Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Setting up a Google Adwords Account

There are many ways you can use Internet marketing to make money, and in this tutorial we have laid out a simple procedure that will get you up and running as quickly and easily as possible with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. The first thing that you need to do is visit Google Adwords and create an account. Google Adwords is where you will begin your PPC advertising campaigns. Although at this point you do not have a product or website chosen, you can still sign up for your Adwords account so that when the time comes to start sending traffic to your websites or landing pages, you can do so without having to sign up for an account first.

When you sign up, you will be asked some questions including what currency and language you want to use. At this point you will also be asked to create your first campaign, but you don't have a product to promote yet so what do you do? You set up a "Bogus" campaign. You can enter anything that you want with the intention of deleting this first campaign once you have successfully signed up. You will be asked for a display and destination URL, but again, you don't have a website so just enter any website that you can think of.

Try "www.wealthyaffiliate.com". You won't be using this campaign so any URL will do. You will also be asked to enter some keywords. Just enter one keyword, for example "wealthy affiliate" and set your Maximum Cost per Click at $0.05. When asked to enter your daily budget just enter $1.00. At this point, you will be asked to sign in using your e-mail address. After setting up your sign-in details you'll be ready to sign in for the first time.

Again, we recommend signing-up for your Adwords account before you do anything else

Choose a Product to Sell

Now you need to choose a product to promote. There are many affiliate networks and independent affiliate programs online that allow you to promote pretty much anything you can think of...from ladders to phones, to make-money books and video-games rentals. You can make money promoting ANYTHING online. You can also look in many other places on the Internet to find products to promote. If you are just getting started, we recommend promoting products from an advertising network called ClickBank.com. When you visit Clickbank.com you can choose the "Promote Products" button and then visit their marketplace.

You will need to create an account with Clickbank (or any other affiliate program) in order to receive credit for any sales . The reason you are signing up with Clickbank is so that you can get paid! Clickbank will handle all transactions including sending you your commission checks in the mail every 2 weeks. Find a product, then click the percentage button " [earn 75%] " and enter your Clickbank "nickname" that you were given when you signed up. The system will create a link for you to advertise.

Clickbank is not the only advertising network out there. There are 10,000s of affiliate programs available and all you need to do is sign-up with a network, or independent affiliate program to be able to promote the products within it. Signing up with these companies will provide you with unique links that you can use to advertise.

A couple of other large affiliate networks that you should look into are:

CJ.com
Linkshare.com
ShareaSale.com

Remember when we set up our first "Bogus" campaign and you didn't have a URL to enter. Once you've signed up with the affiliate programs, you will be able to promote them (with the affiliate links you are given within your account). It's all starting to come together now!

Choose Keywords / Research

The next step is to find some keywords for the product that you have chosen to promote and learn more about the audience that you are going to promote to. You can find many keywords in our keyword list section and easily download the lists by clicking on the download links provided. A keyword is only good if it is relevant not only to the product you are promoting, but also to the actual page that you are promoting. If the keyword does not fit this criteria, Google will punish you by giving you a higher click price and lowering the position of your ads.

Keyword relevance is VERY IMPORTANT. If the keyword does not match the product or the audience you are promoting to, you will be wasting your money.

Keywords allow us to target specific audiences in Google. You can choose the exact keywords that you want to promote under and this control allows you to create quality campaigns. For example, if you are promoting an eBay product and a Google surfer types in the keyword "make money on eBay", you may choose to promote a product such as an "ebay strategy guide" or "ebay success guide" (there are many out there). This relevance will lead to much higher conversions!

Remember, you do not need your own product or website because your ads will take the users directly to the product (merchant) website with your affiliate id attached. If a user buys you'll get a commission. A website can lead to higher conversions and this is why we created Site Rubix (please spend some time learning how to use this tool). Direct linking (linking straight to the merchant) can work and will work as long as you target keywords that are on the merchant's sales page.

To find out more about how Internet marketing works you can view the "Internet Marketing Basics" tutorial.

You can use our keyword lists along with the Keyword Research Tool here at WA to help you find keywords for the products that you are promoting. Now that you have an idea of what keywords you want to use to advertise your product, it's time to create your first "real" Google Adwords campaign

Create a Campaign

Setting up a campaign is the first step in getting traffic to your site, but you need to make sure you have a Google Adwords account. If you don't, please go back to step one and set up your account

Log into your Adwords account and click the button that says "create new campaign: Keyword Targeted". Follow the on-screen instructions and set up your campaign. You can set your daily budget to whatever you feel comfortable spending each day and we suggest you actually set it a bit higher as Google is unlikely to reach this limit.

You will be asked to create an ad. You can go ahead and create an advertisement for your product. You'll have to be creative with your text (Ad copy) because you are limited to a small number of characters. In the destination url, you will enter the url provided to you by the affiliate program or network (ex. http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/?a_id=1234) and the display URL should be the root of the domain (ex. WealthyAffiliate.com). The actual text within your ad should contain the exact keywords that are within your ad group (we cover Adgroup Set-up in the next section). If you cannot add all the keywords into your ad, chances are your ad group is too big.

When you've finished entering the ad copy you will be asked to enter keywords. Enter the keywords from your ad group, making sure they are all relevant to your ad and product. When finished you can review your ad, make changes, or save the ad. Congratulations, you've set up your first real advertising campaign. So what do you do with the "Bogus" campaign that you set up in the first place? You can either delete it, or edit it and make it into a real campaign

Ad Group Set-up

Now that you've set up your first campaign and ad group, we want to tell you how to set up your ad groups properly from now on. This technique will be repeated throughout Wealthy Affiliate because it is one of the most important.

When you set up an ad group, you need to name it with a name that will clearly identify it for you further down the road. Imagine when you have 100 ad groups in your campaign, naming them "Ad group 1, Ad group 2" will not help you at all.

Your ad group should contain from 5-15 keywords and certainly not more than 20. The reason for this is that having an ad group with 20 or fewer keywords will allow you to target your ad with the keywords ...creating a highly relevant ad group. This technique will also increase your CTR (Click -Through Ratio). CTR is the ratio between the amount of times your ad is displayed (impressions) and the amount of times it is clicked (clicks). The higher your CTR, the better your ad is performing and the less you will pay per click & better your ad positioning will be.

So how do you find 20 keywords to put in your ad group? You group keywords together according to "common" words. It's easiest to demonstrate this with an example:

Keywords: make money online make money on the net learn how to make money online make money internet marketing make money web make money e-book make money website

You can see that the "common" keyword is "make money" thus, you will call your ad group "make money", and you will reference the phrase "make money" in your ad copy. If you create all ad groups using this technique you will achieve the performance that is mentioned above. You likely will not want to include the keyword "make money" within your ad group, rather stick with the more targeted keywords. More clicks, lower CPC, higher ad positioning, and a higher overall Return on Investment (ROI) will be the result of quality ad groups. Our keyword lists have thousands of keywords, so split up the lists into tightly relevant ad groups like the list to the left. Try to keep the number of keywords below 20 and you will be well on your way to successful campaigns.

If you are able to use the "common" words in your ad title and description you will see even higher CTR. Google "bolds" the words in your ad that were entered in the search. So if your title is "Make Money Online" and the user searches on "make money online" these 3 words will be bolded in your ad

Getting Traffic

Now that you have set up your adwords campaign and ad group(s), you should have an ad running on the Google network and should be getting traffic to your site. However, despite having set up your ad groups correctly you may find that you don't get traffic immediately. There are certain factors that may prevent you getting instant traffic.

The first factor that we need to acknowledge is that Google sometimes reviews your ads before letting them receive traffic. This is especially true if you have a new account or have had poor performing campaigns in the past. The better your other ad performance is, the faster your ads will show up on the Google network.

When you create each new ad group you should use the traffic estimator to see how many clicks you can expect each day. Some people notice that they are not receiving traffic but this may simply be because the keywords they chose do not receive high amounts of traffic. This is fine, as sometimes the most relevant keywords do not get much traffic, but convert like crazy. Do not delete highly relevant keywords just because they are not receiving much traffic!

If you are stuck and are not getting any traffic at all then it is probably a good time to get into the forum and ask us to take a look at things for you

Monitoring Success

By this time you will be receiving traffic from your Google ads and will hopefully be generating sales. If you are receiving traffic then you need to keep an eye on how much you are spending. There are a few rules that you can follow to make sure that you do not waste a bunch of money on campaigns that aren't performing well.

Let's assume that you are selling a product that costs $50.00 and your commission is 50%. So, you'll get $25 for every sale that you generate. The $25 that you will make on each commission is important because if you have spent more than $25 in click charges and haven't made a sale yet, then it's time to take a look at your ads to see what is happening. Perhaps your ad copy isn't targeted enough, or you are spending money on keywords that just simply don't convert. It's at this point where you need to change things within your ad campaign and either make the decision to drop the campaign or make improvements to it.

You obviously want to create your campaigns with quality to begin with, but once you obtain some data it will be much easier to refine your campaign and make changes to improve it. If you make sales before your spending reaches the commission of one sale, then great! You're in the plus already! If you don't make sales before this point you need to change your campaign

Tweak your Campaign

Tweaking your campaign can significantly improve your overall success. By this point you should be achieving positive return on investment, but because your campaign is fairly new, there are ways to increase your ROI. You can add more keywords, change your ad copy, create a landing page of your own, remove keywords that are costing you a lot of money, increase your max cost per click, and more. As you learn more about Internet marketing you will find new techniques to increase your overall ROI. Of course that's where Wealthy Affiliate comes in! We are always adding new resources and teaching members the most current techniques that will help put more money in your pocket (and less in Google's pocket)!

You've learnt how to setup your Google Adwords campaign, how and where to find affiliate products to promote, how to find keywords, how to set up your first real ad campaign, how to properly set up your ad groups within each campaign, how to monitor your traffic and your success, and what to do when it's time to tweak your ads to make yourself more money.

If you take a look around the resources here at Wealthy Affiliate you will find that many of the other resources elaborate even further on topics discussed within this tutorial