10 Minutes To Instant Web Traffic

In the last chapter you read about how pay-per-click advertising (PPC) was simply the best method for bringing instant traffic to your websites.

Today you'll learn about a simple, 10-minute process that anyone can use to setup a fully functional Google AdWords account and start driving traffic to their website almost immediately.

Before we get into the more Advanced strategies, we need to build a very strong foundation and make sure you understand the basics. The stronger your foundation, the more earning potential you'll have for the future, so pay close attention to every detail I'm about to teach.

Let's do a quick example...

We'll pretend that we sell home theater systems. I am going to show you exactly how to build a campaign for that type of product, starting with some sensible market research.

Research your market

PPC advertising is very competitive for a reason for any high-value product/service, PPC is a cheap and effective way to get your name in front of the people looking for products just like yours.

With all the competition there's just one big problem: If you jump in blind, the sharks will eat you alive. You must first dig up the details on your market and your competition, and that means knowing:

• Which keywords are getting the most traffic
• What are the top bid prices for those keywords
• Which keywords are being ignored and why
• How many competitors you will have

In the next chapter I will explain the exact steps you need to take to pick out the right keywords for your ad campaign. Here, I'll just give you a quick run through of how to create a keyword list using a simple little free keyword generation tool, which you've probably heard of... Overture's Keyword Selector Tool.

Start by heading to Yahoo Search Marketing open the Keyword Selector Tool. As it's shown below, enter your main keyword in the box and click on 'Go'. This will give you a list of keywords with search estimates.

Under the "count column", you'll see that there are lots of searches for the base term but also that there are focused searches for smaller topics as well. Demand is not too strong, but we know that this is a high value product so we wait till we see bids and competition.

It says there are 31,761 searches for the term "home theater system" last month. You can multiply that number by 3 to come up with roughly how many times that word was searched for at Google.com.

Next...

We'll copy the top 6-10 keywords in a text file; we will need them for the next step.

Here's the list I've come up with so far:

• home theater system
• wireless home theater system
• home theater system review
• home theater speaker system
• home theater audio system
• buy home theater system
• home theater system design
• home theater sound system
• dvd home theater system
• best home theater system

Note: This is just a sample listing - you can, and should, create much larger lists (around 200-300 keywords minimum - I'll show you how in the next chapter) to start with, and then build them up as your ad campaign requires it.

Now we want to find out what the top bid prices are for these keywords. That is, how much money is your competition (i.e. other Google Adwords advertisers) are willing to spend on this niche to buy traffic. A high number is a good indicator that your niche is profitable, but on the other hand, if you know for sure that a niche is profitable (like home theater systems, which sell for quite a lot of money), low bid prices can mean that this is a market that is ripe for domination.

Go back to the Yahoo Search Marketing and click on the "View Bids Tool" as I've shown in the screenshot below:

The first time you load this page, you will see the following screen:

(http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/)

Remember that list of keywords you just saved? Take the first keyword and plug it in the first box on this screen. Then, enter the verification letters in the second box and click on 'Search' to continue.

When you do this, you'll see the following:

Above is a search for "home theater speaker system" - notice that the top bid on Yahoo is under $1.00 - that's pretty cheap considering that a pair of high-end speakers can cost several hundred dollars. Allowing for the cost of the physical product, you can see that this is a very nice, lucrative, under-priced bidding market.

Repeat this process for all your keywords and check the top bid prices for them. You are doing this to estimate how much you will have to pay, per click, to match / top your competition. In this case, you'll see that most of the keywords have a bid price of under $1.00. That's good news, but keep in mind that in AdWords you'll have a bit more
competition, so you can expect the top bid price in AdWords to be at least twice that much of Yahoo, and may be more.

After we do our research, we should have a nice list of targeted, profitable keywords to start our AdWords campaign with.

Couple of interesting things you'll notice here:

Despite being a very expensive market (full-fledged home theater systems costs thousands of dollars), there's a low level of competition (bid prices are fairly low). This will allow you to corner the market quite easily, IF you know how to sell to it.

People are as concerned with specific aspects of home theaters (wireless systems, speakers) as they are with the "how to" aspect (design, setup). This can work to our advantage, as you'll see when we get to writing the ad.

Now that we have our keyword list ready, let's go setup our AdWords account. It's going to be fast, so make sure you pay attention.

Start the clock…