by Kirt Christensen

There can’t be anything more dispiriting than putting together your website and then having to wait for people to just “come” to it. Waiting for your birthday when you are a kid. That is the reason that the premier element of your online world is how you manage your PPC.

Ten minutes from right now you can have a Google campaign up and running, sending visitors to your web site. The speed at which you can do new things and make changes in Google’s system is stunning.

Don’t be in a hurry. Being hasty can lead to big trouble.

Blowing your whole budget on PPC management is easy – you select a keyword, make an ad, and pay for bunches of visitors that are not going to by anything from you. To help you be sure not to spend money getting the wrong kinds of visitors to your website. Ask:

How Many People are Looking for this Product?

The answer to this question will help you be realistic with what you expect. It may also help you keep disappointment at bay if you find out later on that Google can’t get the new customers you were hoping for. Should that happen, the chances are that you will find other less well-known traffic sources that are just as profitable but the competition is not as stiff.

In just a few seconds you can have a good idea of the traffic. Look up the useful search term selection tool at http://inventory.overture.com (or http://inven tory.uk.overture.com for the UK). Put in a few of your main keywords and overture will show you the number of searches its serves over the last month for each of the terms.

For example, you have a company that sells a skin-care product designed to slow the aging process. Let’s imagine you’ve just started and want to bring more folks to your web site through Google. Where do you start?

The number one thing to do is put together a start up list of possible keywords. Here is a possible list:

skin

beauty

acne

cosmetics

makeup

cosmetic surgery

dermatology

anti-aging

wrinkles

oils

moisturizers

This list is only the beginning. If I take it over to the keyword-selection-tool on Overture and put them in, I can see how many searchers they had in the past month. These are the results:

skin 7,290

beauty 5,006

acne 1,872

cosmetics 1,862

makeup 1,796

cosmetic surgery 1,736

dermatology 622

anti-aging 503

wrinkles 485

oils 390

moisturizers 120

Notice what’s going on here:

Check it out, ‘skin’ had 60 times more searches than the term ‘moisturizers’ which is at the bottom of the list. ‘Skin’ will be one of your most important keywords.

When you check out your keywords on Overture you will also get with them words that won’t be relevant. You will use those as negative keywords.

There are a huge number of people who may want skin-care products but who’ll use different word combinations than are on the lists we’ve come up with. So for a successful PPC management, we’ll need to brainstorm for more, and then search Overture’s tool again.

According to Overture, we could conceivably get tens, even hundreds of thousands of US searches in a month on those top keywords.

About the Author:
Need to optimize or “fix” your Adwords & PPC campaigns? Kirt Christensen manages over $600k in PPC spending & knows what it takes to make your account hum! When it comes to professional ppc management, he’s the man!

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