What is it now? The 6th slap from Google? Whoa, Sergey and Larry have been messing in the sandbox again. Now, to prove that you are worthy of their “advertising opportunity”, pay-per-click bids start around $5 a click (ouch) if you are unproven, new market, new campaign. There is a way to reduce that with a ramp-down bidding in a few days, but for those who don’t know about it, it could cost aplenty.

Gone are the cheap keywords for the uninitiated. Gone is the cheap long-tail? And if you cram your site campaign with hundreds of keywords, you are going to be judged by Sergey and Larry (without trial, without jury of your peers) as a SPAMMER. And then you pay. What is going on is that they want you to do the inverted pyramid. Remember the time when you crammed your campaign with 200+ keywords and then narrowed down to the few keywords that make money. Not any more. Now you start with a few and slooowly grow the list. Inverted pyramid.

What’s new to me is that the structure of your campaign is as critical as your landing pages. Top-down pyramid. Start with the campaign account keywords, step down to geotargeting per state, then step down to city specific. And as you are doing this, you are stepping down the levels of the pyramid.

We’re exploring sensible alternatives to Google. You see, the reality is that you don’t need a huge list of people. You can do some really serious business with 25,000 people. And postal drops in large urban areas give you more than that albeit not with precise targeting. There are ways …