Ok, it appears that many people wanted to know about PPC. This happens to be one of my favorite subjects, as I have been doing PPC for years…

Below are some of my current thoughts “as they come to me.” Some of them, you will agree with. Some of them you may scratch your head over - and that’s totally cool. Some of the tips will be more “philosophical” in nature and some of them will be “hands on.”

1: “The only constant thing is change.” I think what trips many people up is that they apply today what worked great in the PAST. The internet changes at a fast and furious pace. PPC advertising is no different.

In the past, you could make a mile-long list or “somewhat related” keywords, point them to your affiliate link and make bank. Today, this will get you slapped, broke and frustrated.

The problem is that outdated information can still float around. Older ebooks, forum threads, articles etc. Even “outdated thoughts” inside your head can make you believe that this is the way to go - only to find out the hard way that things have changed. You should always be as up-to-date as possible on how things in your chosen field work.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

- Charles Darwin

2: A rant on keyword selection:

Don’t treat all keywords equally.

It’s in our nature to be “fair.”

“Ooooh, I have 100 keywords and I should handle them all the same way. It’s only fair. After all, each keyword occupies the same amount of space on my screen.”

Would you treat two keywords exactly the same?

What if one gets 2 impressions a month and the other gets 2000?

What if one converts at 0.03% and the other at 12%?

“Yes, but I want the shortcut: I don’t want to spend my entire budget to find out what works and what won’t.”

Fine, who wouldn’t like that? So, here’s what you do: To start with, go for the keywords that have a higher chance of converting. Many people tend to make this for you much more complicated than it really is.

Example:

Let’s say that you have found a popular anti-acne cream called “Anti Acne X” - and it pays you well - and you want to promote it via PPC. Even if you have no experience in this market, which ones of the keywords below do you think have a higher chance of resulting in a conversion?

acne
acne pictures
acne cream
anti acne x
acne treatment
get rid of acne

Trust me, you don’t need to run this campaign to figure out that “anti acne x” (the name of the product) will convert the best. You can’t get any more targeted than that!

What about other keywords like “acne treatment”, “acne cream”, “get rid of acne”? These are definitely keywords to CONSIDER - they at least show that the person is interested in finding a solution to their problem.

What about keywords like “acne” or “acne pictures”? Don’t even go there. This will not work. They are very general and untargeted.

DON’T BE CONCERNED WITH “TRAFFIC” - BE CONCERNED WITH SALES AND PROFITS! “BUY MORE MOOLAH IN YOUR POCKET” - NOT TRAFFIC!

Stop looking at your keyword list and hoping that it will work. You need to UNDERSTAND what is the INTENT behind each search. These terms are typed by real, breathing humans - not robots (novel concept, eh?). And, speaking of keywords…

3: What keyword tools are the best? I’m not going to make many friends in the industry by saying this but you don’t need to pay for any keyword tools. For the most part, you want to bid on the name of the product you are promoting and its variations.

But if you want to expand some more and test the waters some more, then you can use these:

Adwords Keyword Tool
Wordtracker Free Version
Keyword Discovery Free Version

(I like using all three to cover all the bases).

These tools are 100% FREE and they offer you as much “depth” as you will need. If you type a keyword like “acne” and one of the keywords that comes up is “acne treatment” and you want to explore it further - then just enter that keyword in the tool again (or click the keyword).

In my view, most of the paid keyword tools are “relics” of a gone era - at least for Pay Per Click advertising.

Don’t waste your money on the new “must have toy” of the week “coz other kids play with it too.”

4: Why “ultra long tail” keywords do NOT work well for pay per click any more:

I will give you a specific example…

Let’s say that you have two keywords:

“acne treatment”
“whats the best acne treatment in the world”

More or less, they indicate very similar intent.

What USED to work is that you could bid $0.05-$0.10 on thousands of the really long tail terms and they would all “add up” to enough searches and traffic.

Imagine that advertiser A was bidding on “acne treatment” and bidding $1.00 and advertiser B was bidding on “whats the best acne treatment in the world” and bidding $0.10. Then, someone searched for “whats the best acne treatment in the world.” Advertiser B would come up before advertiser A, because he targeted the term much better.

Nowadays, this will not work. Advertiser B may not show for this term at all. Why? Because Google has gotten smarter and greedier, that’s why (nothing wrong with these of course - this is business, after all).

What is going on behind the scenes is this:

Google says: “The term “acne treatment” gets 5000 searches a month, and we already have several ads for that term that have been PROVEN winners (coz people click on them). If we show those ads, we will get paid well (coz those advertisers bid high).”

“The term “whats the best acne treatment in the world” gets only 2 searches a month. We are not going to show that guy’s ad who bids on this term for $0.05 - we will lose money if we do that!”

5: How to manufacture your own “medium tails.” As stated above, the first types of keywords you want to use are the brand terms. The name of the product you promote.

IF you want to expand, you can find variations of other keywords that show commercial intent - but without relying on some keyword tool to give you back keywords like “whats the best acne treatment in the world.”

What you can do, is use the free keyword tools mentioned above and find several “seed” words (meaning just a single word). You can paste all the keywords in a free tool like Note tab lite and analyze the keyword density. Then, you may find terms like:

acne
pimples
zits

get rid of

treatment
treatments
remedy
remedies
cure
cures
cream
creams
product
products

review
reviews

natural
best
top

You can then use a free desktop permutation tool like PPC Keyword Generator. That’s what I use. We use a desktop app so that we don’t give away our keyword list to anyone. (Paranoia, paranoia).

The tool will come up with terms like:

best acne treatments
top acne creams
acne product review

etc…

These are “medium tails” but they are valuable and actually make sense. They are not like “treatment acne best Nevada lolz” - like what some tools helped you generate in the past…

Stay tuned for part 2. You can post your comments or questions for part 1 below. I’m especially looking for opinions that are different to mine. Nothing is black and white and there are as many ppc “systems” as there are advertisers…

George over and out.