The Clean and Green Club

OK, now that you read the July main article and understand the concept of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, the next step is figuring out what keywords to bid on.

Your goal: very affordable but very targeted traffic, and enough of it to keep your ads active (and your cash registers humming).

The way to get it: highly specific keywords–or, more accurately, key phrases.

Let’s take an example: I’m a copywriter. If I bid on writing, an extremely general term, I discover on Google that there are 319,000,000 results–yikes! Changing “writing” to “copywriting” brings it down to a still-unmanageable 11,600,000 results, and there are so many sponsored ads that they don’t even fit on one page! There are eight sponsored listings on the first page, and ten more on the second page (two form the same companies). You can guess that a top five position is going to cost several dollars per click.

But the more specific we make it, the better we’ll do. If I type in “book jacket copywriting” (in quotes, for an exact match), Google only finds 49 pages in natural search–quite a difference from the 11 and a half million for just plain copywriting. And only five paid ads show up–of which three are about securing copyright (a completely different animal), one is one of the general copywriting ads from the previous example, and one is four a copywriting course.  So I could absolutely own this category with a carefully worded ad about book jacket copywriting.

But we’re not done yet. We’ve got to find out if anyone is actually searching for this phrase. So I sign in to my Google Adwords account, and I discover that yes, I could dominate this category, and pay just pennies–four to ten cents per click. But there’s only one problem: This phrase gets so little traffic that Google can’t even estimate the volume, placement, or cost per click! Same thing if I just search for “book copywriting.”

So I wouldn’t get enough clicks to keep my ad active, and there’s no point. I decide not to buy the ad (as usual when I play with this stuff), and am out nothing except a few moments of my time. Isn’t this better than running a pricy magazine ad that turns out to be a lead balloon?

And you? What key phrase can you find that meets these criteria?
* Low cost to bid and get decent placement
* Enough people searching that you get at least a few clicks per day
* Key phrases targeted to attract buyers, and not tire-kickers (very important when you pay every time someone clicks)–and that’s what we’ll talk about next month

Recommended book to supplement this article: Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, which has nine full chapters on Internet/online marketing, with lots of cost-effective strategies you may not have come across elsewhere.

Coming in parts 3 & 4:

October: PPC Copywriting

November: Fast And Effective PPC Testing Strategies