Want to boost your paid search clicks without increasing your budget? Of course you do! Mike Fleming of Search Engine Guide has advice for accomplishing just that. His tip for increasing clicks is to discover untapped markets that can become successful by developing correlations between what you offer and what searchers may be typing.  The idea is, people don’t always know what they are searching for and you may be able to distract them away from the information they thought they wanted. By running groups of experimental words you may uncover less expensive markets that will work for your business.

In the anticipated merger of Yahoo and Microsoft, many PPC pundits are saying don’t panic; simply transition your Yahoo account to Microsoft adCenter.  According to Brad Geddes at BGTheory.com, if you have a strong Yahoo account, it will be easy to transition your PPC campaign to Microsoft.  And even if you have a nonexistent or weak Yahoo account, you should still look at joining Microsoft adCenter, especially if you have an AdWords account.  It is simple to export your AdWords account to Microsoft, and in fact in his blog, Brad Geddes also links to a Microsoft adCenter blog post that gives you a step-by-step of how to export AdWords to adCenter.

It happens to everyone.  You’ve just written the perfect ad, but there’s a problem – one line is stuck at 36 characters and will not budge.  In these situations, there’s a lot of temptation to cut out the punctuation at the line break. However, as David Szetela at Clix tells us, adwriters need to remember that AdWords ad line lengths can change.  Leaving out a period may look nice in your desktop editor, but as soon as the screen starts to shift online, your beautiful ad is now gobbligook.  You want your ads to always be clear and enticing to your viewers – any ad that has the potential to look unprofessional is a big risk to your PPC campaign.

Bing is encouraging user loyalty with a new Bing Rewards program, where participants can win prizes based on how often they search.  George Michie of The Rimm-Kaufman Group explains the program’s catch to the tune of some great Beatles references.

So you’re down to about a month before the big Yahoo! Microsoft merger…What are you doing to make sure your campaigns don’t tank when they go live in MSN? Once the merger is complete, you’re looking at almost one-third of the search queries in the U.S.; advertiser competition is going to spike for sure. But don’t stress! Tina Kelleher with Microsft adCenter gives some great tips on how to handle this transition in her blog.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land gets a nod this week for his article on Google and Apple extending their search deal. This is somewhat related to PPC right? Last I checked, when selecting a mobile platform in AdWords, iPhone is still the only device mentioned by name.  It’s good the two companies get along. However, the real reason this article makes the cut is because I heard the term “frenemies” for the first time today at lunch (completely unrelated to the Internet) and go figure, it shows up in an article I’m reading this afternoon. Coincidence wins today!