Learn to Achieve Special Painting Effects with Acrylic Pouring<div> </div><div>Learn all about a hot new craze for acrylic painters called Pouring! Successfully master all the tips and tricks to cell pouring, create rich color fields, embed objects into acrylic paintings, unusual layering techniques, apply clear coatings, create marbleized effects, pour transparent glazes, imitate enamel, and add refraction to illuminate your colors to glow like gems. </div><div> </div><div>Sound complicated? It’s not! Enjoy easy explanations and clear demonstrations from acrylic painter and professional artist Nancy Reyner. All without the use of toxic resins. These techniques are perfect for both fine art and craft painters for a wide range of special effects. Discover many innovative contemporary painting effects, all obtained through pouring acrylic paint.</div><div> </div><div>All styles and levels of experience will benefit. Some experience with acrylic paint is helpful, as pouring is best accomplished with acrylic.</div>

English

Hello and thank you for joining my course! Please note, there are four pdf documents included with this course providing additional information. They are included with the lectures they relate to. Please don't hesitate to send me a message through Grinfer if you have any issues or questions.  This first Chapter is an introduction about this hot new craze called pouring. This chapter includes tips on preparing painting surfaces, what materials you need, and best ways to set up. Enjoy and happy creating! 

Chapter 1 – Introduction, Preparation & Supplies

Create contemporary special effects called Cells, color shapes that form with strong outlines around them.

Chapter 2 – Cell Pouring

Pour a thin glossy layer over paintings to create a super slick “surfboard finish”.

Chapter 3 – Pouring a Glossy Layer

Deep pours can imitate encaustic (wax) effects. Embed objects and other great tips.

Chapter 4 – Deep Pours & Embedding

Pouring techniques include: Marbleizing, How to Smooth Over Textured Areas, Pouring Color & Transparent Glazes, Antique Photographs, Create Color Shapes for Collage, Dirty Mix Pours, and Jackson Pollock Style Drizzles.

Chapter 5 – More Cool Pouring Techniques

Secret Tricks to Pouring Acrylic Paint

Professional Fine Art Painter

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This course is for anyone who loves to work with Photoshop may be a Photographer or Even Blogger too. 
 
Extract or Remove the background from the Picture or Photograph (Teaching of 4 concepts). 
 
After getting the knowledge about this course &amp; You can do the Work yourself with Confidently and Professionally. You can achieve Production Quality OutCome Results.

How to Remove Background in Photoshop CC Using Professional Methods

Graphic and Motion Designer, 3D Maya Artist

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When you think of WordPress you probably think of blogging. That’s how most people use it. They sign up for a free blog and start posting about a variety of things. Some blogs are very specific and targeted while others are just general everyday kinds of blogs. You might not be aware of it, but some excellent-looking websites are also using WordPress without using it as a blog at all.

Ease of Use: WordPress is designed for the masses. That means there’s really no specialized knowledge necessary to sign up for a blog and get started. If you want to go beyond the free blog and take advantage of their premium features, they’re thrilled. So they lead you through it step-by-step to make it easy.

Deciding to go from a free blog to host a domain with your blog as your site is fast, inexpensive, and easy. At that point, your .com address contains the blog, which you can arrange pretty much any way you want.

Built-in Tools: Using the blogging and content tools provided by WordPress, it’s easier for many to create a great-looking website than it is to use a more complicated piece of software. To create a WordPress site you don’t need an HTML editor or some “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) software to help you build the site. You can still use these, for the most part, but you can also do the same things right through the WordPress interface, including using CSS.

You also won’t need a tool for uploading like an FTP client, and you won’t need to learn a complicated file manager or control panel. If you’ve chosen a theme and made a few blog posts, you already understand how making changes in WordPress works. There’s really no learning curve in going from free blog to website.

Search Engine Friendliness: WordPress blogs, if they’re using keywords and contain relevant content, can rank high in searches on those keywords. Google tends to favor some sites over others, while completely ignoring some domains. Content on WordPress tends to be favored. So your website, as long as you actually do concentrate on keywords and content a bit, will probably have a better chance at showing up in search engines than if it were hosted somewhere else.

Popularity and community: If you’re not paying WordPress and website experts to do your website for you, then the idea of setting up a website anywhere, let alone on WordPress, is probably daunting. But because WordPress is so popular and used by so many people, it’s easy to get help with a problem.

If you have your website set up with Host X and you’re having problems with the PHP, you can wait to hear back from them or do an online search and try to find the exact problem in the exact server configuration in detail. But the WordPress community has active forums where you can ask questions. And chances are your blogging question has already been asked and answered, so your problem could be solved with a quick search.

When you think of WordPress you probably think of blogging. That’s how most people use it. They sign up for a free blog and start posting about a variety of things. Some blogs are very specific and targeted while others are just general everyday kinds of blogs. You might not be aware of it, but some excellent-looking websites are also using WordPress without using it as a blog at all.
 
Ease of Use:&nbsp;WordPress is designed for the masses. That means there’s really no specialized knowledge necessary to sign up for a blog and get started. If you want to go beyond the free blog and take advantage of their premium features, they’re thrilled. So they lead you through it step-by-step to make it easy.
 
Deciding to go from a free blog to host a domain with your blog as your site is fast, inexpensive, and easy. At that point, your .com address contains the blog, which you can arrange pretty much any way you want.
 
Built-in Tools: Using the blogging and content tools provided by WordPress, it’s easier for many to create a great-looking website than it is to use a more complicated piece of software. To create a WordPress site you don’t need an HTML editor or some “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) software to help you build the site. You can still use these, for the most part, but you can also do the same things right through the WordPress interface, including using CSS.
 
You also won’t need a tool for uploading like an FTP client, and you won’t need to learn a complicated file manager or control panel. If you’ve chosen a theme and made a few blog posts, you already understand how making changes in WordPress works. There’s really no learning curve in going from free blog to website.
 
Search Engine Friendliness:&nbsp;WordPress blogs, if they’re using keywords and contain relevant content, can rank high in searches on those keywords. Google tends to favor some sites over others, while completely ignoring some domains. Content on WordPress tends to be favored. So your website, as long as you actually do concentrate on keywords and content a bit, will probably have a better chance at showing up in search engines than if it were hosted somewhere else.
 
Popularity and community: If you’re not paying WordPress and website experts to do your website for you, then the idea of setting up a website anywhere, let alone on WordPress, is probably daunting. But because WordPress is so popular and used by so many people, it’s easy to get help with a problem.
 
If you have your website set up with Host X and you’re having problems with the PHP, you can wait to hear back from them or do an online search and try to find the exact problem in the exact server configuration in detail. But the WordPress community has active forums where you can ask questions. And chances are your blogging question has already been asked and answered, so your problem could be solved with a quick search.

Marketing manager

When you think of WordPress you probably think of blogging. That’s how most people use it. 

WordPress as a website: 4 great reasons

Everyone wants peak performance from a Google AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. To achieve this you must identify poor performing keywords and either optimize their performance or prune them from your campaign entirely. First, you'll need to develop ways to measure performance. But how you measure depends on the type of site you have, whether a traffic-driven site or a conversion-driven site. Each has its own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or characteristic success measurements.

Measuring Success in Traffic-Driven Sites

An example of a traffic-driven site is one that earns revenue by selling advertising, so you'll want to find ways to measure and improve the volume of targeted traffic to your site. Look beyond the initial Cost Per Click (CPC) to get a better picture of the true performance of a keyword phrase. In addition, use an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, to evaluate for each keyword phrase:

Consider, for example, a keyword that generates a visit for a CPC of $1.00 and produces an average of five pages viewed or visited. This would cost you  $0.20 per visitor pageview. Compare that to a $0.50 CPC keyword that averages only two page views per visit and costs you $0.25 per visitor pageview. If most people bounce out of your site after a single pageview, a low-cost keyword actually costs you more per visitor page view than a better targeted, but more expensive, keyword. For some strong message sites, a long visit (time on site) is an indication that your message is being read and hopefully received. Thus it is a more important metric to track than the number of page views. Determine the best KPI metrics to evaluate success on your site.

Measuring Success in Conversion-Driven Sites

E-commerce and lead generation sites are driven by conversions, not just by traffic. As a result, the CPC for a keyword phrase is not the most important factor. Rather, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA, also known as cost per conversion) is the best metric. The Big Three paid search marketing sites - Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing - all offer conversion tracking as a part of their account management, so it's well worth the effort to include their conversion tracking scripts on the relevant success pages of your site. You can also set up conversion tracking through your analytics tool for an independent view of performance.

Setting up conversion tracking is a pretty straightforward effort :

Obtain the conversion tracking code from the account management screen for the search engine. This is a block of JavaScript that contains your account number.

Identify the unique "thank you" page(s) on your site that reflects the successful event that you want to track. This might be the "Thank you for ordering" page of an e-commerce site or a "your contact request has been processed" page for a lead-gen site.

Paste the JavaScript code into the HTML of the success page, usually at the bottom, above the closing BODY tag.

So You've Identified Some Poor Performers. Now What?

Once you have the tracking code in place, generating a report showing relative performance is pretty straight-forward. Deciding how to interpret the data and what to do about it is a little more difficult. Whether you are talking about traffic or conversions, there will be a spread of performance among the various keywords. Decide what is the minimum keyword performance threshold for your business. Then determine a course of action. Usually, this follows two directions: tweak and prune.

You can often improve a keyword's performance by altering one or more paid search parameters:

Bid price. Lowering the bid or changing bidding strategies may boost a keyword's performance and make it more desirable.

Keyword negatives. Weeding out inappropriate clicks can improve performance. Look at the "search query reports" or use a click tracking tool like PPC Probe to track the raw user search terms that correspond to each of your ad groups. Create negative keywords to weed out inappropriate search terms bringing visitors to your site.

Ad copy. If an ad doesn't match the keywords, then the Click Thru Rate (CTR) will be poor, lowering the keyword's Quality Score and raising the bid needed to maintain a given position. Try rewriting the ad.

Landing page selection. If the landing page isn't perceived to be relevant to the keyword phrase, then your visitor is more likely to abandon the site before converting. Match the keywords to a more appropriate landing page or rewrite the landing page.

Landing page targeting. You can use the keyword information that your visitor entered to give your visitor a better experience and indicate immediate relevance. Simple programming can allow you to show your visitor the search term entered at the top of the landing page.

But not every keyword can - or should be - saved by tweaking. The poorest performing keywords should certainly be culled. You'll need to determine the balance point between popularity (traffic volume) and performance. It may be necessary to retain a marginally performing keyword due to the volume of traffic that the phrase brings. Once you've tweaked keyword factors and eliminated the worst performing keywords from your campaign, you'll find that your campaigns perform better with a higher ROI (Return on Investment) - a worthy goal to compensate you for the work it takes to get there.

Everyone wants peak performance from a Google AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. To achieve this you must identify poor performing keywords and either optimize their performance or prune them from your campaign entirely. First, you'll need to develop ways to measure performance. But how you measure depends on the type of site you have, whether a traffic-driven site or a conversion-driven site. Each has its own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or characteristic success measurements.
 
Measuring Success in Traffic-Driven Sites
An example of a traffic-driven site is one that earns revenue by selling advertising, so you'll want to find ways to measure and improve the volume of targeted traffic to your site. Look beyond the initial Cost Per Click (CPC) to get a better picture of the true performance of a keyword phrase. In addition, use an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, to evaluate for each keyword phrase:
<ul>
 <li>Bounce Rate</li>
 <li>Pageviews per Visit</li>
 <li>Time on Site</li>
</ul>
Consider, for example, a keyword that generates a visit for a CPC of $1.00 and produces an average of five pages viewed or visited. This would cost you&nbsp; $0.20 per visitor pageview. Compare that to a $0.50 CPC keyword that averages only two page views per visit and costs you $0.25 per visitor pageview. If most people&nbsp;bounce&nbsp;out of your site after a single&nbsp;pageview, a low-cost keyword actually costs you&nbsp;more&nbsp;per visitor page view than a better targeted, but more expensive, keyword. For some strong message sites, a long visit (time on site) is an indication that your message is being read and hopefully received. Thus it is a more important metric to track than the number of page views. Determine the best KPI metrics to evaluate success on your site.
 
Measuring Success in Conversion-Driven Sites
E-commerce and lead generation sites are driven by conversions, not just by traffic. As a result, the CPC for a keyword phrase is not the most important factor. Rather,&nbsp;Cost Per Acquisition&nbsp;(CPA, also known as cost per conversion) is the best metric. The Big Three paid search marketing sites - Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing - all offer conversion tracking as a part of their account management, so it's well worth the effort to include their conversion tracking scripts on the relevant success pages of your site. You can also set up conversion tracking through your analytics tool for an independent view of performance.
 
Setting Up Conversion Tracking
Setting up conversion tracking is a pretty straightforward effort :
<ol>
 <li>Obtain the conversion tracking code&nbsp;from the account management screen for the search engine. This is a block of JavaScript that contains your account number.</li>
 <li>Identify the unique "thank you" page(s)&nbsp;on your site that reflects the successful event that you want to track. This might be the "Thank you for ordering" page of an e-commerce site or a "your contact request has been processed" page for a lead-gen site.</li>
 <li>Paste the JavaScript code&nbsp;into the HTML of the success page, usually at the bottom, above the closing BODY tag.</li>
</ol>
So You've Identified Some Poor Performers. Now What?
 
Once you have the tracking code in place, generating a report showing relative performance is pretty straight-forward. Deciding how to interpret the data and what to do about it is a little more difficult. Whether you are talking about traffic or conversions, there will be a spread of performance among the various keywords. Decide what is the minimum keyword performance threshold for your business. Then determine a course of action. Usually, this follows two directions: tweak and prune.
 
Tweaking Keyword Performance
 
You can often improve a keyword's performance by altering one or more paid search parameters:
<ul>
 <li>Bid price. Lowering the bid or changing bidding strategies may boost a keyword's performance and make it more desirable.</li>
 <li>Keyword negatives. Weeding out inappropriate clicks can improve performance. Look at the "search query reports" or use a click tracking tool like&nbsp;<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110103224857/http://www.ppcprobe.com/">PPC Probe</a>&nbsp;to track the raw user search terms that correspond to each of your ad groups. Create negative keywords to weed out inappropriate search terms bringing visitors to your site.</li>
 <li>Ad copy.&nbsp;If an ad doesn't match the keywords, then the Click Thru Rate (CTR) will be poor, lowering the keyword's Quality Score and raising the bid needed to maintain a given position. Try rewriting the ad.</li>
 <li>Landing page selection. If the landing page isn't perceived to be relevant to the keyword phrase, then your visitor is more likely to abandon the site before converting. Match the keywords to a more appropriate landing page or rewrite the landing page.</li>
 <li>Landing page targeting. You can use the keyword information that your visitor entered to give your visitor a better experience and indicate immediate relevance. Simple programming can allow you to show your visitor the search term entered at the top of the landing page.</li>
</ul>
Pruning the Losers
 
But not every keyword can - or should be - saved by tweaking. The poorest performing keywords should certainly be culled. You'll need to determine the balance point between popularity (traffic volume) and performance. It may be necessary to retain a marginally performing keyword due to the volume of traffic that the phrase brings. Once you've tweaked keyword factors and eliminated the worst performing keywords from your campaign, you'll find that your campaigns perform better with a higher ROI (Return on Investment) - a worthy goal to compensate you for the work it takes to get there.

Marketing specialist

Everyone wants peak performance from a Google AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. You must either optimize their performance or prune them from your campaign entirely.

How to identify, optimize, and prune poorly performing keywords

Google AdWords strives to display ads that are relevant and provide a positive user experience. One of the techniques Google uses to accomplish this is by calculating a Quality Score for the advertiser's keyword and landing page. Advertisers with high-Quality Scores are rewarded by lowering the minimum bid price and allowing their ad to show higher on the page for a given bid.

Many factors that affect the Quality Score - a new component added some years ago is landing page download time.

You can reduce the download time of your landing pages by practicing the 3 S's of Speedy Landing Pages:

Remove page bloat. The more bytes a server has to deliver, the longer it takes for the page to load. A variety of things contribute to page size. Is your page layout complicated? Is a legacy code that is commented out instead of removed? Do you have large blocks of JavaScript or CSS in your pages? All of these things can add seconds to your download time. Remove unneeded legacy code. Streamline your HTML to remove all unnecessary code. Some editors are especially bad about injecting unneeded code. The more data you can either eliminate or push to an external file, the better your Quality Score will be.

Put your images on a diet. Frequently you can reduce the file size of huge graphics without any loss of image quality by optimizing them through a graphics program. One free online graphics optimizer that allows you to view different compressions of an image is GIFbot. In addition to optimizing the size of a graphics file, consider reducing the number of graphics on the page. While Google is not factoring image size in the Quality Score today, they plan to, and optimized images will optimize the user experience as well.

Avoid the middleman. Avoid using multiple redirects or meta refreshes that slow down the delivery time of your landing page. Interstitial pages that force the visitor to wait for a page annoy the user and can also hurt your Quality Score.

Keep your server up to speed. Don't let an overloaded server slow you down and detrimentally affect page download time. Monitor your server to find out if this is an issue. If it is, consider moving your site to a faster, more capable server. Consider using a dedicated server to serve your landing pages, if necessary.

Dynamic content drags down delivery. Does your page pull information from a database server? Dynamic pages take longer to generate and can slow your page load. Consider using static content promoting your top sellers on the landing page and allow the user to see the dynamic information on subsequent pages.

Reducing Load Time Puts Money In Your Pocket

Since the Quality Score affects the bid price you pay and the position in which your ad is shown, improving your Quality Score can save you money. Reducing the download time on your landing page can improve your Quality Score, the users' experience, and help put a little jingle back in your jeans.

Google AdWords strives to display ads that are relevant and provide a positive user experience. One of the techniques Google uses to accomplish this is by calculating a Quality Score for the advertiser's keyword and landing page. Advertisers with high-Quality Scores are rewarded by lowering the minimum bid price and allowing their ad to show higher on the page for a given bid.
 
Many factors that affect the Quality Score - a new component added some years ago is landing page download time.
 
You can reduce the download time of your landing pages by practicing the 3 S's of Speedy Landing Pages:
 
<ul>
 <li>Keep it Small</li>
 <li>Keep it Simple</li>
 <li>Keep it Static</li>
</ul>
Keeping Landing Pages Small
 
Remove page bloat.&nbsp;The more bytes a server has to deliver, the longer it takes for the page to load. A variety of things contribute to page size. Is your page layout complicated? Is a legacy code that is commented out instead of removed? Do you have large blocks of JavaScript or CSS in your pages? All of these things can add seconds to your download time. Remove unneeded legacy code. Streamline your HTML to remove&nbsp;all&nbsp;unnecessary code. Some editors are especially bad about injecting unneeded code. The more data you can either eliminate or push to an external file, the better your Quality Score will be.
 
Put your images on a diet.&nbsp;Frequently you can reduce the file size of huge graphics without any loss of image quality by optimizing them through a graphics program. One free online graphics optimizer that allows you to view different compressions of an image is&nbsp;<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110104092422/http://www.netmechanic.com/products/GIFbot_FreeSample.shtml">GIFbot</a>. In addition to optimizing the size of a graphics file, consider reducing the number of graphics on the page. While Google is not factoring image size in the Quality Score today, they plan to, and optimized images will optimize the user experience as well.
 
Keeping Landing Pages Simple
 
Avoid the middleman.&nbsp;Avoid using multiple redirects or meta refreshes that slow down the delivery time of your landing page. Interstitial pages that force the visitor to wait for a page annoy the user and can also hurt your Quality Score.
 
Keep your server up to speed.&nbsp;Don't let an overloaded server slow you down and detrimentally affect page download time. Monitor your server to find out if this is an issue. If it is, consider moving your site to a faster, more capable server. Consider using a dedicated server to serve your landing pages, if necessary.
 
Keeping Landing Pages Static
 
Dynamic content drags down delivery.&nbsp;Does your page pull information from a database server? Dynamic pages take longer to generate and can slow your page load. Consider using static content promoting your top sellers on the landing page and allow the user to see the dynamic information on subsequent pages.
 
Reducing Load Time Puts Money In Your Pocket
Since the Quality Score affects the bid price you pay and the position in which your ad is shown, improving your Quality Score can save you money. Reducing the download time on your landing page can improve your Quality Score, the users' experience, and help put a little jingle back in your jeans.

Google AdWords strives to display ads that are relevant. One great Google technique is calculating a Quality Score for the advertiser's keyword and landing page.

Raise your quality score and save money with fast-loading landing pages

If you've owned a website for any length of time, you've probably received one of those spam e-mails offering you some scam search engine optimization service. The most recent twist on this kind of spam is: "Triple your Google AdWords results by reporting click fraud". This latter claims that advertisers are suffering "exponential losses of profit," and that if you submit a "periodic report to provider," the search engines "must comply promptly to your reports." Inane prose and poor grammar aside, what these claims are, most of all, is nonsense. They're designed to sell you a report on apparently invalid clicks. As background information, the right kind of reporting can be useful. From a scam provider, expect the report to be less valuable to you than your own intelligent, common-sense analysis of your traffic quality, and less useful again than your detailed efforts to put together a sound campaign in the first place.

Advertisers that have been implementing paid search correctly since day one (following principles such as organizing your campaign into appropriate keyword groupings, extensive keyword research, etc.) have a lower incidence of click fraud in the first place. Amazingly, Google seems to have caused controversy recently by increasing its level of transparency. It released some click fraud stats and information about its detection procedures. In releasing the information, Google triggered a wave of negative responses claiming that believing Google's stats is like hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.

There's no question that progress in this matter will require ongoing attention at an industry level. It's not a problem. Still, does it justify the level of paranoia that some exhibit? More recently, Google followed up with a second round of statistics and held more informal conversations with industry analysts and practitioners going into more detail about fraud detection procedures.

It's now widely acknowledged that Google proactively filters 10% of clicks across its whole network every year, forgoing upwards of $1 billion in annual revenue. Moreover, only 0.02% (that's 1 in 5,000 or less) of all clicks wind up being refunded based on further investigations triggered by advertiser complaints. So if you're an average advertiser, you aren't being charged - in any given ad group - for anywhere from 5% to 50% of clicks, without you doing anything. If you were to file a specific complaint, on a $5,000 ad spend, Google would refund you $1 (but often, $0). At the market, that'll buy you a honking bunch of broccoli, but not much else.

Do I believe Google's numbers? Sure. As the search market share leader with so much to lose and such a healthy cash cushion, I don't see many motives for Google to make this stuff up. I also see solid results in many client campaigns that wouldn't be there if they were getting charged for a lot of fake clicks.

Here's what I would do if I were a business owner with limited time to devote to minimizing the problem:

Set up your campaign so that you carefully divide your keywords into appropriate categories.

Don't rely overly on "core words." Focus on a broad distribution of keywords.

Be cautious with the distribution. Actively manage content targeting.

Use a quality analytics package like ClickTracks or Google Analytics. Look for indicators of low-quality traffic, such as a high rate of very short visits (over 70%).

Comb through raw referral data in server logs or conversion tracker, but recognize that some low-quality traffic might not have been billed to you.

Stick to the top three paid search providers (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) at first.

Finally, be proactive, not reactive. Patient implementation based on a solid campaign plan will put you in charge of your destiny, and less at the mercy of the "invalid click gremlins."

If you've owned a website for any length of time, you've probably received one of those spam e-mails offering you some scam search engine optimization service. The most recent twist on this kind of spam is: "Triple your Google AdWords results by reporting click fraud". This latter claims that advertisers are suffering "exponential losses of profit," and that if you submit a "periodic report to provider," the search engines "must comply promptly to your reports." Inane prose and poor grammar aside, what these claims are, most of all, is nonsense. They're designed to sell you a report on apparently invalid clicks. As background information, the right kind of reporting can be useful. From a scam provider, expect the report to be less valuable to you than your own intelligent, common-sense analysis of your traffic quality, and less useful again than your detailed efforts to put together a sound campaign in the first place.
 
Advertisers that have been implementing paid search correctly since day one (following principles such as&nbsp;organizing your campaign into appropriate keyword groupings,&nbsp;extensive keyword research, etc.) have a lower incidence of click fraud in the first place. Amazingly, Google seems to have caused controversy recently by increasing&nbsp;its level of transparency.&nbsp;It released some&nbsp;<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090331101725/http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/andy-beal-and-shuman-on-click-fraud/">click fraud stats and information about&nbsp;its detection procedures</a>. In releasing the information,&nbsp;Google triggered a wave of negative responses claiming that believing Google's stats is like hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.
 
There's no question that progress in this matter will require ongoing attention at an industry level. It's not&nbsp;a problem. Still, does it justify the level of paranoia that some exhibit? More recently, Google followed up with a second round of statistics and held more informal conversations with industry analysts and practitioners going into more detail about fraud detection procedures.
 
It's now widely acknowledged that Google proactively filters 10% of clicks across&nbsp;its whole network every year, forgoing upwards of $1 billion in annual revenue. Moreover, only 0.02% (that's 1 in 5,000 or less) of all clicks wind up being refunded based on further investigations triggered by advertiser complaints. So if you're an average advertiser, you aren't being charged - in any given ad group - for anywhere from 5% to 50% of clicks, without you doing anything. If you were to file a specific complaint, on a $5,000 ad spend, Google would refund you $1 (but often, $0). At the market, that'll buy you a honking bunch of broccoli, but not much else.
 
Do I believe Google's numbers? Sure. As the search market share leader with so much to lose and such a healthy cash cushion, I don't see many motives for&nbsp;Google to make this stuff up. I also see solid results in many client campaigns that wouldn't be there if they were getting charged for a lot of fake clicks.
 
Here's what I would do if I were a business owner with limited time to devote to minimizing the problem:
 
<ul>
 <li>Set up your campaign so that you carefully divide your keywords into appropriate categories.</li>
 <li>Don't&nbsp;rely overly&nbsp;on "core words." Focus on a broad distribution of keywords.</li>
 <li>Be cautious with the distribution. Actively manage content targeting.</li>
 <li>Bid to ROI related metrics.</li>
 <li>Use a quality analytics package like ClickTracks or Google Analytics. Look for indicators of low-quality traffic, such as a high rate of very short visits (over 70%).</li>
 <li>Comb through raw referral data in server logs or conversion tracker, but recognize that some low-quality traffic might not have been billed to you.</li>
 <li>Stick to the top three paid search providers (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) at first.</li>
</ul>
Finally, be proactive, not reactive. Patient implementation based on a solid campaign plan will put you in charge of your destiny, and less at the mercy of the "invalid click gremlins."

If you've owned a website for any length of time, you've probably received one of those spam e-mails offering you some scam search engine optimization service

Click fraud: sideshow vs. reality

Search marketers are often advised that they need to deploy advanced techniques to achieve superior results. What many don't realize is that some of the best time and money-saving devices built right into the main paid search interfaces. Costly third-party solutions are often redundant. Here are a few reminders of how powerful the platform can be if you just use it correctly.

Although you probably won't fare well with a lot of single-word, broad match keywords, do remember that by using broad matching or phrase matching, you're covering a large keyword universe. There is only a slight benefit to loading up your campaign with obscure three- and four-word phrases. Matching options are slightly more transparent in Google than they are in Yahoo!. Read the documentation to be sure.

There are many good reasons to think in terms of clumps or groups of thematically similar key phrases, rather than in terms of thousands of individual phrases. Treating groups of keywords as one allows you to gather usable sales conversion information faster, without overreacting to the happenstance that a particular low-volume phrase had, say, a 100% or 0% conversion rate. By assessing conversion rates in groups, you achieve a "smoothing" effect on the data. You can always get more granular later.

Google offers great power tools in the AdWords interface to do things like change ad copy or destination URL's across an account. You can even raise all bids by x% for, say, all keywords with average ad positions lower than 5.0. Just look in the upper right-hand corner of the AdWords interface, above the "Search My Campaigns" box. Click on the link to "Advanced Search." A menu of power tools is provided from there. Another handy time-saver is the AdWords Editor, an offline campaign management tool you download to your desktop. It will help you do your job faster if you have a significant campaign overhaul to accomplish.

No longer is it necessary to "mirror" campaigns if you want different bids on content targeting in Google. But you do need to make sure to go into Campaign Settings and enable "Content Bidding." Then, take care to set all of your content bids lower than your search bids, throughout your account. You can use the little yellow arrow to enable the same bid for a full page of keywords. Sometimes your differential bids don't take effect and you're left with the higher defaults, so be sure to double-check your bids.

Do you know that you have poor ROI performance at night, or on Fridays? Using the Ad Scheduling ("dayparting") feature from within AdWords campaign settings, you can turn campaigns off, or just reduce bids by say 40%, for any day or time period. Use "Advanced Mode" for maximum precision. Uncheck the scheduler in campaign settings if you want to revert to your standard bid scheme. MSN adCenter has a nice implementation of this feature - more advanced than Google's because you can mix in demographic targeting to "boost" a bid for certain types of searchers. Yahoo! Search Marketing currently does not offer this.

Take the trouble to learn new features in the Big Three paid search platforms, and you'll be improving your accounts using custom techniques designed by you. No extra charge.

Search marketers are often advised that they need to deploy advanced techniques to achieve superior results. What many don't realize is that some of the best time and money-saving devices built right into the main paid search interfaces. Costly third-party solutions are often redundant. Here are a few reminders of how powerful the platform can be if you just use it correctly.
 
Matching options
 
Although you probably won't fare well with a lot of&nbsp;single-word, broad match keywords, do remember that by using broad matching or phrase matching, you're covering a large keyword universe. There is only a slight benefit to loading up&nbsp;your campaign with obscure three- and four-word phrases. Matching options are slightly more transparent in Google than they are in Yahoo!. Read the documentation to be sure.
 
Bucket your keywords
 
There are many good reasons to think in terms of clumps or groups of thematically similar key phrases, rather than in terms of thousands of individual phrases. Treating groups of keywords as one allows you to gather usable sales conversion information faster, without overreacting to the happenstance that a particular low-volume phrase had, say, a 100% or 0% conversion rate. By assessing conversion rates in groups, you achieve a "smoothing" effect on the data. You can always get more granular later.
 
Making global changes
 
Google offers great power tools in the AdWords interface to do things like change ad copy or destination URL's across an account. You can even raise all bids by x% for, say, all keywords with average ad positions lower than 5.0. Just look in the upper right-hand corner of the AdWords interface, above the "Search My Campaigns" box. Click on the link to "Advanced Search." A menu of power tools is provided from there. Another handy time-saver is the&nbsp;AdWords Editor, an offline campaign management tool you download to your desktop. It will help you do your job faster if you have a significant campaign overhaul to accomplish.
 
Content bidding
 
No longer is it necessary to "mirror" campaigns if you want different bids on content targeting in Google. But you do need to make sure to go into Campaign Settings and enable "Content Bidding." Then, take care to set&nbsp;all&nbsp;of your content bids lower than your search bids, throughout your account. You can use the little yellow arrow to enable the same bid for a full page of keywords. Sometimes your differential bids don't take effect and you're left with the higher defaults, so be sure to double-check your bids.
 
Ad Scheduling
 
Do you know that you have poor ROI performance at night, or on Fridays? Using the Ad Scheduling ("dayparting")&nbsp;feature from within AdWords campaign settings, you can turn campaigns off, or just reduce bids by say 40%, for any day or time period. Use "Advanced Mode" for maximum precision. Uncheck the scheduler in campaign settings if you want to revert to your standard bid scheme. MSN adCenter has a nice implementation of this feature - more advanced than Google's because you can mix in demographic targeting to "boost" a bid for certain types of searchers. Yahoo! Search Marketing currently does not offer this.
 
Take the trouble to learn new features in the Big Three paid search platforms, and you'll be improving your accounts using custom techniques designed by you. No extra charge.

Search marketers are often advised that they need to deploy advanced techniques. Here are a few reminders of how powerful the platform can be if you just use it correctly.


How to use paid search power tools within Google AdWords

You already know some information about identifying and banking on your strengths and identifying and banking on your sources of traffic. Any time that you find a significant source for blog or website traffic, there are almost always going to be ways that you can build even further on that traffic, which is a key to blogging for profit, or any type of blogging for that matter.

When you notice that there is a lot of traffic coming to specific posts on your website from Google, then it could be helpful for you to optimize those specific pages for the types of keywords that people seem to be searching for in order to increase your traffic even further. Look at your keyword density, link to that page from other pages on your blog using good anchor text, and try tweaking your titles as a way to get started.

When you are noticing that another blog is linking up to yours, then what you have is an opportunity to create and build up a relationship with that particular blog. You should strive to get to know the writer better, thanking them for their link, and you should submit other blog posts that they may find useful, and make an attempt to link up to them as well.

When you are noticing that a social media site is sending you traffic, then this is a signal that you need to get involved on that social media website. Do some analysis regarding the types of content that perform well on the site, and add a voting button on your site so that you can encourage your blog readers to go to the site and vote for your content so that you can perform even better than before.

When you are getting a lot of traffic in the search engines for specific keywords, then that can be a hint that you need to write more blog content on that specific topic. You should be paying particular attention to the types of questions that people are searching for in these search engines as you can convert them into post titles and topics that you can write about.

Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your blog

I have shown only two types of weaknesses and strengths that might be built upon in a blog, but there are plenty more of course. The principles that apply are the same – once you have identified something you are good at, something that people really respond to on the blog, keep at it. 

This does not mean you cannot look to other areas or improve weaknesses, it means you should spend as much time building on your successes as you do fixing those weaknesses. Do this, and you will be onto a good thing.

You already know some information about identifying and banking on your strengths and identifying and banking on your sources of traffic. Any time that you find a significant source for blog or website traffic, there are almost always going to be ways that you can build even further on that traffic, which is a key to blogging for profit, or any type of blogging for that matter.
 
<ul>
 <li>When you notice that there is a lot of traffic coming to specific posts on your website from Google, then it could be helpful for you to optimize those specific pages for the types of keywords that people seem to be searching for in order to increase your traffic even further. Look at your keyword density, link to that page from other pages on your blog using good anchor text, and try tweaking your titles as a way to get started.</li>
 <li>When you are noticing that another blog is linking up to yours, then what you have is an opportunity to create and build up a relationship with that particular blog. You should strive to get to know the writer better, thanking them for their link, and you should submit other blog posts that they may find useful, and make an attempt to link up to them as well.</li>
 <li>When you are noticing that a social media site is sending you traffic, then this is a signal that you need to get involved on that social media website. Do some analysis regarding the types of content that perform well on the site, and add a voting button on your site so that you can encourage your blog readers to go to the site and vote for your content so that you can perform even better than before.</li>
 <li>When you are getting a lot of traffic in the search engines for specific keywords, then that can be a hint that you need to write more blog content on that specific topic. You should be paying particular attention to the types of questions that people are searching for in these search engines as you can convert them into post titles and topics that you can write about.</li>
</ul>
Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your blog
 
I have shown only two types of weaknesses and strengths that might be built upon in a blog, but there are plenty more of course. The principles that apply are the same – once you have identified something you are good at, something that people really respond to on the blog, keep at it.&nbsp;
 
This does not mean you cannot look to other areas or improve weaknesses, it means you should spend as much time building on your successes as you do fixing those weaknesses. Do this, and you will be onto a good thing.

Any time that you find a significant source for blog or website traffic, there are almost always going to be ways that you can build even further on that traffic.

The key to blogging for profit

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