I was performing keyword research yesterday evening-which I always do on Sundays, I find that it’s a neutral day to work-and while doing so, I found an outstanding method to expand your keyword inventory: spy on your competition’s Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. I’ve used this method in the past for isolated situations, but I’ve never used it as part of my methodology for finding profitable niches-until now.

If you think about it, your competition would not be bidding $5-$10 per click on specific keywords if they did not see a return on investment. These words should be at the top of your list for writing content and expanding your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and PPC campaigns. Targeting these keywords first is a smart idea because they have been proven by industry competitors to be profitable.

I recommend Googling your most relevant keyword. From that, generate a list of the top 100 keywords from each advertiser on Google AdWords. Do this over a five day period to cancel out advertisers who aren’t relevant and are short term. After a week, you should have over 500 words, their average CPC, and their maximum CPC. Narrow those keywords down to the top 250 words with the highest maximum CPC and remove the keywords that haven’t yielded a significant amount of daily traffic.

This isn’t to say you should throw out traditional keyword research. Services like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker should definitely be used in conjunction with this method. The most important thing is to organize these keywords into as many groups as possible and sort them by the highest amount of searches. These groups should give you ideas for writing targeted content. The individual keywords should suggest terms that need be included within each article.

If spying on your competition is something that interests you, there are plenty of tools on that market that use the Google AdWords API to display this information. A few of these tools include: SpyFu, PPC Web Spy, and Keyword Spy. I personally subscribe to PPC Web Spy and have been very happy with the functionality and ease of use. Having the right tools will save you hours of extra work and make the mind-numbing job much more enjoyable.

** Just a clarification, when I use the phrase “spy on your competition”, it is not intended for unethical behavior. The tools I use only provide publically available information. **

Since you’re paying for your traffic, you can’t afford to have any distraction on your website whatsoever. I like to only use PPC for websites that are extremely targeted and in a niche market-otherwise you’re probably wasting your money. Here are a few steps you need to take to help optimize a website for PPC:

• Remove advertising from your website. Nothing makes a customer want to leave more than visiting a website full of ads. Advertising also encourages your users to click on your ads and leave your website.
• Case studies show that single column websites perform better for PPC websites. Perhaps you’ve seen these “squeeze” pages before, where all of the content on a website is incorporated into one large page? Believe it or not, this simplistic design performs very well and is one of the most effective ways to make a sale.
• Make your sales pitch extremely targeted and do not sway from the point you’re trying to make.
• Include a call to action and repeat that call to action throughout the page. This means if your call to action is to have the user sign up for your newsletter, mention it several times throughout your copy.
• Most of the time, your headline is the only thing your visitor reads before they exit your website. Make sure that your headline matches exactly what existed in your advertisement.
• Finally you need to use multivariate testing. This means that you test several different versions of a web page and see which one performs better. You should test the copy of the following items of your web page:
  • Headline
  • Calls to Action
  • Caption Copy
  • Graphical Elements
  • Body Copy

I cannot stress enough about relevancy and how important it is to the success of your online business. Here is my formula for success and it has worked for so many. Just remember the following:

Success = The Search Query + The Advertisement +

The Headline of Website + The Copy

All of the above should match up completely in relevancy. If a person types in “how to design a website” into Google, they should see an advertisement that reads “how to design a website” and then the web page he clicks should read somewhere in the headline “how to design a website”. The copy of the web page should contain everything about your “how to design a website” product. This is where most people run into problems with PPC advertising. The secret is to keep everything as relevant as possible.

Steps to getting quality traffic to your website:

1. Before developing your website, make sure it exists in a quality niche that is both competitive (but not too competitive) and profitable. Do keyword research to see what people are searching for and try to solve their problems. A good friend once told me that in this world, there are two ways to make it in business: (1) by giving and (2) by taking. I encourage you to make your money using method number one. You’ll find a sense of pride and comfort when building your online business.
2. Create a very high quality design that is optimized for SEO, keeps people wanting more, and drives visitors to return. To find this “design”, simply find a website that you admire who is doing very well and mimic the layout. Replace their graphics for your graphics, make this your own design. Work with a web designer (to hire me, just click the contact form) to get your ideas together in Photoshop and get the ball rolling.
3. Layout your design into individual web pages. Make sure every image has an ALT tag, make sure every page is keyword dense, make sure that every <A href=”"> body fits in with relevant keywords. Never include a hyper link that says “click here”. Make sure every page is filled with TITLE tags, META tags, and that you’re utilizing valid XHTML in your code. Make sure that you’re Section 508 compliant as well. Avoid using the TABLE tag if you can accomplish the same thing using simple XHTML tags and CSS.
4. Begin to write content for all of your pages. Make sure you have a page for free resources that will help you get organic traffic from the search engines. Hire a copywriter to write keyword dense articles for you. You need at least 20 to see an impact on your traffic. Make sure these articles are answering the questions that web surfers are asking the search engines. Lay all of your articles out on your pages and remember to continue adding articles at least weekly to keep the traffic coming in.
5. Start an Article Marketing campaign. Write an article that isn’t on your website and begin to distribute that article to article directories. Try Article Submitter for a great application that does it for free. Submit only to article sites that have good PageRanks. Sometimes it might be a good idea to “spin” your articles prevent getting held up in Google’s duplicate content penalty. Write a few articles if necessary and submit them on different iterations to remaining directories.
6. Create a squeeze page on your site where you’re trying to sell your product. Make sure that the squeeze page is making conversions from your current SEO campaign. Once you find a good conversion rate…
7. Start a Google AdWords campaign and begin to direct traffic to that squeeze page that has a good conversion rate. At this point, it’s a matter of spending money to make money–fueling a money making machine.
8. Begin to promote that same squeeze page on as many advertising services as possible. Consider starting a Site Targeted Campaign on as many relevant website as possible.
9. And finally, rake in the dough!

This is my “formula” and it works every time for me. Keep in mind, I didn’t include time periods in this because the amount of time you should spend on each step is contingent upon Google’s time to crawl your website, the time for you get a PageRank, and the time it takes for you to complete your tasks (like writing articles, designing website, optimization, etc.) I recommend that if you’re interested in marketing your product or service, begin optimizing your website for SEO. For the most part, SEO is completely free and sometimes has better conversion rates than PPC. Start your PPC campaign when you know the results are coming in and that your converting traffic.

So, how do you get around the PPC blues in a competitive market? Instead of creating a search targeted campaign, create a site targeted campaign. By creating a site targeted campaign, you are able to direct all of your advertising to specific websites through Google’s AdSense program. Here is a neat method that I use to bring traffic to my products:

1. Type in your desired keyword into Google (or any other search engine for that matter)
2. Open the first ten search results
3. More than likely, many of the websites you’ve opened participate in the Google AdSense Program. It’s been my experience that Google shows websites that promote advertising through AdSense first (which is where they make their money), although Google explicitly denies that they are anyway selective with their search results, it does nothing but make them money if they do.
4. Open Google AdWords and create a Site Targeted Campaign.
5. Add in the URLs of the websites that you chose that participate in Google AdSense. Google will automatically begin to display your ad on these sites.
6. Set your minimum CPM. This is how much you’re willing to spend per 1,000 impressions. I like to bid high on these and make sure my ad gets displayed as much as possible. If I really needed traffic, I would bid $5.00. However, it might work more in your favor to instead bid CPC, something more like $1.00 per click. Keep in mind that this is going to get expensive really fast, so you need to make sure that your website converts well, that you’re attracting the right kinds of customers, and that you’re Cost Per Conversion at least breaks even.

Keep in mind that actual results may vary. This is just a methodology that’s worked for me for the past few years–finding the top few websites in the search results and advertising on those pages. Most likely, these guys get a lot of traffic and have optimized their website very well. For a lot of people, this works very well in addition to their current Search Targeted Campaign. Just remember, if you want to have both a Site Targeted Campaign and a Search Targeted Campaign, you need to keep those campaigns completely separate in Google AdWords. Google likes to mix the two together automatically, but you will get higher conversions if you remember to keep those campaigns separate.

In the next few days, I’m going to create a product review site for a niche market and share with you how I can turn a simple review into a money making machine. Keep in mind, although I do get compensated for the reviews of products I promote, I am VERY honest. I will never promote a product that I haven’t tried for myself first. I would like to show you how easy it is to make money by promoting products that you already know and trust. Believe it or not, almost everything on the web is for sale and companies pay money for your recommendations and traffic. That’s coming down the pipe in a few days!

Since you’re paying for your traffic, you can’t afford to have any distraction on your website whatsoever. I like to only use PPC for websites that are extremely targeted and in a niche market-otherwise you’re probably wasting your money. Here are a few steps you need to take to help optimize a website for PPC:

• Remove advertising from your website. Nothing makes a customer want to leave more than visiting a website full of ads. Advertising also encourages your users to click on your ads and leave your website.
• Case studies show that single column websites perform better for PPC websites. Perhaps you’ve seen these “squeeze” pages before, where all of the content on a website is incorporated into one large page? Believe it or not, this simplistic design performs very well and is one of the most effective ways to make a sale.
• Make your sales pitch extremely targeted and do not sway from the point you’re trying to make.
• Include a call to action and repeat that call to action throughout the page. This means if your call to action is to have the user sign up for your newsletter, mention it several times throughout your copy.
• Most of the time, your headline is the only thing your visitor reads before they exit your website. Make sure that your headline matches exactly what existed in your advertisement.
• Finally you need to use multivariate testing. This means that you test several different versions of a web page and see which one performs better. You should test the copy of the following items of your web page:
  • Headline
  • Calls to Action
  • Caption Copy
  • Graphical Elements
  • Body Copy

I cannot stress enough about relevancy and how important it is to the success of your online business. Here is my formula for success and it has worked for so many. Just remember the following:

Success = The Search Query + The Advertisement +
The Headline of Website + The Copy

All of the above should match up completely in relevancy. If a person types in “how to design a website” into Google, they should see an advertisement that reads “how to design a website” and then the web page he clicks should read somewhere in the headline “how to design a website”. The copy of the web page should contain everything about your “how to design a website” product. This is where most people run into problems with PPC advertising. The secret is to keep everything as relevant as possible!

• Bid only on keywords that are highly targeted to your user base.
• Don’t waste your money of traffic that doesn’t convert. How do you do this?-by doing keyword research and only paying for exact keywords and exact phrases that YOU KNOW will make money. If you don’t know what you’re doing in PPC campaigns, I suggest you read my book before you start (or someone else’s book). The reason is because you will loose thousands of dollars if you don’t know what you’re doing. That is my promise to the unprepared and uneducated. You need to be prepared to loose a little money in the beginning because you turn a profit, however, if you use my method you will most likely be able to alleviate a lot of the money that most people loose before I turn a profit.

If you can’t afford PPC, I suggest you start an SEO campaign and drive as many targeted “free” hits to your website so you can get a grasp of what people are searching for to get to your website. Do your research and you will find yourself making huge profits in a short amount of time.

Since you’re paying for your traffic, you can’t afford to have any distraction on your website whatsoever. I like to only use PPC for websites that are extremely targetRead More…