Google Adwords is on the menu again today and rightly so as it is important to know what you are doing to avoid the frustration of spending money with no returns.

Another tip on Adwords is to run two separate ad groups one for the search network and one for the content network, the reason being is that your CTR for the content network will be extremely low which in turn will ruin your search network CTR.

Manage Your Google Adwords PPC Campaign

Today GuruBob goes over how to find keywords for your Adwords campaigns using Market Samurai. There is another video going over a little more detail about running your campaigns. Again as I mentioned yesterday these really aren’t the best video tutorials on Adwords around but they give you a rough idea of how it works.

Visit www.perrymarshall.com for a more in depth and accurate course on Google Adwords.

Finding Keywords For Your Adwords Campaign

Add Keywords To Your Adwords Campaign

Points to not from this video are that when split testing you do not need to switch an ad on or off to ensure the best ad is displayed as mentioned in the video as Google automatically displays the ad which has the highest CTR. You simply need to add as many ads as possible and Google will do the rest.

Also mentioned in the video is to simply add the broad, phrase and exact match of your keyword however that is not necessarily going to give the best results. If you have your keyword entered as broad match then Google will display it for keywords which it believes are related to your keyword which may not convert well therefore it’s best to start off with exact match first and then try phrase and broad match if you have success.

Day 20 of the 30 Day Challenge is an introduction to setting up a Google Adwords Account. Probably not the best introduction to Adwords on the internet however it is pretty difficult to go into much detail in a 15 minute video as Adwords is quite a complex system.

I would recommend spending additional time learning about the nuts and bolts of Adwords rather than just jumping right in because it is important to do it the right way otherwise you will find yourself spending money on keywords which aren’t going to convert and also paying too much per click.

The best advice I can provide in regards to Adwords is to start off with a small budget and keep your keywords highly targeted. The more targeted the keywords are to your niche the more likely you are to generate a sale. If you are successful with your highly targeted keywords then you can start to experiment with broader keywords.

One of the leading experts in running successful Google Adwords Campaigns is Perry Marshall. He has a free 5 day course on his site www.perrymarshall.com

Getting Started With Google Adwords

If you have decided to continue with your niche you will want to really start putting in the hard yards and driving as much traffic to your site as possible. There are many ways to do this as Ed mentions in the video and the next method which the 30 day challenge is going to be focusing on is Google Adwords.

Google Adwords has made many, many self made millionaires because of how powerful it is if used the right way. It is also an easy way to become broke if done the wrong way. The key to Adwords is to start off slowly and closely monitor your results rather than going full throttle right from the word go.

How To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

Today is all about deciding whether or not you want to continue with your niche or not. It’s a pretty simple decision, if you have achieved good rankings, i.e. in the top 5 and you are not getting traffic then it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Ed makes a very good point and that is not to be discouraged by a niche that hasn’t worked out just think of it as a step closer to the one that will. The more you go through the process the better you will get at locating profitable niches.

If you are getting traffic and not making any sales then again it is time to go back to the drawing board. I would look at reasons why I am not making any sales and try a few things first before giving up on that particular niche. At least one sale for every two to three hundred visitors is something you should aim for.

Do You Need To Change Your Affiliate Promotion

Not much a happened on day 17, just a quick video showing how to check your rankings. The method shown is actually just to type in the keyword you are targeting and go through the SERP’s (search engine result pages).

There are actually much easier ways to do this, there are several free tools on the net which can find out this for you. One is www.seomoz.org/rank-checker

For serious internet marketers you will eventually have dozens if not hundreds of keywords that you want to keep track on and using the above method of checking one at a time is just simply not an option as it would take too long.

A tool I use to monitor my rankings for all of my keywords for my many sites is called SEO Elite.

Check Your Blog Ranking In The SERPS

Continuing the process of submitting content, today the site is www.ezinearticles.com. Ezine Articles is an article directory which is well known as being the best directory on the net. Articles on Ezine Articles rank extremely well in Google and because of this back links to your site are highly valuable for your own sites rankings.

Article marketing is one of the most widely used techniques to drive direct traffic and build links. There are literally thousands of article directories on the internet so there is a lot of potential to obtain a heap of back links. You can submit your articles manually or you can use article submission services hwich automatically submit your articles for you.

The top 3 article distribution services are
1. Unique Article Wizard
2. Article Marketer
3. iSnare

If you are anything like me you are probably starting to find all of this content creation time consuming and tedious. Luckily there are many affordable “ghost writers” who will write articles for you on virtually any topic. You can find writers on www.guru.com and www.elance.com

Another tool which creates articles for you is called Instant Article Wizard which you can find out more about here www.instantarticlewizardpro.com

Upload An Article to Ezinearticles

Update On Wordpressdirect

If you are wondering what happened to day 14 it seems to have been pulled from the thirty day challenge. I believe day 14 was about setting up a Tumblr blog but unfortunately we seem to have had a deja vu from last year where Tumblr deleted everyone’s blogs. Because sites like Tumblr and the many other hosted blogging and site building systems are subject to spam they can have very strict guidelines. In the case of Tumblr they do not want people to be using their service as a marketing tool therefore it’s best to ignore their service and move on, there are so many alternatives that it isn’t a big deal.

Day 15 is about setting up a Weebly site. You will start to see over the next few days that it’s all about putting up as much content as possible all over the internet pointing to your own site. By putting content on well established “authority” sites and linking to your own site you are building a lot of trust with the search engines therefore improving your rankings.

Setting Up A Weebly Site

Day 13 is another relatively short day but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing anything. Every chance you get you should be researching your market and creating unique content on your blogs, Squidoo lenses, HubPages or wherever and then bookmarking your content.

Ed just does a quick overview of Google Analytics and how you can monitor your traffic. Google Analytics can tell you a wealth of information and is an extremely powerful tool. The best way to learn how to use it is just to spend time pushing all the buttons and seeing what they all do. Some of the important things you will want to look at is the search traffic data and what keywords people are typing in to the search engines to find your site.

Think about this, if you are getting traffic for a particular keyword and you are ranking say 26 imagine what would happen if you managed to rank in the top 10 considering only 2% of people click on the second page of results.

A good idea is to check the sites ranking above you for those keywords using the SEO tool for Firefox and determine if you think you can outrank them. Look for sites no older than 3 years with few back links as they will be easy to out rank.

If you aren’t receiving traffic and your site is indexed then you may need to re-evaluate your keyword and target something with less competition. The worst thing you can do is keep promoting a keyword which isn’t performing. Don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board and start your market research again.

If your site isn’t indexed then you need to get more back links, it’s as simple as that. Building a Squidoo lens and social bookmarking it should get your site indexed in 24 - 48 hours max.

Using Google Analytics To Check Your Blog Stats

Today is basically the same as yesterday however this time you will be creating HubPages www.hubpages.com rather than Squidoo lenses. They both work in a similar fashion however you have to keep links to a minimum on HubPages as they have more stricter policies to stop spamming. Do not use the same content as you used on your Squidoo lens, make sure you rewrite it so that they are unique. This will ensure that both your Squidoo lenses and HubPages will rank well in the search engines.

Don’t forget to social bookmark all your content!

How To Create A Hubpages Site

Squidoo www.squidoo.com is a great place to create content and build links to your own sites, you should also get a fair amount of direct traffic. You should really try and create as many lenses and/or groups as you can making sure they are of good quality. You can also add your blogs RSS feed to your lens which is a great way to make sure your new posts get indexed nice and quickly.

They key is to make sure you optimize your lens your your chosen keywords in the lens title, lens URL and scattered throughout the lens. The more info you can add to your lens(es) the more traffic pulling potential it has and the more likely other Squidoo lensmasters are to link to it.

Also make sure you use the maximum number of tags which I believe is about 40, as each tag you use creates a back link to your lens from the Squidoo tags pages.

GuruBob also shows today how to find content on your niche using Market Samurai. The find content option of Market Samurai has a pretty cool feature which creates an RSS feed of content pulled from a large variety of sources which you can add to your Squidoo Lens.

Today’s Videos

How To Create A Squidoo Lens

Find More Content Using Market Samurai

Today is a day off…sort of. The only thing required today is to submit your blogs RSS feed using the TDC RSS Submission service www.thirtydaychallenge.com/members/tools/rsssubmit.php

The tool is simple to use you simply enter the URL of your blog, your feed URL and your main keyword. You can also add secondary keywords in the tags field and a short description which should also include your keywords.

Another tool I use for RSS Submission is called RSS Submit, you can find out more about it here www.dummysoftware.com/rsssubmit.html

Submit Your RSS Feed To RSS Directories

Back links are the key to getting top search engine rankings and today Ed goes over additional methods to obtaining back links. By participating in groups and forums and commenting on blogs and social media sites related to your niche market you can not only build links to your site but you can also build trust with potential clients or joint venture partners.

The first place to go is Google Groups www.google.com/groups where you can locate groups specific to your niche market.

To find forums related to your niche simply type your main keyword into Google with forum appended. For example if your niche is ‘golf’ you would type ‘golf forum’ in to Google.

The key here is to add value to whatever discussion you are participating in, if you spam these sites you will have your accounts banned and will be wasting your time.

A tool which I recently posted about called Comment Kahuna http://www.wealthontap.com/blog/seo/comment-kahuna-update-released/ finds blogs and Squidoo lenses related to the keyword you enter which can comment on.

The other thing taught today is how to find out if your site is indexed which is simply a matter of typing ’site:yourdomain.com’ into Google.

If your site is indexed it will come up in the results, if not you will get a message saying “Your search - site:yourdomain.com - did not match any documents.”

It can take some time for your site to be indexed however by building your back links the time will be reduced.

Today’s Videos

How To Get More Backlinks

How To Find Out If Your Site Is Indexed

As predicted today is where we move into the promotional stage and not surprisingly the first method used is social bookmarking. Social bookmarking has become extremely popular in the last few years as a way for people to “vote” for useful or valuable content rather than relying on search engines to work it out via their algorithms. Every time a visitor to your site submits a page to a social bookmarking site it is the equivalent to them stating that the content is of interest and in most cases valuable. The more people who vote for the piece of content the higher the perceived value.

Some believe that social media is going to become more popular than traditional search engines because of the fact it is voted for by humans therefore more reliable. Although search engines, Google in particular, are constantly making huge improvements to their search results they are a long way off being able to observe what a human can. Perhaps Google will start to factor in human submitted content to tools like Google Reader in it’s search results, if it is not already.

The advantage search engines have over social bookmarking sites is that they can process far more information whereas social bookmarking sites are limited by the amount of people submitting content. The majority of people who use social bookmarking sites are generally tech savvy people who all fit a similar demographic therefore you may find a lot of great content on the iPhone but very little on fishing tips. However as more and more people use social bookmarking this will become less of a factor.

Anyhow the search engines are definitely paying a close eye to social bookmarking sites and put a lot of trust in content which is listed there due to the reasons I just mentioned. This is why it is so effective at getting new content indexed. You will notice that social bookmarking sites rank extremely well and your bookmarked content will often outrank your own site especially if it is a new domain.

Social bookmarking is only one method you will be using to promote your site so don’t be concerned if you are not ranking on the first page of Google right away, the first objective is to get your site indexed then you can focus on increasing your rankings.

Something which is extremely important to know and was not mentioned by Ed in today’s training is that if you only bookmark pages on your own site then your account’s will be banned. Social bookmarking sites are highly susceptible to spammers so have very strict guidelines in place, in order to avoid having your account removed you need to use it as it was designed not as a self promotional tool.

A method I use is to bookmark new content which turns up from Google Alerts and throw in a few bookmarks to my own sites here and there but the key is to keep it to a minimum.

Today’s Videos

Bookmarking Your Blog With Socialmarker

Just the one video today which explains how to use Social Marker www.socialmarker.com which semi automates your bookmarking.

Summary of Day 8

Nothing surprising about today’s training, social bookmarking continues to be an effective tool for getting indexed just make sure you use it the right way!

See you on day 9!

Day 7 is all about setting up tracking so that you can monitor what promotional strategies are producing results and what aren’t. We can also find out what keywords people are searching for in the search engines to find your site which is very useful information. Yet again Google come to the rescue and provide another free tool which is as good as most paid tools called Google Analytics

You will also learn a method for tracking affiliate links using another service provided by The 30 Day Challenge team. You can access it by going into your 30 Day Challenge dashboard and scrolling down you will see a link on the left hand sidebar titled ‘TDC Stats Tracker’ or clicking here www.thirtydaychallenge.com/tracking/viewtrackers.php

All you need to do is click the new URL button and paste in whatever affiliate link you wish to track. You will then be provided with a URL which looks like this http://locatereviews.com/2052517237 which will redirect to your affiliate link location. You will then be able to track how many times the link has been clicked on.

I use Google Analytics to track my affiliate links which provides more data and also allows you to use URL’s which match your site such as yoursite.com/more-info/affilliate-product.php rather than locatereviews.com/2052517237

To do this you need to create a text document on your computer and use the following code

Replace the link http://www.domain.com/affiliate-link with your affiliate link and replace UA-000000-0 with your Google Analytics ID.

Save the document as affiliate-product-name.php

You then need to create a directory(folder) on your site called ‘go’, ‘more-info’, ‘review’ or basically whatever you like and upload the file into that directory. You should now be able to load the file in your browser and it will redirect to your affiliate link.

Today’s Videos

How to Setup Google Analytics

A video showing how to set up a Google Analytics account and configuring it on your Wordpress blog.

How to Track Affiliate Links

How to use the The 30 Day Tracking link tracking system.

Add Tracked Links On Your Blog

How to add your links generated by The 30 Day Challenge link tracking system to your Wordpress blog.

Summary of Day 7

Tracking is an essential part of any online business and provides you with extremely valuable information to help your business succeed.

Google Analytics is a great tool which I use on a daily basis to keep track of how my sites are performing and as it’s free it’s perfect for people starting out on the internet.

For those getting itchy feet we should now be moving on to the promotional stage where you will start to learn how to generate traffic to your Wordpress blog and hopefully make some sales.

See you on day 8!