I already have SEOElite and KeywordElite, from Brad Callen.
My other splurge this year was upgrading to Pro member on SEOMoz.
And the final tool in my artillery was going to be a keyword spy tool. A costly monthly service.

But now Brad Callen has gone and created a free AdWords keyword spy tool that will let anyone spy on what keywords their competitors are advertising with!

PPC Web Spy lets you see other keywords and ads used by your competitors.

Let’s say you are searching for “dog training”.
When you install this PPC spy tool into your (Firefox) browser, it creates a button under each ad.
Click the button and you can see the other keywords this person is also advertising for.
PLUS THE AVERAGE POSITION, COST PER CLICK, CLICKS PER DAY AND COST PER DAY!

This is absolutely priceless information. From a free tool!

One of the few times I really need to use upper case exclamation marks in my blog. It’s that good.

If you advertise on Google AdWords, you really need this tool.

PPC Web Spy

Another winner from Brad Callen.

I’ve dabbled with Google AdWords advertising for personal sites on a small budget over the years, with a fair bit of success. My most targetted traffic I get for around 6 cents a click, and has been as low as 3 cents. It’s very targetted. So I keep it chugging along.

About two weeks ago I thought I’d experiment with a more expensive area – the “work from home” field. Clicks are pretty expensive if you want to rank well – even $1.50 for an extremely targetted ad and landing page rarely gets page one results.

Based on conversion cost, it looks like being worthwhile so far. Money I’ve spent has been completely recouped with interest.

But the spam has been oppressive.

My goal was to get people to enter their contact details, so I could follow them up. I had an autoresponder in place, but would additionally contact people personally. I have a contact form to collect details, so I don’t expose my email address.

It was an old site I hadn’t touched for years. It wasn’t ranking on search engines for my preferred words (given that I hadn’t maintained it), so it wasn’t getting any traffic.

So now I am paying for traffic.

And I appear to be paying for abuse and obscenities.

Over half the paid traffic contains profanities. People who have clicked on my paid ads at Google, purely to enter their obscene descriptions, linking back to their obscene sites.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether it is automated traffic or not. But if it is, the fact that robots are visiting sites advertised on Google AdWords, and I am being charged for it, doesn’t seem right.

I validate server-side for valid email addresses. Most seem to be a .ru email address.
But it gets my goat that Google doesn’t seem able to prevent this.

I’ve emailed Google to see what the procedure is. Surely they should allow chargebacks for obvious spam sent through paid links.

I wanted to be able to recommend AdWords as a good way of generating leads for this field. But I have to hesitate, knowing that they would be receiving filthy responses.

I do get spam from other sites I own, even those with captcha systems to validate input. But none of them receive the obcene spam I get from the work from home keywords.

Would love to know what others are experiencing.

In the last two weeks I’ve been having a lot of FireFox crashes. Strangely they have happened 9 out of 10 times whilst using Google AdWords.

Not what you expect from two leading software providers.

But the absolute winner for me has to be Macromedia Dreamweaver. Without fail, if I import an STE (site definition) from our standard library at work, it will crash. I take care to do each click slowly, and ever since I move to Vista Premium this year, Dreamweaver has crashed without fail doing an STE import.

It usually takes about 3 or 4 attempts to import the STE. Maybe it need to warm up the wiring. Doesn’t make sense.

Vista has caused a few problems for me:

My old HP scanner doesn’t have a driver for Vista, so it’s basically a piece of junk now.
My original Canon IXUS camera doesn’t have a driver for Vista.

I finally managed to download a version of Palm Desktop for Vista, to run with my old Palm m505.
However the Documents to Go program that runs for Vista, doesn’t cater for the old version of Palm OS I am running, so I had to ditch that.
Luckily the Adobe Reader for Palm worked, so I can still copy PDFs from my laptop to my Palm, so I can read them on the bus on the way to work.
And Avantgo still works, so I can download the Sydney Morning Herald titles onto my Palm, again for the bus.
Not a lot of memory left though.

I’m dreaming of a luxury HTC Touch SmartPhone though. Feel welcome to drop one my way, if you’ve got a free one.