Using Adwords To Promote Your Blog

So many bloggers think they can simply put a blog together, submit to a handful of social sites and loads of traffic will come piling in, as I have said many times before this is not accurate.

If you are a blogger and you’re serious about making a living from blogging, then you have to invest like you would any business.

So where does Google Adwords fit in??

When I encourage bloggers to use Google adwords to give their blogs that necessary push I usually get the same responses;

“Adwords is too expensive”

“I don’t sell a product”

“How do I track conversions?”

“It’s just not measurable!”

Now when it comes to promoting your blog it is true the success of any PPC campaign can be difficult to measure but this really depends on your goals.

- Are you looking to attract readers?

- Do you sell an eBook?

- Do you have ads?

- Do you promote affiliate products?

Remember with Adwords you could fully optimise a page of your blog to promote a particular product or affiliate program and send relevant traffic straight to it.

However, even if you have no product at all you can still use Adwords to promote your blog and increase your brand and online visibiliy, let me give you a few tips about how to go about this;

Keep It Broad

When you first come to set up your Adwords campaign you are going to have to select keywords to use, then you can use keyword matching options to select either;

- Broad Keywords – This will display your ad to searches who use your keyword, any variations of it or even related keywords. This is great for branding and general exposure but not so brilliant for keeping click rates and conversion rates high.

- “Phrase Keywords” – These will activate your ad when a your keyword is used or any variation in the exact order. This is a much better way for increasing conversion rates but can mean a low click through rate.

- [Exact Match] – This means your ad will be activated only when the exact keyword search is used. Brilliant for maximising conversion and click through rates.

So which type of keywords do you think should be used to promote a blog? Well if you are selling a specific product you will probably want to go with the phrase match, however if you are simply trying to give your blog some exposure you need to stick to broad matches, this makes sure you get a good amount of impressions and your clicks are as cheap as possible.

A blogger’s main aim is to increase readership, if you can get 1000 clicks for 9p thats £90 spend, and you convert 10% into readers, this basically means you could increase your readership by 100 every month for £90. Obviously conversion rates are not all the same but if you create decent content and have a compelling opt in box there is a good chance your conversion rate may be higher.

Placement Ads

Ever since Google Adwords introduced it, this has been one of my favourite ways of attracting blog readers.

It allows you to place your adwords ad on targeted pages that are in the adsense program, so how are you going to take advantage of it?

Really easy, search for one of your main keywords and search down the top 20 results, then make a note of the ones that use adsense, and target them in your placements. You may even know popular blogs within your own niche that use adesense without searching for them, target them too.

Out of all the advertising methods this has made the biggest impact on readership and blog activity. The clickers are already reading a blog before they click your ad, this means their more likely to convert if your content is up to scratch.

Just a couple of final things to finish with.

If your aim is to increase readership then you need to create huge keyword lists, this ensures your using as many long tail keywords as possible and getting clicks for the lowest amounts. For this I suggest you head over to the Google Keyword Tool.

Do a “website keyword search” and this will show you all the keywords that relate to your sites content. It will even display keywords in keyword groups so you know exactly how to group your ads. This is just the starting point though, I want you to use the keywords it suggests to create huge keyword lists, take every keyword and run it through a descriptive search, this will give you a huge keyword list to start your campaign with.

Remember to keep the keywords in the groups the adwords tool suggests.

This will ensure you keep your campaign as relevant as possible and it will keep your cost per click down. Don’t increase your cost per click to accommodate for the expensive keywords, stick to a certain amount per keyword, some keywords may become ineligible but we are not looking to increase quality score here, just looking to drive lots of traffic through low cost clicks.

If you are thinking to yourself, “I am not paying money to promote my blog!” Then you are probably not going to be a successful blogger, you have to invest in this game.