Thursday, March 1, 2007

Adwords Success On A $5 Budget

By Ochedikwu Anyebe

For Google Adwords campaigns on a limited budget, the difference between success and failure often lies in the initial cost. It is easy to get burnt trying out Adwords for the first time. My first attempts at launching an Adwords campaign would leave not only a gaping hole in my tiny pocket, but shatter my initial ambition of conquering the world wide web!

After a few failed campaigns, a bruised ego and a thin wallet, I retreated from the Adwords battleground to carefully analyse my campaign. After a bit of some hard work I came up with a formula for making money with Adwords even with a little start up capital. Infact, you can start a campaign with $5 and let it run itself successfully. But you must know these techniques and follow them guardedly. The following tips will help you run a successful and profitable adwords campaign on a tight budget.

1. Choose a product with high demand and easy convertibility. This rule holds true not only for internet marketing as a whole but also Adwords. Nobody will click on a product or service that is not wanted no matter how nicely packaged. Consumer trends can always be gleaned from such sites as “Lycos 50”, Google’s Zeltergeist, 100hot.com, wordspot.com, or Wordtracker’s latest keywords search report. It is also quite possible to find high converting products from smaller niches.

2. Patiently study the guidelines of the pay per click search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Msn before launching an Adwords campaign. This is to save time and avoid making sometimes costly mistakes.

3. Bid on cheap keywords. Keywords are crucial to Adwords success for they determine not only the search parameter for finding a buyer but actually determine the cost. The cost of your campaign is the cost of your keyword. Time spent on researching keywords is therefore never time wasted. Compile a long list of keywords either manually or with the help of a Keyword Tool like that of Google or Overture. Check their cost per click using the Keyword Tool bid option and add only the keywords with a low cost per click to your campaign keyword list. I consider the minimum keyword bid price of $0.05 or $0.06 {$0.10 on Yahoo) the ideal price to bid on for an effective low cost campaign. Add keywords of no more than these. That is it. Don’t worry if the top keywords are few and expensive. We shall drive our own traffic from the cheap ones. Fortunately most adwords advertisers, some of them firms with big bucks, zero in on only these few expensive keywords {that is why they are so expensive}, leaving us poor folks to pick up the cheap keyword crumbs lying on the ground, much to our advantage of course!

4. Place the cost of your product or service on the ad. This is important as it serves to drive away the casual, oftentimes freebie-seeking browser from wasting your click. It in turn attracts the serious, prospective purchaser. The importance of this point cannot be overemphasized. These days I prefer launching adwords campaigns mainly only for products and services I can place the price of on the face of the ad.

5. Optimize your ad by placing keywords in the ad title and description. This tends to improve the quality of the ad according to Google policies by improving the click through rate (CTR). This in turn reduces the cost of the ad. To achieve this effect, it is advisable to compile different ads for different keyword adgroups.

6. Improve the quality of the keywords by using exact matching [ ], and phrase matching{“ “}. This is because broad keyword matching, the default in Google, tends to waste clicks and is better avoided altogether except in campaigns where you stand to gain commissions per click. In addition, create adgroups of misspellings of keywords.

7. Include negative keywords by adding the – sign before the word. This prevents anyone searching on such a word from seeing your ad. By adding the negative sign to the word free, for example, someone searching for a free version of your product is staved off, saving yourself from a potential wasted click. This optimization helps to create laser targeted clicks that have a high potential for converting to sales. In addition to negative keywords, you can also create an adgroup of keyword misspellings.

8. Don’t conduct Adwords campaigns for products or services with a payout of less than $30 per sale. Anything less than this and you stand the risk of getting burnt or running an expensive campaign.

9. Start your low budget adwords campaign by setting a low daily budget of around $5. This is to enable you test the waters and make necessary tweaks. Remove non-performing, inactive keywords. Keep adding new cheap ones if possible. Run one or two ads at a time to enable careful monitoring and to incur minimal costs. Increase your daily budget as your campaign begins to pick up.

10. Target your ads to a specific geographical location such as U.S and Canada. Ads in English should be targeted at English speaking countries, those in French to French speaking countries, and so on. Targeting your ad to the whole world can effectively reduce the campaign quality and click through rate.

11. Monitor sales from your website. An average performing product converts into a sale in 100 clicks. At 6 cents per click and a product with a $30 payout, 1000 clicks will result in sales commission of $300 at a cost of $60 or profit of $240. Pretty good business I dare say.

12. To run a Google Adwords campaign, follow the above mentioned tips. On a $5 initial deposit on Google or Yahoo, start a campaign by bidding on hundreds of keywords with a maximum cost per click of 5 or 6 cents or 10 cents as in Yahoo. Set a daily budget of $5. Promote a product that will pay you a minimum of $30 per sale. Place the price of the product on the ad. And target your specific consumer preference geographical area. Optimize your ad by placing keywords in the ad title and description. Optimize your keywords by using exact matching, phrase matching, negative keywords, and keyword misspellings. Write your keyword optimized attractive ad copy and launch it like a true general. By the time Google bills your Credit card, you would have made sufficient sales and profit to effectively cover the cost of the campaign. Thus you would have launched an effective adwords campaign with a budget as low as Google’s initial deposit of $5.

Ochedikwu Anyebe is the owner and CEO of Webblazer1.com He is a work at home enterpreneur and consultant who has helped many to make money online. Visit his site at http://www.webblazer1.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ochedikwu_Anyebe

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