When you start out in researching keywords you should have taken some time to get in a mindset of a college or future college student. Did you go to some Yahoo Groups or Yahoo Answers and check out anything people were asking about college scholarships? If so then your on the right track, if you skipped that step because you think your a badass then more power to you. You will soon realize why I think it’s important to take a little time and look at the landing page and see what others are saying about the topic.

First off you dont go firing up your keyword tool. This is a mistake. It’s been said over and over and you’ve probably seen me say it more times than you care to see that roughly 40% of the online searches are unique. If your using a keyword tool starting out then chances are your going to skip what I am going to talk about next. It’s imperative to develop a process so you dont miss out on keywords and ultimately traffic. Is this the right way to do it? Who knows but I can tell you personally after two years of testing, losing money, tweaking, profiting, scaling, test more that this system works pretty damn well for me. Granted you look at keywords and research the way I do we can all communicate effectively a lot better when things dont go our way.

First off Google Content Network

I like to strategize for the Google Content Network FIRST. Before we get into that let me tell you why. I’ve been asked many times why and how I am able to test offers by direct linking and now you know. While I do start off on the content network, I am only starting there as a RESEARCH point. I realize even with targeted adgroups and ads I can still get some shitty traffic. That’s ok though because Ruckles has a few filtering methods he likes to use to weed a bunch of that junk out from the start.

Now it’s come to the world’s attention over the last week that Yahoo allows direct linking. And cool, I was going to search my archives to link to it but I simply thru that into Google and whadda ya know, CT is #9. Anyway that should be a cool point of interest to many and I think after this series when I start direct linking on Yahoo, I will give some case studies.

For now I will stick to Google Content because this is what I have been doing and I hate to break a good routine. Now if it goes downhill on me this does not mean necessarily that the offer is a dud. However my personal preference is that if I cannot get conversions using the following tactics on the Content Network then I usually do not even work any harder on the offer. I’m using the content network as a general guide for profitability. I am also direct linking so I realize that I am not pre-selling the offer at all. These things have to be taken under consideration because each offer is different as are the demographics your promoting it to.

Keywords 

Now that you took some time to look at the offer you should have come up with some general words in your head about the offer. You can always view the source code for each offer and you might come away with some ideas but generally these offers are not optimized that well and generally are hardly any help. You have to rely on your own research ability which I’ve stated is vital. So let’s look at the offer I chose at $1.75 payout and see what comes to my mind:

Right off the bat I think of:

• college scholarship
• free college scholarship
• pay for college  ( with how to pay for college) (help pay for college) (grants to pay for college)
• college scholarship money
• college financial aid

These are just terms that I come up with by looking at the offer. Now I have some initial keywords to throw into the Google Adwords Keyword External Tool. As an example I threw in pay for college and Google returned me 81 results which they thought relevant to the query. I dont necessarily want to add all them. I want to weed out potential words that I “think” wont help me. So here are a few I came up with:

best way to pay for college
cant pay for college
grants to pay for college
help me pay for college
help pay for college
help to pay for college
how to pay for college
loans to pay for college
money to pay for college
pay for college
pay for college books
pay for college now
way to pay for college
ways to pay for college

Now I want to diversify and split these into relevant adgroups. I dont just throw them into the content network (unless I want to burn money). Typically I look at the first words of the longtails:

way/ways, help, money, pay, how

These little words tell me a lot. These words are going to help me construct adgroups and write kickass ads to the demographics. Longtails work just as the short words do. Each one is different and you should research, test and build around so. So now that I have 5 words that I can build adgroups around I want to generate a keyword list to test with. I plug in ‘ways to pay for college’ into the Adwords External Tool again.

Now I come with this:

alternative ways to pay for college
best way to pay for college
best ways to pay for college
creative ways to pay for college
different ways to pay for college
the best way to pay for college
unique ways to pay for college
way to pay for college
ways to pay for college
what is the best way to pay for college

This gives me a very targeted adgroup and also gives me an idea of how to write my ads. Now as I said there are ways to weed junk out of the Content network so I am going to tell you how to do that. After you build your first adgroup you need to go back to your general targeting in Adwords. We are obviously only after US traffic but you cannot just pick US as your general targeting. God this is a HUGE MISTAKE! Adwords is not perfect people and more so on a Content Network campaign. I cant begin to express how many disqualified clicks I have seen in my logs because Adwords does there damn GEO Targeting. You have to take it upon yourself to go back and choose Region/Cities and select each state individually. I’m not telling you this to bullshit you, test both ways for yourself and tell me I am wrong. Another thing you must do is tell the qualifying prospects EXACTLY what you want them to do. Generally I make an ad that tells them this, but I make a second that will get the clicks and I watch them both. Example for this offer and adgroup would be like this:

See in the first ad I have told them and they expect to fill in their email. This will help disqualify a lot of crappy clicks. Most likely this is where your best offer conversions come from but not always. The second ad is a bit more generic because I dont have the word “scholarship” in there. Some people will think its just basically to win money but hopefully by adding the word “college” twice in there it would perform well also. Just try two different ads and watch them like hawks.

Now you got some tips to make the content network work in your favor. Choose the US States individually is a huge tip. Telling the prospects exactly what you want will lower your clicks but they will be more targeted. I cant tell you how many people make the mistake of going for unqualified clicks just to get them. With Adwords charging as much as they are, this is ridiculous if your on a budget. Yes you want clicks, but you want clicks on ads that CONVERT.

That was just an example of one adgroup. This will be repeated over every keyword adgroup you have. Even on the content network this is what you should be striving for. Now on the content network we do have some lee-way because of the mythical “no QS’. I still dont believe that all the way but for such an offer we will glide by typically just to test it.

Now I do need a domain and hosting to actually “direct link” to my offer. However I am not actually direct linking (unless you can get away with it on Content). I actually use an iframe and it’s very simple:

<frameset rows=”100%,*” border=”0″>
  <frame src=”AFFILIATE LINK GOES HERE” frameborder=”0″ />
  <frame frameborder=”0″ noresize />
</frameset>

Basically it’s just a frameset to display the actual offer on my own webhost. Some offers dont allow this but a lot do. You will have to make sure and test that it does not break out of the frame. You will know it if it does. It will be jarbled or it will go directly to the offer page. You may want to make a Title tag along with a meta description and keywords. Generally for the content network we can get away with that. I have been for quite awhile now.

You can typically load this onto your domain in a index.html file. So then your domain would just be this iframed offer. Normally I buy a domain for the INDUSTRY the offer is related to and load an index.html file with my iframe in it, then I throw this index.html into a folder and load it up as a directory on my domain. This helps to let me know what offers I am running simultaneously. My output would be something like www.whatever.com/College

Make sure to get short domains so that with the / and folder name it will fit into the Adwords Display Url limit.

Domains

The unsung hero’s of converting keywords. This method is widely under used although a big name Marketer (Gauher Chaudhry) of PayPerClickFormula has coined it “The Alexa Method”. Basically just go to Google and type in a keyword. For this offer I type in “college scholarship”.  I see that www.college-scholarships.com is #2. The idea here is to first go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and gather all the domains on the first page (or second for competitive niches) and take EVERY variation of that domain you can think of. So here’s what comes to me:

www.college-scholarships.com 
www college scholarships com 
http://www.college-scholarships.com 
college-scholarships.com 
college scholarships com 
http://college-scholarships.com 
ww.college-scholarships.com 
ww college-scholarships.com
http www college-scholarships com

That is really generic to me, if I wanted to get really technical then I could probably come up with 2 dozen domain variations. Since I doubt this site is that popular I wont. Yes, people actually type the address into the search engines and not the address bars. When they do this, what pops up into the search results? Yep, lots of sites with Adsense probably. You need to realize this and take in it’s effectiveness. I’ve spent hours researching browsing habits online and domain targeting for keyword campaigns can bring you some of the best low cost profits. Another thing is that targeting these in the Content Network may not bring you a ton of impressions. However the clicks will be cheap. I still use domains in my Content Network campaigns and you should too. When we get to search I will go into more detail.

You should know that if you target EVERY keyword in your adgroup, your going to have TONS of domains. Like I said we are just testing right now so I try to take the most popular keyword from each adgroup and gobble the domains up from the first page of the big 3 search engines.

There’s more though:

Your targeting search query urls so you should also target high volume RELATED sites as well. For this I go to Alexa. Now here’s where we can “do some damage”.  I type in “college scholarships” and it returns me some results for sites with considerable traffic levels. Even if they dont have high volume you still want to target them. I got a site with an Alexa of almost 200K and yet it yielded over $180,000 in pure profit from last year. Alexa is a great tool but it can also deceive you. If you dont already have those domains from Alexa then gobble them up and make variations as well.

Now in Alexa I see that Scholarships.com has a traffic rank of 66,751. This is not bad. It tells us that it’s getting about half as much traffic as Cashtactics is so it’s definitely something we should target. So we click on it to view more details about the site. On the top left hand corner you will see “Explore this site” and right under that you see “Related Links”.

You definitely want to click and check those out. I did so and seen 4-5 more sites I could potentially make domain and variation keywords for. You want those to test as well.

Like I have said that this is just the testing phase. This is a really quick way to get a direct link (iframe or cloak) up on the content network to see if this offer will make any money.

Things to remember

You are in the testing phase for the offer. Your primary goal is to get some cheaper clicks on the Google Content Network and use a few ideas to make your offer get some better targeted traffic by manually adding all 50 US states and telling people what to expect in your ad. We have not even begun pure keyword domination yet. Keywords are going to take a few things to get thru and there will be some vids coming of watching me actually perform what I am saying. Some people like text and others prefer video so we will do both.

Just know that you dont need a bazillion keywords to test out with. Your looking at the offer specifically just to see if it will make you any money while spending as little as possible. If you have a huge budget then you will probably skip some of this but we want to start at the beginning to look for areas of profitability with the least cost as possible.

Typically you want to test the network for 3 days. I like 3 days because it gives me enough data to decide where to go. Typically I set my content budget at $500/day. Now you may not want to do this but as I have stated that their is something unspoken on the content network. I have found that the higher my budget is along with my CTR then the longer my ad runs without suffering one of those famous “impression breaks”. If you set your budget below $100 a day then your not going to get numbers that you can make important decisions on unless the offer just completely converts like crazy. You should know that this is likely not to happen.

That is basic setup and testing. Your only watching impressions/clicks/conversions at this point in regards to spend. You are making tight adgroups with keywords and domain variations and your setting up all 50 states manually to ensure that Google will give you less unqualified clicks. This can and does happen people. If you watch your logs then you already know this.

In the next part we are going to assume that our offer converted enough to move forward.

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