Many Work-at-Home types and particularly affiliate marketers, use Google’s Adwords to advertise their products and services and while many of them do well there are many more who do terribly.

Getting it wrong can chew up your cash very quickly for little or no reward while getting it right can mean putting a huge smile on your dial. Let’s take a look at some of the principles to getting it right.

Firstly, it’s really important to understand that Google is all about relevance. Relevance to the user searching for information that is. You see Google really does not give two hoots about advertisers as such, it is much more focused on searchers and delivering the best possible results to them.

Why would they think that way? - simple really, advertisers come and go, there will always be a market looking to advertise. On the other hand, by delivering the best possible search results (as in the most highly relevant results to the query), Google guarantees that the person doing the searching is impressed enough to keep using Google forever more! Ultimately, the more users Google has using it repeatedly, the more and more money it will continue to make in the long term.

So what do we mean by relevance? Well if the Google user types in a search such as “telescopes for beginners” they ideally should receive natural results and adwords ads, all of them on the topic of “telescopes for beginners” and closely related concepts. Better still all those listings will have exactly the term “telescopes for beginners” in their titles or descriptions and will lead to pages filled with content all about “telescopes for beginners”. Ok, apologies for the repetition here but it is important to grasp the relevancy thing.

That brings us to the concept of Click Through Rate (CTR for short). CTR is the percentage of users who actually click on your ad when it is shown on the page they are looking over. It stands to reason that the more relevant your ad to that user the more likely he will be to click on your ad, this will mean you have a relatively high CTR. Having a high CTR indicates to Google that your offering is relevant so they list your ad higher and cheaper than lesser performing ads.

So how do we home business owners harness this state of affairs? Clearly, we need to restrict our use of adwords to highly relevant keywords tightly grouped to matching ads which link to matching landing pages. That’s not as hard as it sounds, in fact Google even provides a tool to help with grouping of related keywords. The time invested in setting your adgroups up correctly will be rewarded with lower advertising costs too.

We also need to write ads that are compelling enough to make surfers click your ad and therefore generate a high CTR. This is where a little clever copy writing comes in handy. In short we want to attract attention and compel the reader to click. There are a few ways we might consider for doing that.

The headline is the most obvious place to start as it is the most attention grabbing part of the ad. It also happens to appear in blue which is of course a standard link colour. If the headline contains the keyword just searched for, then it will also be bolded making the ad more likely to catch attention. Using quotemarks, question marks and exclamations can also help to make your ad stand out a little more.

There is a method of having your keywords appear dynamically in ads, known funnily enough, as dynamic keyword insertion (or DKI for short). You can tell Google to insert the searched for keyword into your headline or description lines. This is achieved by using the syntax {Keyword:default keyword}, the default keyword is needed in case the searched term exceeds the maximum number of characters that can fit into the ad, in which case the default is substituted.

So now that we have got at least momentary attention, what can we now do to hook the reader and compel him to click our ad to read the sales copy waiting for him? One shortcut is to examine the sales copy of the product you’re selling and see what hooks you can echo in the adwords ad. Often you’ll find a compelling headline or bullet point that just makes you want to buy the product or at least read on some more. Why not take that headline and try adapting it to fit in your adwords ad!

You can also try using power words in your copy. Words like Ultimate, New, Amazing, are all known attention grabbers while Instant, Enjoy, Try, Now and others are great call to action power words that help to make that click happen.
Now you have the basics on how to make adwords work, we’ll take a look at the specifics in the following posts.

Check out this Google Adwords Tutorial: