Theres two things worth noting in this image. The top ppc results are now surrounded by a nice pinkish colour. As someone who likes a bit of PPC, I’m loving this as I’m sure it’ll help increase click through rates. Secondly, the top result is indeed a credit card comparison by Google! Good luck taking that number one slot from them.

So, is this the beginning of the end for affiliate marketing, or have we nothing to worry about?

So, you want to know exactly how many searches a term gets every month, week or day? Well, a simple technique I use shows you exactly that. I’m not suggesting this technique is in any way new, or innovative. It’s a simple technique that many newbies may not have heard of, so I figured it is worth sharing.

Whenever I am researching a niche to try and identify whether it will be profitable or not, the first thing I do is punch the keyword (and as many variations as I can think of) into the Google Keyword Tool. If this shows a nice high number of exact matches per month, I then use this trick to identify how many searches there are in reality. All I do is setup an adwords campaign for the exact match keyword, and setup an ad that I know wont get clicked due to irrelevancy. It’s a good idea to have a seperate account to do this, as Google won’t be keen on you if you do this regularly, so you don’t want this method tainting your regular campaigns. To make the ad irrelevant, I tend to just put something about me (it’s ALL about me haha)! For example, I was recently researching a fishing niche (not my usual tipple, but if its profitable, I’m there!) and put up the following ad…

Not all that interesting is it? Well, that’s the point! I had the ad on page one 100% of the time for the chosen keyword for a week, and received 0 clicks. So for a grand total of £0.00 I managed to find out exactly how many searches the term receives over a week. Obviously you’d have to take seasonal issues into account, and whether the product is more popular at certain times of the month, but this gives you a great idea of how popular the term is, with real data that you’ve gathered yourself. Needless to say, the term received a hell of a lot less searches than the Google Keyword Tool suggested, but I’m still going to rock with the niche, cause theres zero competition!

Just a quick post as its christmas day and I’m feeling rather full after demolishing an excellent xmas dinner prepared by my Dad (his first time…usually Mummy Boyd adopts the chef role, was dang good though).

I’ve got a bunch of Google Adwords Promo Codes that credit your account with a £50 free spend. These codes will only work on accounts that are 14days old or less, so generally for newbies to either affiliate marketing or PPC in general. Adwords is what I would class as advanced affiliate marketing (once you master it there’s serious dosh to be made!). Many are scared to give it a try after hearing the many horror stories floating around. I first tried it around a year ago and I’ve not looked back. Not only can it allow you to make money on a site instantly, its actually incredidbly good fun and really rewarding when it pays off.

Theres only one way to learn and thats to give it a shot. What better way to do that than with Google’s moolah!?

Here are the codes, they expire 31-12-2009 so use them up quickly, feel free to pass them onto anyone who can make good use of them. Sell them on ebay and ill hunt you down and probably give you a stern talking to, so watch out!

85PP-U2EL-6RVH-482K-QHA
85PP-UFTA-LDCT-CHEV-BGJ
85PP-UVP6-UXG8-2Z49-Q3J
85PP-TPJU-XH5E-39FZ-9PJ
85PP-U4ZP-9PCB-RMUD-4Y2
85PP-UJG9-AU5L-9DFJ-6FJ
85PP-TSKQ-AZX5-R7K4-T4S
85PP-U7K9-LLDP-KS8N-G2S
85PP-UMPE-T2R9-JBA2-972
85PP-V2PG-E83E-SRZH-D3S
85PP-TV4G-U4TP-L89L-8S2
85PP-UAQF-MW8Y-PNEB-4YJ

You can only use one per account so dont try and add them all! If you are a newbie and feel like giving it a try but dont know where to start feel free to add me on msn and I’ll give you a few pointers! If you use a code can you comment to let me know so I can score it off so others dont waste their time entering it

Merry Xmas,

Mark

So, what does it do? Basically it allows you to have the keyword that has triggered the ad in your ad’s title, ad text or display URL. When you create an ad for adwords you should always be aiming to get as much of the ad bolded as possible to help increase your CTR. The more chance of your ad standing out from the rest the better. If I do a Google search for Contents Insurance, the following three ads show up in the top positions.

As you can see, any mentions of “Contents” or “Insurance” have been bolded. So why is this relevant? Well, imagine you are running a campaign that has many keywords assigned to it, you would have to create a lot of ad groups to have an ad tailored to each keyword (to ensure your title gets bolded as it contains the search term), which would take a lot of time and would be pretty tedious!

So, this is where the dynamic keyword insertion comes in useful. When you are creating your ad, insert {Keyword:Default} into the ad title, ad text or display URL. Replace the word Default with the text that you would like to appear if the users search term is too long. So if I was creating an ad for my blog I would insert {Keyword:Mark Boyd’s Blog}. It is important to use a capital at the start of Keyword as this will capitalise each word for your ad text (if you want it to do that!).

So here’s an example. I have set up an ad for the purpose of this post using {Keyword:Mark Boyd’s Blog} in the ad title and at the end of the URL. I then set up a few exact match keywords… [mark boyd is ace], [i love mark boyd] and [wheres mark boyd]. Googling any of these terms now shows the keyword that triggered the ad as the ad title and at the end of the url…

In a nutshell, its a cracking tool, have a think about how it can help you increase your CTR!

So I got to it, within the first month Id sold over £90,000 worth of products for Amazon. I concentrated just on promoting amazon products. The reason for this is pretty simple, they offer great commission on electronics and people just  love amazon so it tends to convert very well. The point of this post isnt to tell you about my methods (I plan to post about them shortly though) but to educate newcomers to PPC of the benefits of using negative keywords.

When you set up an ad campaign in adwords, you define which keywords you’d like to target. There are various ways you can define your keywords such as Exact Match, Broad Match, Phrase and so on. For more information on the various types please see the Basic PPC Tutorial.

I use negative keywords to keep an ad campaign under control! I tend to focus on promoting electronics via amazon. My goal is to target searchers that are ready to buy the product. I don’t want searchers who are still in the research stage of the buying cycle. Therefore it is important to rule out such searchers using negative keywords.

What are negative keywords I hear you ask? Basically, if you add negative keywords to your adgroup, your ad will not show for users that have used that word in their search term. Imagine you are selling a television, lets for examples sake call it the “Boyd 301286″. Lets also say hypothetically its quite an expensive television and to get a decent ad position on google youre going to have to pay around 40p a click for the privilege.

OK so the scene is set, you’re promoting a Boyd 301286 television at Amazon that costs you around 40p a click on adwords. Do you want to pay 40p for any of the following search term traffic?

boyd 301286 reviews
boyd 301286 from dixons
faulty boyd 301286
boyd 301286 wall mount
how to setup boyd 301286

The answer you should have screamed out there was “Of course not! What a waste of money!”. Believe me, without the correct negative keywords in place I would spend hundreds of £s a month on what I would class as useless traffic.

When I set up an ad campaign I add a big list of negative keywords that I’ve used on previous campaigns. My work is not finished though. Everyday I check my stats and add to the negative keywords collection!

The best way to keep on top of your negative keywords is to check your analytics (I use Statcounter) as regularly as you can. Particularly the recent keyword activity. You can then view a list of the keywords that searchers have used to get to your site.  Sift through this list and you will see which traffic won’t have benefitted you in anyway, you then add the negative keywords to your ad campaign.

As time goes on and the campaign matures, you will see you have to add less and less negative keywords.

Its a very simple thing to do and it could save you a lot of money. At the very worst it WILL increase your earnings per click, which is what us affiliate marketers should always be looking to do!

Heres a list of negative keywords I am currently using on a campaign that is promoting a 32 inch television that is for sale at Amazon. It should hopefully give you an idea of how it can improve my EPC.

-28
-37
-42
-50
-connect
-currys
-dixons
-fault
-faults
-faulty
-feature
-features
-firmware
-forum
-hi fi
-how
-info
-information
-instructions
-mount
-pc
-play
-repair
-review
-reviews
-richer sounds
-samsung
-setup
-spec
-specification
-specifications
-stand
-support
-tesco
-tescos
-wall

As I’ve stated earlier in this post. I do not proclaim to be an expert PPCer so Id be delighted to hear of any negative keywords that you all use in your campaigns on a regular basis.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch!