Several years ago, one of the airlines aired a TV commercial that told the story of a leader who gathered his team around a table to announce that one of their oldest clients had just called and fired them. As he handed out plane tickets, he told the team that they were going to visit their customers face-to-face and reconnect with them. “What about you, boss?” asked one of the team members. “Me,” he said pulling a ticket out of his back pocket, “I’m going to visit that old client who just fired us.” It was a powerful commercial. I think of it often.

Some leaders wouldn’t recognize a customer if they bumped into one. Pity. There is a contradiction if you ask the people in your organization about your customers without having any firsthand experiences to add to the conversation. Hearing stories secondhand isn’t the same as talking to a real live customer who’s frustrated by the failure of one of your products. It isn’t the same as seeing how your services enable another entire organization’s processes. It doesn’t match the relationships developed with customers over time. There are leaders, of course, who do work to create opportunities to interact with their customers. Unfortunately, those relationships are often limited to the largest customers or those customers who have complained loudly enough or demanded emphatically enough to get an audience with a leader. These contacts, desirable as they are, do not provide a clear enough picture. What’s a leader to do? Here’s an idea—and a challenge.

Pull out your organization chart and identify twelve areas where you haven’t had, or don’t have, much occasion to interact with customers, and make it your plan to spend time with a person in one of those areas each month for the next twelve months. Spend the day with an installer. Listen in with a customer services representative. Make some sales calls, clean bathrooms with a janitor, and review financials with an accountant. Listen to their customer interactions. See your policies and procedures in action. Ask questions to determine how many of your experiences that day are typical. Experience for yourself the needs and concerns of your customers. Get smart. The next time you sit in a leadership team meeting, think of all you’ll have to say!

P.S. Don’t forget to send thank-you notes.

This question is designed to take the conversation to the level of specific action. This is the What would make us better? question, with teeth. You’re asking your customer to express the thoughts and ideas they had while waiting on hold, fighting to get an invoice corrected, or shaking their head over one of your policies. You’re asking your customer to tell you the truth, and that’s a big deal. An even bigger deal is what you do with the answer to this question. Listening and asking for clarification are acceptable responses. Explaining why you can’t or won’t try the suggestion isn’t.

A note of caution. If you ask a customer this question about change, don’t be surprised if your customer asks it back at you. What would you say? And if this original question-and-answer session turns into an ongoing dialogue, you may find yourself facing a partnership waiting to happen.

Actually, you’ll have better luck asking this question of a customer who considers you a partner rather than a vendor. As the world of business has gotten more complex, customers are looking for the opportunity to work with their suppliers instead of just buying from them. Working together in a partnership relationship, seeing the world from a broader viewpoint than either one of you could ever envision on your own, allows both parties to gain. These partnerships go beyond the traditional working toward a win/win situation. They exist to create. Create new ways of going to market, new ways to solve problems, and new ways to define success.

Partnership carries with it the desire for two-way feedback. In fact, the only way partnerships work is when both parties are willing to make the commitment to a continuous stream of feedback—what’s working and what’s not. Terry McElroy from McLane Company is quoted in Dance Lessons: Six Steps to Great Partnerships in Business & Life by Chip Bell and Heather Shea as saying, “We are constantly asking ourselves, ‘Are we doing business at the level we want to? Are we worthy of this partnership?’ And we want partnerships with people who ask themselves those same questions.” Another set of good questions.

With the knowledge from the previous article, now you know more about Google Adsense and Google Adwords. Let me tell you a strategy that could earn you unlimited profits from Google Adsense. A good web programmer can blend in Adsense nicely into the webpage that readers do not even feel that it is an advertisement. However, without traffic, that would render it completely useless. Now, where would the traffic come from? Blogging? SEO? Just by counting on SEO would not take you anywhere.

The trick is to be a traffic middleman. You have to combine Google Adwords to do this. Get quick, cheap and quality traffic to your website by purchasing keyword advertisements with Google Adwords or Yahoo. Bid on only the minimum of $0.05 to $0.10 or buying one of the top 3 positions on the small PPC search engine. When readers from the world wide web clicks on your advertisements, they will be taken to your web site that shows exactly the relevant information that they are searching about. Google will do a good job in analyzing to show the relevant advertisements in your page, so optimize your page content that you want readers that clicked on your advertisements to click onto your Adsense advertisements.

You will be paying pennies to obtain a visitor, a very small price to pay for traffic. By paying this small price, you can gain dollars with the Adsense advertisements on your page. Later in this article, I will show you a list of keywords that Google advertisers currently pay the most, per click.

You can bid $0.05 for a keyword and gain $0.50 for that back in your page. This is superb. There are hundreds of thousand of keywords that could literally be bidded cheaply on the smaller PPC programs as stated above this page. These keywords may be VERY expensive if you bidded on Google Adwords. The key is to survey the price of various keywords from the smaller sites and choose the larger programs (Adsense) as publisher.

EXAMPLE

I did a search on the price of keywords of “Search Engine Optimization” on Miva.com and found out that it costs $0.21 to bid for the first placing. I did a similar search in Google Adwords for the same keyword and found out that i costs a WHOPPING $7.00 for it. The same keyword, one at the price of $0.21 and the other, $7.00 per click. Now, tell me, is that a huge difference? The fact is larger programs have a higher bidding price if compared to the smaller ones.

The only program that tells you how much an advertiser is bidding on a keyword is Overture (Yahoo). However through experience and research, I found out that Google has quite the similar maximums. The have a look at the list of most paying keywords, click here. You might be surprised that some advertisers even bid more than $100 for a single click on a particular keyword. Do you see the potential now? A few pennies to exchange with at least 50% of $100?

WARNING : Google has very strict policies. Any wrong-doings will lead to a bad for life. Please do not overlook these policies. You can view the Terms And Conditions and the Program Policies here. A few quick pointers if you are too lazy to read all the small caps in the policies :

1) Never click on your own Adsense advertisements
2) Never put Adsense in a page with little or no contents
3) Never point and guide the reader to click the Adsense advertisements (eg. Click here)
4) You can only put “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements” above the Adsense snippets
5) No adult contents allowed

Pointers for your ads to blend into the page and to trigger relevant Google advertisements

1) Do not use borders around the Adsense advertisements. Make it look more like a part of your content
2) Use the same background colour for Adsense and your site page.
3) Put Advertisements within your content, thus to look like a link
4) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the page title
5) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the meta tags
6) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the the description tags
7) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the content several times, with at least 1 rendering it with “bold”
8) You should have a H1 and H2 heading tag on the page for the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” as well
9) Make a link back to the homepage with an anchor text of keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization”

NOTE : Sometimes getting contents are quite a hassle. You just can’t seem to find enough content to put into your website or you are too lazy to write, think and type contents into the website. Do not worry. This is not the end of the world. There are tons of sites that provides thousands of free articles and you are free to use it on your site. Here are some of those sites that you might be interested in:

Article City
GoArticles
Ezine Articles

Alternatively, you can use an automated tool to generate contents about the keywords that you input. Below are the sites that you can use:

The Article System
Article Bot
Traffic Equalizer

The most important factor is to find and create a page with Good Paying Keywords. The ones that is in the Excel sheet above. (I hope that you have successfully downloaded it). Another important thing to do is to bid variations of those keywords such as “biggest”, “cheapest”, “most affordable” and “cheapest”. Create lots of variations, again, be creative! The next thing is to send click-throughs to the page that you have just created and you would most probably get the advertisers that bidded $1-$100 for the top spots. You will also obtain a 20%-50% click through rate if you have followed my instructions earlier. Keep doing this for more and more keywords. Impressions and click through rates may be low, but you can do this with thousands of keywords. Let us imagine, if you get $1 out of each keyword, multiply with 1000 keywords per day. you would get an average of $30,000 per month! Now, how’s that. Keep increasing your max bid penny a bit at a time, until you reach your definition of “peak” profit rate.

NOTE : There is a danger of choosing high paying keywords to advertise to your site. Let us take for example of a $50 advertisement. It is an average that Google Adsense will pay around 50% of the revenue to you. In this case, you SHOULD be paid somewhere around $25. However, to protect the advertisers, if you own a fairly new site or your article does not really match what the advertiser is advertising, you could get lesser than the amount of what you should get. I would approximately guess that it would be somewhere arounf $15-$20. DO NOT PANIC. You could easily tweak your page content back to the original advertisement that was put on your page. For instance, if the advertisement is regarding to “Computer Software” and you are showing “Computer Repairs” on your site, you can easily tweak and add contents about computer software to match bank the advertisements. You would need to test alot of different keywords to choose which one is the most profitable to you.

For me, I would always prefer to stick to those of $1 to $2 advertisements and bid a less amount ($0.05-$0.10) in Miva.com and get a click through rate of 20% or so. For $1 i get 20 visitors. 20% of click through rates would give me somewhere around 4 clickers per $1. Now, 4 clickers would be doubling or tripling off what i invested. While I playing around with cheap and low-bidded keywords I have a few advantages:

1) I can play with thousands of those keywords
2) I can keep on testing and retesting as those keywords are CHEAP!
3) I can avoid the possibility of not getting full percentage if compared to high bidded keywords
4) I always get favourable percentages as these are the keywords that is not usually played with

Another way to attract clicks is to place pictures around the Adsense snippets. (Be careful not to put graphics such as “Click this” or something that resembles that). Here is an example:

It’s also important to create a “channel” in your AdSense account for each of your domains. You can also create
sub-channels for different pages within each URL. This will enable you to track exactly which pages are earning you the most money.

Advanced Middleman Traffic Trick

Here is a simple trick that can be an alternative too for gaining profits from Adsense. This trick uses the technology of the search engine. Create a search engine for your site that returns a pre-populated searches for the smaller PPC search engines and make the first few results SPONSORED results from Google or SearchFeed.

The following is an illustration of what i was talking about:
http://www.uncoverthenet.com/search/?q=pay+per+clic

Now if UncovertheNet were to purchase the keyphrase “pay per click” on Miva or another small PPC search engine for say 10 cents, they would make sure their paid ad led people to the URL above. Now when visitors reach that page, they will see results for the same keyword they originally typed in, so they won’t likely understand what happened when they were shipped to UncovertheNet’s results. Now if they click on the sponsored ads at the top of UncovertheNet’s pre-populated page (which are from searchfeed), or the sponsored ads on the right (which are from Google), UncovertheNet will make 20 cents, 40 cents, or whatever the current rate is on Searchfeed and Google.

Basically you will be paying Miva or another PPC search engine to send people to your search engine that shows relevant results. And hopefully the visitors will click on your sponsored ads because:

1) What they are looking for are relevant
2) The advertisements are on the top-right. This place is the best placement for click throughs
3) They look like real results. Readers do not like advertisements. This serves a very good way to blend in

Now that you have harnessed the power of Google Adsense, i believe you can start a crusade on gaining profits from it. Our next stop, Google Adwords! Enjoy!

Microsoft Frontpage extensions appear on virtually every type of scanner. In de late 90’s people thought dey where hardcore by defacin’ sites with Frontpage. Today, dere are still vulnerable servers found with Google.

An attacker can simply take advantage from administrators who ‘forget’ to set up de policies for Frontpage extensions. An attacker can also search for ‘filetype:pwd users’.

To see results; just write in de (www.google.com/) search en’ine de code:

filetype:pwd service