Read Ling’s Affilorama Mini-Course: Introduction to Google Adwords

Read Mark Ling’s Affilorama Mini-Course titled “Introduction to Google Adwords”.

Mark Ling’s Affilorama Mini-Course is reprinted here.

Introduction to Google Adwords

Mini Course 3 Notes: Introduction to Google Adwords

Hi!

In previous lessons we’ve looked at what potential affiliate programs offer you for a passive income stream.

Today, we’ve going to start looking at one of the best methods of promoting your affiliate product – Google Adwords.

In many ways this Affilorama lesson is one of the most important you’ll ever see. Google Adwords has the potential to make you thousands and thousands of dollars!

In case you’re not sure what Google Adwords are, these are the ads that appear down the ads that show up on the right hand side of the page under the caption ‘sponsored links’ when you carry out any Google search.

If I type in ‘dating’, then a number of small, four line ads about dating appear down the right-hand side of the page. These paid ads are known as Google Adwords and they appear alongside almost every search you carry out in Google.

The ads work on what is called a cost per click basis. The advertiser pays Google each time someone clicks on their ad. It could be $2, it could be 5 cents. It depends how much the affiliate is paying for the ad. But more about that later.

First of all – why is Google Adwords so important for affiliate marketers?

Well, simply because AdWords ads are everywhere. Google reaches more than 80% of regular Internet users, so a well-written ad with a great keyword list has the potential to reach an enormous number of people

This year, Google is aiming to make 3 billion dollars in revenue from Adwords. That’s an incredible amount of money! And it gives you an idea of the enormity of people’s spending – and the amount of money they’re making back too! People are spending so much money on Adwords because they are profiting so much.

Last year, I spent close to $300,000 on my Google Adwords accounts alone. That’s not including all the other types of advertising I use, such as free search, viral marketing and other pay per click engines. That’s just for Google Adwords!

And guess what? I more than doubled my money. The huge profits that are possible with Adwords mean that I, and many other people, make a full time living just from being an affiliate marketer.

Google Adwords are essential for affiliate marketers because they allow you to target your audience very precisely using appropriate keywords.

As you will learn, Adwords can be tailored specifically to the portion of the market you are after, making them extremely powerful.

So, it’s pretty clear that the profit potential of Adwords is huge. But how do you make sure your ads are shown? What determines the order that these ads appear for instance?

For most searches, ads will appear down the side of the page. Occasionally, however, Google will randomly place Adwords ads at the top of the page of search results as well.

I’m not quite sure how Google decide when to do this, but it seems to me that they only do it for very popular search terms that lots of people are bidding on. Because they have so many ads for really popular searches, it’s a big incentive for them to place more ads on the page to generate more revenue.

One question that I’m asked all the time by new affiliates is how the ad order is determined.

Everyone wants to know how they can get their ad in number one position!

A lot of people have the misconception that it’s all about how much you spend on your ad.

This is not true!

Your ad placing is determined by a combination of the amount you spend per click and the number of people clicking on your ad.

The main reason why I’m such a successful Adwords advertiser is that I write ads that people want to click on.

Quite often, I can be paying just 6 cents per click, and I’ll be ranking higher than other advertisers who are paying 11 cents per click. I’ll be ranked number 2, and they’ll be down at number 8.

The reason for this is simply that my ad is more clickable. People like what it says and want to click through to read more. I certainly don’t leave this to chance either. I spend a lot of time optimizing my ad to make sure it’s what people are looking for.

Google likes this because they benefit a lot more from ads that get more click throughs. You see, they only receive money when someone clicks on your ad.

For example, let’s say you have an ad that 1 in 100 people clicked on, and you’re paying 10 cents per click for this ad.

Joe Bloggs might be paying 50 cents per click, but only 1 in 1500 people are clicking through his ad.

Even though Mr Bloggs is paying more per click, Google only gets paid when someone clicks on his ad. Ultimately, they’re making a lot less money with his 50 cent ad than my 10 cent ad.

Plus, if not many people are clicking on Joe Blogg’s ad, it clearly means that the ad is not that relevant to what people are looking for. And Google are in the business of providing the most relevant search results to their users.

So, not only do you save money with a more clickable ad, you also generate more profit. It’s a win-win situation!

A lot of inexperienced Google Adwords advertisers (and I believe that these make up the majority!), are not getting the maximum click through rate that they could for their ad.

The biggest mistake people make is thinking that the answer to a low ranking is to spend more. What they really need to do is lower their spend and work on raising their click through rate with a more enticing ad.

If you just keep increasing your spend, then you better have a huge profit margin! Increasing the amount you spend with Google Adwords is the number one way that people lose money with Adwords.

Setting up an Adwords Account

So are you ready to set up your Adwords Account?

To make your ad:

1. Type https://adwords.google.com into your browser.

2. Click on the ‘Sign Up Now’ tab on the homepage. Google gives you a choice between a Standard and Starter edition for setting up Adwords. I’m going to be taking you through the Standard edition – it’s so easy there is no point in using the Starter!

3. Your first option is to choose which language your ads will be in.

4. Then, choose the area that you would like to target your customers in. This will depend on whether you wish to market locally, nationally, or internationally.

If you have a pet store in Los Angeles for example, then you might only want your ad to be shown to people searching from Los Angeles.

• However, affiliates promoting other people’s products will generally be promoting to countries and territories, rather than localities.
• A lot of affiliates choose all countries, however personally find that some some countries are frankly not worth targeting. A country like the Phillipines will cost you just as much per click, but they don’t have the ability to pay. They are unlikely to have credits or money. There are lots of reasons why people in these countries cannot buy.
• So here is my list of recommended countries to focus on: USA, UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Chile, Bahrain, Trinidad and Tobago, Qatar, Bermuda, Kazakhstan, Zambia, Antigua, and Barbuda, South Africa.

By focusing JUST on these countries, you’ll find that you’ll double your money.

If you really must target a country such as the Solomon Islands for example, then be sure to set up as a separate Google Adwords account just for this country so that you can track exactly what’s happening.

5. Writing Your Ad

The next step is creating your ad. An ad consists of a headline and two lines of ad text. Your word limit is very strict. It’s your challenge is to create a targeted headline and two headlines of ad text using only 85 characters!

• The example at the top of the page gives you an idea of what you ad will look like.
• For example, I’ll type in an ad for HowtoSpanish.net. This is an affiliate site that gives out free Spanish lessons and promotes other learn to speak Spanish products.
• I can simply cut and paste the URL from the site into the ad.
• Then I’ll type in a headline. This can be anything you want, although what you say can make a big difference to your click through rates.
• For example, if you’re targeting people who are searching for ‘How to train an aggressive dog’, then you’ll get twice the amount of clickthroughs compared to an ad with the title ‘Dog Training Secrets’. The key is to be specific.
• The main thing is to establish credibility and give the benefits. For example, if you could say ‘As seen on CNN’, that would be a fantastic way of establishing credibility!
• But if you can’t establish credibility easily, focus on the benefits. For instance ‘Impress your Spanish friends! Speak like a native.”
• Not only will stating benefits increase your click throughs, they will also increase the number of purchases.
• We’ll go into a lot more detail about writing your ad in the next lesson. Click continue now and move onto the next stage.

6. Selecting Your Keywords

The next part of the process is choosing keywords. Keywords are the words that people use when they are looking for information associated with your site.

They help you to get the most targeted audience possible to your site, so they are a vital part of your ads success. Before you even think about selecting your keywords, you need to have a good brainstorm of words and phrases related to your product/service.

• Google will suggest some keywords based on your ad and your website.
• Another way of finding keywords is by using Overture’s keyword selector tool at http://www.inventory.overture.com.
• Just enter a keyword such as ‘Learn Spanish’, or even just ‘Spanish’ and find out what other people are searching for. This shows you how many related words have been searched for in the Overture network, which includes Yahoo and a number of other small search engines. This way, you can gear your keywords to what people are looking for.
• You can have as many keywords as you want. Although, normally, I would create multiple categories for different groups of keywords. For example, I’d have one category of keywords targeting people searching for ‘learn spanish online’ and another group targeting ‘Spanish courses’.

And why do I do this?

Because it’s much easier to keep track of which keywords are pulling in customers this way. It also allows you to easily see how much each ad is costing your per sale.

• Once you have chosen your keywords, click continue.

7. Selecting Pricing

The final stage of sign-up process involves choosing your budget.

• Always make sure you choose US dollars for the currency selection. It doesn’t matter where you live, just go with US dollars. The reason for this is that you’ll end up losing money on the conversion rate otherwise.

Google converts currency itself, and I’ve found it to be a lot more expensive that what your bank will charge. It’s much cheaper to convert to your currency once you’ve received the money to your bank account.

Also, using US dollars means you are bidding against what other people are paying.

• There is a $5 activation fee to start your account, but after that, how much you choose to pay will depend on how often you think your ad will be clicked on, and how often you want it displayed during the day.
• Select your daily budget first of all. Your daily budget determines how often your ad is shown during the day.
• When your daily budget is reached, your ad will stop showing. So you never end up spending more than what you can afford. If you’ve only got $5 a day to spend, then just put $5 in there. But as you make more money, then you’ll want to increase the amount you spend per day so that your ad shows more.

Second, select your maximum cost per click. I strongly recommend setting your cost per click at 15 cents or below when you are starting out.

Why?

I’ve found that if you start at a very low rate, such as 5 cents per click, then it can be very hard to get any click throughs. But, on the other hand, if you start at 80 cents per click, then you’ll probably use up your $20 budget very quickly, and not get enough clicks to see which terms sell well. At 15 cents per click, you should get 133 clicks per $20.

Don’t listen to Google’s recommendations about paying higher amounts. It’s a mistake to pay too much until you’re sure it’s going to convert for you.

Now click ‘Continue’ and move to the final stage of the ad set-up process.

8. You will now be given a chance to review all your ads and pricing selections before completing the signup process.

• Enter your email address and password for your account.
• The email address should be one you check often, as Google will send all account information to this address.
• After providing this information, click Create My Adwords Account to complete the account creation process. You will then receive an email asking you to verify your requests. When you have done so and are ready to activate your ads, log in to your account and submit your billing information. Your ads will start running almost immediately.

As you can see, creating and running a Google Adwords campaign is not difficult. But it does require a lot of homework before you start to make sure that you can complete the process quickly and effectively.

Don’t worry if you are feeling nervous about creating your first ad. In the next lesson we will be taking a detailed look at writing Adwords, and I’ll be sharing my tips on how to ramp up your campaign!

See you then!

Mark Ling

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