Getting Started with Adwords on a Small Budget

There are a lot of articles out there about proper ways to run a paid search campaign targeted to the elite with tips like “use the 80/20 rule” and how to handle “high volume keywords” but the reality is there are tons of us out here who are not ready to throw thousands of dollars into search engine marketing (SEM). Following is a good strategy for the little guy spending as little as $10/week.

If you are considering testing the paid search waters my advice is to just get in there and fumble around. Keep your max bids low and sample as many keywords as you can think of. The keywords that have too much competition will simply show a higher minimum bid than what you are offering and they will not show, there’s no penalty for trying. With a small campaign you will not be able to afford anything short, popular and common. The trick is to get several small drizzles of outliers for a nickel per click.

Here are 10 quick steps you should follow for getting started with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and/or Microsoft Adcenter on a small budget:

1. Create a campaign and set the max daily budget to something you can afford (i.e. $5-10)
2. Create an Ad Group for each of the different categories or areas of your website
3. Toss in one quick ad and several keywords targeted to each category to get through the initial setup
4. Make sure the landing page your ad links to is relevant to the ad copy and keywords
5. Set your maximum bid to something small like .10-.20 for all keywords
6. For each ad group go real wide with your keywords (see Building Your Keyword Arsenal for ideas)
7. Create plurals for each keyword that can be pluralized (i.e. monitor and monitors)
8. Take each phrase and make three versions of it for broad, phrase and exact match types:  Broad = Website Monitoring, Phrase = “Website Monitoring”, Exact = [Website Monitoring] * keywords are not case sensitive
9. For each ad group create several different ads, try some that are real short, use numbers and values wherever possible and allow the search engine to manage which performs best and displays most often
10. Last but not least, participate in the content networks. Even if you don’t get any clicks having thousands and thousands of ads bearing your name and tagline appear on related sites throughout the net is a good thing

Tags: Adwords, Promoting a Website, Search Marketing