption - ensuring your website protects and is trusted by the highest number of internet users possible.” Source: Comodo’s Official Web site

TrustLogo™
This technology will reinforce the trust your prospects deposit on your web site (hence the TrustLogo name) by authenticating your business contact information directly from Comodo’s secure servers.

Here’s an example of this technology in action:

Sales Conversion Tips

• Make sure you place your trust logo on all your web site pages. This should imperatively be done as you never know which page will trigger a “buy-now” reaction. Having your trust logo displayed on the page that triggers this action will actually add weight to the decision.
• Keep reminding your customers that your site is secure, otherwise the green bar wouldn’t be displayed. Make sure you emphasize the fact that this identity verification isn’t done by your company, but by a 3rd party company which is reliable and trustable (Comodo). Always add links to your explanations so your customers can confirm this by themselves.
• Never forget to mention that even if their browser has a limited decryption level, your web server is prepared to add the extra security they need when exchanging sensitive information with your organization.

That’s it for SSL. I hope you enjoyed reading it and most of all I hope to have clarified most of your concerns before deciding which certificate suits best your organization.

To conclude this article, here’s our SSL Certificate products link:
http://www.appliedi.net/ssl-certificates/

Sincerely,
Andre F