So I haven’t posted in forever, I know, and I’m sorry. It’s because I’ve been having so much fun with PPC and affiliate marketing. I always considered myself (and still do) an SEO. I knew some PPC stuff and did well with affiliate programs through SEO, but I prefer natural traffic on principle. One thing I always tell my brother/mom/family/friends when they ask about my business is that “I don’t want to have a job. I want to build things that make money while I’m not working.” The less maintenance required, the more I like it. It’s not because I don’t want to work, it’s just because it’s so cool to go out with your friends on Friday night and come home a few hours later to find you’ve made money while you were having fun. With PPC, I doubt many would argue that there’s a lot more “maintaining” to do than there is with SEO. That’s not to say you can just let an SEO project sit and expect it to do well forever, but it’s not as dependent on your day to day attention as PPC. Anyway, back to the point of this post.

Despite what I said above, I find PPC very fun or even entertaining. And I really love building tools that automate tasks and give me an advantage over my competition (I don’t even have anything fancy, but what I have built makes 1 hour of my work equivalent to 10 hours of work the way I was doing it a month ago).

Although I’ve been enjoying myself, there’s one thing that kills me. With MSN AdCenter, it is SO hard to modify your keywords once you get them online. I love the people at AdCenter (actually just got off a 2 hour phone conversation with them) and I don’t think their platform is half bad, but one thing it really needs is some tool that will allow advertisers to modify their keywords in bulk (and yes, I know they have a bulk edit option, but it’s almost completely useless).

Specifically, there needs to be an advanced way to delete keywords from a campaign. When you have 450 pages of keywords, going through them one by one and deleting isn’t realistic. You should be able to enter a SQL-esque query. For example, I would love to be able to enter a command like “DELETE FROM adgroupname WHERE status=’rejected’” or “DELETE FROM adgroupname WHERE LEN(keyword) > 25″

I can’t imagine it would be that hard to implement. The only reason I can think of for not having such functionality is they are afraid users would misunderstand it and destroy their campaigns with small typos. If that’s the case, MSN could just require a user to go to a special section of his/her account and “enable” advanced queries or something like that. The “filters” are a start, but much more is needed, and, IMO, it’s really not that complex.

Back to work :).