Okay, so you've either just created a web site and you need to get traffic, or you have one that is under-performing and you need to do something about it. Pay per Click advertising of your website using Google AdWords is the way that many people will go. It's a great idea but there are a number of things that you should know before embarking on this potentially expensive but also potentially very lucrative venture.
Why use pay per click or Adwords?
It's simple, with so many web pages indexed now it can be all but impossible to get your pages found by someone typing their search terms into a search engine. If you are on page 700 of the listings then no one is ever going to find your website. What are you going to do? Well, you could spend a fortune on web site optimisation in an effort to move up the rankings and still see little return for all of the effort and expense. Alternatively you can start a pay per click or AdWords advertising campaign and see immediate results.
Pay per Click eliminates all of that struggle and can give you a position on the first results page from day one. Cool! What's the catch?
The catch is of course that many other website owners realise this and they are already using pay per click or AdWords to advertise their website or products.
As this operates on the basis that the highest bidder gets the top slot, you can see how this might prove to be an expensive venture if you are foolish enough to get into bidding war. But if you are smart enough to play the game you can get much better value for your advertising buck.
Yes, it would be great to get the top slot and ideally you want to be within the first page of results returned. But, if you are at number four instead of number one you will still get lots of traffic to your site and it will cost you much less per click than the number one slot.
Let's face it, you want to pay as little per click as possible. How do you do it? Simple, you rely on the competitor's lack of knowledge and imagination. Many advertisers will create a list of keywords (or phrases) that is perhaps 200 to 500 lines long and they will ignore the fact that many other keywords or phrases which are less likely to be searched for exist at all. When they don't get results or their keywords become inactive they will often throw even more money at it. Most advertisers will do the same. This makes competition for those keywords high and the bidding war expensive. This is bad news for advertisers but great news for Google's profits.
So what's the answer? Irrespective of what other people are bidding there is an opportunity for you to compete at a different level and to bid much less per keyword than the opposition. To do this all you need is a huge list of the less commonly used search terms and to bid only a few cents for each of them. Overall you will most likely still get as many clicks!
Remember that you only pay when someone clicks on your link so it costs you no more to have thousands of keyword phrases in your list than only a few hundred. The huge benefit is that you have phrases that other people do not and that when they are searched for, not only will your advert be highly ranked but because of the lack of competition, you will get your clicks for so much less. This allows you to bid 6cents per click where others are bidding 25cents!
How on earth though do you build a list of keywords that runs into the thousands? Fortunatly it's simple to do and you can do it in minutes.
There is a totally free piece of software called Keyword Kruncher.
Keyword Kruncher was created specifically to help you build such a list in about 5 minutes. This free program allows you to build huge keywords lists in an incredibly short time.
The free download is available here: http://www.richimajin.co.uk/krunch.php.
It also allows you to add quotation marks (phrase match) and square brackets (exact match) to any list of keywords that you create or currently use. The benefit of doing this with AdWords is that many competitors don't even realise you can do it and Google will rank a close or exact match more highly irrespective of the maximum bid so always include quoted and bracketed keywords too in any of you pay per click campaigns.
That's it really. Generate great keywords lists and watch your sales rise as your average cost per click decreases.
Tim Phiz can be contacted via http://www.richimajin.co.uk