Get Good Google Adsense figuresGoogle Adsense - you've heard about people making good money from it but you're not sure how they're doing it.

Here's a 4-Step System for Driving Up Your Traffic while Lowering Your PPC Ads Spend - Making Money From Google Adsense.

As an online business, your goal should be to show up on the first page of search results for as many related keywords and keyword phrases as possible. Preferably on the first page of the biggest Search Engine - Google. Google accounts for 65% of all internet searches in the U.S. So thats where you want to be - whether you're a business or a blogger wanting to make money through Pay Per Click (PPC) programs.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising - like Google Adsense - can be immensely powerful if you know what you're doing.

If you're a newbie at all this, don't stress - we all had to start somewhere. It's a bit of a struggle at first but its worth it when you go to check your Adsense account and there's money there. Kerching!

And if you're already an experienced PayPerClick operator I bet there's some tips here that can make you even more money. -

Why Pay-Per-Click?

On search results pages, there are two parts. First there are natural search results - what the boffins call Organic Results. And then there are sponsored links - paid for links. In the image on the left, the natural (organic) search results are boxed in blue and the sponsored links are boxed in red.
PPC Google Adsense

To get your website to show up in natural (organic) search results, you have to master "search engine optimization" (SEO).

Finding the Best Keywords

You can start building a PPC keyword list now, with these 4 steps:

Expand - come up with as many keywords and phrases as possible
Target - refine the keywords you chose (for Google)
Group - separate keywords into groups with matching ad copy
Scrub - eliminate the unnecessary keywords

Step 1: Expand Your List

To begin, think about your product/service. What is it? What does it do? You must know what you are selling/providing and be able to define it accurately.

Also, you know who you are trying to sell to better than anyone, thus you need to think about your customers: what problems are they trying to solve? How might they go about looking for your product or service on a search engine? What point are they at in the purchasing cycle – are they searching for information or ready to buy? Put yourself in your customer's shoes.

Be creative and expansive in your choice of keywords and phrases. Let your mind wander. Spend some time brainstorming and develop your own list of keywords and key phrases.

Tip: UseKeyword Variations

Once you have expanded your list of key terms, expand keyword variations. On search engines, variations such as synonyms, plurals, different verb tenses, and common misspellings of your keywords are unique! So use this to your advantage as you start to build out your list.

Here is an example of common keyword variations to help you brainstorm on how to grow your list.

1) Singular vs. Plural - enter these separately into Google. "Used car" and "used cars" are entirely different keywords in the eyes of a search engine.

2) Hyphens matter! - Often you might come up with a keyword phrase such as "self help." What you might not realize is that lots of people will enter the same phrase as "self-help" or even as "selfhelp." If you don't add "self-help" and "selfhelp" to your keyword list, you might be missing out on half the market!

3) Vary the verb - Different people express themselves differently so use the different variations of verbs. Example: "Learn to play guitar" and "Learning to play guitar."

4) Adjectives - Many people use adjectives when searching such as "new, brand new, best, quality, cheap, free, premium, etc."

5) Use website names - For most people, Google has become the onramp to the internet. As a result, when people want to navigate to a site, they often search for domains such as "www.camping.com" or "camping.com." So be sure to include the relevant domain names and all their variations in your keyword list.

6) Misspellings - Use common misspellings to your advantage! When searching online, users commonly misspell words and phrases they are looking for. As an example, barbecue is often misspelled as barbeque or bar-b-que. Don't leave out any misspellings that might attract customers to your ad!

Recommended Free Keyword Selection Tools

After your first brainstorm, you will come up with dozens or perhaps even a few hundred keywords. However, don't stop now. Use these FREE tools below to grow your list in no time by up to 1,000%! You want your keyword list to include as many relevant keyword phrases as possible and the tools below are critical to help you get there.

The tools here are especially powerful to help you come up with keyword phrases that are 3 or 4 keywords long. These are harder to find on your own but often the longer the keyword phrase, the more targeted and valuable it will be for you. Compare a keyword such as "guitar" to "how to play guitar" - the longer keyword phrase gives you much more information about what the customer is looking for!

The following tools are very useful in growing your keyword list:

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool

Find a list of matching as well as related keywords and keyword phrases in English and in other languages. It is by far the single most powerful free keyword suggestion tool.

Overture (Yahoo!) Keyword Selector Tool

This tool is easy to use and provides a list of related keyword phrases containing your keyword. It also shows the number of times your term was searched on Yahoo! in the previous month. Note, this tool lumps plural and singular terms together. That is fine for Yahoo! but for advertising in Google, you want to make sure you include them separately.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is better for advanced online marketers. Its a paid service and the others are free. But Wordtracker can help you save a lot of time as you come up with the most comprehensive keyword list.

Here's some more powerful FREE tools that will help you to get additional ideas for more keywords phrases.

Ask.com - The Ask Jeeves search engine automatically suggests (1) more precise keyword phrases and (2) related topics you might not yet have thought of.

Clusty.com - Clusty is a new search engine that automatically suggests the major topics for any given keyword or keyword phrase. It is an excellent tool to come up with other keyword ideas and keyword groups.

Google Suggest - Suggests popular keyword phrases.

goRank - Search for related words that you may not have considered or otherwise overlooked.

Amazon.com - This can be a great inspiration for keywords. Just type in one of the keywords that you have in mind and see what books have been written that contain the keyword or phrase. This will help give you more ideas.

Thesaurus.com - A thesaurus will give you a variety of useful synonyms that you can include in your lists. It is sometimes a great way to get fresh ideas that you might not have otherwise thought of.

LexFN.com – allows you to search for relationships between words, concepts, and people. It is a combination thesaurus, rhyming dictionary, pun generator, and concept navigator.

Check Your Internal Site Searches

If you have a search engine on your own website, go and find out what people are searching for on your site. This can further help you grow your keyword list.

Watch Your Competition

By now you should have an excellent keyword list. However, if you want to keep pushing and brainstorm some more, find out what keywords your competition is targeting.

Enter some of the top keywords and keyword phrases that you have identified above and enter them into Google. Now scan the search results for more keywords and keyword phrases. After all, the top sites that show up in Google, are your competitors. They are currently in the position that you would like your site to be in.

Check out what your competitors are doing! How? Go to their site and click on View and then Page Source in your internet browser and look at the tags.

Another useful tool is GoogSpy, which allows you to effortlessly browse by "company" or by "keyword" and see which terms your competitors are buying on Google. Note, however, that you cannot see every competitor and every keyword, but you can certainly get a good idea.

Having LOTS of keywords is half the battle to win new markets and acquire traffic for low bid prices.

Investing time to grow your keyword list is time well spent!

Okay - now we go on to Step 2.

Step 2: Target Your List (for Google)

Now that you have a great initial list of keywords, it's time to refine your keyword list to include the best possible words and phrases that will most accurately relate to your ads.

To help you get started, Google offers some powerful keyword matching options to help you further broaden and narrow the reach of your online advertising campaign. These options are called

broad match
phrase match
exact match
negative keyword match

Google allows you to use any or all of these options simultaneously.

1) Broad Match (default setting in Google)

Google automatically uses the broad match setting for all keywords. You need to be careful with broad matching because it triggers all the search results, regardless of the order of search terms.

Broad match example:

search term: camping gear
For what keyword phrases would the ad show up?

gear for camping (keyword phrase contains both terms in any order)
camping and hiking gear (keyword phrase contains both terms in any order)
Caution: Broad match can be a very powerful way to get your keywords additional exposure for keyword phrases that you did not think about. However, it might also get your ads displayed for searches that are irrelevant. This could potentially be very costly since visitors that come from irrelevant search terms are unlikely going to end up buying your product.

You can use the three additional options Google provides to complement broad matching.

2) "Phrase Match"

When you add quotation marks around a keyword phrase, such as "camping gear," you ensure that only search terms with "camping" followed by "gear" will display your ad.

Phrase match example:

search term: "camping gear"
For what keyword phrases would the ad show up?

winter camping gear (contains keyword phrase)
best camping gear (contains keyword phrase)
3) [Exact Match]

Place brackets around a keyword when you want your ad to appear only when a searcher types in a specific term. The term [camping gear] will only feature your ad for the exact term "camping gear," and not "winter camping gear" or "eddie bauer camping gear."

Exact match example:

search term: [camping gear]
For what keyword phrases would the ad show up?

camping gear (only exact match)
Using [exact match] is clearly the safest of the three options since it only displays your ads exactly for the keywords that you have approved. However, it is also the most limiting since you will not be able to get increased exposure for keyword phrases that you have not yet thought about.

Fortunately, there is an additional matching option that makes broad match and phrase match far more powerful.

4) Negative Keyword Match

When you use broad match and phrase match you cannot anticipate all of the keywords and keyword phrases that your ads might show up for. However, from your keyword research, you will quickly see keywords that are undesirable. Start a list of all the keywords that you see that you don't like and add a hyphen "-" in front of them. Adding negative keywords is crucial for a successful campaign.

For the keyword:

gucci handbags
Negative keyword examples would look like:

-fake
-used
The above keyword list contains a broad match for the keyword phrase gucci handbags and two negative keywords fake and used.

For what keyword phrases would the ad show up?

cheap gucci handbags
gucci and kate spade handbags
For what keyword phrases would the ad NOT show up for?

fake gucci handbags
used prada and gucci handbags
Google will never show your ad when the search query includes the negative keyword. Building a detailed list of negative keywords is critical.

The single best way to identify negative keywords quickly is to use the Overture (Yahoo!) or Google AdWords keyword suggestion tools. If you enter any keyword or keyword phrase, they will list for you all the similar search queries, including all the keywords that you don't want your ads to show up for.

Reminder: Since it's impossible to anticipate all the combinations of keywords that users will be typing into search engines, take full advantage of the broad match, phrase match, and exact match options, and have a solid list of negative keywords to avoid having your ads show up for irrelevant keyword phrases.

Getting a winning keyword list containing all of the delimiters for phrase and exact matching in Google can be hard work, but the AdWords Wrapper free online tool does a lot of the work for you.

Step 3: Group Related Keywords

Now that you have a comprehensive list of keywords, it is crucial that you sort them under separate groups. Because you can only have ONE ad copy for ONE group of keywords, you want each of your keyword groups to have matching ad copy.

Why is This so Important?

1. When the copy of your ad matches the keyword phrase, users are far more likely to click on it.

Our tests have shown that this simple practice can significantly boost the click-through-rate of your ads by up to 100%.

2. Once they click on your PPC ads, the page where you send visitors to (called the landing page) must be tailored and relevant to the visitor.

Obviously, someone looking for a "canon digital camera" is looking for something different than someone looking for a "sony digital camera." Only when you group your keywords can you show specific ad copy which sends visitors to targeted landing pages.

3. You know how much or how little to bid for your keywords.

For example: Someone looking for "cameras" is probably less likely to buy than someone looking for a specific model such as "Cannon EX 650." The conversion rates will be very different for different groups of keywords. As Google allows you to vary the maximum amount you are willing to pay per click, when you group keywords well, you can know how much you should pay per click. (This is covered in further detail in another tactic on bidding strategies).

4. You can beat your competitors!

Studies have shown the majority of online advertisers fail to group their ads sufficiently.

As the image on the left demonstrates, even for the popular keyword phrase email marketing only 1 out of 4 online advertisers has a headline in their ad that matches the copy. Why? Because more likely than not, the other advertisers have far too many keywords in each group of keywords, which prevents them from having highly targeted ads.
keywords in title

The above points are worth repeating because they are so important!

So, put yourself in a far better position to succeed, and start grouping them with these tips in mind:

When should a keyword phrase have its own group?

When a lot of people search for it!

Take a look at the screenshot of Overture's Keyword Selector Tool on the left. Although the keyword phrases similar to internet marketing online are almost identical, you can split them into separate groups because so many people are looking for each specific keyword phrases. It is a good opportunity to show very specific ad copy MATCHING those phrases.
Overture

Google Tip

In Google, splitting singular and plural popular keywords into different groups can further boost the performance of your ads. For popular keywords, even splitting hyphens into different ad groups can pay off handsomely. While people searching for self help or self-help are looking for the same thing, you want to split these phrases into different ad groups so that in one group the copy of your ad says self help and in the other group the copy of your ad says self-help. This alone can boost the click-through-rate by 50%! Paying attention to detail and using lots of groups can go a long way!

Step 4: Scrub Your List

Have you included all the necessary relevant keywords, specified negative keywords and keyword matching criteria, and included keyword variations such as nouns, verbs, hyphens, plurals, and synonyms? Do a final sanity check:

Eliminate all irrelevant and ambiguous keywords that might generate results that don’t include what your customers are looking for.

And this is a continuous process:

You should monitor your performance and profitability of all your online marketing campaigns, at the keyword or at least at the group level. You will start to see which ad groups are profitable and which are not.
For the unprofitable groups, lower the maximum average bid and if the campaign continues to be unprofitable, scrub your list and throw this ad group out. Don’t get attached to keywords or ad groups. Even if the keywords are highly relevant for your products or site. If a campaign is not profitable, bid less or throw it out!
Over time, you will likely be able to delete non-converting keywords and cut your ad costs by up to 50%. This is why tracking and measuring your ROI and profitability is so important.

Summary

Always remember the 4 steps, and use the tools we recommended to save yourself time and effort.

Expand - come up with as many keywords and phrases as possible
Target - refine the keywords you chose (for Google)
Group - separate keywords into groups with matching ad copy
Scrub - eliminate the unnecessary keywords
You should now be equipped with the knowledge and the tools to rapidly build and grow your keyword list for your PPC campaigns, match the right ads, and watch your profits grow.

What you've just read is an extract from the PPC Section of Mind Valley Labs Ecommerce Course. These guys know their stuff - they're ex eBay and Microsoft. The entire section on PPC covers 5 chapters. Make Money with Google Adsense