Making money with Adsense. A review of sorts.
December 12, 2007
The past few posts have been pretty lengthy so I’ll try to make this one a bit shorter, but I’m pretty excited about this topic.
I’ve read a ton of articles, websites, marketing emails etc on Adsense. If you’re not familiar with Adsense, it’s Google’s ad publishing engine that allow you to display ads on your website and make money from clicks.
There are a ton of so-called experts on the web that claim to be millionaires strictly from using Adsense. Keep in mind these experts are also selling their secret in eBooks and other tools. I dug through all of the sites out there and came across a few that caught my eye. I purchased these and will be providing a formal review when I receive the products.
Adsense-Secrets: This is Joel Comm’s best selling eBook, Google Adsense Secrets, 3rd Edition. After the typical lengthy online sale pitch I saw some things that sold me on it. First, while most of the pitches sound the same, Joel is offering to personally review your site and provide tips if you are not successfully earning money with Adsense.
Adsense Templates: I also broke down and purchases the Instant Adsense Templates program that is also promoted by Joel Comm. I’m very technical in nature, but wanted to see how quickly I could get setup using these templates and whether I could actually make some money back using them. Unlike eBooks, these templates are delivered on CD and should arrive anyday. Once I get them, I’ll post a follow up email.
Adsense Connection: The last program I invested in for my review is the Adsense Connection Videos by Steve Weber. While Steve’s website does have the tyical hard-sell marketing look, it offers something that others don’t, an authentic personal touch. Steve has several free videos online, offers one on one calls, conference calls and really seems genuine about seeing you succeed. After I receive his videos I’ll post my review and recommendations.
More on Adwords
December 11, 2007
Yesterday’s post should have got you thinking about Adwords and how you can use them. Today, I’m going to touch on the proper way to use Adwords and some mistakes that people typically make.
Adwords is a great way to drive traffic to your site if you do your research. Far too many people get an Adwords account, pick there keywords, set their Cost Per Click(CPC) and let the campaign go. They don’t realize that they are probably spending money they don’t need to.
Broad keywords can get you plenty of impressions,(Each time your ad is shown is called an impression). Impressions are free. You begin paying when someone clicks on your ad. Some people think that the more their ad is shown, the better the chance of it getting clicked. That can be true, but are the right people seeing your ad?
With Adwords, you pay to get page position. The better the page(1-2) and the higher on the page, the more you pay if someone clicks. You’re paying for a combination of Keywords and Position. Here’s how you can get both and cut down on your costs.
First, Google drops their prices as your Click-Thru-Rate(CTR) percentage goes up. So the more impressions you have, you need to increase you clicks or you price per click will increase. You can get more clicks by focusing your keywords and writing better ads.
Keyword Research
There are quite a few tools on the net that will help you pick keywords. Let’s say that you are selling Golf Clubs. You would more than likely select Golf Clubs as your keywords and a few others. You’ll also want to look at other similar keywords. To do this, I suggest WordTracker. They have a free tool that is very helpful. In this case, WordTracker suggests “Used Golf Clubs”, “Discount Golf Clubs”, and various name brand clubs. If those keywords interested you, then by all means, include them. However, make sure you use Adwords keywords delimeters to help.
Here’s where most people fall short in Adwords. Using quotes ” and brackets [] around your words will significantly change your ad impressions. Using just the words Golf Clubs will yield results when people search for Golf Resorts, Golf Balls, Yacht Clubs etc. That’s not the traffic you want and you won’t neccessary get clicks from them. You’re killing your CTR and raising your price per click.
Instead, Use “Golf Clubs”. Using Quotes will allow for phrase matching. In this case, when someone is searching for Used Golf Clubs, your ad will show. It will also reduce the number of impressions. Using [] will provide exact phrase matching. This means that only when a user search for Golf Clubs will your ad be shown. If they search for Used Golf Clubs your ad will not be displayed.
This technique will take some practice, but it will pay off.
Don’t forget to use negatives. Negatives are the words you want to exclude from your keywords. In our example, if I am only selling golf clubs, I would probably exclude balls, tees, shirts, courses. I would do this by adding a - in front of each of those words.
This alone helped boost my adwords campaign.
Writing the Perfect Ad
We all wish we could craft the perfect ad, but it’s something that isn’t always easy to do. I’d suggest looking at other adwords ads to get some ideas. Each Adwords ad consists of 4 lines. I typically set mine up as follows:
Eye Catching Title
A brief teaser
A call to action or enticement
Website URL
Try to put your keywords in your ad. Think about what the user is searching for. If their goal is to find the best site for discounted clubs, you may want to consider putting that in your title. A word of warning: Make sure you follow the Adwords TOS. That is a quick way to get your ad pulled.
Tomorrow I post some great sources for really learning the ins and outs of adwords.
Driving traffic to your website and eBay auctions with Ads
December 10, 2007
Now that I have a few websites up and running, it’s time to make them work for me. Usually, anyone that works for you is going to cost you money and that’s not what we want with these sites. Our goal is to make money, right?
When I first started selling on eBay my goal was to just get the items to sell for a decent price, cover my costs, learn a few things and maybe make some extra cash. I soon learned that when you have more than a few auctions running, it’s all about getting traffic and getting those items to sell. You definately don’t want to continually relist those items and incur listing fees if you don’t have to.
After digging into eBay I learned that there are several ways to make money without having to sell anything on eBay at all. Yes, I’m talking about affiliate links. While the eBay affiliate program is a great way to make some extra money, you have to get people to your site and your auctions in order to find your links. That can be a job all by itself.
Search Engine Optimization, often referred to as SEO, is a requirement for getting traffic to your site and your auctions. Gone are the days of just putting up a web site, flood it with phrases and keywords and hope your site is picked up by a search engine. It now takes some work. Your website has to have fresh content, relavent content, inbound links, outbound links and keywords that people are searching for. All of that takes some work and time. Don’t be fooled by all of those auctions on eBay that guarantee traffic to your site by buying their eBook. Yes, some work as I mentioned in previous posts, but there is nothing that you can do overnight…. well, almost.
Everyone has seen ads on websites that seem to be relavent to the site, most served up by Google. Those ads can both make you money, and cost you money. Google Adwords is Google’s program for advertising that will allow you to place ads on other websites and in the Google search pages. The beauty of Adwords is that you set a budget per day or per month and there should be no surprises when you get the bill. That’s were people tend to make their mistake, that simply key in some phrases, keywords and let the ad go. They believe that the traffic will start flowing in… boy are they mistaken.
Google Adsense is Google’s ad serving program that serves up the ads you created in adwords. The ads are displayed on sites that are relavent to your ad content. The site owner makes money for each ad this is displayed on their site AND clicked. Hopefully that click will drive traffic to your site.
Sorry to digress, but it’s important to understand how it all works together. So how to do you drive traffic to your auction with Ads? First, I’ll assume you have a website, have some fresh content on the site and keep it updated fairly often.
eBay used to allow people to use Adwords to place ads and have those ads directly link to their eBay store or Auction. eBay now frowns on that and in fact, will not longer give you affiliate credit if you do that. Instead, you need to direct users from another site(your own) to your eBay store.
Using Adwords can be a very good way to get traffic to your site and also send traffic to your eBay auction. Our main website, Webposter.com, uses eBays store tools to display our current auctions on the right side of our website. When users visit our site, they are immediately able to click one of our auctions and bid. Through the affiliate toolkit, we also are able to get a commission on any other items the user may bid on and win. We drive traffic to our site using Adwords ads and those promote the items we are selling on eBay.
Placing an Adwords Ad is pretty straight forward. Once you get your account setup, you create a new ad compaign. You’ll need a catchy title, some brief ad copy, and a place to direct individuals. You’ll also need keywords that are relavent to what you are selling. This is where most people make their mistakes. They simply add as many keywords as possible, set their default bid amount and let ‘er rip. HUGE MISTAKE.
Tomorrow I’ll take you through how to pick your keywords and get the traffic rolling to your site and hopefully the sales
