Eric Ward’s recent blog post “LinkMoses Resurrected #4 – Picking The Right Shovel” makes some great points about the strategy needed behind promoting web content through link building. There is a lot of “spam-flavored” link building taking place. While I can make a stretch that a restaurant supply company might find value in advertising in a printed college newspaper that is distributed to all of the restaurants in a college town, I wonder how much attention that same advertisement gets from the on-line version of that newspaper.

It may be “frenzy” or it may simply be complete naivety on the part of the client. Regardless of the reasons, you need to know where your advertising money is going. Why? Because with no effort at all, a company can blow wads of cash on less-than-helpful paid advertising in the form or Google Ads, Banner Ads, Space Ads, Sponsored Links, etc. There are 1,000’s of website out there begin created for the simple reason of hosting your PPC ads and making money off of them. In the last 18 months, I’ve generated a list of more than 6,000 domains which I have blocked from showing our Google Ads. That’s quite a lot of work sifting through placement reports and synchronizing a list that large over multiple accounts with hundreds of campaigns. A lot of work which saved my division $1,000’s on useless PPC which can be put better use.

It doesn’t matter is you want to do the work yourself or pay someone to do it, a little bit of education and paying attention to what’s going on can save you big (or small) money and make your advertising dollars more effective. Even if you don’t end up saving your company lots of money, at least you can help get your ads in front of actual customers. Otherwise, you might find yourself in the situation where your daily PPC budget is getting maxed out because all your click dollars went to a family of sites in Romania where you don’t even sell your product or service.