Want to advertise your business online? Beware of click fraud

PORTLAND, Ore. - Click fraud has been called the dark side of online advertising, a type of Internet crime aimed at running up bills and cutting down the competition - one click at a time.
Every time you use Google or Yahoo, there are always links at the top of the list for sponsored sites and they do not pop up there by mistake.
Business owners pay for those links. It's called pay-per-click advertising and for many small businesses, it's a great way to attract new business.
However, there is a down side.
Scott Hendison used pay-per-click advertising for an insurance business.
One day, he noticed his bill was increasing, but there was no increase in actual leads. Someone had been fraudulently clicking on his ad and running up his bill, with no intent on using his services.
The good news is that there are ways to protect yourself:
Keep it local - Search engines have the ability to target advertising at a specific area. It's called geo targeting and it can help you because you are not advertising to the world.
Buy software - You can purchase software to help against click fraud. There are several online sites that provide that service, so you can shop around if you think you may be a victim.

WebGuild Using Questionable Tactics To Promote Events

Are you going to the Web 2.0 Conference later this month? No, not the one put on by O’Reilly in San Francisco. I’m talking about the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo put on by WebGuild later this month.
Or do you plan on attending the popular Future of Web Apps Conference? Not the one put on multiple times per year by Carsonified. This is a different Future of Web Apps conference, also held by WebGuild.
Confused? So am I. I hadn’t heard much about WebGuild, but recently dozens of spam comments started appearing on TechCrunch lambasting us for not promoting WebGuild’s Web 2.0 Conference. Examples:

Why aren’t you guys covering what is important in Web 2.0 like the Web 2.0 Conference. They have an early bird that ends in days. Don’t you think that would be of interest to your reads that Apple store line up and CapGemini related crap.
As per your comment # 4, # 16 and # 18 - you keep saying that you are site that covers Web 2.0. How come you TC is not covering Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Jan 29, 2008. As a reader this is more important to me than some of the crap I read. I went there last year and it was a blast http://www.webguild.org/meetings/web20/2008/
The last Web 2.0 Conference & Expo will take place on Jan 29, 2008. After that Web 2.0 will die. It will be no point going to Web 2.0 related conferences after that.

These comments are made by various names, but they all have one thing in common - the same IP address. And that IP address is also the same one used by WebGuild’s President, Daya Baran, when he leaves real comments on TechCrunch.
What’s Going On?
I emailed Tim O’Reilly and Ryan Carson to see if they knew about the events and what their position was. O’Reilly, anxious to avoid situation like this one, said he reached out to Baran to ask him to change the name but never heard back. Ryan Carson was unaware of the event, but was not happy to see the use of the brand his company has built up over the last few years.
I also spoke to Baran on the phone. He said that his conference names are descriptive of the content and perfectly valid. Any legal attempts by O’Reilly or Carson to stop him from using the names, he said, would be comparable to the RIAA suing people for copying music. In short, he was unapologetic, and he also claimed that he was unaware that O’Reilly tried to contact him.
Baran also denied that he left the spam comments. He says he has a number of interns and volunteers at this office, and they may be leaving the comments.
Is This Ok?
Putting legal issues aside, This is still not ok. O’Reilly and Carsonified took a lot of financial risk and time in building up their brands around their conferences. For someone else to come in, take the brand and put on their own conference around it is just not ethical. To compare this with people downloading music is a red herring. A better analogy would be a new band calling themselves U2 and selling CDs under that name. It just smells off.
In fact, attendee confusion is the biggest issue I have with the event. Someone new to the community may have heard about the Web 2.0 Conference or The Future Of Web Apps, click on one of the spam links and buy a ticket for an event they think is something else. I asked Baran if he thought some people might be confused by his conference names. His response was “I don’t know.”
The confusion issue is real. I actually first emailed Ryan Carson to ask him if he was putting on the Future of Web Apps conference in partnership with WebGuild. Given how immersed I am in this community, I’m pretty sure that if I was confused, others will be, too.
Apart from these issues, WebGuild seems like a legitimate organization. They hold monthly events with high profile speakers at Google and elsewhere. Baran claims they are a non-profit organization, and that he takes no salary from his position there.
So why wade into grey areas of trademark infringement and blog spamming? Run the business clean, and build your own brands and community. That’s my advice.

Online marketing services 'set to grow'

The search engine optimisation (SEO) market is likely to "thrive" over the next 12 months, an expert has predicted.Kent Lewis, president of search engine marketing firm Anvil Media, made his comments via a blog in Search Marketing Standard - a publication dealing with issues affecting advertising online.He also claimed that pay-per-click advertising will experience a boost as firms seek to harness the power of the internet in marketing their brands, as will online reputation management (ORM) services."ORM will rise to the top of the media buzz-o-meter with big brands and celebrities hiring firms like Anvil to make negative search results 'disappear'," Mr Lewis suggested.Midlands-based SEO firm B10G claims the "viral nature" of bad press can have an alarmingly quick affect on a company and even make or break a product.Bloggers in particular can impact on a firm's reputation if they have suffered a bad experience with a company, it states.

MerchantCircle offers search to local advertisers

"Over half of our 320,000 members are new to the web and rely on MerchantCircle as their only web presence - and 75% of those buying our current advertising products have never advertised online before," said Darren Waddell, Sr. Director of Marketing at MerchantCircle. "Our new product suite offers the simplest, most flexible solution for local business owners to attract new customers online."
First on the list of suite services is a search engine marketing platform and allows local businesses to create and run search marketing campaigns on the major search engines.
Advertisers who want more than text ads or pay-per-click opportunities, though, maybe want to skip straight to the multi-media ad platform. This offering gives local businesses the ability to create videos which are showcased on hubs like Citysearch. The videos are professionally shot and edited to look like premium pieces of video but are actually very affordable.
There is also a listing submission service which offers local marketers the ability to list their business in all of the major online directories from one location and at one time. This could cut the amount of time that businesses spend listing their information.
Finally the custom budget area helps advertisers create and use an advertising budget to get the most from their online ad dollars.

Why Pay per Click Affiliate May Turn to this Lucrative Affiliate Program? � Part One

As a pay per click affiliate, you know it is impossible to monetize your website with 100% conversion rate. No matter how hard try, you are just not able to make sure every single visitor click the google adsense advertisements. In short, 100% conversion is not possible.Most of the pay per click affiliate publishers rely on the law of statistic - the higher the number of visitors, the higher is the number of clicks - to make a decent income from the google adsense program. I am use adsense as an example but the same truth holds for any pay per click program you are in.Most of us (including myself) hope to find our pot of gold as a pay per click affiliate. I admit I failed. But I know I’m not alone. In fact, I estimate that around 80% of the pay per click affiliate are earning less than a dollar everyday from the program.When I first began online, I was expecting my first child. 6 months later, I did not even make $500 as a pay per click affiliate. With my delivery date approaching, I need to work on something that truly can bring me money with little intervention. I started my online business and never look back since, till recently.A revolutionary advertising method caught my attention. It’s a new innovative technology geared to rival the google adsense program. I spent quite some time studying this new approach to advertisement and I was convinced of the huge money making potential - Pay Per Play Advertisement (PPP). PPP turns the phrase "monetize your website with 100% conversion rate" into reality. In fact, I think PPP can potentially overthrown google adsense program as the most popular advertising program online.PPP is a hybrid advertising method that merges traditional radio advertising into the google adsense program. You can think of it as the audio adsense program. It uses similar technology that enables search engine to determine the readable content of any web page where the PPP code is inserted.Whenever a visitor enters a web page, PPP audio automatically plays a single stream of professionally recorded audio advertisement, that last for 5 seconds (You can opt for the 30 seconds program which I will share in subsequent article for higher profit). And you are paid for that! It’s that simple.For the 2.5 years since PPP come into existence, complaints are rare due to the close relation to the content of the site and short play time. I believe pay per play will drastically and dramatically change the landscape of internet advertising, and become the most powerful form of direct advertising the world has seen to date.Why? Because similar to the adsense program, these advertisement are target at the right group of visitors. But unlike the cold hard written content, audio comes with a human touch. Compare to written text, voice is a better relationship builder. And we buy things from people we like because of the good relationship created isn’t it?Why do you think marketers are using You Tube to promote product? Because of its power to build relationship even for 1st time visitor. Agree that PPP is not as powerful as You Tube, but it doesn’t have the intermittent play-stop issue commonly associated with video streaming.Unless the advertisement is so interesting, else nobody will bother to wait for it to complete streaming knowing they are going to be pitched.PPP is different. The moment the visitor enters the site, the audio advertisement automatically play. I tested the sample PPP audio provided. It played smoothly without a glitch on the site.There are more exciting and motivating reasons, why I think pay per play will be the new generation advertising method on the internet.Watch out for part 2 and 3 of the article, as I give you 9 compelling reasons why you should be one of the pioneers for this revolutionary affiliate program.Stay tuned.