OK I know everyone wants to know when LPGen 2 is coming, but right this moment all I can say is “SOON”.  I hate not being more specific, but LPGen has a LOT of moving parts, and this is pretty close to a total rewrite.  We wanted to have it into the hands of the beta team over a week ago but there are a few nasty bugs that we need to squash completely before we can feel good about doing that.

I’m sure you’ll all agree that you wouldn’t want it released early, only to have it eat your landing pages or send traffic to nowhere.  That’s the thing about LPGen… it’s not like if there’s a serious bug, you can just not use it for a little while.  It has to be able to handle ALL your traffic, ALL the time, no exceptions.  So it has to be incredibly stable, something that’s not always easy to accomplish with software that has so many components.

So anyway, that’s where we are.  Consider that we’re about to go into Beta, but all the basic features are in place.  Hopefully the beta team doesn’t find TOO many issues, and we fix the ones they do find quickly, so you can all get your paws on it.

Stay tuned!

Jonathan

Well here it is finally, after most of the night and day rendering, re-rendering, converting, and re-re-rendering.

Unfortunately, there are more quirks to GoToWebinar’s recording abilities than I realized, and the end result is that this webinar pretty much looks like hell on a bad day.  Fortunately we mostly talked rather than showed the application doing a whole lot, but I still am pretty annoyed at just how bad the image quality is.

So, apologies for this.  In the future I’ll make certain that my resolution AND the guest presenter’s resolution, are one and the same so the recording will hopefully turn out a lot better.

Enjoy the webinar, it’s over 2 hours long and I still can’t believe Billy hung in there so long answering questions!  This is a great deal so if you even think SJ will be beneficial to your business AT ALL in the next year, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of this.

(Give the video a minute to load up if you don’t already see it below)

[kml_flashembed movie="http://tooltrainer.com/tools/wp-content/uploads/sj-webinar_controller.swf" width="400" height="300" wmode="transparent" /]

Offer ends Midnight Central Time, July 31st (TOMORROW!)

Jonathan

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10298303-56.html?tag=mncol;txt

Does this mean AdCenter will go away and only YSM will remain?  Interesting times for sure…

Jonathan

We did the StatsJunky webinar last night and it was fantastic… it went over 2 hours just so everyone could get their questions answered.  Billy was a TROOPER!!!

Now here’s the obnoxious part.  Camtasia is flatly refusing to render the ginormous resulting movie file.  Apparently this is a known bug that’s been around forever and the only known workaround is to convert the movie to an AVI and use THAT in camtasia instead of the GoToWebinar-generated .WMV file.

Can you say, TIME CONSUMING?!?!?!?

So now I’m converting the movie to an AVI file, which I will then import back into Camtasia again and hopefully render out to something I can post to the blog.  It’s going to take around 3 more hours JUST to convert to an AVI, then probably another 3 hours to render out to a finished postable movie.

UGH!!!

Sorry for the delay on the replay everyone, especially since this deal only lasts another day.  I hoped you’d all have plenty of time to listen to all the Q&A and have them help you decide if SJ is right for you.

Oh on that note, one thing that came up a few times during the webinar and again in a blog comment here, was about people who already bought SJ previously.  Here’s the answer as I understand it:

If your previous SJ subscription (monthly, annual, whatever) has met or exceeded $297 then you’ve ALREADY been upgraded to lifetime and that’s that.  You’re set!  If you purchase a license now at the $297 price you’ll actually have TWO licenses and the ability to run two totally independent copies of SJ in two places.  If you don’t want this, you can get a refund for one of the licenses if you’d like.

If you just bought a month or two ago for example, and haven’t yet spent $297 on your copy, then my understanding is you were NOT upgraded to lifetime, which is pretty easy to understand.  Bottom line though is get in touch with the SJ folks and I think they’ll do right by you.  Get on one of their daily webinars if you’re having any trouble reaching them by email.

OK back to rendering for me!  Well, for my computer anyway… 

Jonathan

OK, I mentioned it on my previous brief interview with him, so the time has come.  I’m going to have a live webinar with Billy from StatsJunky, in order to give you all a chance to see SJ live in person as well as ask questions or see any aspect of the program first hand.

You must register here to attend:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/848250938

A replay link will be sent out to all registered attendees.

Whether you already use StatsJunky or not, this is your chance to grab the ear of the guy at the top, so don’t miss it.

I look forward to having you on the call!

Jonathan

I just got to play with the new AdTextGenerator 2 moments ago… in fact I still am.

I am absolutely FREAKING OUT OVER THIS.

Obviously I don’t have any monetary results to show yet but I am absolutely flipping my wig excited over this thing.

More to come, I hope to have some more concrete measurable results from using it later this week.  I will leave you with this…

ESPECIALLY if you have GCD, ATG2 looks like the missing link.  NO JOKE.

Stay tuned…

Jonathan

OK gang this is REALLY weird.

As many of you know, I switched to 99.999% PPV traffic over a year ago and pretty much haven’t looked back.  That being said, I occasionally throw up a PPC campaign on a whim.

Last year (I forget when exactly but it was definitely QUITE a while ago) I put up 2 campaigns on MSN, since I hadn’t used them in ages and they had improved quite a bit.  Both campaigns were to offers on CX Digital.

Well the campaigns weren’t profitable, so I stopped them after a while.  I had uploaded huge amounts of keywords (like 50k or somesuch insanity) and got a lot of traffic, but couldn’t find anything converting consistently enough to even optimize it.

So flash forward to moments ago.  I haven’t logged into my CX account in eons as I’ve been working with other networks instead.  But today I remembered an offer they had so I logged in to look it up.

And what do I see in my stats for today but TRAFFIC!  Specifically almost 2,000 clicks on 2 offers I’m not even running!!!

I figured some kind of mistake had been made - OR I had a stray campaign running somewhere that I’d forgotten about that was probably costing me a fortune!

In a slight panic, I looked at the subids of the offers to see where they were coming from.  Lo & behold all clicks were from MSN!  I was sure I’d shut those campaigns off last year but (again slightly panicked) I logged into MSN to see what kind of spend I’d been looking at.

Zero.  Zilch.  Nada.

Absolutely not one cent spent on MSN since I shut those campaigns down last year.

So back in CX, I looked at my traffic for the month…

7,000 clicks!

For the year?

41,000 clicks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At .05/click that’s over $2,000 in free traffic.

I have completely confirmed that I have not been charged a single red (or any other color) cent for this traffic.

So MSN appears to be filling inventory with campaigns that are shut down.

This is potentially a REALLY BIG DEAL!!!  Here’s what I suspect could be going on:

A PPC network (especially a content network) has page impressions as their product demand, and ads as their inventory.  They MUST fill that demand, because if they don’t then their publishers (the website owners who are displaying ads) don’t get paid, get unhappy, and eventually will stop participating in the network and the whole thing will collapse.

So networks are sometimes faced with an awkward situation:  They have loads of demand (lots of searchers or visitors needing to be shown ads) but not enough inventory to fill it (active campaigns put up by advertisers).

When this happens with Google, you get those PSA (public service announcement) adsense ads, that no website owner likes to see because it means they aren’t getting paid for those clicks.

So I believe MSN may actually in such dire need of inventory, that they are actually running inactive campaigns just to keep the inventory filled.

This is pure speculation of course, but I’d love to hear from anyone else who may have phantom traffic coming from their MSN account when the campaign is inactive.

41k clicks for free certainly doesn’t suck, though in this case they didn’t generate even a single conversion.  Makes me wonder what other free traffic I might be able to get out of MSN though…

Jonathan

What is it about July???  Maybe it’s a summer thing, I don’t know… but I did my first video about a product in July of 2007 (SpeedPPC & Affiliate Radar) and it seems like every July now, there’s a massive flurry of awesome products coming out for online marketers, especially those who use PPC.

So I just got wind of some specifics about the upcoming AdTextGenerator 2, and it sounds MIGHTY sweet.  Here’s the highlights:

No longer is it primarily an AdWords ad generation tool.
But, it’s now a complete pay-per-click secret weapon
to dominate Yahoo and MSN as well.

New features include:

* A redesigned campaign creation process to
give you more freedom and better results from
your campaigns.

* Built-in “Keyword Mixing” tool that automatically
adds hundreds of targeted keywords to your campaigns.

* Swipes ads from Yahoo and MSN and not just Google.

* Pulls up to 50 ads per keywords (increase from 8).

* Built-in filtering tool weeds-out untargeted ads.
This makes uncovering targeted killer ads to swipe
much quicker and easier.

* Gives more freedom in how your campaign is structured.
With a few clicks you can generate one big ad group for
your ads, a group for each keyword (recommended), or a
group for each group of ads.

* Generates ads that DON’T have high-click-thru-rates
for more options and a full picture of all of the
competing ads for each keyword.

* Uncovers and swipes local ads only (regional campaigns
are becoming MUCH more popular).

* Assigns the same ad to multiple keywords for lightning
fast editing (optional).

* Plus, a more advanced interface to make creating your
campaigns just the way you want it a breeze.

So the launch is apparently coming up quite soon, and as soon as I get my hands on v2 you can bet I’ll put up a quick video showing some of the new stuff.  This sounds like a huge evolution beyond version 1, which I also liked quite a bit.

Full review to come undoubtedly!

Jonathan

In case you haven’t seen it, this is a fantastic article on Google’s many dynamic tokens… they go WAY beyond just {keyword}!!

http://www.bgtheory.com/blog/using-adwords-dynamic-parameters-in-links/

Enjoy!!

Jonathan

When I started ToolTrainer.com my vision was to help provide tools and training for all different aspects of Internet Marketing and the tools that we use daily.  That vision is still intact, it’s just not a primary income generator so isn’t able (for now) to be my top priority.

Early on I did some basic training videos on using Excel and other tools and people loved them.  I’ve done some webinars with top experts in their fields, and I’ve created tools to help my business and have allowed other people to use them too (LPGen/KWBot).  I’ve also told you about some other tools or systems that might help you.

I plan on providing more trainings, tools, and tips on the blog but as most people already know, there’s only some much time to do all this and there’s only so much knowledge that one person can provide.

On my support desk some of the most common questions aren’t even about how to use my tools, but about general subjects such as PPC marketing, list building, SEO, and other Internet Marketing topics.

While we do our best to answer some of the questions anyway, we aren’t set up to provide this training via the desk.   The good thing is that there are experts out there on the net that have the ability to do this in all the detail you could ever want!

There are free blogs all over the place with good info, and there are experts who already provide the training that many people are looking for. But with all different things out there, no one has time to find it all.

That’s why I’ll be highlighting some of the information we get here on the blog.

Some will be free tips, some will be links to other sites with good information, some are “pre-launch” freebies, where you have to provide your email address to get access, and some might be tools or systems that require a purchase.

I’m writing this because I don’t want to you think that I’m only doing this to get you to buy something.  No one needs everything that is being offered whether it’s free or not! I plan on letting you know about things that might help you in your Internet Marketing business, but ultimately it’s your decision as to whether or not the products are truly necessary for your business.

There’s no need to buy or even read about a chainsaw if you never intend to cut down a tree.

I’ll put it on the blog as that’s really the only way to reach all of the people who are interested in this stuff.

I’ll tell you as much as I can and share my opinion, and then you decide if it’s worth your time to check out.

Thank you as always for following what I do, and I love getting your comments on the blog (even if I can’t always stay on top of replying to them!)