So as my days usually go, I was browsing around working on the next BIG thing when I jumped over to amazon to do a little research. What did I find, but a new layout on the Amazon site. They have been with the same scheme overall since before I can remember them being this big ecommerce shop.

Overall I really like the look. Its a fresh new design. The launch time seems perfect as it will give them plenty of time to work out any bugs that may arise before the holiday season really kicks into full swing. The navigation is a big improvement in my mind. Before you had to go through all this junk to get to what you wanted. Now its all there on the left bar where I need it, with some helpful quick links to some of the more popular categories. One initial piece of criticism would be they didnt leave a link on the page to go back to the old layout. As horrible as it may be to some users, there are a vast majority who dont like to change things up.

In this Web 2.0 world, Amazon is starting to take a stab at the styling cues that we are starting to become accustomed to. I give this design update a 9.0 on my scale. Whats your take on it?

Well since everyone is the blogosphere is talking about how they are seeing the big G screw them over on their sites. I have seen quite the opposite. Most of my sites went up in PR and even moved up some more spots in the SERPs. Why would this happen to me and not everyone else? No reason in particular. I take probably the same time if not more to do all my proper SEO and go through link values and site link structures. I take at least one day a week to go over my already established sites and try to see if I can go through and improve them even more. A little love goes a long way in SEO. How were you effected?

Occasionally I like to turn on a movie and just pump myself up on what I want in life and what I want to achieve. Well one of those movies is Thomas Crown Affair. No I dont want to be a thief, but nice try. I want to be at that status point. Be at the top of a company and do whatever it takes to keep it that way. I like to watch this movie just to keep some dreams going and inspire me to stay on top and keep pushing myself to the top.

What movies inspire you?

I’m a few days in(and about 2 months late) on this Thirty Day Challenge that Ed Dale and his buddies put together. I have to say its a pretty informative setup. They really walk you through all the basics of making a website and having it build up to earning 10$ in its first month. I would suggest anyone and everyone make some time, even if its 1 hour a day or so, and go try this out. Now I’m only 7 days into it. And at this point I’m really enjoying it.

Link: Thirty Day Challenge

So I have to hand it to Microsoft for making it really easy to set some geographic areas for your ads. This has to be one of the most important things when working with PPC traffic. Purely because you dont want to sell sausages to people in south-africa. Well maybe you do, who knows maybe they love the stuff. Coupling my products with the places its most popular is super important. For one I’m grabbing my demographic and secondly I’m getting some really direct and targeted traffic for my PPC campaign.

adCenter really makes all of that super simple to implement. Another helpful tip when working on PPC is to take advantage of gender and age targeting. If you can get some highly targeted traffic like that it will just further improve your conversion.

On the note of my ongoing PPC experiment, I havent made any conversions yet. I think this is mostly due to the cost of the bid on some of these terms I’m shooting for. Even though I have over 1k keywords for this campaign and all sorts of mispellings and typos I cant seem to break into the right bid point. So I may have to run some more adjustments and settings to get a better foothold in the market.

So, recently I decided it was time to upgrade to the wonderous new Windows Vista. I went down to a local shop and picked up the Ultimate edition. Which besides the few extra gadgets is really not that much extra over the Buisness or Home editions. So I’ve been using it for a little over two days and I like it. It seems fairly quick and getting things going and the over GUI is pretty easy on the eyes. I think its a much bigger improvement over the old XP GUI. I’m still slowly pulling together my old programs and settings but I’m happy with it.

I cant say I would improve anything on it just yet. The filing system is setup really well. Its pretty much idiot proof in that it wont let you screw up a program thats not responding. One downside is its a total memory hog. So if you plan to use this baby, you better have some decent memory. I would say 2gb or more. At times I’ve seen it lag a little bit, but I’m sure its due to the processor I have been using.

Gaming is something else I do on my computer every so often. Vista hasnt had any problems playing games like Counter Strike Source or World Of Warcraft. They even have a handy tab that keeps a list of all the games on your computer with various ratings that relate to how well you can play this on your system.

Overall I’m happy with it and will be using it for everything from now on. What are your experiences with Vista?

Lately I’ve been doing a ton of research into PPC marketing. I’m still very much a newbie to it all. But a while back I read a blog post by Shoemoney with his own 40k PPC experiment. Now I wont be dropping 40k on this experiment, but rather 200$ in one shot at marketing an affiliate offer online. Now to be compliant with the TOS of Google and the rest I wont be giving the actual numbers I earn, but more general figures. So even more recently I got the chance to read Jon of wickedfires Super Affiliate Blog. He made an interesting post about making money with PPC and affiliate marketing in 24 hours. So I thought I would take a stab at it.

I picked up a coupon through the eComXpo for 50$ credit at Microsoft AdCenter. If you hurry, you can grab a coupon code too. Which I thought was a good way to jump on it. I wont tell you the niche I’m shooting for but it has been a fun experiment so far learning how to put together an ad and input all my keywords. I chose a lofty amount of keywords then used the Typo Generator to lengthen that list a bit more. Being that I’ve really only scoured the forums and a few websites out there for info. This will be a big learning experience. I dont plan to make any money back. I’ll drop another note soon with some stats on how everything is going.

If you have some experiences with PPC and affiliate marketing drop me a comment. I’d love to hear what other stories people have about their first times trying this stuff.

So as I’ve grown in this industry I’ve found it really helpful to use the Adsense Competitive Ad Filter and reduce the sites that tend to not pay so well, which drops my eCPM. For a while I was maintaining this list on my own. Until recently I happened upon this blog that maintains a nice list of sites that you should have in your Ad Filter. I’ve tried it for a while now and its helped out my sites slightly. I would suggest trying it out briefly with the list in your Ad Filter, then for a while without and see what works best for you. Every niche works a little different.

Link: Not Spam