The most important factor to how well your google adwords advertising will do, hinges on how much competition you have. So think Niche, Niche, Niche!
The aim of good marketing, isn’t to get a tiny cake-crumb of traffic from an over competitive market. The aim is to get a chunky large slice (if not the whole cake) from a non-competitive market.
In this post, I am not going to be getting into teaching you how to find an uncompetitive niche area. That is really a whole other topic, (which I have already started to write). I am only covering how to write your adwords adverts here.
But do bear ‘Niche’ in mind. If the market you are in is very competitive, as a beginner, it will be very difficult to generate traffic. I should know. I made that mistake with my www.UsedCarsWorldwide.com website (my very first website which started out with a 0.4% click thorugh rate).
GETTING GOOD KEYWORDS
For the sake of having an example, lets make up a fictional niche website called www.makemoneytoday.com , a website whereby visitors can read articles on the latest types of money making ideas (and maybe buy an ebook or two). Lets say, you are now ready to start your adwords campaign.
You should first go to a free keyword search website called Overture here…
http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear…ry/suggestion/
… and type in your main keyword into the suggestion box. Overture will then give you a list of keywords and keyphrases that relate to your main keyword. Most importantly, it will tell you how many people searched for that phrase over the past month, in Yahoo.
Generally, whatever the number of searches in Yahoo, Google is two to three times bigger. So if 20,000 people searched for widgets in Yahoo, we can estimate that 40,000 to 60,000 searched for the same word in Google. If you want exact numbers for Google, you can use www.wordtracker.com although you have to pay for their service. It is a top quality tool however.
So for the website makemoneytoday.com, I typed into Overture the keyphrase ‘make money’, and these are the 10 most searched phrases that I got in return (the numbers beside the keywords show how many people searched for that phrase over the last month):
125982 make money
76147 make money online
45073 make money at home
19946 make money from home
12841 make money on the internet
11860 make money fast
11807 make money on ebay
10492 ways to make money
6133 we make money not art.com
5544 work at home make money
Now ideally, you need to have some 200 or more keywords, BUT whenever you are just starting a campaign, start out with just the 10 or 20 most popular and see how they perform. Afterwards, you can drip feed the remaining keywords into your google adwords keyword list.
PLEASE NOTE: The keyword phrase ‘Make Money’ has a very competive market. How do I know? Well, if you simply type the phrase ‘make money’ into google, take a look at the list of google adwords ads down the right hand side. Literally sit down and count them all. I started counting them, and grew bored after I’d counted 90 ads (and that was only on the first page). A compeitive market is any market that has over 50 or so advertisers in it. So in real terms, the keyword ‘make money’ would be a very difficult market to start out in. Not impossible, but very difficult.
ADDING YOUR KEYWORDS TO YOUR GOOGLE ADWORDS CAMPAIGN
When you start to write your adwords campaign, you are asked to type in all of the keywords you would like your adverts to show up for.
Now, when you input your list of keywords into your google adwords campaign, you don’t just, for example, input the keyword ‘make money’. You need to input that term in the following way…
[make money]
… encasing the word in [ ].
You then do the same for ALL of the other keywords, for example ‘make money online’, would be typed in as follows:
[make money online]
By using [ ] to encase your keywords, you are bidding on what is called an exact match. This means that when someone types in ‘make money song lyrics’, your advert won’t appear. Your ad will only appear when someone types in ‘make money’ and nothing else. We do this because that is the precise phrase that Overture has told us people have searched for.
By only bidding on exact match keywords, you can quickly work out precisely which keywords work and which ones don’t.
WRITING A KEYWORD RICH ADVERT
Now that we know our main keywords and phrases, we can begin to write an advert that will stand out and catch the customers eye.
The basic layout of an effective adwords advert, has four main parts to it:
1. The keyword rich title
2. The benefit with keywords
3. The feature
4. The capitalised display URL
For example, when you type in ‘make money’ into google search, this is one of the adverts that came up along the right hand side of the page:
�1000 a week anyone?
I’ve made �70,000 in two years!
Try it out absolutely risk free.
www.grahamlaurie.com
I am going to break it down and explain how I think it could maybe improved, whilst showing you how to layout your basic adwords ad…
1. The keyword rich title
�1000 a week anyone?
These are people who have searched for Make Money. Whenever your advert appears, the only parts of it that are highlighted are any words in your advert that match the keyphrase the visitor search for. In this advert, neither ‘Make’ nor ‘Money’ can be found anywhere in this ad!
This means that no part of the advert is highlighted, and this advert doesn’t stand out nor captures the attention of the customer. A better title would be something like, Make Money Online. Simple, but keyword rich, and much more likely to stand out. Also, he needs to capitalise each word of the title.
2.The benefit with keywords
I’ve made �70,000 in two years!
No benefits offered. Whether he likes it or not I, as a potential customer, don’t care how much HE has earned. I simply want to know how much I will earn.
The reason why we put the benefit in the second line is because people usually read the title, the first line, then skip the third and fourth line. So if you don’t tell the customer why your website will help them instantly, you won’t get them to visit your website at all. Also, he needs to capitalise each word of the second line. A better 2nd line would maybe read something like, Increase Your Wealth In Five Easy Steps. I have offered a benefit that will draw you in instantly.
3. The feature
Try it out absolutely risk free.
If he had told the reader what benefit he was offering them in his second line, this third line would probably be a clear feature. But without a benefit rich line, the reader simply has no idea what it is that he is offering ‘risk free’.
Also, once again, each word has not been capitalised. Maybe a better line would be something like, Online Resource To Making Money.
4. The capitalised display URL
www.grahamlaurie.com
The domain has nothing to do with the main keywords. Also it is hard to read, since we don’t know where one word ends and the other begins. Also, unless your name is Bill Gates, your name isn’t going to attract much interest when it comes to making money.
If he were to use this domain name for his product, he should present it so that each word is capitalised, like www.GrahamLaurie.com, otherwise he would be better off getting a domain name (or a sub domain name) that has the keywords in it, for example www.GrahamLaurie.com/MakeMoney/ would do well, since the keywords are in the URL.
So if we apply what we have learnt so far about writing a google adwords adverts, his original advert which currently looks like this:
�1000 a week anyone?
I’ve made �70,000 in two years!
Try it out absolutely risk free.
www.grahamlaurie.com
… would have a layout more like this…
Make Money Online
Increase Your Wealth In Five Easy Steps
Online Resource To Making Money
www.GrahamLaurie.com/MakeMoney/
That is just a rough draft, but you can see the difference. The keywords are in there (which means they are highlighted, thus making your ad stand out).
ALWAYS SPILT TEST YOUR ADVERTS
Once you have written your first adwords advert that you are happy with, you should immediately sit down and write another one.
Now when you run your advert, you don’t just run the one advert, you run BOTH of those adverts side by side, simultaneously.
Whichever one performs better after around 20-30 clicks or so, you keep that one and pause the poorer performing advert.
You then write yet another advert, which you now run side by side with the original better performing advert.
The aim is to keep trying to write an advert that does better than the last one. Eventually your click through rate will increase, because you are constantly improving your adverts. This is what is meant by split testing.
ALSO NOTE: When you do set up your advert, there is an option where you can choose how much you wish to bid per click. Never accept their recommended bid. Always put in your own bid.
The recommended amount I would put in is $0.10 per click. A beginner mistake is to bid what they recommend, and this will cost you a lot if you do.
The highest bidder for a certain keyword or phrase will then have the site ranked as number 1 in the PPC Search Engines followed by the second and third highest bidder, up to the last number that have placed a bid on the same keyword or phrase. Your ads then will appear prominently on the results pages based on the dollar amount bid you will agree to pay per click. PPC is one of the four basic types of Search Engines. PPC is also one of the most cost-effective ways of targeted internet advertising. According to Forbes magazine, PPC or Pay Per Click, accounts to 2 billion dollars a year and is expected to increase to around 8 billion dollars by the year 2008. These engines create listings and rate them based on a bid amount the website owner is willing to pay for each click from that search engine. Advertisers bid against each other to receive higher ranking for a specific keyword or phrase.
PPC is not only a source of generating easy profits; it can also help you promote your own site. Most of the programs allow the commissions received to be spent for advertising with them instantly and with no minimum earning requirement. This is one of the more effective ways to exchange your raw visitors for targeted surfers who has more tendencies to purchase your products and services.
Think about it. Where can you get all these benefits while already generating some income for your site? Knowing some of the more useful tools you can use for your affiliate program is not a waste of time. They are rather a means of earning within an earning.
But with millions of websites out there being visited by millions of computer users, how can you make sure that your ad can be seen by your target customers and that your leads will be followed by these users? Here are a few tips.