Player's Guide - Lesson 2

"10 Minutes To Instant Web Traffic"

Lesson:[1][2][3][4][5][6] 

Welcome back.

Yeserday you read about how pay-per-click advertising (PPC) was simply the best method for bringing instant traffic to your websites.

Today you'll learn about a simple, 10-minute process that anyone can use to setup a fully-functional Google AdWords account and start driving traffic to their website almost immediately.

Before we get into the more Advanced strategies, we need to build a very strong foundation and make sure you understand the basics. The stronger your foundation, the more earning potential you'll have for the future, so pay close attention to every detail I'm about to teach.

Let's do a quick example...

We'll pretend that we sell home theater systems . I am going to show you exactly how to build a campaign for that type of product, starting with some sensible market research.

Research your market

PPC advertising is very competitive for a reason – for any high-value product/service, PPC is a cheap and effective way to get your name in front of the people looking for products just like yours.

With all the competition – there's just one big problem: If you jump in blind, the sharks will eat you alive. You must first dig up the details on your market and your competition, and that means knowing:

• Which keywords are getting the most traffic
• What are the top bid prices for those keywords
• Which keywords are being ignored – and why
• How many competitors you will have

In the next lesson I will explain the exact steps you need to take to pick out the right keywords for your ad campaign. Here, I'll just give you a quick run through of how to create a keyword list using a simple little free keyword generation tool, which you've probably heard of... Overture's Keyword Selector Tool.

Start by heading to Yahoo Search Marketing (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/) – open the Keyword Selector Tool. As it's shown below, enter your main keyword in the box and click on ‘Go'. This will give you a list of keywords with search estimates.

(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ )

Under the "count column", you'll see that there are lots of searches for the base term but also that there are focused searches for smaller topics as well. Demand is not too strong, but we know that this is a high value product so we wait till we see bids and competition.

It says there are 31,761 searches for the term "home theater system" last month. You can multiply that number by 3 to come up with roughly how many times that word was searched for at Google.com.

Next...

We'll copy the top 6-10 keywords in a text file; we will need them for the next step.

Here's the list I've come up with so far:

Now we want to find out what the top bid prices are for these keywords. That is, how much money is your competition (i.e. other Google Adwords advertisers) are willing to spend on this niche to buy traffic. A high number is a good indicator that your niche is profitable, but on the other hand, if you know for sure that a niche is profitable (like home theater systems, which sell for quite a lot of money), low bid prices can mean that this is a market that is ripe for domination.

One way to check bid prices is to use another Yahoo tool - the view bids tool.

Go back to the Yahoo Serch Marketing Site and click on the "View Bids Tool" as I've shown in the screenshot below:

The first time you load this page, you will see the following screen:

(http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/)

Remeber that list of keywords you just saved? Take the first keyword and plug it in the first box on this screen. Then, enter the verification letters in the second box and click on 'Search' to continue.

When you do this, you'll see the following:

Above is a search for "home theater speaker system" - notice that the top bid on Yahoo is under $1.00 - that's pretty cheap considering that a pair of high-end speakers can cost several hundred dollars. Allowing for the cost of the physical product, you can see that this is a very nice, lucrative, under-priced bidding market.

Repeat this process for all your keywords and check the top bid prices for them. You are doing this to estimate how much you will have to pay, per click, to match / top your competition. In this case, you'll see that most of the keywords have a bid price of under $1.00. That's good news, but keep in mind that in AdWords you'll have a bit more competition, so you can expect the top bid price in AdWords to be at least twice that much of Yahoo, and maybe more.

After we do our research, we should have a nice list of targeted, profitable keywords to start our AdWords campaign with.

Couple of interesting things you'll notice here:

Despite being a very expensive market (full-fledged home theater systems costs thousands of dollars), there's a low level of competition (bid prices are fairly low). This will allow you to corner the market quite easily, IF you know how to sell to it.

People are as concerned with specific aspects of home theaters (wireless systems, speakers) as they are with the “how to” aspect (design, setup). This can work to our advantage, as you'll see when we get to writing the ad.

Now that we have our keyword list ready, let's go setup our AdWords account. It's going to be fast, so make sure you pay attention :-)

Start the clock…

Step 1 – Setting up your AdWords account

Go to the Google AdWords homepage ( http://adwords.google.com/select/ ) and click on the “Click to Begin” button to get started.

The next screen will give you an option between two types of accounts – Starter and Standard. Since we're going to be going deep inside AdWords, there's no need to go for a Starter account – select “Standard” and then click on “Continue”.

On the next screen, you choose the languages you want to target. So if you were in Germany and wanted to target German-speaking Google users, you would select German. Google also let's you target specific countries, specific regions and cities or even a specified geographic location (such as a 20-mile radius around a certain street address, for example).

I selected the ‘target by country' option, so in the next screen I was asked to enter the countries I wanted to market to – in this case, since we are selling physical products we will restrict our target market to US and Canada (a good thing, because this where the heaviest demand for home theater system resides as well).

I'd recommend sticking with “country-level” targeting for now – the other two options are a bit more advanced, and I personally never use them.

Let's move to the next step – writing your ad.

[Time taken – 2 minutes]

Step 2 – Writing your Ad

Let me take a minute to explain what we've done here, and why.

Our main search phrase is also the headline – whenever possible, follow this example and put your main keywords in the headline.

The first line is a benefit – in this case, expert advice for people who are looking for help on how to set up home theater systems. No matter what your level of knowledge, the chance to get input from an expert (in this case, free advice) is hard to pass up.

The second line is our feature – a free report available for immediate download. Your feature will be a specific offering that matches your previously stated benefit most closely.

The last two lines are the URLs – first url will be the one displayed – this must resolve to an actual web address. The second line is the actual url where the prospect will be redirected to – that is, it must contain the address of your landing page.

And your ad is written! Following this template, you can put together ads in as little as 4 minutes (like I did right now).

Click on “Continue”, and Google AdWords will do an automated check on your ad text and the provided urls to make sure that they follow their guidelines. Once that is complete, you will be taken to a screen where you have to enter your keywords.

[Time taken - 4 minutes]

Step 3 – Bidding on Keywords

Enter your keywords:

You'll notice that I've enclosed my keywords in quotes as well as brackets. Basically, AdWords uses three types of phrase matches to match your ads with the terms being searched at the time – broad match (no quotes or brackets), phrase match (quotes) and exact match (square brackets).

Broad match

This is the default option. When you include keyword phrases – such as tennis shoes – in your keyword list, your ads will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order – and possibly along with other terms like: new tennis shoes, mens shoes for tennis, and so on...

Broad matches are often less targeted than exact or phrase matches.

Phrase match

Your ad appears when users search on the exact phrase and also when their search contains additional terms, as long as the keyword phrase is in exactly the same order. A phrase match for "tennis shoes" would display your ad if a user search on: red tennis shoes, new tennis shoes, but not for: shoes for tennis

Exact match

The search query must exactly match your keyword. This means [tennis shoes] will only match a user request for: tennis shoes and not for: red tennis shoes, even though the second query contains your keyword.

More details on broad, phrase and exact matches in Lesson 6, when we will study keyword research for AdWords in full detail.

On to the next step...

Once we've entered the keywords, we now have to choose our bid amounts. You'll see a screen as shown below:

First you'll select how you'll pay for AdWords. Based on your IP address, Google automatically determines your local currency and sets that as the default value, but you should change it to US dollars. That makes it a lot easier to manage your account as you'll find that almost everyone discusses bid prices in dollars (especially all other guides on AdWords). This setting cannot be changed once your account is activated.

After this, you set your budget. This is the maximum amount you're willing to spend throughout the day (divide your monthly budget by 30 for an easy way to reach this number). For our example, I want to get maximum exposure here as well as test the ads quickly (so I can refine them based on results), so I'll set this to $100 (for big campaigns and especially for high CPC terms, you might have to set this much higher).

Next, you set the maximum cost per click (CPC) for your keywords. Ideally, you should set the CPC for your main keywords individually, but for now (and for the beginning part of your campaigns) an overall CPC will do just fine. Since we already know from our keyword research that we can get top position for our ads by staying within $5, I'll be conservative and bid $1.00 per click. This will allow me to get a good position and stay within budget our budget

After this, you get traffic / clicks / position estimates based on your settings. It gives you an approximation of how many clicks (and what average position) you will get for each entered keyword (based on your max CPC and daily budget).

By now, you're almost done. Click “Continue”.

[Time Taken: 2 minutes]

Step 4 – Pushing the ‘Start' button

You'll be asked to review your account (what you've entered so far).

The page simply lists all the information that you've input, including your ad, selected keywords and your max CPC / daily budget as well.

Scroll down, make sure you haven't made any errors (you can fix them by clicking on the ‘Edit' button next to each field), and then click on “Continue”.

The next page will ask you if you have a Google Account. Depending on your subsequent answers, it will either ask you to create one, or ask you to enter your Account login info.

I'd recommend that you create a separate account for AdWords (for security purposes), but in this example we're going to assume that you already have a Google account and will use that instead.

Once you've passed this step (and confirmed your account), Google will send you a confirmation email to the email address you've entered. Open the email, click the link back to Google, and then enter your credit card or payment information to officially open the account.

[Time Taken: 2 minutes]

And that's about it. Once you've entered your payment information, your ads will start showing almost immediately.

That took you more time to read than it takes to create an AdWords account!

Before we end for today, I want to draw your attention towards a couple of basic AdWords concepts that you need to master before we go any further.

Google AdWords Basics

Most of your questions about Google AdWords features can be answered at the Google AdWords Help Center. Here I want to discuss two structural features within an Adwords account, campaigns and ad groups. I'll go over these REALLY briefly here and will go into more detail later.

Campaigns

A campaign consists of one or more Ad Groups. The ads in a given campaign share the same daily budget, language and location targeting, end dates, and syndication options.

You would usually create separate campaigns for separate projects / sites, and within those campaigns you would create different Ad Groups to cater for sets of keywords.

Ad Groups

An Ad Group contains one or more ads which target one set of keywords or sites. This comes in extremely handy when you are targeting focused keywords, as you can setup different ad groups for different sets of keywords.

In your ad campaigns, your ad groups should ideally be tightly focused around a subtopic, but how you select this subtopic and how you determine whether it is profitable to put that set of keywords into a separate topic is a different matter. This is discussed in much more detail in future lessons.

For more definitions, you can check the Google AdWords Glossary page.

That's it for today. In the next lesson, we will do a similar walkthrough with keyword research, taking you from identifying a topic to producing the final keyword list.

This next lesson will be EXTREMELY helpful in showing you the process of finding a niche market and/or good keywords to use for your campaigns.

I also want to mention a very cool tool I use for all my keyword research: Keyword Elite

But, first let's get you a nice solid foundation built with what I'm teaching you in these lessons. Then, you can use Keyword Elite to find MORE than enough niche markets to completely dominate.

Stay tuned for the next lesson tomorrow!

All the best,

Brad Callen
PPC Marketer
http://www.keywordelite.com