Now it doesn’t matter how good your website is, how desirable your products are, how talented your copywriter is, how much profit you could make from each product, how good your visitor conversion rate could be, UNLESS you get loads of traffic!

YOU HAVE TO HAVE TRAFFIC TO HAVE A BUSINESS!

Let me say that another way.

You have to have visitors to your website so that you can capture their details, build a relationship with them, and supply what they want so you are giving really great value to them and they will remain loyal to you forever.

Your list is the key to your success true. But without traffic, you’ll have a hard time building a list. Of course there are ways it can be done, but they’re for another day.

Right now we are focusing on methods of driving traffic to your website to help build your long term business. Today we will focus on the basics of Pay per click (PPC) advertising. Specifically Google adwords via Google adwords  see http://adwords.google.com.

So we’re just going to go over the basics today, to get you up and running, then we will go deeper into Pay per click later. But lets get something up first, as always, take the action ,then test, test , amend, improve, test, etc etc.

Before registering, you will need to know what site/s you want to link your ad/s to. Ensure you have the full URL of the exact page you want the ad linked to. Best to copy paste and save the URL to a wordpad or word doc so you have it saved on your PC for future use too.

So with that decided, we also need to do some detective work on our product and the relevant keywords we want to use in our Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. Its all about relevancy. So you want to use the keywords that are in your title and metatags of the page you want to link to and then your ad will be relevant. Now you can use other keywords too and , you are also able to change the words your website uses.

So lets say we have a site selling dvds to learn how to give a proper massage. Our keywords in the site may be ‘massage,Indian head massage,back massage,neck massage,how to massage,teach massage,learn how to massage, full body massage’. Basic i know but you get the idea (Im not a massage expert hence the basic keywords!). So in our PPC campaign, we’d likely want to use these keywords.

So we have our URL and a list of keywords to start us off, we can add more and amend existing ones easily enough, this is just to get you started and give an easy to follow example.

So into Google adwords we go, first we need to create our personal account, follow the steps and do that easy enough, then we can start a new campaign.

Give it a name that means something to you, lets be honest, when you have 50 plus campaigns, you need to know exactly which one you want to look at, so make the name so its relevant to you, so that you will know what it is about. This part has no relation to the effectiveness of the ad. I will tell you when that becomes important. For now whats important is to give this new campaign a name that will mean something to you in 12 months time still. So we will call this ‘massage’.

So then onto the adgroup name. Now each campaign can have multiple ad groups, and each adgroup can have its own set of keywords. So our first adgroup will be ‘learn massage’. All the keywords in this group will be aimed at learning massage so we are really targeting strongly for each group. But again the name you give each adgroup is only relevant to you and your memory.

So onto the language choices, now this is the language your ad will be shown in. I guess English though you do have all other choices. Then location. Now we are on the worldwide web, so think globally, however we can also tailor this option to our product. Lets hop across to www.google.com/trends and see what that tells us. Ok we can put  a choice of up to three keywords in (separated by commas) and the results will tell us how popular those searches are and, if we look down the page a bit, what countries/ areas have searched for these keywords. Now whatever countries come up are the ones you need to ensure you choose on the location option.

Then we see a scary page, the ad itself. Ok notice, you don’t have a huge amount of words to choose from, meaning we have to make full use of every single word we use.

Ok secret number one, on Google, you want to try to use your keyword for this ad on every single line where sensibly possible.

So ours is learn to give massage.

So our first line, the headline would read

‘Learn To Give Massage’                 

that then only leaves us 4 more characters on that line and its not good to have it scrolling onto the next line, it just doesn’t work.

So the next line we’d have something like ‘You Can Learn To Give Massage Today’  , again this includes the headline and our keyword phrase, then third line ‘Learn To Give Massage She’ll love U’ , again includes the keyphrase and both really focus on benefits to the customer, both use You or U in the text (We had to cheat in the third line !)

Then the display URL, well this is irrelevant , this gets shown in the ad but it doesn’t have to be the actual URL you’d be sent to if you clicked on the ad. However, for moral purposes it should be so we may have a problem placing the keyphrase in here for all the adgroups. But we can ‘cheat’ the system a bit and after the correct www.mysite.com/ part we can put a ‘?’ , then put at least the main part of our phrase (character number restrictions allowing) So we could put www.mysite.com/ebook?massage.

Then on the destination URL, that has to be correct but again we can use the ? after the full correct URL and then place our keyphrase after it.

Now the ? here makes everything after it irrelevant to where we are sent. So we’d be sent to the correct URL, but Google would see our keyphrase on the last two lines of the ad and our relevancy score would be higher because of it. This is a secret many people don’t know or don’t use. It can keep your costs down, especially on a multi adgroup campaign, and it could also place your ad higher up the rankings.

So to recap, our ad looks like this now

Learn To Give Massage

You Can Learn To Give Massage Today

Learn To Give Massage She’ll Love U

www.anysite.com/ebook?massage

www.anysite.com.ebook?learntogivemassage

So clicking on continue, we Google checks our ad. It may tell us we can’t have certain characters, we can’t have all capitals, things change with Google so try things and see if they allow it, if not , they’ll tell you and you have to change it, if its allowed for now, great run with it.

Then Google gives us some keywords suggestions. Now if our site is set up well with highly relevant keywords etc then there shouldn’t be an issue, we can use the ones we chose earlier. If not, and in any case, we may want to click on some of Googles suggestions and include them in our list. This list is used by Google to determine when our ad will be shown, ie when someone types in ‘learn how to massage’ into Google search engine, then our ad has a chance of coming up and being shown. It wont come up everytime, what we do next is set our daily budget and this will never be exceeded , ie Google will calculate an average of how often it thinks those keywords will be searched for, and then depending on our daily budget and our maximum cost per click (CPC) will ‘show’ our ad on a certain timescale. Most times , unless we’re dealing with highly searched for keywords resulting in much higher CPC, our daily budgets are unlikely to be reached. So you can be confident in your budgeting, bearing in mind you may have more than one adgroup running.

Here you want to click on the ‘advanced option: bidding strategy’ and choose the preferred CPC button. Don’t be afraid of anything that says its advanced! Its baloney!

So then set your cost per click (CPC) rate, start off say at 10 cents or pence, then click on the ‘view traffic estimator’ and that will ‘work out’ how many clicks google thinks youll get based on your daily budget and CPC. Play about with the CPC rates and see how low you can get it without affecting your results too much. You need to check the expected ad positions (preferably top 8 for the first page placement, the estimated clicks per day (relate this to how popular your keywords are!, and check that your ads are shown as active. On certain keywords there is a minimum bid that you have to reach to make them active, again tweak until happy or decide that its too expenses and choose lower ranked keywords.  In any case, Google will charge the lowest CPC rate it can on each occasion, irrespective of what youve chosen, however bear in mind, that it will be simple for someone else to pay a higher CPC rate and, if their ad is as good as yours, get better placing.

Just  a quick word about the CPC content bid option here, we don’t really want to use it as that places ads onto webpages via adsense and, until you know how to control it, that can lead to higher costs with lower targeted traffic.

So if after tweaking our CPC rates, the ad is still shown as active in the traffic estimator,and we’re happy we click continue and then the last chance before making our ad live.

Now there is always a chance for us to amend things, even when the ad is live, we can go into our account and amend anything, even pause or stop the ad, straight away, so don’t be afraid, get something out there, take action, test it and amend, improve and learn.