For those of you who just can’t get enough Internet marketing news, there are a number of industry magazines that you can subscribe to for FREE.

These Search Engine marketing magazines can help you keep up on industry news and generate new ideas for your business and your web site. Reading about the success others are having can also be very motivational.

Here is a list of Search Engine marketing magazines which you can get for FREE:

• Website Magazine – expert information for website professionals on how to succeed on the web.
• Revenue -  affiliate marketing magazine with everything about online marketing, including key business strategies, innovative marketing methods, effective online advertising technique and emerging advertising trends.
• Promo – resource for all promotion marketers providing the ideas marketers need to create powerful promotions.
• Online Marketing Monthly – marketing magazine focusing on the internet marketing industry.
• DMNews – source of news and information for direct, database, interactive and online marketers.
• Internet Retailer – strategies and technologies for the e-retailing industry.
• Multi Channel Merchant – integrating front-end and back-end operations.
• Electronic Retailer – for the electronic direct response industry.

Other Magazines that have a paid subscription but are worth the cost:

• Search Marketing Standard
• Visibility
• Domainers
• Modern Domainer

In addition to these account best practices and other account management techniques, there are three things that can help you drive more traffic and generate more sales for your site. They are, increase your negative keywords, use the Placement Network, and try out the Display Ad Builder.

Increase your negative keywords

Adgroups that only have [exact] and “phrase” match keywords are missing out on related keywords that are only triggered through broad match terms. Some people shy away from broad match terms because they can bring in unrelated traffic. No one wants to pay for traffic from unrelated keywords. The answer is to expand your negative keyword list.

By expanding your negative keyword list, I’m not talking about adding 10 to 20 more terms. I’m talking about adding hundreds to thousands of negative keywords. Aside from adding the common sense negative terms that you can come up with on your own, there are two places you can look for negative keywords in your Adwords account. The first is by running a Search Query Performance Report.

You can create a Search Query Performance Report by going to the Reports tab, creating a new report, and then selecting the Search Query Performance under Report Type. Run this report on all the campaigns in your account that have broad match keywords in them. This report will show you the exact keywords that triggered your ad for the time period. Pick out the terms that don’t relate to your product and add these to your negative keyword list for that campaign. Running these reports on a campaign level is the way to go, since you add the negative keywords on a campaign level as well. Don’t forget to also look for the terms that just aren’t performing. If you have a keyword that appears to be related but isn’t making any sales, add it to your negative list as well. There is no point spending money on a term that doesn’t perform.

The second place you can go to build your negative keyword list is the Keyword Tool in the Tools section of your account. Put in one of your keywords and search the results for any terms that don’t relate to your product. Add all of these terms to your negative list.

Building out your negative keyword lists will prevent you from showing up for unrelated terms and will still take advantage of all the long tail keywords related to your web site.

Placement Network

Many Adwords users have tried the Content Network, wasted a lot of money on worthless clicks, and have written off the Content Network as useless. It is time for you to reconsider. The Placement Network now allows you to pick the exact web sites you want your ad to show up on. You don’t have to worry about showing up on random sites throughout the network and wasting your ad dollars. You pick related sites where your customers will be and your ads will only show up on those sites.

Here is an example of how this works. Let’s say you sell women’s briefcases. Once you’ve activated placement targeting in your campaign search, go to the Placement Tool to search for related sites. You can search by category, topic, URL or demographics. Use all these different search functions to find possible sites. In this case, the demographic search will be very helpful as you can search according to gender, age, and income. For women’s briefcases, I could look at sites that target women ages 25 – 64, with house hold incomes over $100,000.

Here is a short list of some of the sites that showed up using these search tools: www.downtownwomensclub.com, www.womanowned.com, www.thefashionspot.com, and www.businessknowhow.com. Just add the web sites that you know for sure your customers visit. Don’t worry about being everywhere.  Your customers visit more sites than just yours and Google.com. Using the Placement Network in the right way will expand your presence and bring in more traffic and sales.

Display Ad Builder

The Display Ad Builder is a new tool Adwords introduced to help advertisers that don’t want to or can’t pay a graphic designer to design ads, to easily create display ads of their own. If you have a successful Content Network campaign, you should create some display ads and see how they perform compared to your text ads. In many cases, you’ll find you get a better CTR. In some cases though, the extra traffic won’t necessarily mean extra sales. Keep a close eye on these ads and make sure they are performing and bringing in sales.

Google Search Partners Statistics

For the most part, this new information is more informative than actionable. Without knowing which exact partners the traffic is coming from and without having the ability to opt out of individual partner sites it is hard to make any significant changes to your campaigns. But there are still some little adjustments that can be made to improve your campaigns.

One of the main things you can do with these metrics is work to improve your Quality Score. Your quality score is only affected from ads running on Google. So if you look at a campaign and take out all the Search Partner traffic, you can see the exact metrics that are driving your Quality Score and make adjustments to keywords and ads where needed.

I was making these exact adjustments to one of my campaigns a few weeks ago and ran into some trouble. The trouble didn’t come on the day I made the changes to try to improve my Quality Score, it came a few days later. I came back to the account after a few days, with the intent of making some major bid increases in anticipation for increased traffic for the holidays. I jumped in and started looking at data for the last 30 days to see which terms were performing well. Here is where my trouble came. My settings in the account were still set to look at Google traffic only. So as I started to make bid changes, I was making my changes based on incomplete data.

Fortunately, I noticed that the numbers weren’t adding up and changed the settings before any of the new bids went live, but it still scared me a bit.

I now have a new step in my process whenever I make major changes to my Adwords account: change the “statistics” setting to “summary.” Hopefully, this will help me avoid ever making this mistake again.

Some people love to do the least amount of work possible to get a job done. They find great pleasure in finding shortcuts and discovering what the minimum requirements are to still complete a task. Sometimes finding shortcuts and doing as little as possible is OK, but not when it comes to building a successful web site.

I sat through an interesting presentation during Pubcon a few weeks ago by Matt Tuens from AcuVox Inc. The topic of the session was “Effective Action-Based Copywriting.” He brought up the point that the wrong approach to building your web site is thinking “what is the least I can do to be successful?”

How many times have you been asked, how many pages should my web site have? Or, how many words should I have on this page? Or, how about this one: How many back links do I need for my site? These types of questions are the bases of minimal thinking and are no way to build a successful web site and business.

In his presentation Matt explained that a more effective approach to building your site is to create the ultimate resource for your given industry. What an idea! Rather than trying to figure out the minimum amount of pages or words for your site, figure out how to answer every possible question your visitors may have about your topic. Become the ultimate resource for your industry—then your customers won’t have a reason to visit anywhere else.

There are a few great examples out there of companies who have taken this approach: Google.com, Zillow.com, Amazon.com, Wikipedia.org, Craigslist.org and ESPN.com, just to name a few. These companies have accepted the challenge to become the ultimate resource in their given industry and have seen success because of it.

Quit trying to figure out the least you need to do to be successful. Ask yourself, what are my customers really looking for? What questions do they have? What is their ultimate goal? What concerns might they have? Provide them with answers and solutions to these questions and become the ultimate resource for your industry.