You know. I am a firm believer that in this day and age, if you share information with others and try to help others out, it will come back to you some day. That’s why I have decided to share my most secret KW weapon on this blog today. It’s one of the coolest tools that you can find on the Internet, but it’s powerful as well.

Everybody knows what a thesaurus is. A paperback thesaurus is just an unattractive lot of papers that simply don’t belong in the 21st century. I am sure you can use it if you are an English major but for a marketer, a thesaurus book is just too heavy and inefficient to carry. That’s where Visual Thesaurus comes in.

If you have been doing pay per click for a while, you are probably know you simply cannot just compete on the so obvious keywords. It’s always very satisfying to find a set of keywords that bring you good traffic but are cheap enough to play the bidding war with. With Visual Thesaurus you can significantly expand your horizon and find the not so obvious phrases for your campaigns.

Using VT, you can branch out every single core keyword and find replacement keywords to use for your campaigns. Take the word “balance.” VT breaks it down for you and you can dig deeper by clicking on each of the branches.

You can also define relationships, which is very handy. You can choose negative association and get negative keywords for your campaigns.

Now you may look at this software package and tell me, “who needs this?” Believe me, someday you are going to wake up and just totally blank. Visual Thesaurus is going to let you start your engine and do a productive brainstorming session. VT is not only cool but also powerful.  And it’s very cheap. Can’t beat that.

So we here all this talk about the U.S. economy going down in flames, and the dow going sub zero. Is this all bad news? I am not going to pretend that there won’t be families who will suffer from this economy. Folks are going to lose their jobs, and that’s no fun. The last thing you want to see is people struggling to meet their ends in the holiday season. But just because 10% of folks don’t have jobs and won’t be spending, doesn’t mean the other 90% won’t be.

There are lots of folks who will be spending money this holiday season, and if you are in the selling business, you are going to have plenty of opportunity to make a living. But the better news is that recession may force some hands, meaning that the PPC bids could come down. Now, I am not an economist, but when I see the price of oil nearing $40 per barrel, I’d like to think the same thing could happen in the PPC world.

Besides, some of the niches are going to become even more attractive than before. For instance, the job niche is going to be extremely hot as folks try to find jobs in these tough conditions. When folks get desperate, they buy books, CDs, super expensive courses, and so on, which means there will be more money available for marketers such as you and I.

Another niche that is going get even hotter is the green market. President Obama has talked about the green industry being our way out of this mess, and I’d like to believe him. But really who cares about that as long as you can capitalize this publicity to make some cash. I know this may sound cruel, but you’ve got to be tough to be successful in the Internet marketing world. We all want the economy to get better, but the truth of the matter is, recession is not a bad thing. So why fret about it when you don’t have to?

I don’t know about you, but I enjoy a lazy lifestyle. I am not saying that you don’t need hard work to succeed in pay per click marketing. But I just don’t feel as though I have to work as hard as I used to just a while ago. When I started in this business about 8 years ago, there were not many options really available. The Internet was primitive back then. When the search advertising era started, there were not many folks who were taking advantage of it. Sure. Some folks were don’t Google cash back then. The concept of PPC marketing was new back then.

Fast forward 8 years, and we have one of most competitive eras in the history of pay per click marketing these days. Folks who couldn’t start a PC in 2000 are now writing effective ads and managing effective campaigns. Now the costs have gone up due to the increased level of competition, but I actually like seeing folks entering this market. It makes my job easier.

Using spying tools allows me to create campaigns faster than before with the help of my friends (or rather competitors). Spying on others is nothing new, but I know for a fact a lot of top marketers do it on an everyday basis. It’s true that you can start a campaign from scratch and be successful these days, but it is just not efficient enough. The amount of time that you can spend trying to figure out how to start an effective campaign can be spent on more productive things.

You can learn a lot of things by watching the players in your niche. If they are making money with their campaigns on a consistent basis, you can too. So there is no reason to be uneasy about this. At the end of the day, your goal should be to make as much money with as little effort as possible. That’s why spying on others rocks.

If we learned anything from the presidential election in the U.S., it is that negative campaigning still works. But negative campaigning does not only belong in the political arenas. Pay per click marketers also use negative campaigning to promote products, and it is one of the most effective methods to make a killing on Google and other search marketing networks.

PPC negative campaigning is a little bit different than its counter part in the world of politics. In politics, you are trying to keep folks from voting for the other guy. In the PPC world, you are trying to raise doubts about a product and make folks read through your sales-letter to find out why they NEED to get the product.

You have probably seen it on Google before. Let’s say you want to get John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0. If you take a look at paid listing, you’ll see some of the following headlines:

• Don’t buy John Reese’s TS2 before reading this
• The Shocking Truth about TS2
• Is TS2 a Scam?
• TS2 is a waste of money

Now, none of these headlines are complementary for TS2, but they raise questions in shopper’s minds. If you are 50% sure about buying TS2, you are likely to click on one of these ads to figure out what all the drama is about. Of course, once you do that, you are going to be presented with a sales-letter that encourages you to get TS2 in addition to the bonus that these guys provide to complement what’s included with TS2.

The moral of story is, negative campaigning pays in the paid search channel. Information seekers and shoppers are likely to click on your ads just to figure out if there is any truth to your claim. That means your CTR will be up, and your quality score will be up, and you’ll pay less to get folks to your site. Who knew negative campaigning could be so positive?

Are you risk averse? Afraid of taking risk, wondering what might happen if and when you do take the risk? Well, I can tell you from experience that being risk averse can help you live an easy life without having too much stress. Don’t get me wrong. There will be tough times, and there will be challenges, but your life won’t be more complicated than that of a risk lover.

But being risk averse is exactly what you shouldn’t be in the pay per click marketing world. Pay per click marketing is a tough business, and nobody is going to have any sympathy for you if you lose your shirt. But a wise man told me once, “you have to spend money to gain money.” That’s really all to it. Now, you shouldn’t burn money recklessly to achieve your goal, but you shouldn’t be afraid of spending a little either.

Being risk averse can put a lot of pressure on you when running your PPC business. Risk averse businesses tend to stay ultra conservative, and their goal is usually to stay in business longer than actually growing their business. But my goal has always been making enough money to retire or have the convenience of being able to set my schedule. At the end of the day, being risk averse doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. You’d just have to find the right balance being too conservative and too reckless.

Your take: are you risk averse? Does bidding on adwords make you stay awake at night?

Being lazy doesn’t pay in the pay per click industry. If you look at the most successful pay per click marketers, you are going to see folks who are constantly testing and tracking everything to figure out how they can earn more with their each and every campaign. I know a lot of folks watch commercials on TV that talk about setting and forgetting things. Well, PPC marketing is not one of those things.

Testing and tracking go hand in hand. You can’t test without tracking, and tracking without testing doesn’t really do you much. By testing different keys and concepts on your landing pages, you can find out what works better, which helps taking a step forward. A lot of folks don’t believe in testing individual keywords. They think of it as “overdoing” and a waste of time. No reasonable marketer would tell you not to test every keyword. Not all keywords are created equal, which means you should try to use ones that give you the best chance of making money.

I personally use WP Affiliate to test my keywords as far as tracking is concerned. I do use Google Analytics and have tied it into my Adwords accounts to figure out how conversions are happening. But I use WP Affiliate on my WordPress sites to reconcile the differences between Adwords numbers and my internal numbers. Tracking individual keywords with WP Affiliate it easy, and there are 10s of other solutions you can use for your keyword tracking. But you should never fly blind in pay per click marketing world. You should test everything, and then track them all.

So you have taken time to build a website, and you have designed an advertising campaign to promote your site. You do your keyword research, and you input your keywords, and then it hits you. Your bids are not high enough to be on the first page of Google.

So in my case, you can decide whether the max CPC of $.5 is worth going for. But what if that number was $15? Believe me, it’s possible. I have seen some obscene numbers to show up on the first page. Now, a lot of folks believe that you can make a living by staying on the second page, but that simply does not work for me. Unless you are in the top 6 listing of Google, you are not going get enough traffic to make a decent living off your site. Whether you are an affiliate marketer or just a lead generator, you should aim for positions 1 to 6.

Lots of folks do go for the first position regardless of the money involved. I personally believe going for the first position is just dumb. You are going to pay a whole lot of money to get that spot, but you actually get better conversion rates on the third or fourth position. The number 1 position is much different from others as you will have to pay a premium to get it. And since you get lots of unqualified clicks, your budget is going to dry up sooner than you think. Positions 4 to 6 provide you with enough traffic to stay afloat and at the same time are not too hard on your budget. What I do with my own campaigns is that I multiply the minimum bid by 1.5 and use that as I Max CPC. Then I watch my campaigns to see where I end up and if the results are not satisfactory as far as the traffic goes, I multiply the new number by 1.5 and repeat the same process.

There is no magic Max CPC that you can use in your campaigns, but you should bid high enough to be in the top 6 positions. The best way to achieve that is by actually doing it. Don’t worry about losing money in the start. If you continue to optimize your pages to get more conversions, you are going to make enough money to cover your costs (that’s obviously dependant on your business model).

So how high do you bid for on search marketing networks?

One of the biggest mistakes that newbie marketers make with adwords, and other paid search services is targeting everything under the sun in one adgroup. Let’s say I want to promote a coupon site. If you use a keyword tool, such as WordTracker, you can get thousands of keywords that are related and not related to coupons.

By putting everything under the sun in one adgroup and using the same ads and landing pages for all these keywords, you are not only going to hurt your pocket (as your quality score will drop for unrelated keywords), you are not going to realize a high enough CTR and conversions from your campaigns. That’s why you should limit what you put in each of your adgroup.

The best way you can optimize adgroups is by targeting only one keyword in each group. But here is the thing. Most pay per click services limit the number of adgroups and campaigns you can have, which means you may not be able to use the one-keyword-per-adgroup concept for your adwords campaigns. I personally use the concept of “mini-themes” for my adgroups. But you should avoid putting bargain keywords in a coupon adgroup. You should also have different landing pages for different keywords. Research has shown that if you customize landing pages for specific keywords, you are going to see better conversion results.

There is no magic number that you can use here, but you should always follow this rule: never put completely different keyword phrases in one adgroup (by that I mean keyword phrases that are mutually exclusive). It’s very simple but you’d be amazed how many folks don’t do it.

Well, are you? Most people don’t know that they are leaving something on the table or they wouldn’t. I mean either you are not greedy at all or you don’t have the same logic most people do. If you know your advertising campaigns are not as effective as they should be, you  test and optimize. If you feel you don’t have enough exposure in a market, you try new channels, do PR, and so on. When there is a problem, you try to find a solution for it.

When it comes to paid advertising, many folks waste their traffic without knowing it. If you send traffic to a page that does not ask for your visitor’s information or gives them a way to come back to your site for more, you are wasting your traffic. When folks come to your site, either they are ready to make a purchase, or they are just shopping around. Maybe, they are just curious about your product and are non-buyers. It doesn’t matter what their mindset is at that point. You should always have a back up plan (a flow-chart scenario tree if you will). If they end up buying from you, you will get their contact information to sell more to them in the future. If they don’t buy from you, you should provide folks with enough incentive to sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your RSS feed.

You may say, “nobody is going to sign up for my newsletter.” That can’t be further from the truth. If you provide the right incentive, people will sign up. Signing up people is not really that hard but retaining them is. That’s why you want to have a clear plan about what you will communicate with your leads about. Most folks have a set of autoresponder messages at had that will go out every 2 or 3 days. They don’t even have to break a sweat to keep their leads. Others try to do it day by day, which is really inefficient.

Planning is the differnence here. If you plan for the scenarios that I mentioned above, you can make sure you have everything ready to go once you start giving your money away to Google. Even if you are paying $0.01 per clickto Google, you should still try to turn those clicks to leads. The more effective you are in that department, the more money you are going to make through your PPC efforts. It’s no rocket science.

Your click through rate is one of the most important factors that can be the difference between you running a successful pay per click marketing business Google or achieve utter failure on Adwords. Google’s ranking system is sophisticated. There is no question about that, and while you can burn your money through the first position by putting up an obscenely high amount for your Max CPC, you should try to optimize your Quality score to pay less to Google.

Your ad CTR is a big part of your quality score. Google wants to take your money and a low CPR means they are leaving money on the table. So what they do is raise your min bids to either make you optimize your ads or pay the penalty for your negligence. While increasing your CTR dramatically will depend on many factors, there are simple steps that you can take to gradually increase your click through rate. Here is how:

• Call to action: you should try to use call to action phrases in your ads. Google does put limitations on what you can use in your ads. For instance, Google frowns up using the word “click here” in your ads. But you can use the word “apply now” or similar words, and that usually does the job.
• Keyword Phrases: make sure you have your keywords in the ad. Google emboldens phrases that folks have searched for on Google if you have them in your ads.
• Keyword Insertion: going back to the previous point, if you have an Adwords with more than a few keyword phrases, you can’t possibly fit your exact keyword inside your ad. That’s why you should use Google keyword insertion to automatically show the keywords in your ads that are relevant to what people are searching for. Use {keyword: keywords phrase} in your title, your body, or your URL. You can read more about it here.
• Symbols: Google is not comfortable with folks who use symbols such as “@” or “!” in their ads to attract the searchers’ attention. Having said that, you can still use “!” in your ads body (one time). So you should take advantage of it to set yourself apart from your competitors and attract the searcher’s attention.
• Unique Feature/Benefit: you have heard it before. Being unique can make you stand out in a crowd. Google Adwords has enabled lots of folks to come online and participate, which means in most niches the competition has intensified. What that means for you is that you should provide a unique benefit/feature in your ad to make people want to click on your ad. I would put a major feature or benefit on the first line of the add to grab the attention of the searcher as quickly as possible. Make sure your benefit is relevant to the product you are advertising.

Your CTR on Adwords is only a part of the equation but is a big part of it. In fact, without a good CTR, you are not going to be able to compete effectively. But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be able to achieve respectable CTR with your ads. And don’t forget to test your ads! That’s all that matters in the end.