Keyword research is vital to many forms of online marketing. It’s utterly vital to successful pay per click marketing, and pretty amazingly useful even for regular websites and blog posting. Knowing what people search for really helps your site be found, however you market it.

There are a number of for pay keyword research tools out there, such as Keyword Elite, Micro Niche Finder or Market Samurai. Market Samurai has a free trial, but after that you have to pay.

Any of these can help you to narrow your niche, figure out the keywords you should be targeting in your ads, on page text or linking campaigns, but are they really necessary? Can’t you do it for free?

Mostly yes.

There can be some functionality you can’t get without paying, but there’s quite a bit you can do without spending a penny. Just some time, which you’d have to do with the research tools anyhow.

Google’s a great place to start, of course. Top search engine, the one most of us want to target. And they provide some pretty nice free tools to figure out what keywords to target for whatever purpose.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a nice one. Free and you don’t have to be signed in to use it. It’s been around a while. You can tell it if you want broad, phrase, exact or negative matching to what you’re searching on. You get search volumes and a bit of a guide as to the level of advertiser competition for each suggested phrase.

But Google has more to offer. You can get some interesting data just from regular searches. Let’s start with a search on ‘home business’ (without the quotes, I’m not being too picky here).

Lots of results, of course. But the fun part comes in clicking the “Options” link just above the search results. Suddenly you can pick from videos, forums, reviews, past 24 hours, past week and more. You can also pull up related searches or look at related searches in Wonder Wheel form.

The Wonder Wheel really isn’t so different from the usual related searches, but it’s an interesting way to look at the results.

Some paid tools can give you some different data, but others give you little more than what Google will gladly share with you for free. Using Google also means you don’t have to wonder if the data is current.

And don’t forget one of the greatest keyword research tools ever – your own website stats! Pay attention not only to what’s bringing you a lot of traffic, but the obscure and interesting phrases that bring people in. You can find some interesting ones, and some will be profitable.

Whether you use a free or paid keyword research tool, make sure you’re using something. Guessing what people are searching for can only take you so far.

According to Search Engine Land, Google has a new bid simulator for AdWords users. From what their article shows, it looks pretty interesting.

In essence, it’s a tool to see what would happen as you change your bids. It approximates what happens as you raise and lower your bids.

Very useful if you’re serious about your AdWords advertising. You can figure out which keywords need a change, how much of one and about how much it will change your traffic.

If you know what you can afford to pay this can be a huge help in deciding if raising your bids will be worth it, or if you can drop them and earn more.

If you’re using AdWords, take some time and play with this toy. It’s on my list now. I’d love to see where I can get better results on my campaigns.

All AdSense publishers have to deal with Google’s latest change to the TOS. We now have to have a privacy policy on all websites with AdSense. JenSense, as always, has a good review of the requirements. She’s also going to post a privacy policy that meets the new requirements as soon as she can.
Fortunately for me, most of my sites already have privacy policies. It’s pretty easy to include one as one of many default pages when creating a site. But I am having to go through and drop in my usual policy on those sites I hadn’t bothered with.

And of course I will have to check and see if it meets the basic terms. In my basic policy (the one used on this exact site, in fact), I do mention Google as a possible source for ads, although I’ve been using Yahoo here. It also talks a little bit about cookies. I’m just not sure it’s enough, since Google wants something said about web beacons, which is a factor I’d never considered before.

Of course, if you haven’t used a privacy policy on your sites before, and you have a number of them, this could be a real headache. It’s not just adding it, it’s linking it to the rest of the site. If you use includes or a CMS, this can be pretty easy… but a bit of a pain if you don’t.

I have things most of the way taken care of already, since only some of my sites need this. Once I know exactly how I ought to be phrasing things, no doubt I’ll change it a little to be more precisely matched to the new policy.

The absolute fastest way to get traffic has to be pay per click. It’s also one of the financially riskiest. You can learn a lot about your website’s ability to convert customers from using pay per click.

At least, if you do it right.

Mistakes Are Easy to Make

Just going through Google’s pay per click ads you will often seen mistakes being made. Some people worry too little about relevance. Google’s Quality Score does help to limit that these days. Others don’t know how to use negative keywords to their advantage.

But one of the worst mistakes you can make is to have a product, bid on the relevant terms, with a well-written ad, and not send visitors straight to that page. Sure your home page may be relevant enough, but when someone is searching for a particular item on a search engine, they don’t want to have to search all over again on your site.

Google’s blog can be very helpful when it comes to determining why a page gets a low quality score. While some of what Google wants can make it harder to design your landing pages, doing your best to adhere to their guidelines helps you to pay less for the traffic they do send.

But the absolute worst mistake you can make is to fail to test.

You should be testing your landing page. Your ads. The keywords and phrases you’re bidding on. Everything.

Sometimes a very small change makes a big difference. Even singular vs. plural in your ad text can make a difference.

Once you get your ads optimized, you still can’t relax. You should still test things regularly. Ads can suffer from lower conversions completely out of the blue.

What About My Site?

Your site should be tested for ease of use and good copywriting. An easy to use shopping cart won’t get you much of anywhere if your copy doesn’t encourage people to buy. But a difficult shopping cart means people will abandon their carts out of sheer frustration, despite otherwise being sold on the product.

A lot of sites make the mistake of requiring visitors to make an account in order to place an order. This is a big mistake. You’ll annoy people who don’t want to make an account right away, especially if you require it to even put something in the cart. When an order is placed you”ll be getting enough information that an account can be set up just in the process of ordering, not as a separate step. That’s the right time for it.

Some sites even make it hard to figure out how to order. Add to carts or buy now links can be hard to see sometimes. This is really poor planning on the webmaster’s part.

If you want to read some great tips on testing your site for conversions, including things like the placement of the add to cart button, head over to Grokdotcom. Some of it will be very difficult for beginning webmasters, but it’s great food for thought.

Who to Use and What to Pay?

There are plenty of pay per click options out there. Google’s AdWords is of course the best known, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search is also well known, but there are less known companies too.

It’s best to start simple. You don’t want to be managing several different accounts until you know what you’re doing and have an idea as to what works. However, sometimes slightly different landing pages work better for different pay per click engines, and you may have to take that into consideration.

AdWords has the advantage of being well known, but that also means it can get more expensive more quickly. But the traffic is excellent. I would strongly recommend opting out of the content network at the start, however. Some people do very well with it, but until you know how well you’re converting, the content network is best left alone. It can get expensive fast.

There can be good and bad about the less known engines, such as Enhance Interactive or MIVA. The cost per click is generally lower, but some feel that the quality of traffic is much less. These are things you need to test carefully, no matter which pay per click engine you use.

How much to pay will depend on two factors: what it takes to get your ad seen, and what you can afford to pay.

Some areas are very competitive, and if you aren’t bidding on obscure keywords (a good practice in just about any case!), you may have to pay a lot for traffic. If you aren’t making enough money from the traffic you’re buying from pay per click, you need to cut your price or improve the sales you’re getting from the ad.

If you’re earning $10 per sale, for example, you need to do better than 1 sale per 100 clicks if you’re paying a mere $0.10 per click. That’s not a lot for many keywords.

The beauty of pay per click is that if you’re good at it you can get an exceptional return on your investment. Only trouble is that you can just as easily wipe out your budget.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Niche
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a WordPress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work – Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click? (current page)
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

There’s a change being made to AdSense units, dealing with an issue I hadn’t ever considered. They’ve shrunk the clickable area to just the link text and domain name, rather than the entire ad block. I hadn’t particularly noticed that the entire block could be clicked, but I can see wher that would be a problem.

I first read about this in a post over at Problogger, but it’s also up at Marketing Pilgrim, JenSense and many other websites.

Many people are concerned about the decrease in income for the publishers, but I think it is more important to consider that this move may well make advertisers more satisfied with AdSense, since accidental clicks will be less likely.

I do pretty well with AdSense on some of my sites, and so I will be watching this with quite a bit of interest. My AdSense numbers today look normal. The clickthrough rate is no lower than usual, so I don’t know if this hasn’t been rolled out on my sites or just is not having an impact.

In terms of quality, I have to call this a good move. It means ad units will be clickable where people expect them to be clickable; that is, at the actual links.

Technorati Tags: adsense

If you read a lot on webmaster forums you will probably regularly see people asking which PPC program is the best to use as either an advertiser or a publisher. There are a lot of possible answers, depending on the niche.

Bidvertiser is one that I’ve seen come up pretty regularly. Right now they even have a pretty good deal where you can put a button on your site offering $20 in free clicks. If people sign up, you get a referral fee.

They pay through PayPal and I’ve seen a good number of positive things written about them. While they aren’t one of the top companies, they don’t appear to be a bad option at all. Click Here to Signup as a BidVertiser Referral!

Here’s a bit more information:

BidVertiser is used by tens of thousands of bloggers to make money from their blogs by showing the BidVertiser ppc ads. Anyone can join BidVertiser either as a publisher or an advertiser, but we would like to share a new opportunity that not everyone is aware of:

BidVertiser now opens the the opportunity for bloggers to join as a referral, and as a unique benefit – a $20 coupon of free clicks is included with every referral account! This coupon can be shared and passed on to anyone – by placing a referral button on the blog, by adding the coupon link to a newsletter or even to an RSS feed

Once you signup as a referral, you get your unique referral link which will give $20 in free clicks to anyone that clicks it, adding great value to your blog as well as being a great benefit to your readers. Referral earnings are tracked online in the referral control panel and payments are made monthly, via PayPal or check, with a minimum of only $10.

If you choose to also activate your publisher account, you will also be able to get access to a new set of referral links that will both give your readers $20 in free clicks and will enable them to advertise directly on your blog via BidVertiser, increasing your earnings even more!

Google’s Landing Page Quality Score has a huge impact on PPC costs. If you don’t have a good quality score, you pay more per click. It can be pretty painful.

But today the Google AdWords blog has a post on the topic. It goes into the types of landing pages that will tend to get low quality scores. They can even refuse to run ads for some sites. The pages that will generally get low scores include (from the blog):

• Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information
• Arbitrage sites that are designed for the sole purpose of showing ads
• Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor’s computer

Seems pretty reasonable to me. They also include”get rich quick” and similar sites. Seems to me I still see plenty.

I know a lot of people find Google’s standards pretty tough. It’s not always the easiest advertising to do, especially if Google declares that your page that was converting well for you “low quality”. But that’s all a part of the game.

Technorati Tags: adwords, ppc, quality score, landing page

I read this over on the JenSense blog. This just sounds really great for better blending when a border makes sense.

You can now select the old squared corners, slightly rounded or very rounded corners. It looks great for being able to really coordinate your AdSense with the overall appearance of your website.

I can’t help but wish they’d come up with this sooner. Yes, it’s a minor change in a lot of ways, but it’s also a flat out really great change. Now you don’t have to just blend the entire unit when you use rounded corners on your site.

Technorati Tags: adsense rounded corners