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In the previous article you had a chance to whet your appetite to the flavor of a successful campaign as Frank Rumbauskas a Google-Certified AdWords Professional gave us a number of tips in How to Use AdWords to Explode Your Business. Now we’re going to talk about conversion.

The term “conversion” as it’s referred to here isn’t the adoption of a new religious identity, or a change from one religious identity to another, though for some it does entail the sincere avowal of a new belief system. In online advertising, a conversion occurs when a click on your ad leads directly to user behavior you deem valuable, such as a purchase, signup, page view, or lead.

How do I create a high quality landing page? First of all, if you’re putting money into driving traffic to a page, whether it’s through AdWords or organic search result (listings in search engine results pages that appear by dint of their relevance to the search terms as apposed to pay per click advertising), wouldn’t you agree that the content of that page should be worth every dollar you spend?

I think we’ll all agree, traffic is absolutely necessary and good in abundance, however, until your visitors actually convert you’re not making any money. In other words, no amount traffic equals conversion if your landing page, simply put, sucks ass! No matter what that conversion happens to be, either sell a product or collect and email address, you want people to take that action.

Clearly then, for conversion to occur the overall aesthetics and user friendliness of your landing page weigh heavily on the success of your ad campaign. With that said, here are the fundamentals.

Your landing page must be super-relevant. For instance, having your keyword in the landing page headline will get the visitors attention. It will tell the visitor the page is relevant to what they searched for. Doing so will more than likely increase your chances of having the visitor remain on your page long enough to read your shpill and possibly convert.

You landing page must have an undiluted clear-cut call to action. Give then only one option, the option to convert. Don’t let them get distracted! Pages that have only one goal outperform the rest simply because of the fact that having two goals requires communicating two messages. Remove any navigation links, outbound links and advertisements from your landing page. Your goal is to convert, convert, convert. Keep it simple and to the point.

Select the right look and placement for your message. Here’s an exercise: think about yourself. Think about your car, your clothes, your favorite brands, restaurants, radio stations and fave sites online. In all that you do, you CUSTOMIZE your life. Similarly, you must customize your web page to speak to your ideal visitor. Keep everything on the page geared toward making that individual feel comfortable.

When at first you don’t succeed test, test and retest. You can use web tools like Google Analytics to track how effective that content is in getting you conversions, but tracking won’t tell you how to make your content more effective. Experimenting and evaluating your results will enable you to identify what users respond to best so you can create a page that will be more effective in getting the business results you want.

So, as my shameless plug, I’m leaving you a link to one of my own landing pages so that you may see and study hands-on how to apply what you just learned. Likewise if you want to discuss your landing page or if you need a quote, or want us to built one, just get in touch.

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In this article Frank Rumbauskas a Google-Certified AdWords Professional introduces you to the many important benefits of using AdWords and offers you tips on how to make your campaign a success by continuously generating new leads.

Personally, the reasons I prefer using Google AdWords over any other type of PPC service are number one, because it grants me access to googles enormous advertising network and also because AdWords charges me only if and when someone clicks my ad, and not just when the ad is displayed. Significantly, however, a click on your ad may not always mean conversion. In online advertising, a conversion occurs when a click on your ad leads directly to user behavior you deem valuable, such as a purchase, signup, page view, or lead.

In other words all the hits in the world amount to nothing if the user is not compelled to take action. Clearly then, for conversion to occur the overall aesthetics and user friendliness of your website play heavily on the success of your ad campaign. In the next article I’ll show you how the right template customization make it easy to increase your site effectiveness and visitor satisfaction, which leads to higher conversion rates and a higher return on your investments.

AdWords, when used properly, will not only grow your business and list exponentially but it is very cost effective as well. There are many people who have tried using a pay-per-click program such as Google AdWords but have failed. Why did they fail?

One of the main reasons that internet marketers fail with their AdWords campaigns is because they are lazy. Honest, but true. AdWords is not a guided missile to riches that you can simply fire and forget. Like all things in life that provide a great reward, a successful AdWords campaign is something that you have to work at.

1.) Understand the Nature of the Beast

The most important thing in a successful AdWords campaign is developing an understanding of the system. It may not be rocket science but it is pretty darned close. Before you begin, head over to the AdWords site and read the FAQ. Then hit the Google search engine and visit some message boards dedicated to AdWords. If need be, pick up a guide and read it as well. The more that you know about the system and how it works, the more you will be able to take advantage of it.

Take the opinions of others into consideration but do not let them guide you. On some of the internet marketing forums you will find that many people are against AdWords and other pay-per-click systems. Many times this is because they jumped in with both feet before they understood the system and therefore they failed. You are not going to fail because you are going to take the time to do your research BEFORE starting your first campaign.

2.) Set Spending Limits

AdWords gives you the ability to set daily spending limits for keywords. Use this feature to control the cost of your ads. If you only want to spend $75 per day on advertising, set that as your limit and the system will stop serving your ads when your limit has been reached.

3.) Create Relevant Ad Copy

When creating an ad the goal is to achieve top placement at the lowest cost. One way to accomplish this goal is to include your keyword in both the headline and body of your ad. This increases the relevancy of your ad and thereby lowers the cost.

4.) Use Different Types of Keywords

How often your ad is displayed and how it is triggered is really up to you. There are 3 main keyword types that you can use.

Broad Match - example: fine dining??This phrase is entered without quotations or brackets. You ad would be triggered anytime a user enters a search string that included the words “fine” and “dining” regardless of order or placement.

Phrase Match - example “fine dining”??Enter this type of phrase with quotation marks surrounding it. Your ad will be triggered by searches that contain the words “fine dining” in that order.

Exact Match - example: [fine dining]??This type of keyword is entered with brackets. To trigger your ad a user would have to conduct a search that exactly matches the keyword phrase.

Use of keywords and match types can help your keep your costs within reason and lead to a successful AdWords campaign.

The 4 topics discussed here are but a few of the many strategies that you need to learn and understand to be truly successful in the AdWords game. Get as much information as you possibly can and use it to explode your business.

About the Author
Frank Rumbauskas is a New York Times bestselling author and a Google-Certified AdWords Professional. He has created several highly successful businesses using AdWords alone. To download 10 chapters of Frank’s AdWords system and get his free AdWords Tips newsletter, please visit http://www.adwordsinsidesecrets.com

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Google offers free webmaster tools to help you check for technical issues that may be barring your website from high natural rankings. Here’s the skinny on what’s available in Google’s Webmaster Tools, and what you can do with them.

Note: To use all the webmaster tools available, you must have FTP/back-end access to your website. This is so you can verify your site on Google and utilize automatic diagnostic features that help you improve the indexing of your site by search robots.

1. Log into Google’s Webmaster Tools with your Google Account info.

2. Type in the URL of the site you want to optimize in the Dashboard.

3. You will now see an Overview page, where you can follow instructions to verify your site by uploading a file to your server via FTP, or adding a meta-tag to the site’s HTML. Verification will unlock diagnostics tools, statistics on your site, link information, and various other tools.

4. Now it’s time to upload a sitemap in xml format to Google. It’s easy to create your own site map online, or learn how to make one yourself using Sitemap Protocol. Once your sitemap.xml file has been created, upload it via FTP to the highest directory on your site’s server. Now go to the Sitemaps section of WM Tools and click on the link to “Add a Sitemap.”

5. After submitting your sitemap, go to Diagnostics > Web Crawl. This is where information is listed about errors or issues impeding Google’s searchbot from crawling any page on your site. This includes any broken links, pages that time out before loading, and any restricted URLs. Using this tool to identify erroneous pages on your site will allow to pinpoint the problem to go in and repair site content.

6. I will skip Mobile Crawl as that is for websites designed for mobile devices - and since this is a fairly new invention, I’m sure this is not applicable to most of you.

7. Now go to Diagnostics > Content Analysis. This page deals with issues to do with the actual content on your site, including meta-tags and title tags. You can drill down and identify pages on your site with duplicate, long, or short meta-descriptions, or missing title tags, and any non-indexable content.

8. I’m honestly not so convinced of the value offered by the Webmaster Tools’ “Statistics” section, but go ahead and poke around if you are interested in general Page Ranking on your site, what search queries are leading to your site on Google, and general info about subscribers (if you have any - though I would recommend FeedBurner for gathering those stats if you’re serious about subscribers), or a list of indexed pages.

9. Ever wonder what pages on your site are being linked to externally? Check out the Links section of Webmaster Tools. You can also find out what Sitelinks appear for your site on Google’s search results pages. For more information on how to get sitelinks up for your site, or what the heck sitelinks are, you can read some theories on how to get sitelinks to appear.

10. Upload a robots.txt file to your site’s server if you want to prohibit Googlebots from crawling specific pages of your site. For example, block the bots from certain secure pages. Remember also to include a reference to the location of your sitemap in the robots.txt file.

11. You can generate and analyze your robots.txt file in the WM Tools “Tools” section.

And that about wraps up Webmaster Tools.

About the Author
Digital Age Dump is a collection of articles and insights on web 2.0, SEO, copywriting, and more to do with the evolving way we connect and communicate on the web.

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Great news for all Webmasters around, Google opens their Web Master Tools doors to the public. Last November, the search giant announced a pilot program whereby all Go Daddy users got free and easy access to all Webmaster Tools has to offer, right from their account management panels in Go Daddy. Now they’re taking that program and bringing it to the peps!

With access to the Google APIs hosting service provider can now integrate Google Webmaster Tools into your customer’s control panel, so customers can create accounts and submit Sitemaps all without ever leaving your service. From a customers standpoint this is awesome too because it’ll help then understand their traffic and diagnose potential problems by providing insight into how Google crawls and indexes their site.

What if my hoster isn’t offering this yet? No problem. You can still sign up for Web Master Tools the old fashion way simply hop on over to Google click Business Solutions scroll down click on Webmaster Central and then sign in to Webmasters Tools, if you don’t already have an account don’t worry it’s totally free and there’s no obligation.

In addition your account allows you to include as many domains as you want and lets you share info about your web pages directly with Google to help improve the site’s visibility. Similarly you’ll also get up-to-date helpful articles, webmasters guidelines and technical information specifically designed to make your site more search and user friendly.

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