Should You Use Adwords To Promote Your Blog?

I have not been blogging so much here because I have been learning about Adwords and creating a new site called Adwords Marketing . This is a subdomain of one of my first sites where I used a character called Genie rather than my own name because I was still shy and unsure of myself and I thought it was cool. I understand now, thanks to the advice of Andy Baird – who took time from his busy schedule to answer several emails I sent him, that branding of your own personal name is an essential part of the overall success formula.

Genie is still fun though, I enjoy having these two lovely Jinn at my beck and call! The idea that Google Adwords is a powerful Jinni who can conjure your hearts desire out of thin air if you are just clever enough to word your wishes correctly, also appeals to me as a relevant Adwords analogy.

So is it worth spending money on Adwords to promote your blog?

This is the question I asked. So lets go through a few scenarios.

If you have a personal blog that you share with friends with no monetization then probably not. You have to learn a great deal about Adwords to be able to use it effectively.

If you do have some form of opt in and monetization on your site, then you need to consider whether  getting fast traffic to your site is worth the time and effort you will spend on learning how to make Adwords work for you to get more traffic to yourblog.

Adwords is not free and simply setting up an account and creating an ad – when you don’t know what you are doing – will cost you more than it may be worth.

If you are prepared to leap in and try your luck with Adwords then you need to start learning about what they call their quality score. This is basically to ensure that even their advertisers provide Google searchers with quality content. You may already have an Adwords account. If so you will have seen the phrase “keywords inactive for search”

A new tool that has recently been released (last Friday) is going to help you immensely with this, especially if you have sites as well as blogs. It’s called

Put On Your Google Goggles,

and its a desktop appiclation that you can use by entering in an ad and an url to see the likely quality score of your landing page. A short PDF report is generated to explain what factors need improving to get your keywords showing great scores. Couldn’t be easier!

For a short time, during the launch of this new nifty gadget, the creators of it, Larry and Amish, are offering a special deal on their main product, an ad spying and ad tracking tool. This deal is so special its almost worth getting it even if you are not sure Adwords is right for you but you are doing affiliate marketing! You can easily find new niches with it, you can check affiliate conversion rates and so much more. So if you have ever been tempted to try this kind of thing, get over and check out the deal, it’s awesome.

Even if you are not yet ready to use Adwords, a peek at the videos on the sales page will explain a lot of info about Adwords quality score and what the Google slap was and why people are still talking about it. It’s a worth a look just for that! You can also use such information to improve your knowledge about SEO.

Here’s a report you can download (no email or money required)
Google Goggles Report .

Or if you opt in at the following page you can also get a resale audio/pdf interview with Google expert Simon Leung about the quality score and how to overcome it. Click here to get that bonus with your report. Also no cost, just the email so I can send you the link.
Nice Guys Don’t Get Slapped

OK. So that’s when not to use Adwords and something new about how to use Adwords -

What about when to use Adwords to advertise your blog.

I guess the time is when you have a professional site that is fully monetized and, especially so, when you are perhaps selling advertising on it, whether that is banner advertising, text links or Adsense. You may need to use different urls rather than just a home page, so using pages for these landing urls may be better. Treat these pages as landing pages and optimize each one for your ad text and specific keyword combinations.

If your blog is appearing for seo terms then you may not need to advertise with those keywords just to get traffic, but aim for a wider variety of keyword search terms than you can seo for. The content network can be good for this as using a lot of keywords for one ad is less of a problem with the content network.

Part of Adwords marketing is working out your visitor value. This basically means that the profit you make from your site is divided by the number of visitors to your site. Those visitors who sign up for your list or perhaps buy from you immediately.

If you make a profit each month of $1,000 from 1,000 visitors a month – your visitor value is $1. This is how you can start to judge whether you can afford to send more visitors using Adwords and how much you can afford to spend to use it. There’s not much point in spending $2 to earn $1. But if you can spend $2 to earn $4 then it’s probably worth it.

So think and plan before you spend and don’t forget to check those Google Goggles out!

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Free Blog Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.