Who’s Mark Roth?

He’s generated more than 1 million leads using Google’s AdWords PPC program.

In the process of his PPC efforts, he had customized software and a management platform developed to facilitate his affiliate marketing and CPA marketing efforts.

With PPC and its associated databases of keywords and keyphrases, there is a significant amount of data management involved. While you can still track keywords on Excel spreadsheets up to about 1,000 keywords effectively, you’d be hard-pressed to go beyond that without automating your systems.

…Which is where Affiliate Radar comes in. Mark mentioned that it’s the same system he uses in his marketing campaigns. Here’s an overview of Affiliate Radar’s features:

Affiliate Radar’s key feature is to manage your PPC and conversion tracking efforts from a central console. It currently supports Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter from a central interface.

Besides the ability to track your keywords with it’s broad, exact and phrase match variations, Affiliate Radar allows you to replicate successful campaigns across the different ad networks, as well as track and remove non-performing keywords from your ad groups.

Here’re a couple of slides from Affiliate Radar’s feature set:

If you’re new to PPC traffic generation, Mark and his partner Amish have created a suite of training videos to guide you through the setup process.

As most PPC software and tools involve some degree of complexity, the Affiliate Radar videos are a godsend.

Here’s an overview of the Campaign Launcher which allows you to manage your ad campaigns across the networks:

In addition, Affiliate Radar incorporate a keyword research module, tapping on WordTracker’s keyword database.

Affiliate Radar’s keyword tracking tools include:

The keyword tracking functions across 12 affiliate networks, including:keyword tracking across 12 affiliate networks

• Affiliate Traction
• AzoogleAds
• Clickbank
• Commission Junction
• DirectTrack
• Hydra
• Kolimbo
• Maxbounty
• NeverBlueAds
• Promote AR
• Rocketprofit
• ShareASale

I think one of the key differences between Affiliate Radar and other PPC products in the marketplace is that Mark is an active PPC practitioner, rather than a marketer who decided to develop a PPC product as a side project.

As a result of this emphasis, you can be sure that Affiliate Radar will continue to see continual enhancements over time.

For more information, you can check out:

–> Mark Roth’s Affiliate Radar

In the course of your Internet Marketing efforts, you’ll inevitably need to harvest keywords and keyphrases during your site development.

Developing content featuring these keywords helps you rank for these terms in the major search engines, and will ensure that you’re creating content that visitors will find useful and relevant.

Launched in Nov 2006, Levi’s WordZe tool goes beyond just showing search volume alone, it features a number of associated tools too.

Besides the primary keyword research tool, WordZe also features:

• A misspelling/typo tool
• A thesaurus
• A “WordRanking” tool
• Historical/keyword charting tools

There are a number of instructional Camtasia videos and new search marketers will be able to use the WordZe tools fairly easily.

The search parameters allow you to filter out adult, drug, gambling and warez/hacks (pirated software) results, so your keyword lists will be more search engine friendly. (the major Pay Per Click programs do not routinely accept gaming and adult sites into advertising programs).

Here’s a sample search for the keyphrase “affiliate marketing”:

Although KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is listed [Generally the higher the number the better you’ll do in monetizing the keyphrase. Derived from the number of searches divided by the number of available results], you’ll need to ensure that your base results and searches are high enough to ensure sufficient traffic flows through for your campaign.

You can toggle the search parameters for “broad” or “exact” match to refine your results and add “expand” and “refine” flags to fine tune your results.

Most of the output generated by WordZe is available for download in Microsoft Excel or text format, so you can further manipulate the data using macros and pivot tables and the like.

What will be useful for the newer marketer is the available of associated tools, and you can migrate the data between the tools to refine your analysis.

You can use the keyword density tool to measure keyword density on specific domains, and cross compare them against other websites. And the “find related keywords” tool will help you expand your keyword list.

The above example shows that you will need to exercise a degree of human intervention, rather than blindly copying the keywords. For example, most of the related keywords for the phrase “Internet Marketing” are not relevant, but the one gem “permission marketing” might help you score more traffic if you optimize your site for it.

Likewise, you can expand your scope to look at your keyword competition beyond the confines of the search engines.

The “WordRank” tool also takes into account other authority sites such as Amazon, Blogspot, Ask, About, Wikipedia and social media like Wikipedia, MySpace and Digg.

WordRank pulls in comparable, such as the above list when I did a test for the phrase “blogging”.

CPA Marketers will likely be drawn in by WordZe’s WordRank geotracking functions:

Down to a city level breakdown:

While it would be foolish to think that WordZe or any other keyword tool will be able to do all your SEO work for you, it is nonetheless, a useful research and analytics tool.

At a monthly subscription rate of $35 per month, or $7.95 per day trial, it’s certainly a tool within the reach of new search marketers.

Check it out at:

–> WordZe keyword research tool