Adword secret

If you’ve been involved in affiliate marketing or AdSense for a year or more, you’ve probably received at least one free Google AdWords credit.

Google AdWords is a pay per click program (PPC) that you pay each time a someone clicks your ad-listing link and is taken to your website. AdWords allows you to bid on keywords, and you pay when your site gets a visit from those keywords. Typically, the more popular the keyword is (volume of searches), the more it will cost per click.

Occasionally, hosting companies will offer free AdWords credits and Google has been known to send them out as well. In fact, recently, Google sent $100 credits to many AdSense members.

So what do you do when you receive one of these free AdWords credits? Well, you may be tempted to sign up with AdWords and use it right away. Many people make the mistake of bidding on their most significant keyword phrases and use up the credit without even tracking their return on investment (ROI).

Bear in mind, the purpose of using AdWords is to make a profit. If you spend $200 on keywords, then your goal should be to make more than that on your traffic. So before you go and waste your credits, you should have a strategy.

Many people who’ve become proficient in PPC have done so with the squeeze page strategy. Suppose you promote a book on ClickBank and you earn $65 per sale. You would bid on specific keywords related to that book, and create an appealing landing page that has a goal. That goal might be to offer a related, free download (teaser) in exchange for an email address. Once you have email addresses you can send them follow-up emails to help presale the ClickBank product.

If you create a “squeeze page”, it should have relevant and useful content. If your page has too much hype, it may not receive a good quality score, which could hurt your ranking potential. Usually it takes several exposures before someone buys a product, so that’s why having an email list can be so important. This is particularly true if you learn how to use it to your advantage. So if you pay $35 for AdWords clicks/visits to get one sale for this book, your ROI is $25 ($60 commission – $35 spent on AdWords).

Google know what they’re doing by handing out so many free credits. They realize the average person has to spend much more than $100 to return a profit with AdWords. So the free credit they give is just to get you started. They know most people don’t figure out AdWords right away. Ultimately, it takes a lot of campaign testing (headlines, copy, keyword selection, bid price etc.) before you acquire the right ad to return a profit.

A lot of people who do PPC full time earn 6 and 7 figures per year. Most shelled out at least $1,000 before they began to return a profit. They also devote hours each day monitoring every single detail about their campaigns. A single word in their ad title may increase their profit by hundreds of dollars. If you want to become proficient at PPC, you have to be willing to track everything and lose some money. And if you are lucky enough to turn Google’s free gift into a profit, that’s great! You are unquestionably in the minority.

Many people use AdWords just to steer traffic to their site. They research long-tail (very targeted, low-cost) keywords to bid on and establish a small, daily budget to minimize their costs. If you can afford to do this, fine. Just keep in mind, if you don’t track what those visitors are doing then you could be wasting money. All traffic is not automatically good traffic and you have to take the time to learn what keywords give you the best return on your investment.

There are loads of people making a stack of money with AdWords. As I pointed out, some are earning up to 7 figures annually. This kind of accomplishment produces countless self-proclaimed ‘AdWords gurus’ who want to sell you their secrets to AdWords. Why would they sell the secret if it means creating more competition for them? You may get some broad guidelines, but no real AdWords master is going to tell you everything.

AdWords can be a fantastic program to help improve your traffic and sales. Just realize it’s going to take time, persistence and probably more than that free Google credit to conquer it. Map out a strategy before you haphazardly bid randomly on keywords. Also, watch your campaigns closely and set a daily spending limit.