Module V: Adwords Inception

Now you have your generic domain name, your landing page as I outlined in the previous “Landing Page Intelligence” module, your keywords and the affiliate program you’re going to promote.

All that’s left is to put it altogether by firing up your Adwords campaign. Google has a wizard that makes creating campaigns, ad groups, adding keywords, creating copy, and setting up bid prices pretty easy. So I’ve just listed out the main points here…

Create a new campaign just for this test niche. You might just call it “Dog Training”.

Create the ad groups by theme, Dog Training, Puppy Training, Train Dog, etc… Remember that you must focus in tightly. For this example, we’ve decided to go with ‘dog training’ instead of ‘housebreaking’ or ‘dog obedience’. We’ll save the themes we don’t use now for later.

Within each ad group go ahead and copy and paste the keywords from your theme lists.

Next, start on the ad copy for each theme as you set it up. I really don’t get very fancy with the copy for my test run. The main thing is to put the ad group theme words in the copy at least twice (once in the headline and at least once in the body copy). Part of the reason I had you organize the keywords this way is that ALL the keywords in a single ad group have the same copy. Anytime a surfer searches for the words in your ad group, the words show up as bold.

So by having a central theme for each ad group and using those words in your ads, the searcher will always see at least some of the words he or she used for the search bolded in your ad. This will increase your click-thru’s significantly.

Depending on the niche, sometimes I’ll make it clear that surfers are going to a review site. Other times I’ll talk about the problem and solution. Just be sure to include the theme words in the copy. If you want, write 2 ads and split test them against each other. Make it clear one is a review and the other is a problem and solution. Most of the time, the problem and solution ad will out-pull the review ad, but not always.

Set your bid prices pretty low, especially if you are new at this and don’t want to go broke. I know I don’t want to give Google any more money than I have to, so I still set my bid prices pretty low to start (15 to 35 cents a click unless I know it’s a hyper-competitive market like ‘web hosting’ and I’ve decided to go for it anyway).

Set your daily budget pretty low, like $5 to $10 a day. Set an end date for the campaign just in case you forget to stop it. 5 to 10 days is usually enough for analyzing whether this set-up is worth pursuing.

Within your campaign, make sure you have only English speaking countries selected and disable the content network. I would also set the budget to accelerated (to show the ads as quickly as possible) and you’ll want the ads to rotate as evenly as possible (especially if you set-up 2 ads to run against one another). All this can be found under “Edit Campaign Settings” just in case you missed it during set-up.

You are now live!

Watch your campaign for a few days. You should expect to spend about $50 to get any worthwhile results. You will need about 200 clicks to begin making any judgments at all.

Now I realize some of you reading this are going to throw a fit that you have to spend some money to get into a business. All I have to say is ‘are you kidding me?’ Compared to the cost to enter most businesses, this is peanuts. Don’t go crazy with your ad spend, but $50 to test out a niche is not a whole lot of cash. For many niches, you can get a pretty good idea with even less.

That’s really about all I need to figure out if I want to pursue a niche or not. Top affiliates I’ve spoken with agree that number is plenty in most cases (just don’t pick something like ‘web hosting’ which has a minimum bid of about $10 to get to the top of the rankings).

Analyze your results. Did any of the keywords result in sales? Hopefully you had some.

If not, pause the campaign and see if your landing page is the problem. If you think it might be, you may want to re-work it and try again. We’re shooting for credible here. If the fonts are all over the place and the copy is hard to read, you’re not looking very credible. You also want compelling. This can often be accomplished by talking about the problems your prospects are having, how you had them once too, but you found the solution in the product you’re recommending.

If you really put in some effort on the landing page, have done your keyword research homework and still have not made any sales, you may want to examine your keyword themes and try a different subset (for example, since we started with dog training, you might want to try housebreaking this time). Give it another go.

If you really are not getting any sales at this point, you should scrap the whole experiment and move onto your next niche. Seriously. If you can’t make any sales with about 200 or so clicks set up the way I showed you for a tight theme (and you’ve even tried it twice now), you might not have a good market to match. It happens.

Note that I’m not talking about making a profit; I’m talking about making any sales at all … period.

If you made a few sales with the quick set up I’ve outlined above, you’ve probably found a niche worth going after. If you broke even (spent $50 and made $50) you definitely found something with potential and should pursue it further. If you actually made money, you are onto something scorching and should be super excited to put in more work.

If you didn’t find a winner this time then go back to the beginning and try again. Don’t be too upset because next time all you need to do is select a niche, an affiliate program, some keywords, and put together a landing page on your generic site. So you’re at least starting with more than you did the first time. You should also have more experience writing copy for the landing page and setting up Adwords campaigns. So you are learning. Do not take this experience as a failure at all.

While I know you can definitely earn money with these techniques, they do take a little practice.

Expect that you won’t find a winner every time and just get back to the drawing board.

When you find a winner here’s where the momentum should kick in. Stop testing niches for right now and get going.  You’ve now completed the ‘Assessment’ phase of the program.  Now you need to learn how to increase your profits.  I call this next phase, ‘Level I’… and the first module within it will show you how to “Slap Google Back”.  But we’ll get to that later.

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