How Pay Per Click Advertising Really Works
Organising keywords, as far as PPC (pay per click advertising) is concerned, can be broken down into three parts.
1. Compile a list of relevant keywords 2. Use them correctly in your Google ads 3. Manage your campaign with the right adwords software
By the time we get to part three we will need software to manage our PPC campaign and there is nothing finer than the wonderful Ad Grenade.
So, stage one, let’s get together a list of relevant keywords without spending a dime !
There are some first class keyword research tools out there and the good news is that two of the best are free, namely Traffic Travis and Google’s own, excellent, ‘Keyword Tool External’.
If you are not very experienced in internet marketing and/or money is tight, I would recommend sticking with the free tools to begin with.
How To Compile A Large list Of Relevant Keywords - FREE
From the top of your head make up a list of keyword phrases that you are sure must be relevant - keep it ‘tight’ - ‘Bees’, ‘Honey Bees’, ‘Bee Keeping’, ‘How To Keep Bees’ etc. Type these into the normal search bar on the Google home page, a drop down menu will suggest more phrases.
Now put the whole lot through the ‘keyword finder’ in Traffic Travis and send everything T.T. has found to the ’sorter’, where you will cut out duplications, phrases shorter then two words or longer than ten and any phrase that includes ‘free’. You are looking for buyers not those just after freebies. Download your this list to your Notepad or some other kind of *.txt file where you will eliminate all inappropriate phrases.
Now copy and paste the whole list into the Google tool and hit the ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ key, Google will suggest more keywords which you should consider using. Now download your new list to a text file where you will find it conveniently sorted into alphabetical order.
Your final task is to arrange your list into very targeted groups of keywords, that is phrases that are very tightly related. I cannot over emphasize how important this is, your pay per click ads must take your customers to pages that not only use the keywords in those ad groups but must focus completely on the subject they suggest.
I haven’t taken a step-by-step approach to working with these two keyword tools, however Traffic Travis has great tutorials and I’m sure you will have little difficulty with Google’s product.
In other articles I will describe how I use keywords within a campaign and how to manage the campaign itself. When you get to stage three it will become all too clear why, without some kind of adwords software, this whole system would be impossible to manage.
John Rivers
