photo credit: ul_Marga

Keywords. Now, they have been a real stumbling block for me. I can generate lists of keywords. Even I know where to find the Google Keyword Tool and to enter terms in to find more terms. Making sense of keywords and how to use them, that has been my stumbling point.

I can’t just blow the concept off though. Keywords are the building blocks of search engines. When people enter terms in the search engines, those keywords determine what sites are going to be found and displayed for the person’s search. Their relevancy on each site determines which sites will be displayed first. Therein lies my stumbling block.

How do I move that list of keywords from list to relevancy?

I’ve read lots of material about keywords, much of it really well written yet, it seemed most writers just left it up to me to understand them so well, that I’d just know the right keywords to use. I’d know which ones I’d want to optimize for. I really had started to think I was a bit thick, I always seemed to hit the wall.

I often opted for throw a bunch of keywords at the wall and hope something stuck. Not a very effective use of time and resources.

Finally, Some Keyword Light!

Last week I stumbled across an article on the Clickbank blog which gave me a Eureka moment. The two part article, Moneywords, Your Key to the Keyword Kingdom, is one of the best laid out articles I’ve read. What really got me excited that I had found a guide I could understand and use was the moneyword matrix found in part two.

I’ve used that guide to create my keyword list for the project I’m currently working on putting together. I did the list manually, which took me most of a day to go through, find the number of competing sites and then apply the matrix to the list to find the moneywords.

Niche Profit Classroom

The author of the Moneywords article is Adam Short, the creator of the Niche Profit Classroom. Inside that membership site is an automated tool which would have cut my keyword search time to a fraction. Man, I was SOO tempted to spend the $1 for the two week trial just to get at that tool!!

Alas, one of the goals I laid out for myself was to not spend any more money on tools, books, software or even domains until I have used what I have to generate some actual income. I slowly put away my ‘buy’ urge and settled back to do the hard slugging until I can meet my goal.

I’ll be talking more about Niche Profit Classroom in a future post. It is definitely on my tool want list for when I get my first income from my efforts. You don’t have to wait, so go and visit there now and let me know what you think.

So, how are you with keywords? Do you have a handle on them? Are you using them?

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Those All Important Keywords

Online advertising has rapidly grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, with Google’s recent $900 million deal to advertise on MySpace an example of it’s huge demand and popularity.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is the most cost-effective form of advertising so it’s vitally important that all aspects of advertising campaigns are managed to achieve maximum return on investment (ROI). Google AdWords is the most popular method of PPC and is an excellent way of increasing targeted website traffic, providing the advertising costs can be justified by ensuring the clicks turn into sales.

Nobody gets it all right the first time and most of the best advertising campaigns are developed over time. Below are 10 tips to get started and help to get the best performance from your Google AdWords advertising budget.

1) Keyword selection

Good keyword selection is essential to ensure you can attract users who are interested in your products and with the potential to become customers. It can be very easy to get carried away and select the most popular keywords recommended by Google AdWords and the highest in terms of clicks from the estimated traffic tool. But remember traffic is not your main goal, a successful advertising campaign is based on bringing quality traffic with the potential to bring sales to your site at a cost that can achieve a positive ROI. To help keep track of the performance of your ad campaigns it is useful to manage the selected keywords in multiple AdGroups and this will also help you to use ad text specific to each keyword.

2) Where to target your ad’s

The best performing campaigns generally target the search network which for AdWords means that your ad will appear on Google and it’s network of partner websites. You also have the option of advertising on Google’s content network which includes all AdSense publishers, clicks from the content network can normally be attained at a lower CPC (cost per click) but this generally doesn’t convert into sales as well as the search network and is more likely to receive fraudulent clicks. The content network is normally a good option if your main objective is increased traffic as opposed to converting sales.

It is also important to define the geographic locations you are targeting to produce sales from. If you are a business which only delivers within the UK there is no need to advertise your website outside of the UK as this would be a waste of a large proportion of your clicks. In some cases it is essential to restrict your ad’s visibility further than country level by setting a city or region to advertise in, for example a taxi company in the Oxfordshire region would only want to advertise to users within areas they pickup from.

For companies targeting worldwide users it can be advantageous to create individual AdGroup’s or campaigns for each country. This way sales can be tracked in order to define which countries are producing sales and which need working on or should be dropped.

3) Reviewing your competitors

Define what makes your company stand out from your competitors and try to find a niche in your market that users will be interested in. If your ad can stand out from the rest it is more likely to be clicked. Another good method to stand out from your customers would be to find out if they display their prices within the ad, if this is the case and your prices are lower it would be a good idea to display them as well to entice the user to click your ad instead.

4) Using effective matching options

Most optimized campaigns would use the exact matching option on all keywords to ensure that they are only bidding for that individual search. This is effective for ensuring you are only bidding on relevant keywords and improve your click through rate (CTR). CTR is a very important factor in deciding the cost per click (CPC) so the higher rate you can achieve, the less you are likely to pay for that keyword.

Using only the exact matching option can have the negative effect of only receiving a low amount of traffic as you are only targeting a specific audience. In addition, to attract a wider range of searches it may be worth adding the phrase and broad match versions of your exact match keywords. As these are less specific they are likely to achieve a lower CTR and conversion rate but will increase the amount of clicks. It is important to use the negative matching option effectively with phrase and broad matches to filter out any unrelated searches.

5) Managing your budget

In order to get the best from your daily budget I would suggest on starting with a low budget to begin with. This way you can ensure you are bidding on the right keywords at a cost-effective price without losing too much money. I would strongly suggest defining a separate value for content network bids as these should be achieved at a lower value than the search network. Once a positive ROI is being achieved you can then think about increasing the daily budget.

6) Choosing your Ad Text

Entice users to your site with a genuine interest in your business by describing what you can offer and why it can benefit them. Whenever possible it is also useful to raise your quality score by including the keywords within the ad title or description and by using action keywords such as register, sign-up or browse so that the user knows what to expect on the next page. A high quality score will help to improve the relevancy of your ad which can result in your ad ranking higher than a competitor with a larger bid. For large accounts a quick trick is to use {KeyWord:Default Text}, this will insert the keyword from your AdGroup into your ad text providing that it is within the character limit, otherwise it will use the default text defined.

7) Selecting your destination URL

The Google AdWords algorithm now reviews the quality of landing pages so it’s more important than ever to ensure your destination URL is relevant to the keyword bid upon. It is also important to make sure that the user is directed to the webpage they expect to see, rather than being taken to the homepage and having to find the right page for themselves.

Conversion tracking

In order to monitor the performance of your account it is important to track conversions so that you can review where sales or leads are coming from to help manage the campaigns based upon results. A cost per conversions value will then be displayed within your reports which will help to make key decisions (such as changing bids, dropping keywords or ad variations) easier. If you are running any other, non-AdWords, advertising campaign you can also set-up a cross-channel to track the conversions from these as well, for example Yahoo! Search Marketing. Research has shown that Google users are generally more likely to purchase online and this is normally reflected with a greater conversion rate from AdWords, although there are advantages to advertising using both methods such as exposure to a wider range of websites and lower CPC’s.

9) Using Reports

Once your campaigns are up and running you’ll need to monitor it’s performance, making the most of the Google AdWords reports to help make decisions based upon results. The reports will help to visually display detailed statistics on your clicks to show where the ad’s are performing well and areas which can be improved upon or should be dropped. Examples of improving the accounts performance are by monitoring conversion rates, cost per conversions, CPC’s and CTR’s of both keywords and ad variations, ensuring the CPC is being achieved at the lowest possible value while still attaining the desired amount of traffic and most importantly making sure the account is cost-effective.

10) Website analysis tracking

Once your campaigns are up and running you will need to monitor how your users view your website. Google Analytics is excellent for it’s AdWords integration, displaying user stats to find out the users location, search engine, search term and the most popular links clicked on your webpage.

About the Author:

Kevin Gibbons is a Google AdWords Qualified Professional, please check out Kevin’s website http://www.seoptimise.com for more information about Google AdWords management.

Read more articles by: Kevin Gibbons

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

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10 Tips To Getting Started With Google Adwords

– Rosalind Gardiner, guest column

I like Google Adsense. It contributes a nice little chunk of change to my income each and every month.

That said, I don’t and won’t follow the lead of those whose sites earn only through Google Adsense.

What happens when their Adsense accounts are shut down by Google? It does happen, and they’re left scrambling to replace lost income!

Don’t believe me?

Try clicking on your own site’s Google Adsense links once or twice and see how fast Google shuts down your Adsense account. (No, don’t really do that!)

Does it make sense to build an entire site around financial products to make a few bucks on Adsense clicks, when you can earn up to $40 for a completed credit card application?

Not to me, it doesn’t.

I use Google Adsense to supplement my affiliate income, not replace it.

Basically, it comes down to value. Value for you, and value for your visitors.

Sites that monetize only with Adsense aren’t getting real value from their site’s real estate.

Too, it’s important to me that my visitors find information of value to them on my sites, and I do that by offering balanced product reviews and articles on the related topic.

If after reading my material, they’re not interested in the product offerings, then perhaps they’ll see an Adwords ad that captures their interest.

Placing Google Adsense on your site is a strategy that will put money in your pockets even if your visitors don’t buy.

However, in the same way you need to be smart about choosing lucrative affiliate programs, you also want to do your homework when monetizing topics with Adsense.

For example, I was recently re-reading some information about under-represented niche topics with huge markets.

One of the topics suggested as a winner was ‘snakes‘.

I found that hard to believe, so I did my own research.

The term ‘snakes’ had 152,857 searches at Overture and its partners in January, so yes, that’s a pretty sizeable interest in ‘snakes’.

OK, but who’s your market? Kids looking for snake pictures for a school project? People who want to buy snakes? Someone who wants to visit Snake River?

What are you going to sell? Snakes? The game, ‘Snake’? A $10 book on which you make a 15% commission? A $60 poster from allposters.com on which you earn a 30% commission seemed to be the best bet, but how many people want to pay $60 for snake posters?

To me, that’s not enough interest or commission potential to build a site around ‘snakes’.

So, what about incorporating Adsense to boost potential profitability?

Well, search Google for ‘snakes’. See what comes up in the Google Adwords column?

NOTHING!

If you want to monetize with Adsense, you have to pick topics whose Adwords advertisers spend mega-bucks per click.

How do you figure out what those topics are?

Easy!

If you haven’t already done so, open up a Google Adwords account and create a new campaign. Add a list of keywords (one niche topic at a time), then click on ‘estimate traffic’. The resulting page will show you the average cost per click for each keyword.

Make note of the most expensive words in that list and optimize your pages for those phrases.

THAT’s how you’ll really profit with Google Adsense.

Warning! Warning! Warning!

Once you find a lucrative topic that is projected to cost you $36,987.57 per day, don’t forget to pause that campaign, or delete it altogether!

Author’s Resource:
Article by Rosalind Gardner, author of the best-selling “Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online“. To learn how you too can succeed in Internet and affiliate marketing, please visit http://NetProfitsToday.com

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How to REALLY Profit with Google Adsense

I received a note from Google over the weekend. It informed me:

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have
been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of
third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit
your site. Such programs may include, but are not limited to auto-surf,
pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.

As a reminder, any method of generating invalid clicks or impressions
is strictly prohibited by our Terms & Conditions and program policies:

I was rather startled to receive it for a couple of reasons, the most important being that I really haven’t generated all that much income from Adsense to even have expected to show up on their radar for anything.

But that is maybe the good news in that if I’m making some errors, then best to catch them now then to suddenly discover that I’ve been generating income in a truly dodgy way. So, I took a look over my sites (I currently have four displaying Adsense ads) and couldn’t find anything that I could see could be taken as methods of generating invalid clicks or impressions.

Later that evening as I was watching TV and doing some surfing via the traffic exchanges I have joined to help boost traffic, it dawned on me they may be the problem. I dropped a note off to Google inquiring about them. Considering that on most sites effort is made to place Google above the fold (on the first screen) it would be logical that traffic created through traffic exchanges could be seen as an improper method.

A day or so later, back came this response:

We understand that you would like to have more traffic visiting your site. However, we do not endorse or encourage the use of any traffic exchange programs for this purpose.

We recommend that you exercise caution when using traffic exchange programs to ensure that you do not violate the AdSense Terms and Conditions and that you do not artificially inflate your pageviews or clicks. Please note that AdSense participants are solely responsible for verifying that any tools or software used in conjunction with AdSense do not violate the AdSense Terms and Conditions.

So, does seem that Google isn’t happy with traffic exchanges. Fair enough, I removed the sites from the exchanges which were displaying Adsense. Since the exchanges have brought me traffic but neither buyers or subscribers and Adsense has brought some income, Adsense trumps exchanges.

I left the exchanges on my landing pages. Then I toyed with the thought that since I hate hitting dead ends when I’m surfing — pages where I can’t link off to something else — that I might insert Google search boxes at the bottom of those pages so those who really didn’t want to subscribe could find their way out.

I dropped Google another note asking them since these are at the bottom of the page and traffic from a traffic exchange wouldn’t likely see them without having been converted to an interested visitor if that would be allowable? I got back a rather non-commital note reiterating that “we would like to remind you that we neither endorse nor encourage the use of any traffic exchange programs for the purpose of increasing your site traffic.”

I took that to mean that they weren’t saying no BUT don’t hold your breath on OK. On further thought, I decided to drop the idea. After all, why would I want to encourage a visitor to leave the page without subscribing?

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Adsense and Traffic Exchanges

If you have been considering a business in online marketing using Google Adsense then you should consider using WordPress as a basis for your site. My blogs run on WordPress, I’ve experimented with others but always return to WordPress.

WordPress is a blogging platform that can also be used as a Content Management System (CMS). Getting content online with WordPress is quick and easy, and managing your content is a breeze. The administration panel known as ‘dashboard’ allows you to write and manage posts and pages in a simple word processor like fashion, manage categories, links, plugins and all other aspects of your site.

The really great thing about using WordPress as a basis for your Adsense website is how customizable it is. Many thousands of different templates (or ‘themes’) are freely available to WordPress users, and many of these include Adsense blocks in optimal positions for maximizing your click through rate. This means that creating an Adsense website can be as simple as uploading an Adsense ready theme to your server. This leaves you with more free time to concentrate on writing quality content for your website!

Personally, I’ve customized the themes I use but then, I have some design background and a basic understanding of style sheets.

Some WordPress themes that include Adsense ad units and link units are also Search Engine Optimized (SEO), which means that the pages of your site are constructed in the best way possible for search engine spiders, and also the pages are interlinked in such a way as to ensure the search engines can reach all pages of your site in the correct manner.

WordPress also ‘pings’ many services for you through pingomatic each time you create a new post. This alerts the search engines to the fact that you have created new content and tells them to send the search engine spiders out to index your site. RSS feeds and sitemaps can also be generated automatically.

As WordPress is a blogging platform it has built in functionality to allow visitors to your site to comment on the articles you write. This is great as it encourages user interaction and site ‘stickiness’. Another often overlooked advantage to this is that your readers are creating more content on your website each time they leave a comment!

Thousands of ‘plugins’ are available for WordPress – plugins bring extra functions to your site and are quick and easy to install. One super-useful plugin for affiliate marketers automatically turns words into links. It is easy to create a list of affiliate links and words that you would like them associated to.
If you don’t have your own site hosting, that’s ok, slip on over to WordPress.com and start your free blog.

WordPress is the Adsense and affiliate webmasters best friend!

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Team Adsense and WordPress to Make Money

OK it’s a hype filled world out there trying to sort out how to market on the web. A big part of the reason is that online marketers have to fight and scramble so hard in this niche that they really create some huge smoke screens for those trying to sort out how to market their niche areas.

That is part of why I have this site here, I can post what I figure out and share with those who are just as much in the dark as I am.

So, anyways, what’s this death of adsense stuff all about?

Well about a week ago, I came across acess to this free report on this subject. It’s a report you need to read especially if you think you’re going to put Google’s Adsense ads on your website and rake in big bucks. The writer isn’t saying that Adsense is truly dead, more that with some changes they made to the Adword side of the equation the Adsense income dropped off.

Adwords generates the ads which appear on an Adsense site to be clicked on. Google allowed the advertisers opportunity to purchase the ads which appear on content generated sites to be purchased at a lower rate which means the publisher of the content site will receive lower income.

The writer of the report, Scott Boulch, cut the report in two parts. The first part talked about the death of Adsense, the second which was released today, was to talk about how to make some serious money without Adsense.

So, why didn’t I post about this a week ago?

I decided that I wanted to wait and see if what Boulch was offering was worth sending you to. Just because his reports are free doesn’t mean your time is to read it.

I’ve read the report through and what he writes makes sense, and can be done just by following what he’s telling you. I suggest you head over there and download both reports.

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Death of Adsense