Choosing to bid on the right keywords can be key to your pay per click success. By choosing the proper keywords - words that your potential customers would use to search for your product - you can pre-qualify web traffic and skyrocket your conversion rate.
But how do you choose the right keywords Here are 3 powerful tips to uncovering profit-pulling keywords for your pay per click campaign.
#1) Choose Relevant Keywords
While this SEEMS obvious, youd be surprised at how many ppc campaigns bid on unrelated keywords (Their logic might have a foundation but we just cant see it from a searchers point of view).
So for example if youre selling an e-book on how to make money buying foreclosures, dont bid on keywords related to stock trading. Yes, these both have money in common but that is a WIDE net to cast - and a huge waste of your money.
Even when you bid on a keyword - make sure the description not only fits the keyword but matches what the searcher will find when they click on your ad. Nothing ticks internet searchers off more than misleading ads.
Youll not only NOT make the sale - but youll be making a non-customer for life, even IF they would have eventually bought your product.
#2) Choose Lots of Low-Cost Keywords
Unless youre Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, chances are you cant afford to spend $5.00 on the keyword diet. Thats ok, you dont have to.
Think niche with your keywords and youll find lots of low-cost related keywords - sometimes with absolutely no competition.
Now obviously these keywords are low cost because there are not a lot of searches on them (say 50-100 searches per month). But if you bid on a LOT of these keywords (say 200-300) that adds up to a lot of CHEAP traffic over time:
100 searches x 300 keywords = 30,000 searches and possible hits a month.
How do you find these low-cost keywords
Use the keyword selection tool provided by most ppc engines to look up a main keyword. Then start from the bottom up to pick out related, low volume (less than 1000 searches a month) keywords.
Also, dont forget to use misspellings. So many people dont bid on misspellings that you can usually top positions quite cheap.
#3) Use Your Keywords In Your Title or Your Description or Both
Using your keyword in the description can double your click throughs, which means more interested prospects visiting your website.
You want the visitor to click on your link, only if they are really interested. Including your keyword in the title or description is a great way to weed out the tire-kickers from the sincere customers.
It reinforces the idea that YOUR website can give them what they are searching for - a sort of mirroring back what they typed, which breeds trust and likeability.
So those are several tips to helping you choose the right keywords for your pay per click campaign. Good luck and may your traffic (and sales) increase exponentially!
Kathryn ONeill is contributing writer for Pay Per Click Advertising, a website helping you get the most for your pay per click dollars.
For more pay per click tips, reviews, and ppc savings, visit
Googles Adsense is one of the most powerful weapons in website publishers arsenal. It enables you to monetize your sites easily and if used properly can generate a very healthy income. However, if youre not using it properly and maximizing the income you squeeze from it, your leaving money on the table something we all hate doing.
Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and youll be amazed by the results.
I ran Adsense on my sites for over a year before I discovered these techniques, and like many people, I though I was doing pretty well. My clickthrough rates and CPM figures were very healthy, and I didnt honestly think that they could be improved a great deal. How wrong I was. Immediately after I implemented a few quick changes my clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some fine tuning I manged to get nearly three times as many people to click on the ads as had been previously doing so.
The first technique is one that was discovered by the amazingly helpful Debs, on SiteSells SBI! forums. When I read it originally, it made sense and I decided to goive it a go, but I wasnt prepared for the immediate impact it would have on my income. It involves making only a few simple changes to the format and positioning of your Adsense ads.
Firstly, forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats are almost universally ignored by surfers. Why Because weve all been conditioned to recognise a skyscraper or banner as an advert and as these adverts are rarely of any interest, we ignore them. Whats needed is a way of integrating Adsense ads into the editorial on your site as seamlessly as possible. To do this you need to do three things:
1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format2. Make the background color of the ad the same as the background color of your site, or as close to it as possible.3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border color to be the same as the background color of the ad.
These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and creating a custom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom color palette. Use the color picker to pick the coor you want. The Javascript is automatically generated at the foot of the page, ready for you to copy and paste into the pages on your site.
Now, you need to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. Research using retina scanning technology has shown that the place that surfers tend to look at first and most often is the top left. I dont know the reasons for this, perhaps its because thats where were used to seeing the most useful search engine results (at the top of the rankings) and search engines are the sites we most often visit, so we automatically look at the same place on other sites.
Whatever the reasoning, as soon as I made the above changes to my Adsense ads, clickthrough rates doubled, immediately.
The second technique is much newer and one which is entirely based on my own experience. Google has recently added a new type of Adsense format, called Adlinks. This displays a series of links on your page in the same style of Ad unit as regular Adsense ads. When a user clicks a link they are taken to a page of adverts that resembles regular Google search results. As a publisher, you are paid every time a user clicks one of those ads.
Adventurous soul that I am, I jumped in with both feet and started to trial Adlinks on my most visited pages as soon as it was launched. Im using the four links in a square box format, positioned top left of my page content. After a few weeks of running Adlinks alongside regular Adsense ads, its clear that the return on Adlinks is about a fifth to a quarter higher than regular ads. Theres no clear reason for this but one explanation may lie in the fact that clicking on an Adlink takes the user to page of results. When a user clicks on one of these, you are paid for the click. If the user finds what they want, great, if not, it seems that they hit the Back button on their browser and try again, just as you would for normal search engine results. Then they click on another result, and you get paid again. So its possible to be paid more than once from the same Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, but it does make perfect sense in the light of my Adlinks results.
Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allow you to track your results across a number of sites on a site by site, page by page, or just about any other basis you choose. This is a very powerful tool and you should use it to find out which ads are performing best for you and fine tune your Adsense and Adlink ads accordingly.
So you see, by spending an hour or so of your time making a few adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly treble your Adsense income. Give it a go, youll be amazed by the results.
Kenny Hemphill is the editor and publisher of and has been making money from Adsense for two years.