AdSense vs AdWords Free Marketing Tips

After working with clients for the past few years, I have noticed there is still confusion about Google AdSense versus Google AdWords. Surprisingly, quite a few people think they are one in the same, or they are not sure what they are at all. Some who believe they know which is which, are not optimizing either program to its fullest financial benefit.

I will clarify the difference between the two for everyone who is still not completely certain what and how (or if) you should AdWords and AdSense.  And please take note, just because I offer services to set up AdWords accounts does not mean I think everyone should use it. In order to make that determination, I speak to business owners first to see if their product or service meets certain criteria, including their budget for daily advertising and their overall expectations.

AdSense How To

Can you make money with Google AdSense?  AdSense is for people who OWN a website or BLOG and PUT those ads you see (some in boxes, sometimes without the borders of the boxes though) on their OWN web site to make money. The ads you see all over the Internet on web sites, are people who put those ads on their web sites in hopes to make a lot of money from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others when people click on them.

Some BLOG services do not allow you to post AdSense.  Some will let you put one set of articles on your web site.  Google allows three (3) per page.  For example, you will see some sites with a tall skyscraper ad, then a horizontal ad, or just some text ads, placed in different areas on the page.  You are allowed to have three (3) of these per page.  That doesn't mean you should put three on each page if it will hinder from your content or look and feel of your page for the user.

It is also very important to customize each ad to make sure it blends in with your page.  It should look natural.  Statistics have shown the blue link, black text, and light grey URL (http://www.google.com/) link convert the best.  The horizontal ad toward the top, center of the page, looking like it is part of your page also converts to people viewing it and clicking on it most.

If you are looking for Google AdSense templates, be careful.  Nothing is really free.  And there is usually a catch.  Many hosting companies offer cheap web sites with easy templates where you can place your coding from Google. Critical point - you must spend time placing new, fresh, unique articles on your web site or BLOG at a minimum of two times per week.  Do not use articles more than once.

Another very important item I need to mention is that Google is very, very strict about anyone (including you) clicking on ads repeatedly to give you more revenue.  They have an extremely effective technical structure in place which tracks clicks coming from all places.  They know your IP Address, and other people's IP Addresses.  They know what type of browser you use, which version, which size monitor, who your Internet Service Provider is, and what keywords you typed to do your last search. 

It's pretty scary, I agree.  But that data is used for marketing research to help businesses who use Google AdWords, and it also helps stop fraudulent clickers.  Whenver you subscribed to a magazine, they added you to their affiliate mailing list, too!  And they had your home address.  That is more scary.  Unfortunately, it is a necessary evil to ward against the wrong-doers online.  And they are out there.

AdSense is NOT quick money! I've done it, and I still do it. It is pocket change unless you can get about 100 sites up and get traffic to them. I've bought all the products from the gurus, and talked to many personally. Depending on  your web site or BLOG's market, those related products and services will show  on your page.  On average, you can expect to receive .02 - .10 per click you receive.  Google takes a nice share of the profits, you get the change.  But hey, something is better than nothing, right?  That is why you need to have many sites in order to make a real profit.  So do not quit your day job.

Every single one of the extremely successful AdSense profit makers has 100's and even 1000's of sites with AdSense.  How is this affordable?  You buy your own servers and host them in different locations around the world so you get Class C IP Addresses.  Yes, there is much more to everything than meets the eye when it comes to what you actually buy, but you don't get the whole secret of how it works and what to do.  It's sad, and I bought it all, thinking it was the next big thing.  It is not.

You probably heard about this eBook floating around the Internet this past year. You might have even signed up for it because you were shocked to hear that AdSense was now dead!  I knew what they were doing, but I signed up just to look at their very intelligent marketing technique.

The Death of AdSense was a marketing ploy to build opt-ins for an affiliate marketer who built 30,000 leads in less than 30 days. After you provided your e-mail address, and whenever there is a great commission affiliate product for him to market, he sends an e-mail to all those who opted in for that "free" marketing manual about the supposed death of AdSense.  If you buy the product he is promoting, he gets a big fat commission check from the person for which he is promoting.

How much can you make from one e-mail to your list if you send only one a month? If 5% of the list buys the product he is promoting, and he receives $50 commission for each one, he makes a nice fat paycheck of $75,000.00!  That's 1,500 people who bought (figuring 5% of the list) at $50 each.  Wow.
I have strayed off the topic of AdSense again, didn't I?  I get so excited to let the cat out of the bag on the real scoop, that I get carried away. But you might have learned a few valuable marketing tips in the process.

AdWords Strategy 

Google AdWords are the ads you see at the very top (light blue portion) of the search engines on Google and their partners search engines; i.e., Ask.com, iWon.com.  This also includes the right-hand side text ads you see when you type in a search query like, "used cars san diego." Whenever you see Sponsored Links and you click on those ads, companies are paying for it.  You might be more familiar with the term "pay per click."  Sometimes the cost is outrageous.  Sometimes the cost is moderate.  Sometimes the cost is cheap.  Your cost depends upon many factors.

There are also banner ads, image ads, and video ads, but we are going to focus our discussion on the text ads which is most widely used.

Google AdWords accounts are set up for web site owners who want a lot more traffic because 1) their own site is not search engine optimized well for free (organic) traffic, or 2) they are smart and want to use a different avenue of media (form of advertising) on the Internet to capture even more business.  Every web site cannot attain organic (free) traffic rankings for every single keyword.  So using AdWords for the other targeted words people use  to search for will grab the rest of the market.

Be forewarned, there are so many new companies popping up on the Internet each day who say they "specialize" in setting you up with a "highly optimized"  account, and all you get is a list of many keywords that give you a lot of clicks at high prices, but no conversions (sales)!

What's worse is 99.9% of these companies charge you exorbitant monthly fees to maintain your account, anywhere from $300 to $7,500 and higher, depending on how much you spend on your own daily advertising. I say 99.9% of these companies, because I refuse to charge these outrageous high fees for continued services.  I think it is literally ripping people off, because I am fully aware of what is needed for continued optimization efforts.

Most companies also make you sign a 3-month or 6-month contract prior to receiving these services.
The largest part of setting up a fully optimized, high-yielding, converting keyword list is implementing extensive, tedious research after spending an hour or two with you on the phone to discuss and pinpoint your market. This process also includes time spent linking correct pages to relevant keywords, and writing highly relevant content ads for each group of keywords.

I will literally spend 20 hours just to implement the best keyword research for my clients. Then another 10 or more setting everything up correctly and letting my client know how they need to optimize their landing pages and which keywords to use. This, in and of itself, is worth thousands. You don't need a big company to get great results. It's education and experience that get you results, along with satisfied clients. You are welcome to view my experience with pay per click and look at just a few of my personal web sites by clicking on the clickable keywords in this sentence.

Continued campaign optimizing IS critical in the first few days and month when your ads start running, because it is during this time that you continously review which clicks are converting into actual sales.  If you are not making any sales, it is either time to remove them, continue optimizing your landing pages, or reduce your cost per click if it is a keyword that you know will soon convert into a sale (based on your customer - which you obviously know best).

Reducing your cost per click for certain keywords might not activate a word to show your ads, but it's better not to use a keyword and related ad if you aren't going to make any, or only very few sales.

There are various web tools (programs) companies use to get your keywords, and that could be a good thing, or bad.  For example, I find thousands of keywords for a client, but I would NEVER add all of them to their AdWords account. I treat every customer's account as if it were my own. I do not want to pay for keywords that get me clicks but do not make sales.  Do you?

I manually look at each keyword, one at a time, and use the psychology of the consumer who would be typing in that keyword. If you are selling "Hartz dog shampoo" would you add the keyword "dogs" into your account?  Absolutely not! 

Do you want to pay for a generic, broad term where people are looking for basic information about dogs, or do you want to target people who are only looking for "dog shampoo"? 

Do you know which keywords to use?  Please do not use Overture to build your campaign, which is now called Yahoo Search Marketing.  Almost all people do not know these results are overinflated.  Meaning, the search result numbers include actual robots which crawl your site.  It's a machine, not a person.  You cannot seriously base your AdWords account keywords based on using this free tool.  Use it only as a guideline only.

I use an amazing tool which gets me so much information, when I use it for myself and my clients, we are all leagues ahead of the competition in terms of long tail keywords, getting competition links, seeing how many web sites are competing for a particular keyword, seeing if the ratio makes it viable to even try and obtain free (organic) traffic, or set it up with AdWords, search results for the last 100 days, and most importantly (my favorite part of this tool), getting search results for the last YEAR!  If you want to check it out, just go to NicheBot.

Since we started with dog shampoo, I'll share with you the top results for this long tail keyword.

If you wanted to sell dog shampoo, you would have found the following:

"dog shampoo for dry skin"

7 Searches on the Internet in the past 100 days - This is the number of times "dog shampoo for dry skin" was typed into the search engines and appears in the database of WordTracker.

12 Searches on the Internet is the predicted Wordtracker daily count
1,510 Competitors have specifically optimized their web pages for this keyword in their title tags, meta name description, keywords, etc.

0.03 is your KEI (keyword effectiveness index).  The higher this result is, the better your chances of using it to capture the market with your product or service.  This particular result is extremely low.

215.71 is the Ratio calculated on the data above.  This shows you the numeric value of competing websites based on the number of searches.

Now that you have this data, would you begin building a web site to sell "Hartz dog shampoo"?
Based on the more generic long-term, but highly relevant keyword term "dog shampoo" and the top result showing "dog shampoo for dry skin," has dismal searches, you would not waste your time getting into this market. 

Every term under this has even fewer search results.  The highest results are always listed at the top.
Additionally, you receive a graph showing you which month people actually searched for this term.  How valuable is that to your budget allocation? Tremendously!  Most business owners throw the same amount of money to their daily and monthly budgets. But when consumers are looking for their product certain months out of the year and not the other months, you are wasting money every month they are not really looking.

My clients are shocked when I show them the search results on their main keyword terms for the past year.

Can you make money with Google AdWords?

AdWords can make you money, but don not go it alone. Either sit and make time to review EVERY single Google video on the subject matter (which is free), or hire an expert who wants you to succeed without depleting your savings account.  Keep in mind, the videos do not share with the you the in's and out's of how to optimize your web site so you can pay less per click. It can be lucrative, but there are many factors involved. I don't suggest you do it to promote a $20 eBook, you'll lose your shirt.

Using this form of advertising CAN be extremely profitable if you have a good product and landing page (the page people see when they click on your link). If you have a lousy page, it doesn't matter how much traffic you have. People won't buy your product or service.  Just ask yourself how many times you have clicked on an ad and immediately clicked BACK to find a more professional looking web site that targeted the actual search words you typed?  If your web site is not appealing to the user or irrelevant to their search, you lost money and will continue to do so.

Finally, there is no such thing as an adwords miracle.  Do your research and find someone to set up your account that is not just looking to make a quick buck off you.  You can get ahead of the competition by optimizing your site and might even think you are beating adwords when you pay so little for each click.  Talk to an SEO professional about optimizing your site.  There are so many on-page factors, you would be very surprised to see over 95% of the websites are not optimized for search engines.

Many companies are used to spending money through direct mail postcards, Val Pak coupons, newspaper ads, classifieds, et cetera.  If you are one of them, set aside part of this advertising budget for online advertising.  Do some research on your own market and type in keywords that relate to your product.  Look at your competitor's web site.  Look at the AdWords at the very top and right-hand side.  It is not impossible to get to the # 1 spot, but you will pay a higher price to do so.

Where do you go to set up AdSense?  Where do you go to set up AdWords?  Even though Yahoo and other search engines offer their version of this type of advertising, I am only discussing Google here.  The ever-increasing market share of people using the Google search engine is over 60% and rising each day.
Just go to http://www.google.com/ and click on Advertising Programs.  Depending upon which one you wish to sign up for, click on either Google AdWords or Google AdSense. 

I recommend you set up a free gmail.com (Google E-mail) account first, then sign up.  Try and get your business-related name in your e-mail address if it is available.  Never, ever use a cutsie name for a professional business.  Unless you are selling cutsie products which relate to your web site. 

After you set up your account, watch the free videos.  Enter your web site URL(http://www.AdWordsandSEOServices.com/) and grab the small script of code they give you.  AdSense has several options for ads, so pick the code related to the type of horizontal, vertical, or other types of ads you want to put on your web site.

One final word of recommendation. If you have a website, or a BLOG, always, always, always put Google Analytics on every single page of your website. It is FREE.  Tracking is crucial to your business, but that will have to be another article.