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The last time we talked about Pay-Per-Click advertising, I
told you about the massive advantage paid
advertising has over traditional search engine marketing. It can all
be summed up into two points:
- PPC advertising allows you to bring traffic to your
website in just minutes .
- PPC pays for itself AND your other
SEM expenses (like link-building) while leaving you a decent
profit margin .
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Yes, PPC advertising can really take your ads live, and bring
your website traffic, in just a few minutes. In fact, once you have
set up your advertising campaign (we'll talk about this a little
later) and gone "live", it takes less than a minute for the first
visitor to show up at your website.
And this is not random traffic. We are talking about
laser-targeted visitors who are actively looking
for the services that YOU provide. To take a real world example -
instead of promoting your newly-opened restaurant, if you had the
option to implement a marketing strategy that would bring you
hungry customers to your doorstep, wouldn't you
take it up?
Of course you would!
PPC advertising is the Internet version of this scenario. It
will bring you "hungry" searchers - people who have a "need" for the
information and / or solutions that your business
provides.
In the rest of this article, I'll spend some time telling you
a bit more about Google AdWords, and then cover some basic
strategies that will help you succeed at Google AdWords in
particular. If you aren't using AdWords as yet, I would
strongly recommend that you switch over (I'll tell
you why in a minute). If you are already using AdWords, or are
contemplating starting your PPC campaign, then read this article
very carefully - it includes techniques that form the foundations of
a successful PPC campaign.
In other words, to benefit from the methods below, it doesn't
matter what PPC engine you use - the basics remain the same.
Keyword
Elite: Generate 1000s Of Keywords In Seconds!
Many people have asked me
why I support AdWords when there are much cheaper alternatives, and
also why I choose AdWords over Overture (now known as Yahoo Search
Marketing).
I've addressed the first question in part 1 of this two-part
series on PPC - while AdWords and Overture may be more "expensive"
in terms of cost per click, they are far more effective than other
PPC engines when it comes to the following:
- Market Reach - combined, Overture and
Google AdWords cover over 80% of the search
engine market.
- Quality of Service - AdWords is
far easier to use and set up compared to any of
its competition, even when compared to Overture (which requires a
manual review of your keywords and ads, leading to a 3-5 day delay
before your campaign can actually go live).
- Quality of Traffic - The top 2 PPC engines
bring in significantly better quality traffic -
especially when you measure traffic in terms of conversions. Add
to that the fact that these two are less
afflicted with click fraud than the rest
of the industry and you have your case made.
Between AdWords and Overture, there is little to choose
except for the emphasis on user-friendliness that
Google maintains. Not only do you get instant traffic, it is
ridiculously easy to make campaign-wide changes to your ads, and
this is a big concern when you are managing several ad campaigns or
have a large list of keywords.
Now, let's look at how to guarantee that your "instant
traffic" translates into " instant sales
".
Quite like search engine
optimization, PPC advertising is a lot about getting the basics
right. If you have solid foundations, your campaigns will invariably
be a success. Let's go through the core elements of any PPC
campaign.
Keyword
Research
When compiling your keyword list, consider using a
professional tool such as WordTracker or NicheBot instead of coming up
with all the keywords yourself. Why? Because quite frankly, no one
has the time to manually compile a list of several hundred keywords.
Also, these tools will tell you exactly what people are
searching for AND give you a lot more options that
you may never have even thought of. Using either WordTracker or
NicheBot, you can easily compile a keyword list of even a thousand
keywords in under an hour.
Another tool that I highly recommend is a program called Keyword Locator. You can
have a look at that program below. It does a heck of a lot more than
WordTracker and Nichebot.
=> http://www.keywordlocator.com/
Once you have your keyword list ready, break it down into
sub-lists . Essentially, instead of lumping
together all the keywords, you can use the main keywords as
"headers" build your list around them. These headers will be the
keywords receiving the most traffic. To give you an example, take an
online soccer store. Possible headers would include "soccer store",
"soccer equipment", "soccer goals", "soccer accessories", "soccer
merchandise", "soccer nets" and even "soccer supply". All these
terms have hundreds of related keywords
.
What's the advantage of creating sub-lists? For one, it helps
you focus your campaign even further - you can send
visitors clicking on your "soccer goals" ads to an internal page on
your store that is dedicated to soccer goals, and so on. Second,
your campaign becomes more manageable - if one
theme of keywords is not working well, you can improve it without
affecting the rest of the lists.
However, the most important reason to using sub-lists is that
you can create ads that are customized towards
your header keywords. An ad for "soccer equipment" will not
be as effective as an ad for "soccer nets" if they both appeared
next to search results for the term "cheap soccer nets". Customized
ads will give you higher click-through rates ,
and a high ad CTR can help lower overall costs .
Find
High Paying Adsense Keywords!
Ad Copy
Your ad copy will make or break your PPC campaign, so it is
important to get it just right. There are two sections of your ad,
the title (or the heading), and the ad
description . Apart from adhering to the basics
(place your sub-list "header" once in the title, and once in the
description), there is a lot to learn about writing winning ad copy.
Think of PPC ads as intensely summarized version of
a regular sales letter - approach ad copy with that
view will help you write better.
The ad copy has two key components - a riveting title/header,
and a compelling description. Taking Google's example, you have
space to write 25 characters in the title, and two lines of 35
characters each in the description. Eventually, writing winning ad
copy boils down to convincing the skeptical
searcher into clicking on your ad (amongst several others) in a
maximum of 95 characters.
Put each ad that you write through a stricter test than you
would put your sales letter. The title is the key to attracting the
searcher's attention - if it contains the keywords that are being
searched for, the keywords will show up in bold and
help make the ad more visible. The description, on the other hand,
has just two short lines to convince the searcher to click on the
ad. Focus on the user and the benefits your website
/ product will provide. If it helps, you can make a bulleted list of
key terms that highlight your business and spread them throughout
your ads.
Use the title to grab the searcher's attention
, and then reel them in with your ad
description. If you follow the principles you have used to write
your sales letter, you'd be at an advantage compared to most of your
competition.
Ad
Optimization
Setting up the ad campaign is, believe it or not, the easy
part. Managing it is tricky (though your work is reduced if you get
the basics right). There are two main challenges facing a PPC
campaign:
- You don't know how well your ads will work
- You don't know which keywords will convert
into sales
The result is that managing a PPC campaign is a
continuing process of tweaking your ads based on
results - it ultimately involves regular improvements in your ad
copy, to keyword lists and maybe even in your website.
The main aim of managing a PPC campaign is to constantly try
to increase your CTR . While the quick and
dirty way to do this is to pay high enough to rank on the top
of the ads list, this can easily break your budget. A better
option is to regularly review your ads, weed
out the ones that don't work and improve on the ones that do
work. Like sales letters, this involves reusing the
working elements (titles and descriptions) and modifying
them slightly to test if the CTR improves.
Learn how
I quadrupled my Adsense earnings!
One of the best sources
of information on how to succeed with AdWords is Google itself. The
next two resources will go a long way towards
Google
AdWords Help Center
This is the information center for
everything AdWords. This will answer all of your newbie questions,
and all of your " getting started " questions as
well.
Google
AdWords Demos and Guides
If you prefer watching how-to
videos, then click on the above link to go to the AdWords Demos
page. The page contains a series of Flash presentations that will
guide you through the basics right up to the advanced
strategies of managing your account.
Running a Google Adwords campaign involves a lot more than
just knowing how to write good ad copy (although
this is the most important step). You need to understand the nuances
of bid management , ad optimization (especially how
to set up ad controls and how to use them to
improve your CTR), and eventually, how to track
your clicks and measure how they translate into
sales .
The best book I've found so far that answers all those
"how-to" questions AND gives you advanced strategies for turning
even "completely failed" ad campaigns around in a matter of hours,
is Perry
Marshall's Guide to Google AdWords.
I
can't possibly go into what this course teaches, here... But, I
highly suggest you visit the link below and atleast sign up for his
free eCourse. Afterall, it's completely free. Perry's
Definitive Guide To Google Adwords is known in the "internet
marketing world" to be the Adwords Bible... So, chances are
you've already purchased and gone through his course, but if not,
quit wasting time and losing money with Adwords. Grab a copy of his
course and start making money.
Click the link below and grab a copy of his free eCourse
now.
=> http://www.seoelite.com/GoogleAdwordsGuide.htm
Until
next time, I hope your businesses are as profitable as
ever!
All
the best,
Brad
Callen
Professional SEO
Purchase SEO Elite: SEO Software
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