Exploring Adwords Cost Per Click Day 1

Being a fairly accomplished Adsense Publisher and having various affiliate programs that bring in revenue from viral videos and syndicated articles, I decided to bite the bullet and start doing something I've put off for a long time, and that is Cost-Per-Click Advertising. If you've ever heard of Google Adwords, then you know what
CPC advertising is.

Seasoned internet marketers often present CPC advertising as *the* way to promote affiliate programs, and rather than write article after article to fight for a handful of sales I could be more efficient and leveraged using paid ads. But CPC is so complicated, and the only time I ever tried it in the past, I had no clue what I was doing and the $100 I put into my account got eaten up in a couple of days, wasted on $1 clicks in the dating niche. Lame. But this time I've gone into CPC expecting a learning curve, and expecting to bomb and learn from my mistakes.

Before starting this campaign, I studied CPC with a program available online called Google Cash. This program consists of a 200+ page ebook, along with a collection of demonstration videos and bonus ebooks. After using this program I feel armed with a lot of knowledge I didn't have the first time I dipped my toes into CPC. But, of course, that knowledge is useless until I apply it in the real world, and that's when the real learning takes place. So here we go.

For my first test campaign I decided to promote Google Cash itself, because I just finished it so I'm very familiar with the program. Promoting an online marketing course might be a dumb idea - it's a competitive niche, but I was anxious to get started, and however catastrophic it is, I will learn from it.

Today I used my credit card to add $100 to my Adwords account, and I created a new campaign with two add groups (I plan to add more). Actually, I added a third ad group who keywords included the terms "Google Cash" but it seems that Adwords rejected the ads. After completing the ads they appeared nowhere in my account, and I tried a few times. Maybe they object to having the Google name used in an ad.

My other two ad groups were accepted. I have 2 ads in each group which are almost the same, except for one change so I can split test and see which variation does better. The problem is that so far my ads are not showing. It seems like they're not showing because the ads have been given a low quality score, so the minimum bid price must be higher than the amount of my bid. Google gives you a quality score for your ads, and if they are deemed low quality they don't reject the ads--they just charge you more money. I think this is what murders most small time Adwords users and drives them out of the business, because they blow a lot of money and give up. I want to conquer this.



Inside Adwords it tells you a few details about your quality score. It says that my selected keywords are relevant to my ads. But it says that my landing page is not relevant enough. I am not using my own landing page, but rather Google Cash's landing page, to which I directly link with my affiliate link. So maybe I will have to rewrite some ads and choose different keywords that better reflect the words used on the Google Cash landing page.



Another option is to try increasing my maximum bid price so I start to get some traffic at the higher "low quality score" price, and then if I can get a good clickthrough rate I'll start to lower my bids as my quality score goes up. Your clickthrough rate is another factor that influences your quality score and determines your cost per click.

That's my first day of Google Adwords in a nutshell. I didn't really achieve anything concrete, but the learning process has begun. Tomorrow I plan to add more ad groups with different keywords, and hopefully some of those will get better quality scores and I can keep those and weed out the poor-performing keywords/ad groups. I will also take a closer look at the Google Cash landing page to see if there're any keywords on it that I can better target in my ads to make them more "relevant". If those things don't bring any progress I will increase my minimum bid, which is currently set at $.10 per click. Maybe if I increase it to $.15 or $.20 that will be enough to make up for the low quality score. We'll see.

I'll sleep on it and hopefully wake up with fresh ideas and insights. Good night!

Adsense Keyword Empire Part 6: Rinse and Repeat

Step 6:

Rinse and Repeat

You will be creating a lot of content and adding a lot of pages, so you will be repeating a lot of the above steps over and over. When you exhaust all the useful keyword phrases and subcategories for a specific site or blog, move onto creating a new site. Be sure to keep momentum up in your content creation/posting. Don't get paralyzed worrying about whether your content is good enough or not. It doesn't have to be revolutionary content and you don't have to be an amazing writer. You just have to use the targeted keywords in your content and write something useful or interesting on that specific topic.

It's important that you are persistent and don't give it up even if you don't make any money for the first month or two. The hardest part of this business for me has been that everything online has a delayed reaction. You can create amazing content with great targeted keywords and for be disappointed for weeks when it gets almost no visitors. But then suddenly visitors start coming, sometimes flooding in, and clicking on your ads. It took weeks for that content to be picked up and move up high in the search engine results. So don't be discouraged by apparent failure, because it's usually not failure at all. It's a small snowball starting to gain momentum. So it is imperative that you continue building content, even if the content you created yesterday or last week isn't making you any money yet. Trust me. Your income stream will eventually be mostly automated, but for now keep fighting.

Closing thoughts

The above is the essence of the method I've used to create an automated income stream with Google Adsense. I hope that I've given you a better idea of how to create your own Adsense income stream. But more than that, I hope that I have in some small way motivated you to take action and get started in making money online, or to find new ways of making money online.

Congratulating you on your success to come.

Adsense Keyword Empire Part 5: Promoting Your Content

Step 5:

Promote your content

Now you have pages containing targeted keywords that we are intending will bring in traffic through search engines. You can just let your page sit and hope the search engines will spider it, and they probably will eventually. But we want to get the page spidered quickly, and we want to get it to be high in the search engine results for your keyword phrases, preferably on the first page of the search results. So we need to promote the site or page.

The main thing is to build backlinks to your site and pages. Having backlinks tells the search engines that your site is important and should be ranked higher.

To get backlinks to your main site, I suggest you:

* Submit your site/blog to web directories. These are directories where people can browse or search for sites and blogs on specific topics.

* Post comments on other people's blogs with your link included in the comment.

* Post on forums relevant to your topic with your site or blog link in the signature

* Contact other webmasters or bloggers and ask to exchange links with them, so you put their link on your site, and they put yours on their site.

To build backlinks to your individual pages, I recommend submissions to social bookmarking services. Social bookmarking services are websites on which you can store all your bookmarks, and share them with other users. These social bookmarking sites are often very popular and a backlink from them can increase your search position.

Here is one list of good ones (a few seem to be dead links, but there are more sites arising in their place, don't worry):

http://www.hasan-online.com/2008/05/30/22-top-dofollow-social-bookmarking-website-get-quality-backlinks/

Similar to social bookmarking sites are news sharing sites like Digg.com and reddit.com. You can post your own content and other users can look at it, vote on it, and recommend it to others.

All of the above methods increase your backlinks, but also give you direct exposure to websurfers. So you will get some benefit to your search engine results position, but you will also gain some direct traffic because people will see your link and click on it.

Every time I add a new page of content, I submit it to a number of social bookmarking services and news sites. And every time I create a new site or blog, after adding 10 or so pages of content, I submit the site/blog to a few dozen directories. The immediate effect of submitting to directories is not so apparent, so you may think it's not helping. But I know from experience that if a site has backlinks from directories like this, then the site's search engine results position will be much more stable and it will not be so prone to slipping down lower in the search results. Submitting to directories is a pain in the butt, but it's important if we want to have automated income, to have your content remain high in the search positions even if you stop posting for a while. Also important to that end is getting backlinks from relevant sites, sites on the same general topic as yours. If you create quality content, you will naturally gain relevant backlinks over time.

Now that you know how to promote your content, you must now continue to rinse and repeat.

Adsense Keyword Empire Part 4: Adding Content

Step 4:

Add Content

First you have to create your main page, with some keyword phrases related to your main niche. Use your main niche keyword phrase in the domain name of your site, or blog name of your blog. Then use the keyword phrase again in your site description, again in your content text, and again in the ALT TAG of a photo if there is one.

The it's time to start to add pages on your subcategories.

Again, you want to optimize the subcategory page with keywords from your research. Use the subcategory keywords in the page title. So maybe your page title will be www.hey-mom-let's-adopt-a-dog.com/dalmations-in-germany. And again you will use the targeted keyword phrase in your text a couple of times (and I usually bold the phrase once in the text), and if you have any photos on the page put keywords in the filename (like "dalmationsgermany.jpg" or "germanydalmations.jpg"), and put the keyword phrase in the ALT TAG (in the html code for the photo you write something like alt="Photo of dalmations in Germany").

Note that I don't always write the exact keyword phrase, because if it's repeated too often the search engnes might view your page as spam. So I include the exact phrase a couple of times, and use some variations of it in addition to that. The days of useless websites full of nothing but keywords like "motorshow car truck monster truck race vehicle motorcycle moped...." are OVER. That's a good thing. Because you have a brain and can write something valuable. If you don't provide value in your content, you won't make money. Our targeted keywords are intended to help your readers find your useful content, not to spam them or trick them into visiting your site.

I'm not an expert in optimization, but the method described above is basically how I've optimized all my pages for all my sites. You can repeat the process over and over for every page you create. It becomes second nature after a while.

Now that you know how to add content, it's time to start promoting your content.

Adsense Keyword Empire Part 3: Setting Up A Site or Blog

Step 3:

Set up a site

I have done this two ways. One way is to build your own website, and the other is to make a blog.

Making your own website gives you control over the design of your site, and gives you more flexibility in where you place your Google Adsense ads on your site. If you have a real vision for how you want your site to look, or if you have some experience designing your own websites, this might be the best option for you.

If you decide to make your own website, you will need to find a web host (a service that keeps all of your website files stored and up and running online). I have tried a few different hosts but the simplest to set up and maintain and the one with the best control panel interface is definitely Hostgator.

If you are interested in designing your own site but have no experience, then you can use a program like XSitePro. This is an easy-to-use web design software and you don't have to know a thing about html code to use it. You just have to click buttons and enter text and drag and drop. It's easy and quick to learn, and is money well spent for those for more than a passing interest in website creation and design.


The second option is to make a blog. This is a great option for people who want do it the easy way and are willing to sacrifice some control over their page's desgin and ad placement. Blogs are great because it's so easy to just add a new page by typing in a new blog entry. Each blog entry is spidered as a separate page by the search engines. So it's very easy to produce content quickly without worrying about building new pages yourself. The easiest blogs to set up are blogger blogs, which you can find at http://www.blogger.com. They have nice professional looking templates that you can set up in about 30 seconds. Another popular option is to use Wordpress to build your blog, since it is more flexible than blogger. But it is also more complicated, and the free-hosted version of Wordpress doesn't allow Adsense ads. You have to use your on hosting with Wordpress if you want to use it to make money.

Now that you have some idea of how to set up a site, let's think about adding content.

Adsense Keyword Empire Part 2: Keyword Research

Step 2:

Keyword Research

There are a number of keyword research tools on the internet, two which I recommend are SEO Book Keyword Tool and Wordtracker. With these tools, you can enter a keyword and find out how many times on average it is searched for on a daily basis. They also give you suggestions for other keyword phrases with your keyword in it.

Let's use my favorite tool SEO Book Keyword Tool and enter the term "dog".




You can see that the word "dogs" gets 26,133 Google searches daily. That's 783,990 searches per month. Now let's do a Google search to see how many competing sites there are for the word "dogs".



You can see that there are 167,000,000 search results. That is WAYYY too many. Your site, at least its main page, would be buried in a sea of search results. We have to pick a narrower focus. Skimming through the suggested keyword phrases (and ignoring all the obscene ones!), I see "adopt a dog".



That might work. It gets 26,220 searches per month, and if we check in Google (put your search term in quotation marks) we can see that this phrase has 289,000 pages. That's still a lot, but I think it's alright for the website's main page. And it seems flexible. The general theme could be "Adopt a dog", and on each of the many pages we will add you could describe a different breed of dog for the reader to see which breed of dog is best for them. (The "adopt a dog" theme won't really matter much on the subcategory pages--really you could write whatever you want about dogs on each individual page, but having a general theme gives the site a purpose).

Let's look at keywords for some subcategories. Let's research "dalmation".



The term "dalmation" itself gets 401 searches per day (12,030 per month), and there are 1,020,000 Google search results. That's too many search results. I am always looking for less than 1000 search results in Google (remember, in my system we're searching with the keywords in quotation marks. Some people argue against this, but they usually don't make much money from Adsense so I ignore them). Look down at "dalmation breeders". I have a feeling this might work. It gets 990 searches per month, and there are 960 search results. That is borderline ok. I usually want less than 1000 search results (ideally less than 500) and I want the number of monthly searches to be at least double the number of search results. But these numbers are ok, so let's make a note of them and maybe we'll use them.

You may be wondering what "dalmation breeders" has to do with "adopt a dog". Well, you can try to draw a connection between the two topics on your subtopic page, but to be honest it doesn't really matter. With this method, most of your traffic will probably come directly to your subcategory pages straight from the search engine results. So they'll only read the "dalmation breeders" part.

Let's try "dalmation puppies". It gets 5280 searches per month. It has 24,100 search results. That's way too many. We won't use these keywords.

Let's try "dalmations in germany". This gets 570 searches per month, and there are NO SEARCH RESULTS in Google. That means no competition at all, so that's good. 570 monthly searches is not that many, but we will use these keywords just because there is no competition. It might be hard to write a whole page on dalmations in Germany, but maybe you can find a way to fit that phrase into your page somewhere.

Continue this kind of keyword research until you find a couple of keyword phrases for the subcategory that you think are good and have a good ratio of monthly searches to Google search results. Remember, the way I like to do it is:

-Monthly Google Searches are at least double the number of Google search results.

-There are under 1000 Google search results, preferably under 500.

These are guidelines, and I do violate them sometimes. For example, if a phrase gets 250,000 searches per month it's probably ok if there are 2000 Google search results, because of the massive volume of searches. But basically, I follow the above whenever I can. These are guidelines that I developed intuitively through trial and error, and I didn't learn them from any other source. These are strictly from my own experience.

The above is a keyword researching strategy that you will repeat time and time again with your many subcategories. In this example, you could reapeat the same process for every breed of dog you can think of. Then what the hell, add cartoon dogs, famous dogs from tv or movies, imaginary breeds of dogs, hey why not. As long as you do the keyword research properly you can add and add and add. Some people complain that it makes the site low quality because it is not integrated, that it's just a mishmash of individual pages. Well, that is a problem if you want to build a readership, get people to bookmark your site, or buy something directly through your site. But we are just looking for search engine traffic to as many pages as possible so they can see and click your Google Ads. These don't have to be amazingly professional sites. I follow the rule that if it is offering value to the person who searched for it, then it's valid, even if its connection to the main page of your site is questionable.

When I do keyword research, I use a notepad and simply draw 3 columns, with the keyword on the left, the number of monthly Google searches in the middle, and the number of Google search results on the right. I write down all the keyword phrases I might use, then highlight the best ones that I will definitely use. This works well for me.



Now that we've explored keyword research, it's time to set up a site.

Google Keyword Empire Part 1

I've been doing internet marketing for around 2 years now, and I make a fulltime living from a variety of online income streams. My most profitable income stream is Google Adsense, which earns me an average of $50 per day, or around $1500 per month. This money is almost entirely automatic! I barely have to do anything, and I still get the same amount every day. Because of that low maintenance income, I can focus my efforts on building new income streams. Before I quit my day job, all of my coworkers used to ask me how I did it. My friends and family members send me emails asking me to rescue them from their day jobs and help them build an online income. I can't help all those people individually, so I decided to lay out my system online for everybody to read. Today is part 1 of a series of posts about my "Google Keyword Empire". Before you read on, if you don't know what Google Adsense is, please read What is Google Adsense?

So how do I make money on Google Adsense? Well, the basic concept is simple. The idea is to build a keyword empire, so that people will find your webpages through search engines, visit your pages, and hopefully click the Adsense ads on your page. Simple, right?

Well, what is a keyword empire exactly? First, when choosing what niche to focus your website around, choose a niche which has a large number of subcategories. Let`s say you choose “dogs” as your niche. That niche has a lot of subcategories each with different keyword phrases, and we're going to target all of them. You do keyword research not only for the main niche, but for every subcategory as well, and you make a page for every subcategory, optimized for those keywords.

For example, your main page is an introduction to dogs, with general keywords about dogs. Then you make a separate page about dalmations. That page contains keyword phrases specific to dalmations. Then you make a page about poodles, containing keyword phrases specific to poodles. You do this for as many kinds of dogs as you can, provided that in your keyword research you find keyword phrases that you can use for that type of dog. (don't worry, I'll explain how to find appropriate keyword phrases later). Each of those pages gets spidered by the search engines, and since you are targeting a lot of different keyword phrases on different pages, you will get traffic from a wide variety of searches. Then you make another site. And another. Rather than focus on one high competition keyword like "dog", you target large numbers of low competition keyword phrases. That's why I call it an empire.

The above is just a quick summary to give you a general understanding of the method I use. Let's get into more detail.

Step 1

Find a Flexible Niche.

You will have to do some brainstorming to think of a niche that you are interested in, and that is flexible (meaning it has a lot of subtopics or subcateogories to write about). It has to be a big enough niche that its subtopics will get a significant number of search traffic. Something like "sparkplugs" is probably not a good niche, because even if there are indeed many subcategories of sparkplug, they probably don't get much search traffic. Let's try dogs. There are lots of kinds of dogs, and I imagine that each subcategory has a variety of keyword phrases to target, but that aren't too hugely popular (we don't want hugely popular keywords because then we have to compete with lots of other webpages). This niche might be good.

So now that you have a niche, let's move on to a very important step, keyword research.