I wanted to write this post up because a lot of people seem to think there just going to jump into Adwords and start profiting right off the bat. Which granted it does happen, but if you have a new account or starting a new campaign it won’t always turn out like that.

See the thing is when you create a new account your going to have to spend a lot to get it going then eventually you will break even sooner or later, but like I said you’ll have to spend maybe a good 2k if not more to break even most generally on new accounts (if not more).

Here is a list of things below you should pay attention to:

Keyword Matching Options: I can’t tell you how important this is knowing how to match your keywords is a must. Another mistake that a lot of AdWords users make is going broad at the beginning on all keywords and that is not what you want to do. What you want to do is define a well set keyword list of maybe 100-400 keywords depending on your niche and use exact match. Therefore you’ll find out what keywords are converting and what keywords need improved or just straight out deleted.

Highly Relevant Keywords with Ad Copies: You should try to create highly relevant keywords to match your Ad Copies. Some people will go in and create 75 keywords under each ad, and really there no reason for that. The idea is to have very highly targeted keywords that are relevant with your ads; therefore, you’ll have a higher CTR level which will result in lower CPC (Cost Per Click) eventually after time (keep in mind time).

A / B Testing Landing Pages and Ads: You should always A/B test your Ads, let me reiterate you should always A / B test your ADS and landing pages at least your Ads for crying out loud. A / B testing your ads periodically is a must for a successful and profiting campaign.

Bidding To Low: Don’t bid low in the beginning stages, bid high as you can or at least bid in the sweet spot. When I say the sweet spot I’m referring to positions 5-8 because they usually convert better, but then again depends on the vertical your promoting. Just keep in mind to bid high on new campaigns (so your not on page 10) and also you might lose some money if not a lot specially when your testing a new account out with a new campaign.

Separate Content Network from Search Network: Make sure you always separate your content network from your search network becuase of course the content network will convert at a lot lower level. Out of all honesty I never even use the content network (I do, but not that much).

Not Setting Geo-Targeting: You should always use Geo-Targeting specially if your only shipping to certain countries or if your promoting an affiliate offer and they only allow US conversions then you better make sure you have your ads to only run on the US Google Search Network.

Not using the Conversion Tracking tool: You should alway use the keyword conversion tool specially on your own site. Now there is a few affiliate merchants that won’t allow anyone entering there tracking codes on there site, but honestly once you become good enough you will be able to fly blind no problem, but I still wouldn’t recommended doing this unless your very experienced.

Conclusion:
AdWords is like a black box, and you must know how to work it. If you use good sense you will be successful with using AdWords. The idea is to test, test, and test and if you can do that and have the patience then your heading in the right direction with it.

Relevant Links Below:
10 Worst AdWords Mistakes
10 AdWords Mistakes from Ubber Affiliate
15 Tips for AdWords Beginners

Ignoring certain things in PPC can take a total haul on your account and believe me there is certain things I have ignored at times well I wouldn’t considering it as I was “ignoring” them, but more then anything I wasn’t focused in completely as much as I should of been into that specific area.

What are important things you should really zoom in on?

1. Keyword Matching Type: Pay attention to your keyword matching options and if you find any negative keywords  make sure you add them to your negative side and try to use exact match when you first launch your campaign then you can possibly (slowly) start going down to broad or phrase match, but make sure you pay attention to what your negative keywords are because if not your account balance could sky rocket over night with no conversions.
2. Ad Groups: Try to split your keywords up into more relevant Ad Groups even if you have to create 1 keyword per adgroup. I mean it only makes sense if you have a keyword performing at a higher CTR (Click Through Rate) then why not. Also make sure your descriptions and titles are relevant as can be because this will improve your CTR big time I had one campaign go from 2-3 percent CTR to ~10 percent ctr by just creating around ~100 well defined ad groups with only 2-3 keywords per ad group.
3. A / B Testing: Always perform A / B testing and never quite. You need to squeeze as much out of your campaign as possible, so always make sure your testing at all times (Note: Be sure to test your landing pages to with website optimizer).
4. Keyword Conversion Tracking: Make sure you install the keyword conversion tracking tool this will dramatically help you. It will give tell you exactly what keywords are converting and what keywords are not converting, so therefore if you have any keywords that are not converting you can eliminate them.
5. Decreasing Bids to Soon: If you ask me this is the biggest problem in Pay Per Click is that people decrease there bids too soon, you always want to bid super high in the beginning stages of your campaign to collect data.
6. Landing Page Quality: Building the best landing page as possible and alway try to make improvements to it. I know some people say that having more content increases your ability to have a better QS (quality score), but I don’t really believe that which granted it might help, but honestly we have had affiliate sites and I know of affiliate sites that are performing very good such as having a QS of pratically great across the board.
7. Ad Words Tools: Use the tools provided by AdWords to your advantage such as the Keyword Tools and etc they can be helpful when I firs started using AdWords out of all honesty I didn’t see much use in them, but then as I started to play around with them I come to find out they were very effective and can be used for numerous things specially if your wanting to build your keyword list up.

Conclusion
There are many factors in the Pay Per Click game, but the idea behind it is to test, test, and test then see what results you get if it works then keep pushing that direction and testing more. Just make sure you use the tools provided by pay per click programs and use everything to your advantage, but like I said the idea is to test, test, and test that right there is the magic recipe to being successful with PPC.

I will have discussions with many of my clients from time to time about PPC (Pay Per Click) Vs Organic Search and some of them think that PPC is a waste of money until I explain to them the power of PPC and how it can be such as fabulous marketing model to use.

PPC is a very powerful marketing tool, so is organic search, but with contextual advertising services such as Adwords, Yahoo Publisher, and MSN Ad Network you can create very fast sales over night and when I mean over night I mean literally over night if you are a PPC guru then you know exactly what I’m talking about the thing is with PPC is that it takes skill and patience to get it going its not something thats going to happen over night.

Another big factor about pay per click is spending most generally the more you spend in the beginning the better off you will be for the future the reason being for is because you need to build your CTR (Click Through Rate) rate up then you can slowly start to decrease your bids also keep in mind they’re many other factors in the pay per click game such as account history and etc.

If your someone looking to get fast traffic over night or wanting to build momentum into a website that will be used to build e-mail lists and similar things to that nature then you will definitely want to use pay per click I have seen many website and companies grow from nothing to inc 500 companies with then a quickness.

I have seen many forums launch and build very fast by using pay per click networks for example v7n.com which has a user database of over 40k users was built through PPC and affiliate marketers including my self use PPC to generate revenue which I plan on promoting our affiliate websites through organic search, but right now my main focus is using PPC due to the quickness of traffic and sales that it can generate, so always keep in mind PPC is a very powerful marketing tool and don’t ever put all your eggs in one basket specially as strict as organic search engines are getting with paid links.

PPC marketing is very affective if used properly. The thing is with PPC is that you have to spend before you actually get results what I mean from this is you literally have to invest money to improve your QS score, so spending is the biggest factor of building a good Ad Words campaign.

Which granted relevancy of ads does play a vital factor, but if you ask me I would think you would automatically optimize a relevant ad with your keywords. The thing is I’ve notice with a lot of people they keep trying to tweak with there ads when they launce a new campaign and I did the same exact thing until I learned that spending is the key.

You know you might lose some money in the beginning well I wouldn’t say lose some money, but in the beginning stages what your doing is trying to get that CTR rate up and as that CTR comes up with the more competitive keywords or your more broad keywords your Quality Score will improve big time, so don’t get upset if your QS keeps reading poor just invest some money into some good keywords that have an excellent CTR rate.

Now what do you do when the QS goes up for these more broad terms and there converting very well. You have room to play in now you can build lateral keywords around your highly converting keywords and start to play with your bid rates and get it down to where your profiting right off the bat, but keep in mind don’t automatically take your bid rate down too much if you do that your QS score can get hit again.

Also keep in mind your Quality Score is humanly edited a lot of the times if your QS score gets smacked bad then it was probably someone monitor your account, but overall from my experience you should be fine with your QS as long as your CTR rates are good thats mostly automated from my understandings for example if you have a great CTR rate then your QS score should go up.

Now I’m not 200 percent on everything I said above, but from my understandings and what I was told thats pretty much how it works, but when it comes to organic I will tell you this I’m the best if you ask me, but PPC is something I have been playing around with the last week or so because I’m starting to promote affiliates through it and possibly I might even start promoting our own site through it just keep in mind spending is the biggest factor and don’t be afraid to lose money if you have 1k why not just throw it into your adwords account and find out what keywords are converting, but at the same time improve your QS score.

Also keep in mind you can get super high CTR rates by making more targeted ad groups for each keyword, but that does take time there is software thats called Speed PPC which will dramatically increase 1000’s of ad groups in seconds.

For more information about PPC and even Affiliate marketing check out Jeremy Palmer E-book which he is offering for free at Quit Your Day Job (ebook).

For any one thats is famaliar with Pay-Per-Click they know there is some value using it as a marketing trend, but there is some excellent ways of generating competitors keywords. I was reading an interview done with Kris Jones the other day and he was showing how he used keycompete.com to generate keywords that resulted in 15k a month in profits through affiliates using keycompete to mime his keyword list, and quite honestly I never even bothered with this tool until I was reading this the other day, my mind has just been so focused on organic search.

You can use Key Compete to mime up your keywords for you and scrape your competitors keywords so for example you want the keyword list that www.remax.com is using well you would just type in www.remax.com in the keycompete search field, it will then bring back all the results it has scarped into there database. Pretty cool if you ask me, and you can scrape from numerous domains therefore you can mime up a large list and set a low bid on your campaign settings.

If you’d like to take it to even another level and mime up more keywords you can use Aaron Walls SEO tool which is called Free Open Source Keyword List Generator. This tool will generate long tails and you can combine certain keywords for example say you are trying to combine the word “tips” into 1000’s of other words such as web design, website design, html, css, and etc. It has a box below it where you can put in tips then it will add it into the text string for all the given keywords in the box above. Check it out they have a little bit more clearer details done on video and some documentation for the tool at Free Open Source Keyword List Generator.

If your someone wanting to get a keyword list mimed up that are low paying keywords this would be the way to go. I just can’t believe the information and data that is available on the web. Tools like this can mime you up keywords faster then you ever imagined, and make you a lot of money specially through affiliates. Which granted it will probably take some time to get it just right, but once you get the hang of it you should be on your way.

Which I’m not an affiliate marketing king or anything, but I do understand all the aspects of search specially organic search which I major in organic and I’d have to say I’m a guru with that (speaking I’ve ranked some of the most competitive keywords out there), but as far as affiliates go this would be the way to go. You can make some major money with Affiliates. Another thing that is so great about Affiliates is that it requires no over head (employees), so therefore you can work on your own and make large sums of cash, but not have to deal with people.

One more quick note I almost forgot,  Key Compete even has a long tail generator which is an additional cost. The service runs at about 40.00 dollars per month (the long tail generator is additional), or you can just run a test and export a list for $10 dollars and see how well it works. I did a few test on a few sites and wack got there keyword list. I will definately be using this tool in the future for keyword research on PPC with affiliates once I get the time to set down and play with some affiliate offers.

I think a lot of people should focus into PPC along with organic search even though organic search might be more profitable to a degree, but then again pay per click can be pretty profitable. I think every organic search engine marketer should be somewhat be qualified with PPC. Learning PPC is quite simple, but time consuming and I would have to say some of the best blogs out there for PPC would be Kris Jones blog which is at http://www.pepperjamblog.com, I’ve learned some valuable things over there well a few post he wrote I was thinking this was an excellent post such as the one that led me to his interview by Search Engine Marketing Standard.

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Search engine optimization can be very profitable in every aspect, but would you want to depend on organic listings your whole life, or would you like ppc listings too, and profit off both. Ask your self, would it be better to profit off organic listings and PPC (Pay Per Click). Now imagine the passive income streams you could create using both.

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