Month: March 2010

Google Adwords

Pay Per Click Basics

Pay Per Click or PPC is a way to advertise to a specific group of people who are searching for your information using keywords or a keyword phrase. It’s called Pay Per Click because you, as a business owner, only pay for the advertisement when someone clicks on it.

The clicks are good because they’re clicking on your URL and heading on over to your website where you can close the sale and make a profit.

There are different PPC programs through various search engines and companies however the most popular PPC service is Google AdWords.

It’s free to participate in AdWords however, before you to sign up there are a few questions you’ll want to answer including:

1. How many people are looking for your products or services? Keyword tools will help you find this information and it’s key to creating an effective PPC campaign.

2. How much will your click’s cost? Google’s traffic estimator will tell you how much it’ll cost you each time someone clicks on your ad. This is important because you can quickly spend thousands of dollars and if that’s not in your budget you need to design your campaign carefully.

3. Who are your competitors? Using Google, search for your keywords and pay attention to the ads that pop up in the right hand column of your search results. These are your competition. Study them carefully. Scan through the first couple of pages. When you see an ad that’s a repeat, you’ve gone through your competition. If there are more than 50 ads, you may want to reconsider a PPC campaign with those keywords.

Setting Up Your First Ad

Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to include in your ad, it’s time to write your first PPC ad. AdWords has a strict character limit. You get 25 keywords for your headline, 35 each for the next two lines of text, and then your URL. This means it’s time to get creative. You want a headline that captures attention and hopefully promises a benefit and then two sentences that inspire curiosity, evoke emotion, and motivate clicks through to your website.

Each PPC ad you create will be optimized for very specific keywords and should thus send readers to a relevant web page. If, for example, you have a PPC ad selling a dog training eBook and people who click through land on a page that sells dog care information you’re not going to have the same conversion rate as if you sent them directly to a sales page for that dog training eBook.

Once your ad is written, the rest is easy. Simply log onto or create your Google AdWords account and follow the steps. Set your budget low (you can always adjust it), create your ad, enter your billing information and you’re good to go. Oh, one final thing. Track the success of your PPC ads. You can fine tune them for optimal results, delete them and start over or add to your campaign.

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Google Adwords

March PPC Challenge

This month I am participating in Matt Levenhagen’s Blast Challenge 11. What is that, you may ask? Every few months, Matt challenges the members of his campaign blasts forum to challenge themselves and do 100 PPC blasts/campaigns in a span of 5 weeks.

It’s an intense 5 weeks, but the results are usually incredible. As a matter of fact, the very first blast challenge I participated in helped me find my first wildly successful PPC campaign, and I only did about 10 campaigns, not 100. Here is a snapshot of that campaign:

successful PPC snapshot

This month my challenge is to do 50 PPC campaigns (even though I participate in Matt’s challenges, I am in the group that only do what we can). I’ve never done 50 campaigns in a month: my highest was 35 I think.

So, here is what I will do: every Monday for the duration of this challenge, I’ll post my progress here: how many PPC campaigns I did so far, what network I used (CJ, SAS, etc.), if my campaigns are direct to merchant or to landing pages, and my results for that week.

I’ll also concentrate a lot of my blog posts on how to succeed with pay per click this month.

I hope you’ll follow along with me, and if you’d like to try a campaign blast of your own, try out Matt’s blast guide and forum: there are no contracts, and the knowledge you’ll gain from doing a blast challenge may change your life. Come on: join me!

start building your AdWords business today!

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Challenges

February Challenge – Did I Meet It?

At the beginning of this month I challenged myself publicly to increase traffic to this site by 75%, and to accomplish that, I was going to do several things.

First, I was going got post at least 5 times a week, and since the day of the challenge (February 7th) I posted 19 posts, so I met that challenge.

Second, I was going to submit one article a week to a few article directories, and only submitted one, so I fell short on that one.

Third, I was going to guest post at least once, and I did 5 guest posts, so I exceeded that.

So, did all that help me increase my visitors 75%? Unfortunately, no. I fell short by a couple of hundred visitors. Here is a snapshot of my February visitors.

February 2010 stats

What I learned form this month’s challenge? I can guest post! And if I can, so can anyone else. Yes, it takes me a long time to come up with a good guest post, but the rewards are incredible!

Here are my guest posts for February:

Keyword Research with Shopping.com

How to Select Keywords for a Pay Per Click Campaign

5 Online Business Models You Can Start Right Now

Follow Me Buttons on Sidebar

How To Do Keyword Research With EBay

I also learned that posting daily on my blog is too much for me: I’d rather write quality content than try to push lots of content that doesn’t meet my quality standards.

In the end, I am happy with what I accomplished this past month, and I will continue to come up with monthly challenges to grow my business.

How about you?

Edited to add: I actually did one more guest post, so a total of 6. Not sure how I forgot it. Here it is: Plus Size Wedding Dress Niche, a guest post similar to my own free niche research.

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