How To Use Pay-Per-Click to Promote Your Blog

I personally use Google Adwords, more than MSN AdCenter or Yahoo! Search Marketing. I like the interface the most, and I find that it’s just easier and faster to setup ads and see them running in search engines results.

What To Target

I have a bunch of campaigns setup in AdWords for this site, a couple of them are just general ad groups that target keywords like “web development blog” , “freelance web developer blog” and other terms like that. They are great because they can drive a lot of traffic to the site, but if I want to really increase my subscribers, I get a much higher return when I focus on the articles I write. For example, I recently wrote my thoughts on the Microsoft Yahoo offer, so I setup an ad group that focuses on that article. I also did the same for reducing spam, finding office space, and exporting blob objects from MySQL. These articles have literally no competition on adwords so I’m getting clicks for really cheap. In fact, I’ve been getting over 1000 clicks per month to my blog, at an average of about $0.03 per click for a total cost of about $30/month. That’s a lot better than I’d get out of advertising on some web sites. I ran a banner ad on a separate blog for a couple months and paid $60/month and I only got a couple hundred clicks in that entire time. The same thing happened with sponsored reviews. I wanted to give ReviewMe a try so I bought 10 reviews at $10 each. That was $100 investment and it sent maybe 200 clicks, I also want to add that with the $10 reviews you really get what you pay for which isn’t much - in fact, I am going to try it again and buy a single $100 review from a larger site and see what difference it makes.

Content Network

Something else that you don’t hear to often is good things about the content network. Almost every other blog I’ve read on the topic has said to stay away from the content network and to disable it as soon as you setup any campaigns. Although I totally agree when I run campaigns for clients, when you’re just trying to send traffic to your site for cheap, the content network is where it’s at. You get a really horrible click-through rate, but don’t worry about it. In my cases, I’m getting about a 0.01% CTR, but with over 8,000,000 impressions a month, I’m getting tons of clicks out of it.

Find More Keywords to Bid On

Look through your web log files and see what keywords are driving traffic to your site? Make a list of these words and see where you rank for these terms, if you’re not ranking on the first page, then setup some PPC ads for those exact terms and then you’ll be on the front page. Because you’re getting traffic from those terms and you’re ranking on the 3rd or 4th pages, users are obviously not finding what they’re looking for, so setting up some PPC ads will make a lot of sense. Also, if you are in the first 5 pages, you should have some relatively decent content for those terms, so your quality score should be pretty good, and you shouldn’t be paying to much for clicks.

As your campaigns run, watch your log files and mine them for even more keywords you can target in your campaigns, additionally, you can find more keywords that you can target with more articles and blog posts in the future.

I’ve been setting up ad groups for all the bigger posts I make to this blog, and for the minimal money I’m spending, I’m getting a lot of traffic. If you want to spend even more than the $30-50 per month, you should be able to drive a couple thousand clicks per month to your site, which is a great way to start driving traffic to your blog and get noticed by some other larger blogs that can send even more traffic.