Like many around the country, we’re dealing with some unemployment issues ourselves. Not directly online, but within our own family. With that in mind, and if you’re facing the battle of trying to make headway to secure a new position, upgrade a current position, or even sell your business ideas online to someone else (see below for further clarification), here’s information that may help you turn mountains into mole hills: (more…)

We got screwed. And here’s the rest of our rant…

Choosing the right top-notch marketer “to follow” can be tricky at best.

We have our own personal guidelines for giving these marketers our time (and money) which starts, foremost, with that marketer’s sincere desire to help… us.

It’s very easy to throw stuff out there, but it takes time, patience, and a true desire to help others for an internet marketer to truly shine.

A willingness to help others is more than evident in many marketering “guru’s” business dealings online, and no more so then a marketer we will be telling you more about in tomorrow’s post.

In the meantime… Something happened that we feel duty bound to point out. What follows may sound like sour grapes to some, but created confusion, frustration, and anger for us.

Here’s what happened:

Last night checking back through outstanding business folders, we were reviewing a program we believed we would be participating in this week. The program will be one of those “giveaway” sites where, if your hard drive isn’t yet full enough, give you the opportunity to pick up more stuff… for free.

The odd thing about this is… we were declined.

Our offer was generous! A full 30 days of free assistance with one’s marketing and advertising. Initially, we got the setup a bit wrong, but then we made immediate modifications to our offer – thus fulfilling our end of the arrangement. The offer had to be your own original “something” and be free to boot. Ours was.

That, too, was denied.

We submitted an email stating our confusion as to why our offer was declined. The answer back was snotty to say the least. No need to say more, we logged right in and deleted our entire account.

We are amazed. We are confused. We are, now unfortunately, skeptical from all angles.

Ah well. Guess we could just say you win some, you lose some. But really, in the back of our minds, we cannot help but think… what the hell? Why wouldn’t someone accept other people’s offer of hands-on services to HELP [their participants] for FREE??

Just shaking our heads…

Reported Sunday, March 30 in the Washington Post, writer Juan Carlos Perez of the IDG News Service sites a second straight month of declining paid search for Google.

Perez’s referenced source is a comScore report that suggests, “Google’s revenue engine is slowing down, highlighting again the perils of the company’s overwhelming dependence on a single type of online advertising to fuel its business.”

Unless you are a comScore client, the possibilities of you getting your hands on this report are nil. However, Citigroup analysts Mark Mahaney and James Samford appear to back up this report, too.

Citigroup reports only a 3.1 percent year-on-year search using Google’s paid search ads. They also indicate that a 0.3 percent year-on-year decline in January presents an emerging trend that Google’s PPC ad business “may be losing steam, after powering the search giant mindblowing levels of revenue and profit growth for years.”

Investors in Google may be the ones most concerned over this development. But Google executives say they are aware of this situation and they are promising “concrete results this year and in 2009 in display advertising, such as banners, now that the DoubleClick acquisition has been finalized.”

What does this mean for the average marketer? It might well explain the phone calls and emails we’ve been getting about poor PPC results and excessive amounts of money being spent to sustain these types of marketing campaigns. The bottom line to these inquiries, what else can a marketer do to promote their website online?

While PPC may hold a spot in an online website owner’s business, diversifying your marketing methods has always been, and will continue to be, your best bet.

Resources to check out:

Molten Marketing
and
My Wizard Ads’ Numerous Advertising and Marketing Bundles

Remember… diversify!