Woo Hoo! Way to go Benjamin. The first sale is sweet.
You learned two important things with that sale. 1. There is demand for the product. 2. You can sell the product.
I'm going to give you some suggestions. First things first. Go, right now, and pause your adwords account. Don't even read the rest of this post first. Just go do it.
Did you do it? Good. Now I'm going to show you a three pronged approach to making some money with adwords and your site. The reason I say adwords is that I have no clue about the MSN product.
Markus has given you some valuable information about the long tail. We'll use some of it here.
You very likely know what I'm going to say next, but it bears repeating. Marketing in general, and ppc in particular, is a numbers game. It takes x number of impressions before you get a click thru; it takes x click thrus before you get the visitor to the merchant site; it takes x visits to the merchant site before you get a sale.
Your goal with ppc is to get as many click thrus as possible for the least amount of money. You would also like to know which keywords pay off. It is also nice to know which ad produces the best. And, on average, how many visitors to your merchant account will provide a sale.
That being said, I would much rather get 100 clicks at 5 cents each than 5 clicks at $1.00 each.
Ok, here we go. Go back to your keyword research notes. Look for phrases that get anywhere from 60 to 100 searches per month. That will roughly equal two to three clicks per day. Make you a list of each of those phrases. If you can find 100 of them you'll have a good starting point. If you don't have that many, then up the number of searches per month until you do have (roughly) 100 phrases.
The important thing here is that you are not going to target the top keywords/phrases. You are after the low hanging fruit. Those terms that not a whole lot of others are bidding on are easier to get a high position for at a smaller bid price.
Now, break out your favorite html editor. Open your index page. Open a blank page and paste a copy of the index into it. Change the title of the page to your first keyword. Change the meta robots to read 'noindex' 'nofollow'. No need to fool around with the description and keywords. The SE's will never see this page.
In your content section, the first thing you should have is an h1 tag with the phrase near the beginning and some sales pitch. Remember, the visitor clicked on a specific ad. He needs to be reassured that he clicked on the right ad, so the keyword needs to be prominent.
Maybe something like this:
<h1>The very best *keyword* to be found anywhere at any price.</h1>
Next are specific benefits related to that keyword. Best, cheapest, strongest, etc. This is just sales pitch stuff, but it is important. The rest of the page can be exactly as you had your index.
Now, change your navigation links. Ask Chet to show you the code that will take a visitor click from the 'ingredients' link on your site to the ingredients.php page on the CutRx site. You will use your affiliate code plus a specific subid so your traffic will be credited to you.
This is important. You
will not link to this (or all of the others you make this way) page from anywhere else on your site. The only visitors to this page will come from adwords. You don't want someone to come in from one of the other pages and get all confused. It'll also screw up your metrics.
Now, go into SizzleCash and set up a subid for this page. For example: GC1, where G=Google adwords, C=CutRx, 1=first keyword. Now change your paylinks on the page you just made to have the correct subid and save the page as your keyword.html (or whatever). As an example, the href might be like this:
/best-keyword-online.html
Upload the completed page to your webhost.
Now, go to your adwords account ant set up an ad group for CutRx. You want to make four (4) ads for each keyword. Select the ad variation tab and write the ads and have them displayed equally.
Try to have your full phrase as the headline. Sometimes you can't because of the 25 character limit, but try to do it. Failing getting it in the headline, be sure to get it in the body of the ad.
For two of the ads, have the headline be identical. Use different compelling copy in the body of the ad. For the next ad use the best sounding body copy from the first two, and write a different sounding headline. For the last ad, get happy, crazy, different, off the wall, inventive. But make it sound good.
The destination url will be the same for all four ads. To the *keyword* page you made specifically for this keyword.
Think up some negative keywords for this phrase. Like maybe free, sample, pictures, whatever you don't want to get clicks from. In other words, separate out the non buyers with your negative words.
Set your bid price at 5 cents or lower if you can (I keep hearing about the elusive 3 cent adword bid) and save the ad.
Repeat with the other 99 pages and you are good to go.
After you get a hundred or so impressions for each ad (within a keyword) you should be starting to see a trend. If one of the ads is under performing, then change it up. Sometimes all it takes is a tiny change to an ad to make it a winner. Sometimes it takes a complete re-write.
The adwords winners are not the ones with the biggest ad budgets. The winners are the ones who continually test and improve their clickthru and effectiveness of the landing page(s).
The importance of a well written ad cannot be overstated. The best written ad will almost certainly out perform a less effective ad that is above yours. Another way to say it is that having the first ad is not as important as having the best ad on the page. (I personally like to be in the number 3-5 range on the first page, or very near the top of the second page of search results.)
After some time, you will have a better feel for just where your ad should be placed to maximize conversions. Adjusting your bid price is required to keep your ad in the sweet spot. Keep in mind that your chosen product is seasonal. You will need to review and revise your bid plan when the season is about over.
Keep one eye on your stats at SizzleCash and the other on the stats at Adwords. Adjust your bid prices and ads until you have the winner that you want. After you have a little more experience with the entire process, make pages and subids for that rest of your keywords.
Pay off the house and car, and take a long vacation. You earned it.
Dink
P.S. I hope Marcus doesn't charge me too much for publishing this ebook on his forum.
edit: cdc jumped in with some good thoughts while I was writing this monster post. Here is my best advice. Buy a really good book on ppc marketing.
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