PPC Ian Visits Maui

Pay per click can be a crazy career at times. Why? Just think of it as the NYSE trading floor, only it’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. That’s also part of what makes it so much fun in my opinion! At the same time, it’s imperative to take vacations and recharge. After all, career longevity is the real key to making it big in online marketing. Today, I’d like to talk about my recent trip to the Ritz Carlton, Maui, my first "real" week long vacation of the year!

My First Real Vacation of 2010, It’s About Time!

PPC Ian and Nicole In Maui

2010 Has been a crazy year. I have been making stellar progress against my 2010 goals but have hardly had any time off. In fact, I’ve only taken one official day of PTO (paid time off) all year. That’s a good thing in that I’ve truly accomplished a lot. However, it’s a bad thing in that it’s not super healthy to work that hard with no break. As such, I’m extremely happy that my wife and I spent an amazing week relaxing at the Ritz Carlton, Maui.

The crazy thing about PPC: It’s really addictive and you can get stuck in a mode where you really don’t even want to take time off. It’s this strange state that’s brought about by the instant feedback loop of PPC. I was most definitely in that mode. My advice to you: Force yourself to take a vacation! You are in this for the long term.

My First Vacation With My iPad

I’m PPC Ian so you know I didn’t check out completely! I actually wrote and published two blog posts while on vacation: Inflection.com and Commission Junction. The fun part of it all: I didn’t even bring a laptop to Hawaii. I wrote and published these posts on my new 32 GB iPad with 3G. Moreover, I kept up with important work email and campaign management, all on my iPad! It’s important stuff: When your’re a Director, you can’t just abandon your team while on vacation. It sure was refreshing to have long battery life and less weight in my carry-on.

The only downside: Things took a little longer, especially considering I was having troubles pairing my wireless keyboard even though it worked just fine at home. Oh well, I was on "island time" anyway!

Hawaii Is Ideal For PPC

My wife and I love Hawaii. I also love the pay per click career path. The natural conclusion: Find a way to spend more time in Hawaii (maybe a few weeks each year) while working remotely. This may be even easier to swing if I can split the time up into a few separate blocks. This goal is something that will continue to motivate me well into the future! One thing is for sure: I’m blessed to be a leader in an industry that theoretically has no geographical boundaries!

Image In This Post © PPCIan.com

My Best Month On Commission Junction

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 7 27

I’m a big fan of passive income. I’m also a big fan of SEO. Put the two together and I have built a network of information sites that drive passive income from affiliate programs. Historically, my main methods of monetization have been Google AdSense and the eBay Partner Network. However, I set the goal in 2010 of diversifying my affiliate programs. Even though I’m the biggest fan of AdSense around (and AdSense dominates my affiliate earnings), it always a great idea to diversify for added stability. To that end, I’m excited to report than I earned $991 on Commission Junction in the month of August, a new milestone for me. My earnings were at 100 percent margin, all from my SEO sites. Moreover, I spend less than 5 hours per month on this stuff (I’m a corporate SEM Director) so I’m super excited with the results.

My CJ Earnings Are Pure Profit

Commission Junction

My friend Jeremy from Profit Addiction said it best. Jeremy’s tagline "When revenue is not enough" indicates that it’s all about profit and not revenue. You hear a lot about people making thousands and thousands of dollars with affiliate marketing. However, most of the time they are talking about revenue and not profit. There’s a big difference!

Just think about it: Pay per click is getting really competitive. If you’re a savvy affiliate, your percentage margin may be 25 percent tops (most are much lower). Let’s assume I earned my $991 via PPC at 25 percent margin (instead of my 100 percent SEO margin percent). That means my theoretical PPC revenue is $4,000 or $48,000 per year. Not bad!

However, PPC margins can be volatile. As such, I would always swap PPC dollar margin for the same dollar margin in SEO. In short, I’m a huge fan of SEO earnings. Sustainable SEO margin is just like a great dividend-paying stock, whereas PPC is more like active trading.

Affiliate Marketing Is A Small Percentage of My Income

So you may be thinking why is Ian writing about a $991 monthly profit, it’s not that much money. Here’s the cool part and why I’m such a big proponent of moonlighting: It’s all gravy on top of my salary and involves only a few hours a month. (Also its just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my affiliate income as CJ is a smaller component of my cash flow.)

However, I’m here to make a point… I spend the vast majority (99 percent) of my time on my full time job. A good percentage of my full time salary goes towards bills. My affiliate marketing income, however, is pure savings that goes directly into my bank account or other investment vehicles. With only a few extra hours a month I have learned invaluable SEO skills (helpful in my career) while building a stream of pure profit that goes to my bottom line.

Since my $991 is passive and recurring, it’s representative of about $240,000 value in my eyes (I would have to invest $240,000 at 5 percent dividend yield to get that same annual cash flow via stocks). In short, no matter how small your affiliate business, SEO margin is much more valuable than you may think!

Give Commission Junction A Try

I’ve been building out a lot of SEO sites and have been placing CJ ads on all of them. I have been very pleased with my results and highly recommend giving Commission Juntion a try. Many people I know don’t use CJ as much anymore since the eBay affiliate program is now managed by eBay (and not via CJ like it was in the past). However, I’m here to say that Commission Junction has many great offers that convert quite well in SEO, especially in "review" style sites.

I Own Shares In Inflection.com

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 3 13

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know I’m a tremendous fan of stock options. One of the huge advantages to the corporate online marketing career path (as opposed to affiliate marketing) is the ability to accumulate stock in leading privately held companies that later have the opportunity for major liquidity events. Just recently, I wrote abut how I made it big in online marketing. How did I make it big? I cashed in on my NexTag and QuinStreet options! Today I’m excited to share another success story: I own very early stage shares in Inflection.com and according toTechCrunch Inflection.com just secured $30 million in funding. That’s right: Every private company I have worked for has turned into an investor’s dream. I love the online marketing career path!

I’m Not Writing This Post To Brag

Inflection

So I’m super excited but want to make it very clear from the start that I’m not here to brag. Rather, I’m here to empower and share the power of the online marketing career path with the world. I know I’ve mentioned this many times but I must underscore it again: Online marketing professionals are in demand, especially pay per click professionals. Due to this fact, you get your pick of which companies you want to work for. This abundance of choice (which 99 percent of the working world doesn’t have) affords you the opportunity to make wise investment decisions. View your employer as an investment opportunity and you too can have three amazing private company investments in a row, just like me! PPC is unlike any other career for this simple reason.

Hey Jon, Have Anything To Say This Time?

So after my recent post about making it big in online marketing I received several spam messages from someone named “Jon”. Jon did not provide a valid email address, but was quick to tell me that I did not make much on my QuinStreet stock (which is quite untrue). Hey Jon, this post is for you. Also, I think I know who you are. How are things going at your fourth tier ad network? I actually enjoy getting these types of messages. As my friend John Chow says in his book Make Money Online, haters are the number one leading indicator of your own personal success. Hence, the Inflection news coming in such a timely manner!

Inflection.com Rocks and They’re Going To Dominate

Ok, time for me to get serious again. I wanted to close out by talking a bit about Inflection.com and my personal experience there. Right before my current gig, I thoroughly enjoyed running Inflection.com’s paid search business as their Director of SEM. I’d like to close out with a few great things about Inflection:

The co-founders are awesome. Brian, my former boss, started the business in his Harvard dorm room. He joined forces with Matthew, his brother and serial entrepreneur, and started Inflection. They bootstrapped it and quickly turned the company into a 50 person cash machine. These guys know their stuff and I’m obviously not the only one who thinks so. It’s extremely rare to land 30 million funding in this economy.
The team is very seasoned (which is one of the big reasons they are doing so well)! I have two pieces of information to quickly prove this to you. First, their executive VP of business development used to be President of Match.com in its early days. Second, their VP of finance was VP of finance at Netflix and took that company public. When I was there, half the team were Stanford graduates like myself, how awesome.
Inflection’s products are cool. Just check out Archives.com!

Here’s to Inflection’s continued success! Want to work at this amazing company in the heart of Palo Alto near my alma mater Stanford University? Send me your resume to jobs@ppcian.com and let me help connect you!

Picture in this post © Inflection.com

Pay Per Click Persistence

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 30 5

Over the last few months, my wife and I have been running a lot of great races! The first one was back in May, the 5K San Carlos Fun Run. One week ago, I’m pleased to announce that I ran my first 10K race, the San Mateo Bay Vista Run. You can see some pictures from the race in this post. The 10K is definitely an endurance race, one that requires a lot of persistence both during the race but also in training. My persistence certainly paid off and I finished the race with an excellent time and more excitement for running than ever! In addition to my running career, persistence has been absolutely critical in my pay per click career and today I’ll tell you why!

Persistence, A Requirement For New PPC Campaigns

Right Before Bay Vista Run

Pay per click is very different than it was in 2004 when I started. Back in the day, I could simply launch new campaigns and they would turn to pure gold relatively quickly. Sure, there would be some optimization required, but profitability usually came within a few short days or less.

These days, however, profitability typically takes some time. That time is typically anywhere from one week all the way to a month. Why? Two big reasons: competition and quality score.

The competition side is simple enough. The pay per click marketplace is saturated. The bids are high, the landing pages are outstanding, and most of the keywords have been discovered. Because of all this competition, it takes a lot longer to really figure it out and make your new campaign profitable.

Now, let’s add the concept of quality score on top of that. Not only do you have to optimize around the fierce competition, but you need to establish a strong quality score from day one. I’ll keep it short because I recently posted a video about launching a new AdWords account where I cover this very topic. The takeaway: It’s always smart to go out the gate with strong bids so you establish a great quality score from day one. The downside? This will definitely lower your profitability in the short run (but will dramatically increase it in the long run). When you launch new campaigns, it’s all about persistence. The rewards will come, but it definitely takes time!

Persistence and Career Longevity

Running In Bay Vista Run

I’m a huge fan of the pay per click career path. I’ve made it big in online marketing. How? Hard work and persistence.

There are two main reasons persistence will pay off handsomely in your online marketing career. First and foremost, this is a difficult career path. We’re managing multi-million dollar budgets and have a lot riding on our shoulders. As such, pressure can exist. I actually embrace the pressure (I view it as excitement) and harness its power to my advantage. It’s a rush for me.

However, many people don’t look at it this way. They can’t take it and leave the industry. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen leave a great PPC gig because they didn’t have the persistence. What happens when you’re the last one standing? You learn a lot really quickly and have the opportunity to get promoted very fast. Leverage persistence to your advantage, career longevity is your secret weapon.

The second reason persistence pays off in your online marketing career: It’s all about stock options. My stock option batting average has been simply amazing. However, to really cash in on stock options you need to vest as many of them as possible. What does it take to vest a lot of options? Persistence!

All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com

Optimization Beyond Bidding Whitepaper

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 26 7

I’m a huge fan of whitepapers! In fact, I just wrote a FREE 12 page whitepaper all about buying SEM software. It actually took me nearly an entire day to write, edit, and publish that whitepaper so I have a ton of respect for anyone writing great PPC whitepapers. Today, I’m excited to share with you a great new FREE whitepaper I just discovered, Marin Software’s Optimization Beyond Bidding.

What Is Marin Software?

Before I discuss this great whitepaper, I wanted to first take the opportunity to introduce Marin Software. Marin software is the leading pay per click search engine marketing software solution. It’s the package of choice for corporate search engine marketing organizations. Recently, Marin Software announced that over one billion dollars worth of annual spend is managed by their system. That’s simply amazing.

Want to learn even more about Marin Software? I highly recommend reading my exclusive interview with Matt Lawson, VP of Marketing at Marin. Want to learn more about Marin and other amazing SEM tools? Check out my recent article about my favorite four SEM software solutions.

My Key Takeaways From Marin’s Whitepaper

Optimization Beyond Bidding is absolutely packed with great information, 16 pages of great information. My favorite part of the whitepaper: It’s the perfect mix of strategic and tactical. This is very important in the corporate world. It’s not enough to simply execute and grow the numbers. You also have to explain the strategy behind it all! Some of my favorite highlights:

Lunch at Tres Agaves San Francisco with my friends Robby and Chris from Marin Software

The whitepaper defines the exact mathematical equation behind your CPC (as a function of quality score and also bid of your competitors). I’m always getting questions about this at work, it’s an equation you definitely want to have handy.
It offers several tactical workflows for optimizing your quality score and ROI. My tip: Print these out and post them on your cube. These are workflows you want to live by!
Optimization Beyond Bidding identifies the reasons you should focus on exact match as opposed to broad and phrase. This methodology has been core to my personal paid search philosophy for many years and is extremely powerful.
Offering real world case studies, Marin’s whitepaper ties its tactical tips to your personal business situation.
The whitepaper is sprinkled throughout with handy statistics that will help you in communicating strategy with your executive team.

So, what are you waiting for? Go download your FREE copy of Marin’s Optimization Beyond Bidding whitepaper. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Google Is Advertising On Yahoo!

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 23 18

I was absolutely shocked to see Google advertise on the last Superbowl. Recently, I saw something that shocked me even more. I really can’t believe it! Google is advertising on Yahoo Search Marketing. I’ve got the screen shots below to prove it, just read on!

Google Shows Up On "Mortgage Rates" On Yahoo!

The other day, I noticed that the word "mortgage rates" was trending on Yahoo’s homepage. As someone who used to manage multimillion dollar campaigns in the mortgage vertical, I couldn’t help but click through to the search results to see what was happening in the category. Mortgage sure has changed since I was in that category: Google showed up in the first position on Yahoo Search (see screen shot below).

Google’s Mortgage Tool

I wouldn’t want to be in the mortgage lead generation business right now. Why? Google now offers their own mortgage rate comparison tool. Whenever you search for a major mortgage keyword on Google, you’ll see Google advertising their tool at the top of the page. Honestly, it’s a really cool tool and provides some serious competition for mortgage lead generators.

Google Is Tracking Their Yahoo Search Marketing Campaign

My last screen shot for today is really neat! After I clicked Google’s ad on Yahoo Search, I took a close look at their tracking URL. You can see in the URL bar screen shot below that Google is definitely tracking their campaign. The two parameters that stand out to me are s=3 and kw=mortgage+rates+today.

I believe the first parameter indicates that Yahoo is identified by "s=3" (perhaps "s" stands for source?). In terms of the keyword parameter, it seems like Google is advertising via advanced match since they showed up for the keyword "mortgage rates". Moreover, "mortgage rates today" is a bit longer tail so it shows that Google is not just going after the top, obvious keywords.

It’s funny: I’m really glad I took these screenshots when I did! Today, Google is no longer showing up on Yahoo for popular mortgage queries. One thing is for sure: I’m going to keep a very close eye. What’s even stranger about all of this: Yahoo Search Marketing is going away very soon. Shortly, Yahoo! search results will be powered by Microsoft adCenter via the Yahoo Microsoft Search Alliance. Perhaps Google will be advertising on adCenter next?

Images In This Post © Yahoo! and Google

Google Testing New AdSense Formats

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 20 14

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know that my posts tend to be very long. In fact, I average about 800-1,000 words per post. As such, it’s become an intimidating challenge for me to post more than one or two times a week. However, it became very apparent to me at SES San Francisco that I absolutely must post at least two times per week to maximize the potential of PPC Ian. I have very big goals for this blog! As such, I’m going to start incorporating some more concise posts in my mix, such as this one. I hope you find the shorter format equally entertaining and helpful!

Google’s Awesome New AdSense Leaderboard

So, for my first shorter format post I wanted to highlight a fascinating change I’ve seen with Google AdSense recently. Basically, they are testing an awesome new format for their leaderboard where you see three horizontal ads rather than the four standard ads (image below).

New Google AdSense Leaderboard

My AdSense Earnings Started Spiking Recently

How did I notice this change? I actually pulled this ad from one of my personal sites from the financial services vertical. I own a portfolio of websites that drive passive income via affiliate earnings, IJL Productions LLC. AdSense is one of my favorite affiliate programs and it drives the lion share of my passive income. The other day, my earnings started spiking due to an improvement in CTR (my page impressions stayed consistent). After a quick audit of my sites, I realized that the new format could very well be the driving force behind this!

Higher AdSense CTR At The Expense of Advertiser Conversion Rate?

So I’m super happy right now (more money is good). However, I have two points. First and foremost, I don’t want to get too happy because this could go away. The jury is still out whether this test will turn into functionality that Google decides to keep.

Second, who knows what this higher CTR is doing to advertisers (I’m also on the advertiser side) on the Google display network. It’s always possible that the higher CTR is at the expense of conversion rate. I’m hopeful that it’s a true gain (CTR up while conversion rate flat to up). In fact, I think this is very possible because AdSense, in my opinion, is overdue for some format changes. It’s been the same too long and some users are getting immune to it. By shaking things up a bit, Google is doing the right thing, both for publishers and advertisers.

Image of Google AdSense © Google, Ads Within AdSense © Their Respective Advertisers

SES San Francisco 2010 Rocked

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 18 12

Search marketing conferences this year have been great! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed TRAFFIC Las Vegas, SMX West Santa Clara, SMX Advanced Seattle, and now SES (Search Engine Strategies) San Francisco. Today, I’d like to recap my experience at SES San Francisco this week and some of my exciting takeaways. SES was absolutely packed and it was a tremendous conference!

SEM Automation Is Hot

My Friends Craig and Alex From Click Equations at SES San Francisco

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know that I’m a huge fan of pay per click automation. I even wrote a FREE 12 page SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide. SEM automation is constantly on my mind, it’s the only way to gain the leverage to succeed when you’re managing multi-million dollar PPC campaigns.

Excitingly, SEM automation was everywhere I turned in the expo hall! It was truly remarkable. SEM automation is hot! It was really great to see both old and new friends in the automation game. I got the opportunity to sync up with the Marin Software team. I met the amazing ClickEquations team for the first time in person. I even had the opportunity to learn about American Express getting in the game with their new OPEN SEM platform. I was totally floored when I learned about that!

Being a Celebrity Executive Is Cool

PPC Ian and My Friend Dan From Marin Software

The keynote yesterday by Jeffrey Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak, was awesome! There were several takeaways around people management, especially motivation and turning organizations around. However, that’s not what impressed me the most.

What really impressed me was Jeffrey’s delivery. This guy is truly talented. He’s basically an expert presenter and actor. As my personal career progresses, I’m setting my sights high. I’d love to become a celebrity executive one day and pick up some acting skills myself. It’s really captivating stuff! It’s also a completely different skill than my Stanford Computer Science roots. I’m definitely a leader and expert people manager. I’d also call myself a stellar presenter (just check out my Stanford Graduate School of Business speech all about online Marketing). However, Jeffrey takes it to a whole other level!

I Picked Up A Few PPC, SEO, and Blogging Tips

To close out, I’d like to highlight some of my lower level notes. I was writing very quickly yesterday and jotted down some awesome stuff, a lot of it very actionable.

It Was Great Catching Up With Mike From Yahoo

Perhaps most excitingly, I learned about the concept of citations in Google’s new organic caffeine algorithm (launched in June). Apparently, Google is now looking quite a bit at social networking sites and how many times your website or blog has been cited (mentioned or linked to). This is really great to learn from an SEO standpoint. It’s not all about links anymore, you also need to focus on citations! As a side note, I’m a big fan of blog commenting. While most comments have a nofollow tag on the link (unless you get on the top commentators), I’ve long been a believer that Google gives these nofollow comments some kind of weight. Now, I’m seriously thinking these comments could be counted as citations!

I was also really excited to learn about Google’s definition of a blog: Any website with a feed. When I typically think of a blog, I think about your typical WordPress blog like this one! It really opens doors when you start thinking about a blog as any site with a feed. Basically, you now have the option to add a feed (or feeds) to your "static" website and turn it into a blog. The speakers were making the point that this could have an SEO benefit because Google’s new caffeine algorithm is giving weight to blogs because they offer up to date information (caffeine is all about the real time). At the same time, I think this only makes sense if you update your site (and feeds) regularly. Otherwise, Google will now view your "blog" as one that doesn’t get updated frequently (which is worse than a static website that doesn’t get updated, in my opinion).

Yahoo is doing some seriously great stuff. Shashi Seth dazzled the audience with his discussion of Yahoo’s focus on the front end of search. The last 12 years, in his opinion, have been all about the back end of search. Now, Yahoo is partnering with Microsoft so Microsoft can take over the back end of things. This will allow Yahoo to focus on what they do the best: Optimizing their front end user experience. Shashi pointed out that there’s far more to the search results page than the actual results themselves. Yahoo will still be really focused on search, more from a front end perspective in terms of adding valuable experiences to search that aren’t there right now. Something else that blew me away: The "trending" topics on Yahoo’s homepage now account for 5 percent of searches on Yahoo.

How I Made It Big In Online Marketing

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 16 12

You hear a lot of stories about people making it big in the world of online marketing. Today, I’m looking forward to sharing my own story about how I made it really big. The great part: I did it all in a nontraditional way, one which has higher leverage than any other in my opinion.

The Typical Online Marketing Fortune

My wife and I at Tryst, Las Vegas. PPC paid for our trip to Wynn last week!

I’m always hearing about online marketing fortunes. It seems like every blog I read is boasting of tremendous profits. Typically, these fortunes are coming via affiliate marketing, blogging, or even starting a small company that takes off. I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone that makes big money on the Internet. Why? It’s not easy, period. It takes a lot of hard work, hustle, and intelligence. However, I’m here to say that I think the three methods just mentioned are lower leverage these days than the corporate route (the route that produced my success). I’d like to start out by talking about some of the difficulties with affiliate marketing, blogging, and starting your own business. Later, I’ll transition and discuss my personal success and leverage via corporate marketing (in addition to my secret money-making strategy).

Let’s talk about affiliate marketing and blogging. Most obviously, everyone is trying to do it! We live in a global economy, which is currently in a recession. Basically, you have everyone in the world trying to make some extra cash online. What does all of this competition mean? Less upside and thinner margins. Now, let’s think about corporate marketing. The corporate world requires a certain mindset, you’ve got to have that professional swagger and the degrees to back it up. Moreover, while most corporations are global, those with huge budgets want someone on call in their hometown.

Start Your Own Business, Delay Your Payout By 10 Years

Now, let’s quickly talk about starting your own business. I have huge respect for anyone that starts their own business, it’s a lot of work and a very respectable route. However, as I see it, there are only two real small business routes within online marketing. The first is the small affiliate marketing shop. I love this route because it involves zero investors and is pure profit for the owner. I even went this route myself and started IJL Productions. However, affiliate marketing margins are getting thinner and competition is getting more fierce (not only from other affiliate marketers but also from large corporations which have a lot of money to throw at their campaigns because of their high margins).

The second route: Get some funding and start a small business that may get bought out or go public one day. One problem with this route: Investors will dilute your ownership tremendously. My bigger problem with this route: The payoff is WAY in the future. You often have to wait five to ten years to be able to sell. Moreover, when it comes time to sell there are so many restrictions that you may not be able to dump all of your shares at once. You hear about all these Internet millionaires who started their own business, but I wonder how much of their fortune is liquid versus stock that can’t easily be sold. If the money isn’t in the bank (or in very liquid assets), it’s not real in my opinion.

How I Made It Really Big

Now, I’d like to talk about my personal career path and how I made it really big. You may be thinking, Ian’s going to talk all about working your way up the ladder and earning a big salary. Well, that certainly is a great thing and I do highly recommend it, but it’s not the point of today’s post. Today, I’d like to talk about stock options in high growth private (and public) companies.

Invest Like a Venture Capitalist and Get Rich

Who are some of the richest people you know? The richest people I know tend to be venture capitalists. Why? Easy! They got in on the ground floor of amazing companies. They own a diversified portfolio of private companies that later got bought out or go public. They own the leverage because they simply need to pick the right companies and then sit back and profit as the companies take off (leverage in its purest form). So, why not just become a venture capitalist? Again, an easy answer! The only people making money at the VCs are the partners (requires many, many years of tenure) or the folks wealthy enough to invest in the VC funds.

However, there is another way! Why not join the best companies in an online marketing capacity and accumulate stock options? That’s exactly what I did. I own stock in NexTag, QuinStreet, and Inflection.com (the first two had major liquidity events which I’ll discuss below)! When I started, there were haters for sure (and there still are). People were telling me I should discount stock options because they’re rarely worth anything. People told me stories of friends that worked at companies, but their options expired worthless. Well, what these haters didn’t know is that I was co-president of the investment club at Stanford and that I’ve been picking stocks my entire life. I intentionally picked the top companies in Silicon Valley. I intentionally negotiated a large portion of my pay via company stock. And, I intentionally worked hard and received additional stock option grants. Now, I’m one of the rare individuals in the world that owns stock in both NexTag and QuinStreet, two of the largest success stories of recent years.

Stock In NexTag and QuinStreet, PPC Ian’s Secret Leverage

I was one of the earlier employees at NexTag back in 2004. Because of the power of the pay per click career path, I eventually ended up running the entire PPC team and having a lot of clout at the organization. In 2007, 2/3 of NexTag got bought out for $830 million! I profited handsomely, not only from my own work, but through the leverage of everyone working hard at this great company. I also got in early at QuinStreet, well before their finance business took off. Earlier this year, QuinStreet went public and the company is currently valued at nearly $500 million (even in this bad economy). I’m confident that I picked my other companies correctly as well and that there is more great stuff to look forward to!

So there you have it, my leverage strategy: Accumulate stock in privately traded companies and profit like the big VCs. You may be thinking: Couldn’t I do the same thing even outside of PPC? My honest response: Not really! PPC is very well regarded because we’re dealing with huge multi-million dollar budgets. It’s an exclusive club and a skill (on a multi-million dollar level) that is very rare. As such, PPC professionals are truly in the driver’s seat when it comes to choosing the ideal companies and getting as much stock as possible. There’s only so much time in the day. Do you want to accumulate stock and enjoy the leverage of everyone’s hard work (not only your own), or stay internally focused on your own affiliate campaigns or business? My take: The corporate world offers an unparalleled amount of leverage! Want to learn even more PPC career strategies? Make sure to check out my free PPC eBook.

Unique Blog Designs Rocks

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 10 18

I started PPC Ian back in October, 2009 with very high aspirations. I started planning my ascent to becoming the John Chow of pay per click from day one. With blogging fame in mind, I immediately knew I wanted Unique Blog Designs to design and build my blog. After all, Unique Blog Designs also designed the blogs of these famous Internet marketers (and so many more): John Chow, Jonathan Volk, Zac Johnson, and Yaro Starak. Moreover, I immediately had a ton of respect for UBD because they truly understand online marketing. Case in point: They created the amazing Squeeze Page WordPress Theme. I had very specific and high expectations from the beginning and UBD executed like crazy (I give them my absolute top recommendation)!

PPC Ian Works With Unique Blog Designs On Enhancements

Recently, PPC Ian has been on fire, thanks to all of you (I sincerely appreciate it). As such, I decided it was the absolute perfect time to work on some enhancements to my blog. When I was at SMX Advanced Seattle, I had the great opportunity to meet up with the Unique Blog Designs Team, specifically Matt Blancarte and Josh Mullineaux. It was great getting to meet these guys in person and planning the next round of revisions to PPC Ian. Today, I’d like to walk through UBD’s awesome work!

My Awesome New Blog Footer

As my top priority for UBD’s enhancements, I wanted a new footer. All the great blogs have slick, graphical footers. More than anything, I wanted a new footer to make the overall design of PPC Ian stand out. I wanted that flashy appeal that only comes with a professionally designed footer. I’m pleased to announce that Unique Blog Designs absolutely killed it when it comes to my new footer (just scroll to the bottom of this page and check it out for yourself).

Basically, we took my simple single row footer from before and totally pimped it out. My new footer features three columns with an additional row below containing my copyright information. In addition to some awesome graphical appeal, my new footer serves three main functions:

It provides an easy way to sign up for my Feedburner Feed. Whether you want to sign up for my posts feed, my comments feed, or both, it’s super easy! Just enter your email and you’ll automatically receive new posts and/or comments directly to your email.
It offers enhanced site navigation. As PPC Ian grows, I had been quickly running out of space to link to relevant pages in my old footer. Now, I have much more space and more comprehensive site navigation.
Perhaps most excitingly, my new footer now offers a top commentators section. Your heard that right! If you’re one of my top five commentators, you will receive a link to your blog or website from my footer. This is a very powerful link as it appears on every page of my site (and is "real" in terms of SEO value). I’m a huge fan of blog commenting. There’s nothing I appreciate more than a great blog comment on PPC Ian. As such, I wanted to go above and beyond to reward my top commentators.

PPC Ian Now Supports Advertising

As my traffic grows, I’m starting to explore options to drive revenue from PPC Ian. The obvious place to start? I’m going after some select advertisers with opportunities to advertise via 125×125 banners in my right rail (under the "Ian Recommends" section). Right now, I have a few affiliate banners there. However, I have already signed up my first advertiser (one of my favorite companies in the space) and expect to sign a few more in the coming months. Want to advertise on PPC Ian? Please don’t hesitate to contact me about advertising opportunities.

I’m Determined To Grow My Email List

I’m sure you’ve read it over and over, especially if you frequent blogs about affiliate marketing: The power is in your list. From what I’ve experienced so far in my email marketing tests, this is absolutely true. As such, I’m totally focused on growing my email list. I originally started building my list by offering my free PPC eBook for simply signing up. Then, I took things to the next level by offering my free PPC Whitepaper by signing up for my new whitepaper series mailing list. Now, I have installed the Standout Comments plugin to gain more subscribers (both to my email list but also to my Feedburner feed). How? It’s super easy: When someone comments, I offer the opportunity to sign up for my lists!

PPC Ian Goes Mobile

As you probably know by now, I’m a corporate guy. I absolutely love managing gigantic pay per click campaigns in the corporate setting. I actually work in San Francisco but live on the SF Peninsula. As such, I’m commuting each and every day on Caltrain. What do I like to do on the train? You guessed it: I like to read (and comment) on online marketing blogs. It’s always so much easier when you have a great mobile theme. PPC Ian now has a slick new mobile theme to make it that much easier for you to read (and comment) on my blog on the go!

Trackbacks Now Work

I’m a huge fan of trackbacks. What is a trackback, you ask? It’s how blogs communicate with each other. When one blog links to another, the blog with the link will ping the other. If you have trackbacks enabled, the blog that got pinged will then automatically link back to the other blog. It’s basically a reciprocal link exchange automated. Moreover, it’s a great way for the user to find other relevant posts on other blogs. For a while, my trackbacks were not working due to formatting issues. Trackbacks are now integrated into my comments section and look really slick! Want to see an example? Check out the comments section of my new dot co post. While you’re at it, don’t forget to register your favorite dot co domains!

Graphical Links To Facebook and YouTube

I’m also pleased to announce that my right rail now offers some really slick graphical links to PPC Ian’s Facebook Page and YouTube Channel. If you friend me on either Facebook or YouTube, I will be sure to friend you back (please email me if I forget).

One Change We Didn’t Make

As you can see, Matt really went all out and made a ton of awesome improvements. There’s one, however, that we tried but just couldn’t do. Can you guess? It’s changing the background color of my posts. We tried experimenting with lighter colors to make it easier to read, but decided to stay with black. Why? Any changes we made dramatically changed the look and feel of my blog and I just couldn’t stand to do that. I love my theme just how it is! I know what you’re thinking, it’s not a best practice to have white text on a black background. Well, it’s my firm belief that rules are meant to be broken!

I’d like to close out and thank Unique Blog Designs again! I can’t say enough great stuff about these guys. I know I will be doing business with them for years to come and would not trust my blog design to anyone else. Make sure to check out their Squeeze Theme and also Blog Theme Wars sites as well. I sincerely hope all of you enjoy the enhancements to PPC Ian!