First, let me explain what I mean by the word "positioning".

Positioning refers to the rank or "position" of your Ad on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), when someone searches in Google.

For instance, let's say that someone searches on the phrase "car loans". Google will do its best to deliver the most relevant Ads and the most relevant organic, i.e. "free" listings, for that search query, so that the searcher sees a SERP that is almost 'nothing but' every single facet of "car loans" -- the cost of car loans, the different types of car loans, the availability of car loans, the interest on car loans, the market for car loans etc... you get the picture.

The question is, where on the page, at what Ad position, do you want and is the best place for your Ad for "car loans" to appear?

4. POSITIONING

The focus of the inexperienced AdWords advertiser is quite often on those keywords which produce the most clicks, on the assumption that the Ads which appear each time at the top of the page will be those most often clicked, which is true.

But if profit margin on the product or service offered is a large motivating factor for you, you need to know that tests have proven that the first Ad position on the first page is, generally, not the most profitable.

Yes, it gets the most clicks, but it's often a spontaneous action by the surfer before studying the ad.  Sometimes the surfer is merely browsing the subject and is not ready to buy (commonly known as "tyre-kickers"). 

Tests show that the further down the page an Ad is, or, occasionally, even on the second page, the greater is its conversion rate.  Why?  The surfer has taken the time to read the Ad carefully because he is ready to buy.

Its not just about getting clicks - its about getting sales.

The clicks are fewer down the page; so, your overall pay-per-click bill is less than for a higher-positioned Ad.  The downside is that the click-through rate (CTR) of the lower-positioned Ads is also lower, which affects your Quality Score adversely and raises your cost per click.

Now you can see its starting to get complicated.  But hold on, there is a solution.

A happy medium is to aim for positions 4 to 6 on Google's first page.  (You can use the "Show Estimated Ad Position" and "Estimated Avg CPC" columns in the on-line Google AdWords Keyword Tool to determine the cost-per-click to bid for each of of your exact match keyword phrases, and then you can set those bids accordingly. 

These figures can, however, be notoriously inaccurate.  Always check your keyword phrases' positions afterwards in the 'Avg Pos' column on the Ad Group's 'Keywords' index tab or by testing with a search on the main keyword phrases.)

Paid, or as Google calles them "sponsored" Ads, will normally appear at the very top and off to the right-hand side of the SERP.

Let's say there are seven paid Ads and all of them are listed down the right-hand side. If your Ad is at the very top, then your Ad is in "Ad postion #1." If your Ad were 7th from the top, then that would be "Ad position #7."

Now let's explore a scenario and lets say, for the sake of argument, the top Ad position for the keyword "divorce attorney" can be obtained for $10, but to be in position #6 on the page it 'only' costs you, say, $4 per click.

Let's also assume that the top position gets 30 clicks out of a hundred searches, but only 5 of those clicks result in a lead, because the searcher is not finished 'researching', and is clicking on many of the the Ads to get a feel for what's out there.  Therefore, Ad position #6 gets 15 clicks, but those clicks result in only 5 leads.

What's a winning placement strategy here?

Well, Ad position #1 cost us $300 (30 clicks x $10) for the clicks and that bought us 5 leads. That is a cost of $60 per lead (i.e. $300 / 5 leads). Ad position #6 would cost us $60 (15 clicks x $4), and since we would obtain 5 leads from that position, those leads would only cost $12 per lead (i.e. $60 / 5 leads).

Stll with me so far?

OK, in this scenario, Ad position #6 won, but just wait a minute!  What if position #6 only got, say, 4 leads?  That makes a substantial difference and changes the actual cost per lead to $15, but in our scenario, if the average conversion resulted in $10,000 in legal fees and the conversion rate was, say, 50%, then even though Ad position #1 cost a lot more per lead, it is ultimately more profitable than position #6.

Does that sound confusing?  Well, it should, because it IS confusing, very confusing, and normally requires quite expensive third party software like "Affiliate Prophet" ($97) or "Affiliate Prophet Pro" ($147 upgrade) from Peter Yoon at http://www.affiliateprophet.com to track and test your AdWords results profitably.

Fortunately for you, there's also a FREE software option - "Prosper202", which you can get at http://prosper.tracking202.com either as a version you run on your own server, or one that is hosted on thier servers, which in turn is the 'little brother of their "Tracking202" professional solution you can get at http://pro.tracking202.com which, if you want to pay a tiered monthly fee based on the total click volume, you could also choose.

The only real way to find out what is best for you is to test, test, and test again, which is where Affiliate Prophet Pro is especially good as it can do AIDA Formula Testing, Split-Testing, Affiliate Spying, Keyword Testing and much more.

Either way you choose, if you are not tracking, testing and keeping accurate performance records, your campaigns may well be in real trouble VERY quickly, but you won't know until its time to pay Google.

Anyway, a professional (i.e. profit oriented) attitude to AdWords management always starts with good keyword research and ends with proper testing. Though, in reality, top AdWords affiliates and SEO/SEM experts never stop testing what works and what doesn't.

There are various Google network alternatives such as "Google Search" Ads, "Content Network" Ads, "Search Network"/"Search Partners" Ads, "Placement" Ads. you can use.

You can specify different maximum bid amounts for each these various types of advertising.  Because the quality of their traffic tends to be lower, bids for the Content Network ("entire network" option) and Search Network (Search Partners) (see Tactics > Search Network) should be kept lower and be more tightly controlled than those for Google Search traffic and the Content Network ("Placement Ads" option).

In the early stages of a new Google AdWords campaign, it is advisable to go with only Google Search traffic and switch other options off, to help you to control costs.

Once you've discovered the keywords that produce the highest return on investment (ROI) using whichever tracking solution you have chosen, you can enable other options or, as I recommend, you should create seperate campaigns for "Content Network", "Search Network"/"Search Partners" and "Placement" Ads for those keywords to see what results they produce.

If you find that a Google Search traffic campaign is too competitive, don't just abandon Google AdWords altogether. Try a Content Network Placement Ad (see "PLACEMENT ADS" in a later article), bidding either CPC or CPM (q.v.) to reduce your Cost Per Click.

Next article in this series: Testing & Tracking

OK, this time I want to talk about getting backlinks - about where to find and create backlinks for your site.  Not just any backlinks, but really good sources and high-value links.

I will cover the basics, move on to manually setting up the best link system in the world (hypothetically), and share an amazing FREE tool with you that actually finds not just this 'perfect link', but helps you create hundreds more like it.

3. BACKLINKS

When Google was just starting out, they realized some major flaws in the basic design of most search engines at the time. They never separated the ads from the search results, so their results were based on highest bidder, not the most relevant pages. Google took a radical step and decided to put the searchers' (rather than the advertisers) interest first; to look at all of the links on the web and use that as a gauge for determining a pages quality.

As Google became a large public Corporation (and popular), webmasters began to try and beat the system and acquire backlinks from anywhere they could in order to boost their ranking. The more they succeeded, the more the system began to lose it's value since it became a game of acquiring links indiscriminately and it returned to cash becoming the primary motivator influence search results.

Leap forward several years of this cat and mouse game and Google's highly modified algorithm now takes into account only high value links to a webpage that match the site's topic. This is called 'relevance' and means that the pages are somewhat related, even if not a perfect match. The closer to a perfect match you get, the more relevant the page is and the bigger the boost you get from those links.

This is what you have to remember.  As the relevance increases, the value of that link increases exponentially.  This means that you need, say, 100 links from 'poor' pages to equal the value from 10 links from 'decent' pages, which in turn is equal to one of the highest value links you could possibly engineer. While the actual numbers may vary in the algorithm, they do scale out to where massive links from irrelevant sources are not worth the effort since they simply don't matter.

I will cover link-text and how to use that to influence your ranking in my next topic. That article will be based on the keyword research you must perform as a foundation to most, if not all of your search engine optimisation and marketing. But for the moment, just remember that when a link to your site uses one of your your 'target' keywords, and the page that link is on is related to your keywords - Google gives you an even bigger boost in value.

Part of the value of the page linking to your page derives from the value of the pages that, in turn, are linking to it.  In other words, if a page links to your page using our 'perfect link' formula (good keyword research + well-built links + placed on highly relevant pages = relevance) and this page itself has nothing else linking to it, then it is still only of moderate value.  But if we use the same 'perfect link; formula and add a lot of high authority links coming into that originatin page or pages, then the link value increase expotentially!

And if the links coming into those originating pages are relevant to the page linking to you.... the value of your page is driven sky high!

The 'Perfect' Link Strategy

To squeeze the most value from a link...

A) Do your keyword research. Since we are aiming for the 'best link possible', pick a very relevant, high value term without concern for the competition.

B) Build a top-value backlink using your keywords in the title attribute, together with one of your keywords as the link text, and to find the necessary high authority origination site, use a tool like Matt Harwood's amazing "Laser URL" which you can download FREE from Matt's most excellent blog here at http://www.mattharward.com/.

C) Put that link on a page containing your high-value keywords.

D) Turn the page your link is on into a very important page - use this link formula again to get links to the page(s) linking to your site.

* The total value of the link to your site is astronomical. You have received a very targeted link from a very respected page with tons of relevance to your target keyphrase.

5) Do this again and again using subtle variations in your link such as linking to different pages within your site (not just the homepage) and by using different keyword phrases.

* You won't be able to gain much value if this is always done with the same sites over and over. You will want to get links from different websites on different hosts using different IP addresses owned by different people.  That's why you need "Laser URL".

Next article in this series:  Other Google AdWords Strategies

AdWords' broad match feature is designed to allow Google to display ads for phrases that are related to a base phrase entered by the advertiser.   For instance, an advertiser running an AdWords broad match campaign on the phrase "used cars" might also show up for a search on "buy used cars" or "research used cars."   

The idea behind broad matching is to allow advertisers to reach more consumers without having to enter every single variation of a particular keyword phrase. 

Broad matching also allows advertisers to have their ad display for unique query strings that are searched rarely enough that they don’t show up when keyword research is conducted.

But, the AdWords system is setup to disable Ads that do not achieve a high enough click-thru rates.  Therefore, advertisers running broad match campaigns with AdWords could have their Ad dropped because their click thru rates on related phrases might not be high enough.  

What is the solution?

2.   TARGETING

There's no point in advertising anything unless the ad reaches a person who might be interested in it.  

That sounds obvious, but you wouldn’t believe the number of advertisers who waste money on "catch-all" ads with a "shotgun" approach, hoping for the best.   If you follow their example, you'll lose a lot of money fast with Google AdWords.  

The secret of success with Google AdWords, as with any advertising medium, is accurate targeting.   And with Google AdWords, you can home in on your target market with pin-point accuracy.

If you sell something with a specific model number, that model number should be one of your main keywords.   If you sell it only in a certain State or county, that State or county should be a keyword in the Ad Group.   If it relates to a particular season or holiday time, that should be a keyword.

Keywords can be combined with each other or with incidental words, such as prepositions like "in", "for", "with", to form 2-word, 3-word or 4-plus-word phrases in various ways and different word orders.   Ideally, every conceivable phrase that a surfer might type as a search term would be desirable to have in an Ad Group as an exact match keyword phrase.   Then your cost per click for each of those keyword phrases would be minimal.  

If you're creating your Google AdWords campaign manually, such a task would be totally impractical, of course, if not impossible.   For such jobs specialist software that applies "automated" algorithms is a sound investment.   You get what you pay for, and even the high-end software pays for itself, usually many times over.  Check out my recommendations in Google AdWords Strategy & Tactics - RELEVANCE.

Negative keywords have a great impact on a targeted AdWords campaign.   If you sell software, for example, and don’t just give it away, you do not want your Ad to appear when someone types the phrase “free software”.   That might trigger an impression of your advertisement unnecessarily, thus affecting your keyword’s and your ad’s click-through rates adversely.   Worse still would be if that person were to click on your Ad.   Yes, it would help your CTR, but you’d pay good money for a non-revenue-earning click.  

Specify “free” as a negative keyword, to prevent your ad from being displayed.   To micro-target your market, your negative keyword list could be surprisingly large.

The same principle applies to the ad text - you don’t want freebie-seekers clicking on your ad unless you’re giving away something for nothing on your landing page.   That costs you money.  

Don’t be afraid to target your potential customers who are prepared to pay for your product or service by making it clear in the ad text that it’s for sale and not free.   Stating its price in the ad is the easiest and most succinct way to get that message across.

As well as geographic targeting, you can also make use of demographic targeting to a certain extent.  

Demographic targeting with Google AdWords, however, requires some judgment on your part.   Use the Google AdWords "placement targeting" function (see 'Tactics | Placement Ads' in this series) to pick specific web sites that, in your opinion, would be visited by the kind of people you want to see your advertisement.  

Combine those placements with specific keywords and bids to attain the desired position for your ad on context-relevant pages on those web sites.

Here's a summary of what happens, depending on the Google AdWords settings you choose:

Select 'Search' with keywords in the Ad Group:

• Your ads can appear on user searches related to your keywords.

Select 'Search' with no keywords in the Ad Group:

• Ads in this Ad Group won't appear on search.   (Keywords are needed to be matched to user searches.)

Select 'Relevant pages across the entire network' with keywords in the Ad Group:

• Your ads can appear on Content Network pages matching your keywords.

Select 'Relevant pages across the entire network' with no keywords in the Ad Group:

• Ads in this Ad Group won't appear on the Content Network.   (Keywords are needed for your ads to be matched contextually on the Content Network, but if you have also selected Placement targeting in this Ad Group, your ads can appear on any individual placements you selected).

Select 'Relevant pages only on the placements I target' with keywords in the Ad Group:

• Ads can appear only on the placements you choose, and only if the content of those placements matches your keywords.   If your chosen placements don't match your keywords, your ad won't show.

Select 'Relevant pages only on the placements I target' with no keywords in the Ad Group:

• Ads can appear on any of the placements you choose, regardless of relevance.

By the way, don't forget to check out Google's very helpful pages - AdWords Targeting and Tracking Tips

Next article in this series:  BACKLINKS

I admit - there's some serious messing with your head going on here.

It seems like just a cheap trick to put "Don't Open?" on your next email or newsletter as a subject line, I know, but oddly enough it's been proven time and time again to receive extremely high open rates. 

I mean EXTREMELY high!

You'd have thought by now that we were all old enough and ugly enough to have figured out we are being manipulated in some way, wouldn't you?

Do you want to know why it works, what kind of people are motivated to go ahead and open it and what they want to acheive by ignoring your advice, then you've got to read Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. 

I bought it at Amazon the other day for £4.97 in the UK ($19.95 in the US), and that's a direct link if you want to buy it cheaper too. 

There's a ton of really awseome, motivational stuff in this book - its incredible - but I'll let you be the judge of that.

Anyway, why don't YOU use variations of that subject line in your own email marketing?  When all's said and done, you are in the business of motivating people to do what you want, aren't you?

And you know it works!

Have fun, live large, create value, think different.

Terence.

It's a well known fact that PPC (Pay Per Click) Marketing using Google AdWords is the fastest and most effective way to generate targeted traffic and huge affiliate profits online, and the reason for that is simple.

Millions of people use the search engines every day looking to buy something.

So, no matter whether you're selling ebooks, software solutions or even physical products, it stands to reason - if you create an irresistible promotion and bid on targeted keywords, the money you'll bring in can be MASSIVE.

Fortunately, most AdWords campaigns are managed really poorly, either through lack of knowledge or a dislike of tedious work.  Either way, this makes it possible for YOU to get targeted traffic extremely quickly and easily, using a clever strategy together with automated tools.

Let’s talk about how you’re going to do that.

1. RELEVANCE

One of your primary aims must be to reduce your cost per click (CPC) to a minimum.  Google will  favor you with a low cost per click if you master the concept of relevance.  If you don't, your pay-per-click rate will be high, your profits will suffer, your campaigns will probably fail, and your competitors will beat you.  So be warned!

Google is the undisputed leader (by far) among search engines, because it provides searchers with results more relevant than those of any other.  When a surfer types in a search term, Google's complex algorithm returns pages that match closely the words searched for.

Google applies the same principle to AdWords advertisements.  Ads that are more relevant than others are given preferential treatment.  Less relevant ads are allowed to compete, but they are penalized by a high cost per click.

Google AdWords employs two distinct modes of measurement of relevance: A.  Robot;  B.  Human.

A.  An automated program compares the search term not only to your advertisement text, but also to the keywords in its Ad Group, to the URL of the specified landing page and even to the textual content of the landing page itself, to determine how relevant these components are to each other.  If all four are tightly integrated with the search term, you'll pay a very low cost per click -- perhaps only 5 cents -- and still command a high position on Google's first page.  Any component that does not match the search term closely causes the CPC to rise, perhaps even by a factor of a hundred!

B. Every time Google displays your ad, it records the fact.  This is known as an "impression".  If a surfer clicks on the ad, Google records that also, and divides the number of clicks by the number of impressions.  The result gives your ad a "click-through" rate (CTR).  A similar calculation is made for your keywords that appear in the search term, to give them their own click-through rate.  Google AdWords assumes that, if a human clicks on your ad, it is probably relevant to the search term typed in.

As your CTR rises, so do your keywords' Quality Scores, and, as more and more keywords' Quality Scores rise, so does the Quality Score of the entire Ad Group.  The higher the Quality Score is, the lower will be the cost per click.  Conversely, the fewer clicks your ad gets whenever it's displayed, the lower your Quality Score and the higher your cost per click will be.

OK, so by now, you are probably wondering – how do I increase relevance of the 4 components (keywords, ad text, URL, landing page)?

This is what you do.

If you create a campaign manually (rather than by "automated" means), use only one keyword phrase per Ad Group, e.g., "keywords guide", and specify exact match initially.

By the way, if you are thinking of buying software to "automate" your campaigns, I would recommend you take a look at just two –the first is AdGrenade ($147) which you can find at http://www.adgrenade.com and the second is SpeedPPC ($397) and SpeedPPC Pro ($497).  You will find both at http://www.speedppc.com.  

AdGrenade is less expensive and very, very good.  SpeedPPC is 'the market leader' and quite expensive, but the support and training is second to none!  

There's nothing available as a FREE offer at the moment I know of, but if I find one, you can be sure I will post it here. For now, I am afraid you'll have to buy whichever suits your pocket - but you won't go wrong with either one. 

Whether you create your campaign manually or with one of the tools above, once the Ad Group's Quality Score has increased, expand it to phrase match also, to capture phrases such as "online keywords guide" and "keywords guide for beginners" for example.   (To specify broad match, to capture search terms like "keywords online guide" and "guide to keywords", is impractical unless you use "automated" software.)

• Use the precise keyword phrase in the heading of the Ad variation, and sprinkle the keywords in the two description lines.

• Use the keyword phrase, hyphenated or unhyphenated, in the display URL, e.g., "/KeyWords-Guide" or "/KeyWordsGuide".  Not only does Google's robot consider it relevant, but humans do, too, and are more likely to click on the Ad.

• Use the keyword phrase, hyphenated or unhyphenated, in the destination URL of the landing page, e.g., "/keywords-guide.html" or "/KeyWordsGuide.htm".

• If possible, register “dot com” (e.g ‘keywordsguide.com’ or ‘keywords-guide.com’) domain names, both hyphenated and unhyphenated, containing the keyword phrase.  Use the hyphenated one in the display and destination URLs, and redirect the unhyphenated one to the hyphenated one for other promotion purposes.

Use the keywords in the landing page content as follows:

• The precise keyword phrase in the <title> tag;

• In the <keywords> and <description> metatags;

• The precise keyword phrase in the first <h1> heading tag and variations of it in other <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.  tags;

• Sprinkle the keywords liberally but naturally throughout the <body> content, particularly among the first and last 25 words, but do not commit the Google crime of "keyword stuffing", which is penalized.

Ideally, the landing page should relate ONLY to the SPECIFIC product, service or information being offered in the ad, and the objective of the visitor's search term should be IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS to his eyes as soon as he lands on the page.

If your Ad sends the visitor to a website's general home page, or the visitor has to spend time looking for his objective on the landing page, you'll lose him in seconds and your click cost will be wasted.  Furthermore, the Google robot (googlebot) will see the landing page as irrelevant, and the keyword's Quality Score will be reduced, thereby increasing its cost per click.

Next article in this series: TARGETING

Here's a quick trick that almost nobody uses because it is so little known.

If you must include some irrelevant words that would dilute your web page's content in Google's eyes, "character reference" encode them with one of the free conversion tools available on the Web.

For example, the words "New York" are utterly irrelevant on this web page; so, they are encoded in its HTML as "&#078;&#101;&#119;&#032;&#089;&#111;&#114;&#107;".

Simple.

If you have any trouble finding the conversion tool, let me know and I'll either send you a copy or send you a link to download it.

Have fun, live large, create value, think different.

Terence.