by Kirt Christensen

There’s nothing more frustrating than building a web site and waiting for people to just “show up.” It’s worse than watching paint dry. That’s why PPC management is one of the most important parts of the online world.

Ten minutes from right now you can have a Google campaign up and running, sending visitors to your web site. The speed at which you can do new things and make changes in Google’s system is stunning.

Speed could also be a problem. “Haste makes waste” is an applicable statement here.

It’s really easy to blow money on PPC management-you can pick a keyword, write an ad, and get a bunch of visitors who cost you money but have no chance of ever wanting to buy something from you. The following question will help make sure you don’t buy the wrong kind of traffic for your web site. Ask this:

How Many People are Looking for this Product?

Your answer will keep your expectations realistic and prevent you from running into disappointment later if you discover that Google can’t bring you as many new customers as you had hoped. Even if that happens, odds are you’ll discover other untapped traffic sources that are less competitive but every bit as profitable.

Using Overtures search term suggestion tool http://inventory.overture.com (or http://inven tory.uk.overture.com for the UK), you can estimate what your traffic could be in just a few moments. All you need to do is put in some of your main keywords and then you will see just how many searches were done last month on their servers.

What if you had a company that was marketing anti-aging skin care products. You are just getting started and would like to get more traffic by using Google. How do you get started?

To start with, get a starting list of potential keywords. Here is what we brainstormed:

skin

beauty

acne

cosmetics

makeup

cosmetic surgery

dermatology

anti-aging

wrinkles

oils

moisturizers

This list is only the beginning. If I take it over to the keyword-selection-tool on Overture and put them in, I can see how many searchers they had in the past month. These are the results:

skin 7,290

beauty 5,006

acne 1,872

cosmetics 1,862

makeup 1,796

cosmetic surgery 1,736

dermatology 622

anti-aging 503

wrinkles 485

oils 390

moisturizers 120

Notice what’s going on here:

See that ‘skin’ got more than 60 times the searches that the last term, ‘moisturizers’ got. ‘Skin’ will be an MVP for you.

Along with the useful terms you get when you use Overture, you will undoubtedly get some terms that will lack relevance. You will want to use those terms as negative keywords.

There are a huge number of people who may want skin-care products but who’ll use different word combinations than are on the lists we’ve come up with. So for a successful PPC management, we’ll need to brainstorm for more, and then search Overture’s tool again.

The results from Overture indicate that we could get ten or even an hundred thousand US searches in one month using the top keywords we found.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing