Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are very popular right now, and Google AdWords is the king. I’m actually going to focus on AdWords and pretty much ignore the others, because I haven’t had much experience with Overture, Yahoo! Search Marketing, etc. – I haven’t needed it, because AdWords is so powerful.
Keywords
Keywords are available in many places on the ‘net, including through the Wealthy Affiliate and Nichebot.com sites I mentioned earlier. But once you have a keyword list, what do you do with it? How do you make money? You have to spend time with it, group the keywords into groups that are alike. For instance, if you’re doing a Dog Breed niche, and you have the following keywords:
Collie Training
Spaniel Potty Training
Collie Potty Training Lassie Dog
Training Spaniel Basic
Commands Lassie Dog
Black Lab
Yellow Lab
You’ll want to break them down into their own little “groups:”
Collie Training
Collie Potty Training
–
Spaniel Potty Training
Spaniel Basic Commands
–
Lassie Dog
Lassie Dog Training
–
Black Lab
Yellow Lab
Note that I didn’t put the Lassie group with the Collie group, because the keywords are different. Now, you need to break them down further for your AdWords campaigns, because you’ll want your ads to be as targeted as possible.
Collie Training
Collie Potty Training
–
Spaniel Potty Training
Spaniel Basic Commands
–
Lassie Dog
Lassie Dog Training
–
Black Lab
Yellow Lab
Now, notice that I left the collie group and the lassie group together. That’s because it will be easy to create a set of ads that fit both keywords, and that will save me a little time.
Once you have broken your keyword lists down, you’ll want to set up your AdWords account, and create a new campaign. In the campaign, you’re going to create new ad groups for each group of keywords that you have. Time consuming, yes, but it will save you TONS of money in the long run.
In fact, if you don’t split them up, you will have tons of “untargeted” ads, and Google will penalize you with much higher bid prices and lower positions. Put a keyword list of 1000+ keywords, and your bid prices will be $1-$5/click minimum, and that will still put you at the very bottom of the list. That’s just a huge waste of your money.
Now that you’ve got your ad groups, you’re going to want to create the ads. Here’s what I suggest that you use:
Headline: Keywords if possible
Line 1: Keywords and description
Line 2: Keywords again or finish the description
Display URL : linkdomain.com/keyword(s)
Real URL: whatever the link is
Notice that I recommend you put your keywords on every line. That will increase your relevance, and therefore get you higher positions for the same price, and it will increase your click-through ratio (CTR), which will also raise your position without increasing your price. I have a few campaigns running where I pay $.02-$.04 for the #1 position out of 5-10 advertisers because my ads are more targeted and my CTR is higher. I’m quite sure the others are paying upwards of $.10/click, too.