When you guys say smart pricing, I think you mean quality score?
Yeah, sorry. I get the two backwards.
chrislingle said:
if you just copy what someone else has done most of your stuff will fail
Totally agree. I think a lot of people just want a template and a bulleted list of how to make money. I tried that with some of my previous attempts. Saw something that was making someone else money and tried to copy it. Didn't work. So, I went back to the drawing board, reread a lot of threads here, read some Shoemoney (replace the word "ringtones" in his posts with your keyword and it's still great information) and then just started experimenting.
My primary focus was on targetted keywords. If you're shotgunning shit, and most of your keywords are unfocused or too broad, you're throwing away money. So, every one of my keywords is a "buying" type of keyword. Let's use "ringtones" since everybody seems hung up on that (and I can borrow from Shoe's blog so I don't have to give away my niche). If you're keywords are along the lines of "cell phones", "ringtones" or even "cell phone ringtones" they are not as targetted as "get ringtones", "free ringtones" or "buy ringtones". See, the second set has an action in it, whereas the first doesn't.
Reread chrislingle's thread on PPC affiliate. Don't try to add to it, just reread it. Work on finding keywords. Once you have a list of 200 - 500, carefully pick through it and pull out all the phrases / keywords that don't have some sort of action to them. Broad keywords get lots of clicks, but they don't convert as well as focused action keywords. After you have gone through your list several times, start looking for negative keywords. Like "scam", you don't want your add to show up for "{keyword} scam" or "{keyword} fraud" do you? Imagine if you're promoting Hoodia Gordonii and one of your keywords is "hoodia diet", if you have that set to broad match on Adwords, then it will show up for "hoodia diet scam" also. Do you really think that the person clicking on your ad for that result is going to buy? No. They just clicked out of curiousity, but they already have a negative opinion about your product. So, they just cost you $x.xx for that click.
Don't rely on others telling you how to make money. It won't happen. There is some excellent information here, but you need to adapt it to how you do business. Understanding your own limitations is also key, and that's not something that is talked about here or anywhere else very often.
