There are two main forms of advertising: the free kind and the paid kind. Online, free methods tend to produce long term results because it takes time to implement them, but the rewards are huge. Paid advertising online also provides huge rewards and can produce short term results, but requires a lot more attention and obviously capital as well. The two forms of advertising are totally different animals and both have their benefits and drawbacks, but we’ll just focus on a specific kind of paid advertising for now: paid search.
Paid search involves paying for ads which are featured alongside organic search results. In the old days, profiting big from paid search involved sticking up a poorly worded and researched ad with a whole bunch of irrelevant keywords and pointing the ad to a poorly constructed landing page. After Google made some dramatic changes, the entire landscape for paid search transformed. Some quit in disgust after losing their massive cash cows while others stuck with it and are now making far more than they were before.
How did they do it? They learned the secret successful paid search marketing, and that secret is relevancy.
Everything in your paid search campaign needs to be relevant to your target audience’s needs. If someone searches for “learn Spanish online”, then your ad and landing page better be about learning Spanish online.
There are three major components of a paid search campaign that need to be highly relevant: your keywords, your ad copy, and your landing page (if you have one).
The keywords that you target will be the keywords that your ad will show up for when someone searches for them. In general, you should target long tail keywords, which are broad keywords with added modifiers. A broad keyword would be “hummingbirds” while a long tail keyword would be “how to set-up a hummingbird feeder”. By doing this, you’ll be facing less competition and you won’t be required to pay as much to get your ad featured on the front page of Google.
Next up is your ad copy. If someone is looking for “how to set-up a hummingbird feeder” and your ad promises the solution to that, then that person is likely to click on it if they see it. You don’t have a lot of space to get your message across, so pick your words wisely. Quantifying things like timeframe or cost always helps. For example, replace “quickly” with “7 days”, or “lots of money” with “$5000”.
Lastly, there’s your landing page. If you choose to have a landing page, then you’ll need to make it relate directly to your ad and your keywords. Your keywords must be found a few times in your landing page, preferably prominently such as through the use of bolding or sticking them somewhere in your headline. Not only does creating a relevant landing page lower your cost-per-click on paid search platforms, it also increases your chances of getting more clicks and sales because the visitor will find exactly what they’re looking for on your website.
Having low relevancy in your paid search campaign will dramatically increase your advertising costs, so make sure every part of your campaign is highly relevant. And that’s the most important thing you’ll ever learn about paid search.
Dr. Bob Clarke coaches and mentors new and experienced entrepreneurs in making money online with integrity, honesty, and professionalism. He is a marketing and branding expert who teaches his team the secrets to making money online. Visit http://NetworkMarketingMadeSimple.info?t=artalley to see the entire "Network Marketing Made Simple" series and more of Dr. Clarke's extensive training.
