Are You Ready for Google AdWords Traffic or Should You Stick With Free Traffic?
Every online marketer knows that in order to become successful, you’ll have to have a high amount of traffic driven to your website. Traffic volume means more income potential, but when you’re just starting out, adwords ad campaigns may not be a viable option for your marketing budget.
So when you are trying to drive more traffic to your site, you’re faced with whether to try to get free traffic or use paid traffic programs such as pay per click (PPC) marketing like Yahoo search marketing and Google AdWords. (Or you can go for both).
Free traffic routes deliver the best ROI (return on your investment) because there’s no out of pocket cost. But the traffic you bring in may not be as targeted as a PPC campaign and quite frankly, may take you longer to get started.
Some forms of free traffic-generating methods include articles marketing, social networking and forum marketing on niche-related message boards using a link-driven signature file. You can also toss in more creative ideas like eBay and Squidoo.
The problem with free traffic is that it’s a work-heavy advertising technique. In order to gain high amounts of traffic, a marketer needs to continually advertise their site to get their link exposed to prospective customers.
If time is in short supply, free marketing isn’t an option that will benefit you. So then what?
It’s time to turn to paid marketing.
Paid traffic avenues cost you money to gain traffic, but if executed properly, the ROI will be much higher and the maintenance much lower. If you’re using article directories, you may have to wait 10 days for approval, but an AdWords campaign can be live in minutes.
While costs are considerably higher, so is the potential for profits - higher the risk, higher the reward right?
If you don’t know how to conduct a savvy PPC campaign, you stand to lose a LOT of money, trust me… I’ve “been there, done that”.
There are barriers in place to prevent anything bad from happening, such as daily limits to your spending. Unfortunately, many marketers put limits far beyond what they can actually afford, not knowing Google will find a way to tap into your coffers.
Let this be a lesson to you, I like to advise my AdWords clients to start with $100 (my default budget, which may vary of course depending on your market). Treat it as their “AdWords testing money” to get their feet wet with AdWords.
The best way to use paid and free traffic is to implement a strategy that combines both methods. You might run a pay per click campaign and at the same create a lens on Squidoo and HubPages – both for the same keywords. Now you are covering your basis.
And assuming the keywords you tried ranking and advertising for, a few days later, you might find your lens ranked #1 in the Google SERPs.
Do you need to continue the PPC campaign? That’s what testing and tracking of conversions will tell you. You might find that the PPC ad linking visitors directly to your sales page has a higher conversion than those who click through to the lens and then have to take an additional step to get to your sales page.
Savvy marketers understand the need to constantly track and tweak their marketing efforts. Implement new strategies. See what works best for your niche audience. Then wash, rinse, and repeat your success!
Lawrence Talent
How Not to Blow Your Marketing Budget
Google AdWords can be awfully intimidating to those looking to get started (and also very costly). Especially considering the amount of competition nowadays.
I remember my first experience with Google AdWords. And let me tell ya, it wasn’t a good one. Rather than attracting customers and making a killing, I was being bled dry… by Google.
Since then I have painstakingly learned the mistakes I made, which I found to be very common among beginners.
The first lesson and one that will have one of the highest impact on your campaign has to do with your keyword selection.
Don’t Go For the Obvious
When I first got started, I was promoting an affiliate program. My initial keywords were blatantly obvious and competitive; they were the product’s name itself and also the creator’s name. Let’s call the affiliate product XYZ and the creator Mr. ABC. Essentially I thought it’d be so easy and so clever of me to just throw up ads with “XYZ” and “Mr. ABC” as the keywords.
After all, I reasoned, those who are searching for these terms must be interested at buying the product. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
I was right on one account, lots of people searching those terms are looking for that product. However, I was wrong on the account of it being as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
First off, because it’s such a popular product, it’s already attracted many other marketers. And these marketers had much more experience than I had.
Second, as a result of it being so competitive, Google was charging an arm and a leg per click. As if that wasn’t bad enough, because of my inexperience, I was getting Google Slapped silly to the point where I was putting up $1.00 ~ $5.00 a click. And more importantly, my clicks just weren’t converting into sales!
I just couldn’t hang with the other marketers.
Lesson #1:
As a newbie starting your campaign marketing an affiliate product, do not bid on the obvious keywords themselves. Odds are, these keywords are already inundated by marketers more experienced than you. They will most likely have a better relationship with Google, have better ads that convert better, get cheaper clicks, AND offer a more enticing offer than you are.
(Don’t worry… we’ll be sharing with you exactly what these “experienced” marketers are doing so you can do the same and dominate your niche market. All in good time =] For now, avoid bidding on the keywords that are your product’s name and creator’s name.)
On that note, I’d also like to point out that you should avoid broad terms that are sure to be inundated by competitors and aren’t targeted at all. Terms such as “real estate”, “network marketing”, “home business”, “chiropractor”, etc. (Doing a search on “home business” reveals over 800 competitors for the same exact keyword.)
You aren’t interested in marketing to everybody under the sun. It’s much more efficient and effective for you to home in only on those with the highest probability of purchasing your product/service. You do so by studying your market and brainstorming on more targeted keywords.
So Then What Keywords Should You Start With?
This takes us back to AdWords Seduction Newsletter #1 – knowing your market.
See, being able to pick effective keywords is tied directly to knowing your market, ideal client, and the product you are promoting. You have go get in your prospects’ shoes. Know that they are online seeking for information to either
- Move towards pleasure
- or - - Move away from pain.
From our studies, we have found that success lies more in targeting those who fall in the latter category – moving away from pain. So we suggest you start there.
Lesson #2:
Target your prospect’s pains.
Tools of the Trade
With that idea, start visualizing
- What problem it is that would motivate them to go online searching for a solution.
- and - - What keywords/phrase they would be searching with to address that problem.
Here are some tools to help you come up with ideas:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
http://www.goodkeywords.com
Use Google’s own site-related keyword tool -
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool
Also, go ahead and do a search for your keywords and check out the organic search results. What are those websites promoting? What keywords jump out at you?
These tools will help get your initial list of keywords started.
Lesson #3:
Use tools and current search results to help you brainstorm for targeted keywords.
Tunnel Vision
Now, at this point, a lot of people will take this idea and get tunnel-vision. They’ll go for depth rather than width. We’ll cover this in part II of this newsletter. So stay tuned!
To Your AdWords Domination,
Lawrence Talent
P.S. When you are ready for the next Google AdWords step, don’t be afraid to step up here: AdWords Secrets!