I use various pay per click (PPC) keyword tools and today thought we should discuss one of them, Google adwords keyword tool and look at how it can help you choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected key term.

It's not the only keyword tool I use, but the adwords keywords tool certainly can yield some very profitable results, if utilized correctly.

When you enter a key term, the adwords keywords tool will query information from several Google searches, which it will use to determine popular and re-occurring keywords used by websites in the same industry.

The relevancy of a key term is determined by counting the number of times a given term occurs.

The adwords keywords tool can be a very effective way to find new keywords for your PPC adwords campaigns.

The Keyword Tool can be especially helpful in these common situations:

1. When you first create a new ad group.
2. When your current keywords are performing sub optimally and you need to find better options.
3. When you have one or two adword keywords that really works well and want to find more like it.

The Keyword Tool seems to works best with short keywords of one or two words in length. Fir example, "guitar software" will get better results than "best rock guitar software".

The reason for this is because if your keyword includes many words, the adwords keywords tool may have a difficult time in determining what the most important adword keywords are and may then find it difficult to deliver the appropriate alternatives.

Here are some advanced tips I have had success with.

Find keywords based on your site content.

Google's adwords tool allows you to either choose the option of entering your own keywords, or try using the Website Content option.

Using the Website Content option lets you enter the URL of your website, or of any site related to your niche. The AdWords system then scans your page and then suggest relevant keywords.

This is particularly handy if you have some decent content on your site.

A sneaky but ethical tactic is to enter the URLs of related sites, or even of your competitors' sites, to learn what keywords they might be advertising on themselves.

Create new, separate ad groups with similar keywords.

Our experience has confirmed the suggested practice of creating several ad groups in each campaign, each with a small, narrowly-focused set of similar keywords.

Google suggests keywords numbers of approximately 5 – 20 focused keywords per AdGroup. We have found these numbers to work well depending on the campaign.

Identify negative keywords.

The adwords keyword tool can also show you keywords that users may be thinking about that you are not interested.

For example,let's suppose you sell guitar pickups and you type the following in the Keyword Tool - "guitar pickup." The keyword tool may suggest the related term " best acoustic guitar pickups," and you may want to add that term to your ad group as a negative keyword because you are only sellingelectric guitar pickups and not acoustic guitar pickups.

That will keep your ad from showing on searches for "best acoustic guitar pickups" or similar terms. This helps make sure only targeted customers see your ads.

Find synonyms - or not.

The 'use synonyms' box in the descriptive words or phrases option is always checked by default.

What does this mean?

This means it might suggest " les paul" (which is a specific brand guitar), as a synonym for the keyword "guitar". If you uncheck the box, the tool will suggest only keywords that contain at least one of the terms that you entered, so Les Paul would not show.

We have also had some great success using embedded match. This is a advanced form of keyword matching that most adwords advertisers don't seem to know about. It allows you to prevent you ad from showing in relation to certain phrase or exact matches.

Specify a language and location.

Google adwords keyword tool also gives you the option to tailor results to a particular location and language. If for example you happen to be running a cost per action (CPA) offer for United States citizens living in France only, make sure you set the Keyword Tool to that language and location.

Start broad and then get specific.

Try broad terms like "guitars" in the Keyword Tool first. Then try specific terms like "vintage guitars" or "gibson guitars."

Adding the new keywords to your campaign.

There are two main ways to add any keywords to your adwords pay per click campaign that you have found using the keyword tool.

If you're already signed in to your account, just click 'add' next to the appropriate results. Ensure you are adding the keyword to the correct campaign and AdGroup.

If you're not signed in to your account and you're using the keyword tool, you can simply copy the keywords to a text document of your choice, and then paste them into your ad group once you're signed in.

In summary….

The Google adwords keyword tool can be a very powerful ally in your keyword research. I strongly suggest you do not rely on this tool alone though as it is in your best interest to also use a non google adwords tool. There is also a video on using the adwords keyword tool that is available from the bog.

We will later look at Wordtacker which is another one of my favorites.

All the best for now.

Anthony

Today's post is all about conversion tracking.

It's often said that "content is King". I agree with that statement but would add that if content is King then tracking must come in a very close second or even as an equal to content.

Careful tracking, and intelligent use of the data, can make the difference between success and failure in your pay per click PPC campaigns.

It's that important!

What is conversion tracking then?

Good question. In on-line pay per click (PPC) advertising, a conversion occurs when a click on one of your ads leads directly to some user behavior that you set have as being valuable. This behavior could commonly be a purchase, an optin, or sometimes a view of one of your pages.

Google has developed a neat tool that measures these conversions, which will ultimately help you identify how effective your AdWords ads and keywords are for you. The tool is called "Conversion Tracking".

This is how conversion tracking works when it has been correctly set up.

Conversion tracking places a cookie on a user's computer when they click on one of your Google AdWords ads. Then, if they reach one of your conversion pages, that cookie is connected to your web page.

Making sense?

When a match is made, Google records a successful conversion for you and this will show up in your google reports.

Google's cookies generally last 30 days.

When you have access to conversion data in your google adwords reports, you can then make smarter online advertising decisions, particularly about what ads and keywords you invest your hard earned money in.

The great thing about Google's tracking is that it's free!

With this detailed data that you can easily get with adwords conversion tracking, you can then better measure your overall return on investment (ROI) for your AdWords campaigns.

ROI is the key indicator that indicates the value to your business gained in return for the cost of your ad campaign, in other words it indicates how much profit or loss you are returning.

For example, let's say you own an online business that sells a 'how to build a guitar' eBook. You would obviously know how many clicks your AdWords campaign gets, but wouldn't you like to also know specifically which keywords are converting to sales for your guitar campaign?

Conversion tracking allows you to quickly and easily get this information.

I would suggest you take the tracking one step further and set up your conversion tracking to report the actual dollar amount of each sale and get the total revenue generated by 'each of your keywords' as compared to the total cost of the keyword.

So for example, with your guitar campaign conversion statistics, let's say you discovered that the phrase matched keyword phrase "learn to make a guitar" had a return on investment (ROI) of 150 %, you could then optimize your campaign by increasing the spend on that particular keyword, thus maximizing your ROI.

This is very powerful information and believe me when I tell you that most PPC marketers do not utilize conversion tracking fully.

As part of your PPC campaign management, you'll want to keep track of just about every different type of metric you can.

One guru I look up to is John Reese, and he impressed upon me many years ago the absolute importance and power of tracking and tweaking and I have been addicted to it ever since.

All tracking, but particularly conversion tracking, is truly worth your time and is reliant upon your ability to make good decisions based upon good information.

What I mean, is that unless you analyze and do something with the tracking data, its wasted effort. Some thought and intelligent action after looking at your conversion tracking reports, can help boost your PPC success.

So in summary, conversion tracking is a powerful free tool available on Google AdWords that every adwords advertiser should be using.

I have put a video together that details how to set up your conversion tracking.

All the best for now.

Anthony

To Your Internet Success

My brother Tim, the geeky software programmer, is arriving shortly from South Australia to spend 4 days on our exciting new PPC project, so I better quickly get this post up beforehand.

This post addresses several questions I have had lately about how to research niches.

Let's say you have gone to all the trouble of building your AdWords campaign, you have built a website and several pages of content, you have set up a series of autoresponders with aweber, you have your clickbank or Paypal payment system set up, you have produced a product and some bonuses and probably spent many hours writing your sales copy, not to mention some dollars on traffic generation using AdWords, possibly Yahoo and MSN, and web 2.0 or SEO strategies.

BUT…..only to find out nobody is really that interested in buying your ebook or other product about widgets and it's not selling.

Unfortunately, this is still a very common problem among many people selling on the internet.

Here's one suggested process to help you carry out your niche research:

Step 1. Find a niche product or service you are passionate about.

This will greatly improve your chances of being successful in the beginning. Why?

Because it's generally the easiest and most practical way you're going to be able to devote the kind of time and effort required to create a meaningful web site, build up the right traffic, generate worthwhile income, and enjoy what you're doing. At least in the beginning.

Step 2. Choose a niche product you are knowledgeable about.

Reflect on what skills, products or hobbies you know the most about already.

If you don't have the knowledge yet, then choose a niche product that you would love to promote, then spend the necessary time to research it, so you can eventually become seen as an expert in your marketing niche.

Step 3. Define your niche market.

Do the necessary niche research to see if there is a 'market' for your niche product. To create a profitable business for your niche product, you need to ask yourself this question:

Is there sufficient demand for my product or service?

If you choose a field that is too broad it may be hard to stand out from the competition. Visit google and see the competing AdWords Ads plus the Google's organic search results for your keywords.

If you see a number of AdWords ads advertising products in the niche you are researching, don't let this necessarily scare you off. Rather use this information to confirm there is a market in the niche.

You can find some great niche ideas by visiting sites such as www.amazon.com and www.ebay.com and simply looking to see what are the popular sellers are. Niche it down as much as you can. Dig deep.

Once you feel you have found a reasonable niche you need to do some further basic niche research before you go out and start building your niche website.

The research involves analyzing the supply and demand for the chosen niche/theme. As mentioned above, you want to look for competition which will help confirm the niche is viable. Don't be fooled into thinking that no competition mean big profits for you. In nearly every instance, no competition means the niche is not viable.

If you want visitors you need to match what you offer to what they want. The key to this is in basing your website and web pages around carefully chosen Keywords. The right keywords are crucial to the success of your AdWords campaign.

Demand and supply keyword research is simply a matter of looking to see if people are using the keyword search term and then looking at how many websites cater for that demand.

There are a number of excellent tools available for researching keyword demand for your niche.

Proper keyword research is absolutely vital and its incredible how many Google AdWords users are willing to spend their hard earned money before researching which keywords to bid on.

I use both www.wordtracker.com and www.keywordelite.com and have no affiliate connection with either.

Wordtracker runs through your browser window on your server while Keyword Elite is a locally installed application.

I have video camtasias to show you how to best use these tools.

I also use and recommend the free powerful free SEO Book keyword suggestion tool. Again, I have no affiliate connection with this tool.

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

Some of the features of SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

• offers rough suggested monthly search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (Microsoft Adcenter).

• Links the search volumes to the related global search results.

• Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords. That Google AdWords tool shows the necessary bid to rank #1 for 85% of queries, and roughly how much traffic you could expect AdWords to send you based on that bid price and ad position.

• Links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, and Keyword Discovery keyword research results.

• Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.

• Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account (recommended) they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.

I am in the process of finishing a video on an in depth look at niche research and that video will that available soon for you on our blog.

Talking the time to properly carry out niche research before developing you product can pay very big dividends for you.

It can save you many hours of wasted time and energy, not to mention money, by ensuring your efforts are directed to a profitable and responsive niches.

Talk soon.

Anthony

Hi guys,

I got quite a few emails asking for some more info about using 'better targeted' keywords in your adwords pay per click advertising.

This short camtasia video should help explain a few of my suggestions on how to use you keywords in and Adwords ppc campaign.

Enjoy.

To your ppc success.

best regards,

Anthony

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the positive feedback about our new ppc site.

My brother Tim and I are stoked that you are enjoying the free info we are giving out. We have plenty more on the way.

Keep any questions coming in and any feedback at all. Would love to hear more from everyone.

On a more serious note …..I have put a short 2 min video on the blog here, mainly for my brother Tim who has been ribbing me about my guitar playing during work time.

I thought it best I respond in a professional way here now, so that Tim and I can get back to our internet marketing work.

Cheers,

Anthony

I actually finished up at work today. Had a nice lunch with the team and suddenly I realize my regular pay check has gone. What have I done?

I've left a good paying secure job, to move into a new exciting but somewhat scary business with my brother Anthony.

You see, for the past 25 years I've been a computer programmer.

In the past few years I've been helping people out with Search Engine Optimization and writing programs, learning everything I could possibly find out about SEO and Web 2.0, and even Web Traffic.

I even knocked up an entire site about Web Traffic and came up with a 21 part free course teaching people what they need to know.

I have spent and continue to spend hours doing this because I love it, it really is a passion for me. But I always had my day job to fall back on. Not any more!

But I have my doubts, am I ready to do this full time?

I am quite happy just sitting back and helping from the sidelines, now Anthony is thrusting me into the limelight and urging me forward.

Anthony is telling me that the programs I have developed and am developing will make a real difference in peoples online experience and actually assist them in succeeding online. I just hope he is right.

Because quite frankly in early June I will be out of cash, so the clock is ticking.

Enough posting, it's time for me to go back and knock up some more code.

I've got this particular linking problem with a piece of c++ code that I just cannot seem to get working cross platform. It works fine on Windows, but I'm having some difficulty with it on the Mac.

Need to find a solution to it. I do all my programming on a Mac, but use Parallels (a windows emulator) so I can also run Windows on it.

Anthony tells me that lots of Internet Marketers have Macs so I said fair enough I'll just write all my programs to work on both Windows and Mac so they can decide which operating system that want to use.

Very easy to do, I am surprised other programmers don't do this. I wonder why not?

Would love to hear from you guys.

Am I crazy? Should I just go back to the day job?

Catch up with you later.

Cheers Tim

Get Flash to see this player.

A quick post from me today and more importantly a video I shot about my job and PPC software.

I finish up my job tomorrow, and am excited and nervous about the future. I put the blame entirely on my brother Anthony.  He has been bugging me for what seems like an eternity to join him online, and I've finally taken the plunge.

I hope I can get him to spend enough time helping out, and not just playing his guitar. He is an absolute music nut and spends all his time playing!

Anyway have a look at the video, I think you may be a bit surprised when it starts!

Cheers

Tim

Strange sometimes how things work out.

My younger brother and I, have lived in separate states in Australia, 732 kms apart, for the last 25 odd years. I don't know why we lived so far away from each other as we always get on so well together and both have the same weird sense of humor.

I've been selling info products online since September 2004 after going to my first internet conference in August 2004.

I was lucky enough to be taught at that confernence by 2 of the best internet marketers in the world, Ed Dale & Frank Kern and then later by John Reese.

Tim has been quietly programming away for most of those 25 years and I have been nagging him to get an online business for the last 2 or 3 years or so.

He's been studying SEO for a couple of years now (being a geek he loves SEO) and has helped quite a few people get some great organic results.

But he was never that interested to start up an internet business of his own before even though he could see I was doing OK at it.

Then suddenly out of the blue, he tells me;

"Anthony, I've resigned from my programming job and am ready to get into an online business. What do I have to do"?

That was 2 weeks ago and he finishes up work tomorrow!

What have I done?

I did keep telling him over the last 18 months how I would help him and how with his programming and SEO skills and my online marketing experience we would make a great team.

Now it's time I have to prove it as he has put his faith in me and himself. I know we can do it.

A gutsy move by him I reckon to leave his secure job to some uncertainty.

Will keep you posted but basically we have till about the middle of June to make a success of our business together or Tim will be looking for a day job again.

All the best.

Anthony

Hi and well done on taking the time to find strategies to boost your Google AdWords success.

I'm Anthony Buchalka and I'm happy to offer you our FREE detailed 22 page report that looks at the 10 biggest mistakes made by those who use Google AdWords as part of their business model.

Many of these mistakes cause dwindling profits and poorly performing campaigns for many online marketers, and absolute carnage for many others under the various 'Google slaps' that have occurred and continue to occur.

All of us want to achieve maximum return on investment (ROI) for the keywords or phrases that are most relevant to our niches, and are most likely to provide our sites with targeted traffic that converts.

With AdWord's cost-per-click (CPC) prices and competition increasing, it's more essential than ever, that you avoid these common serious mistakes that will undoubtedly result in poorly performing PPC campaigns and could mean the difference between your business success and failure.

By following the tips in this report, you can expect greater success with your Google AdWords campaigns and begin to build some protection against Google's regular slap.

To receive the AdWords Report immediately, simply fill in your name and email address in the box above and click the "Send me The AdWords Report" Button.

And don't worry, I promise you that you will not be hit with offer after offer of the latest greatest internet marketing product.

I will send you some complimentary tips on PPC advertising from time to time though, and you always have the option of unsubscribing at any time if you feel I am not offering you anything worthwhile.

I will also NEVER pass on your details to anyone else.

To your PPC success,