Here we will discuss the simplest way to get traffic which is pay-per-click advertising. With this type of search marketing you spend a small amount of money to get traffic to your site. But, it is the simplest way to get visitors and start making sales.

More than that if you did your homework and have the right product in the right niche, all of the traffic you send to your site is the simplest way to begin getting noticed in that niche. However you look at it, paid search advertising is the most inexpensive way to get started with ads.

TV advertising would cost you tens of thousands and you never know if you are reaching your exact market. You could advertise in other traditional media such as radio, magazines, or newspapers, but again you have no way of ensuring that the people you want to see the ads actually see them. With PPC advertising you get highly targeted traffic, and your advertising isn’t guesswork like it would be with many other types of ads.

With that said let’s get started.

An Intro to Search Marketing - Keywords

The basic premise of search marketing is that we find a keyword, that directly relates to our product, and then we pay one of the search engines money to display our ad when people search for that term.

From this, obviously our first step is to find keywords to market with. In this section we will talk about the free way to get keywords to bid on, and then we will cover how to see what your competitors are doing to get your ad campaigns going faster (and be more profitable from the start).

To begin with, we need some keywords. If you navigate to Google’s Keyword Tool, you get an easy way to get keywords that relate directly to your site.

Assuming I had started a niche store that sold dog collars, I could begin by entering keyword phrases and clicking get keyword ideas. In this case you just want to begin by thinking of what you might search for if you were looking to buy the product that you sell.

For the example I chose diamond dog collar, and leather dog collar (both products that our fictional niche store might sell). I enter those into the keyword tool and then click search:

From the list above, the keyword tool has suggested some terms that might work well for promoting my dog collar site. In fact, if I could fit the whole list into the screenshot, it has suggested well over 200 terms that directly relate to dog collars.

A could of things to note here: When you’re looking at this list there are two columns you want to pay attention to.

First, the advertiser competition tells us how competitive the terms are. If the green bar is filled that means the term is competitive and it will likely cost us a little more to get our ads displayed for that term.

Next, if you look at the Local Search Volume column, it gives us an idea of how many times people search for that term (based on last month’s search data). These columns matter when you are choosing keywords because you should look for terms that have less competition (not always possible), but still have decent search volumes.

Looking at the last term on our list – spiked leather dog collar – it got 4400 searches last month and it isn’t a highly competitive term. This might be a great choice for keywords to bid on, but we aren’t done yet.

You should find 20 – 50 terms from your list and then put those terms into a spreadsheet. Before we begin our campaign we will use another tool to find out whether or not those terms are worth adding to our campaign.

Once you have a list of terms, you can use Google’s Traffic Estimator to get an idea of how much those terms will cost you, and how many visitors you can expect from those keywords.

Entering a few related terms into the traffic estimator:

I enter a maximum cost per click (the amount I am willing to spend on those terms). I then chose international targeting, and clicked search.

Upon doing so I am given a list of costs and estimates of the traffic I can get from those terms:

Looking at the list, if I bid $0.40 I can expect to pay between $0.22 and $0.36 per click, to get my ads in 4^th to 6^th spot on Google. Looking close though, only two of the terms I chose will be sending traffic on a daily basis. The term dog collar will get me between 93 and140 visitors, and the term leather dog collar will get me between 5 and 8.

In other words, if I bid on those two terms alone, I can expect to pay $30 to $60 per day for my ads, and that money will bring me somewhere in the realm of 100-150 visitors. It should be noted that this tool is not extremely accurate. It is based on historical data and it doesn’t factor in things like your ad, or your market.

For example, if you can write a stellar ad, then it’s quite possible that you will get more clicks from that keyword, and if your quality scores are good you will sometimes be able to get those clicks for less money.

One last thing to discuss is ad placement. With the example above our bid would have put us in 4^th to 6^th spot. For clarity, this is where the ads would them show up:

Some marketers prefer to bid higher to get their ads in 1^st place. With most markets though, this can make your ad costs too expensive. 4^th to 6^th place is a good place to try and keep your ads. They aren’t so low down the list that they don’t get noticed, and at the same time you aren’t spending a fortune on ad costs. Using the traffic estimator you can have an idea of what you need to bid to get your ads in those spots.

PPC Advertising, and in particular using Google Adwords is such a huge subject that I would in fact need a whole new course to cover it in any depth and give it justice.

What I will do instead, is give you some insider tips to really dominate your position in the list of advertisers and get the most profit per click.