joeydavidson.com

As I said earlier, in the upcoming weeks I will be posting a step-by-step guide to creating a Google AdWords campaign (or PPC campaign or SEM campaign or paid search campaign or whatever you want to call it). One of those steps will be focused on keywords – which keywords should you be bidding on, how do you find them, etc.

Well, I finally finished the first article devoted to that topic – The Top 5 PPC Keyword Research Tools. This will tell you how you find your keywords (aka “keyword research”) and which tools to use to find them.

Check it out!

I received this brochure in the mail the other day. It’s advertising a “Google Online Marketing Boot Camp.”

(At first glance, I thought it was actually GOOGLE themselves putting this out. I mean, you see the big bold logo with the trademark symbol). But then you look at the fine print – “not endorsed or sponsored by Google, Inc.” )

It’s a 3 day course that teaches the basics of
1) SEO (as much as you can learn in a day I suppose)
2) paid search (or AdWords, SEM, pay per click, PPC – whatever you want to call it)
3) Google Analytics

They even print the course outline in the brochure. Which, I gotta hand it to them, is pretty ballsy. They must be targeting a relatively unsophisticated audience because once you have the outline, you could just do a Google search on any of those topics and find the information. And it’s not like these are complex, highly advanced marketing tactics or proprietary “tricks” or strategies or something that they devised themselves. Judging from the outline, this is pretty basic stuff. You wouldn’t really have to break your back to compile all this yourself.

Anyway, the thing that got my attention was the cost. It’s $1,500 for the course. $1,500!

It showed to me just how VALUABLE this information is to some people. And it gave me an idea. I’m not an expert on SEO or Google Analytics, but… I AM an expert on paid search.

I can teach the basics of paid search. I’ve DONE it. It’s not rocket science.

So in the upcoming weeks, I’m going to develop an “AdWords How To” (or “how adwords works” or “adwords guide” or something like that). This will go over the basics of a paid search campaign (or AdWords since it’s basically synonymous with paid search at this point – sorry, Bing). How to set it up, how to write the ads, set the bids, etc. A step-by-step, simple, straightforward guide.

Here’s the proposed outline:
- Paid search: how it works, what’s it all about
- AdWords campaign structure
- How to setup a campaign step-by-step (how to target by device, location, etc)
- How to do find keywords
- How to setup “Ad groups” (aka how to categorize/segment keywords)
- How to write ad copy that works (<— already done!)
- How to set bids
- How to set budgets
- How to track and measure campaign performance
- Expanding your campaign (MSN Bing/Yahoo!, Google display network, Facebook, etc)

Look for it in the upcoming weeks!

Thinking about testing the Google Display Campaign Optimizer? WELL, THINK AGAIN.

Be sure to read this in-depth analysis before even CONSIDERING a test.

(Sorry, that’s just my sensationalistic ad copy voice. It’s actually a pretty impressive tool. I’ve got nothing bad to say about it.)

Check out my latest article…

A SUPER EASY STEP-BY-STEP FORMULA FOR WRITING TEXT ADS

This is for the AdWords novice who’s looking for a quick A-B-C approach to writing ad copy. It’s very easy. Very straightforward. Plain and simple. Hope you enjoy it!

Man, WordPress is not intuitive or maybe I’m just a complete idiot. On the post below I inserted a picture of my Twitter page. And in “Edit Image” I entered the link as

www.twitter.com/joeydavidsoncom

So I publish the post and when I click on the link, it goes to

www.joeydavidson.com/wp-admin/www.twitter.com/joeydavidsoncom

WHY? That makes absolutely no sense. If I plug in the link URL, then why wouldn’t it just simply link to that URL? That would seem the easiest, most logical thing to do, right? Am I missing an extra step somewhere? And if so, maybe WordPress should eliminate that extra step because IT DOESN’T HELP

So I’ve basically wasted the last 15 to 20 minutes trying to figure it out. And typing in “wordpress image link won’t work” into Google doesn’t help much.

Man, that’s frustrating.

My Adsense account was disapproved because of “insufficient content.” I think the problem was that I had joeydavidson.com default to the homepage, where there was no content. Now I have it default to the blog section. I’m going to post an article about ad copy and resubmit.

Also, I still have a cold.

I have a cold and yet I’m still taking time to blog. Aren’t I a trooper?

I have some stuff to do:

1. Put together a better banner. The one I have up there right now is UGLY. I’m going to use this thing I created on my iPhone app:

2. Put some content on the homepage – an overview of the site and what kind of content I will have (someday)

3. Figure out Socrates – I want to get rid of that border

4. Keyword research – I’ve gotta plow through all the search queries out there to see what people are actually searching for and then develop a structure for all of it.

Also, I did get a Twitter account. You can follow me at @joeydavidsoncom

Big props to Jeff Carey at Blue Traffic for helping me out with this thing. He showed me a step-by-step to putting this site together. Now I just need to make it look better and put some actual CONTENT up here. Thanks again Jeff!

Alright, so I installed WordPress and now I have to start creating content. So… here we go, I guess…?

The goal of this site is to create a one-stop shop for all things paid search (or sponsored search or pay per click or PPC or SEM or AdWords or whatever you want to call it). Basically, I’m going to provide to you, the reader, everything you need to know about running a paid search campaign – from creation to tracking to analysis to optimization. Instead of having to look at a bunch of books (which are probably going to be outdated anyway) and sites (which may or may not have any credibility), you can just come here. And it’s all FREE. That’s right – FREE.

I bought a theme called Socrates so that the site will actually look somewhat professional, but I still have to figure out how to use it. So that’s the next step.

So CUT ME SOME SLACK – I’m still figuring this thing out!

In the meantime, enjoy re-reading this post again and again. And take all your paid search/AdWords/PPC books and BURN THEM.