How to Advertise Your Blog The Right Way With Google Adwords

"What are the ways on how to advertise my blog?"

There are many ways you can expose your blog to people who have not come across it yet. Some channels are free while some are paid. Most of the time, the majority of the bloggers will seek for free promotion channels. I mean who doesn’t want free traffic, right?

However, very often the free ways to get visitors to your blog needs a lot of efforts and time to make the whole campaign a success. By spending your precious time and labor on getting free traffic, did you realize those are actually not free? In other words, you are just paying yourself instead of paying others to get the job done for you.

So one way to get more eyeballs to your blog with lesser time and efforts is by spending on advertisements. Paid advertisements are more scalable and faster to see results too. Besides you will be receiving targeted traffic for your business, eliminating non-targeted ones from what you get from free traffic.

This way you can focus on other areas of your businesses and let the advertisement companies take care of your campaigns. Another benefit of paid advertisement is that it’s predictable. You know what works and what doesn’t, therefore it helps you to achieve a good revenue to expense ratio. For example, for every $1 you spend for targeted traffic, you get back $1.30, which means a 30% profit margin. With a revenue forecast, it will be easier for you to plan and expand your business by putting the resources straight from the horse’s mouth.

So now let us dive straight into today’s topic on how to advertise blog effectively.

How to Advertise a Blog Using Paid Search Marketing?

Some of the most common paid search marketing solutions are Adwords, pay per click (PPC), cost per click (CPC) or sponsored advertising. While there are many strategies on how to use Google Adwords, we won’t go into that. Rather we will just focus on one effective strategy that can help you advertise your blog posts and gain more targeted exposure.

Step 1: Research on a topic that is widely talked about and has a great demand. When there is demand, there is competition as well. Take note of that.

Step 2: Write and publish a blog post of the topic that you have done research for. Make sure that this post is something of real value to your readers. In fact, your content should somewhat be longer, packed with information and focused for your audience.

Step 3: Choose exact match or partial match keywords based on the topic you published. You do not need to use broad search keywords because they are expensive and not as targeted. For example your post is about lessons on inline skating so you might want to select “inline skating lessons” as one of the keywords.

Go to Google Keyword Planner (GKP). Plug in all the keywords that you have selected and look for the keyword terms that are high searches but low competition. Most terms that meet the criteria may only have 1000, 500 or even lesser searches per month but that’s alright. You are targeting very close terms to what users are searching for. Alternatively, you can also key in the URL of your blog post and let GKP select keyword ideas for you.

Step 4: Use the keywords suggested in Step 3 to build a new campaign. Basically you would want to group closely-related terms together in the ad group so that the quality score will be higher and the costs will be lower.

Step 5: Create ad creatives that are short, simple and have a call-to-action. The headline must be clear and straight to the point while the description must state the benefits for your readers. After creating the ad, you need to ask yourself if the reader is you, would you be enticed to click on the ad? Here’s a simple example of how the ad should be.

Ad Headline: Learn Inline Skating

Ad Description: Safe, Fun & Effective Lessons for All Ages. Coach with 30 Years Experience.

Here the ad clearly tells the readers that you are offering inline skating lessons that are for all ages. Most importantly, the coach has 30 years of experience which can attract people’s attention.

Step 6: Disable the Content Network setting. The default settings for Adwords campaign will show your ads in Google Search and its content network (meaning your ads will be shown on other sites which have Adsense on it). As a start, it’s advisable that you learn and master the Search portion first before going into content network which is another topic on its own.

Step 7: Test and find the winners. Since you are starting out to learn how to advertise your blog with PPC, you will want to do a lot of testing to see which type of ads, what kind of headlines, description and content works the best for your niche.

When I say a lot of testing, it really means you have to put out many different combinations and versions of headlines and description to test the market and see which ones converts the best.

Along the way you might also come across other ads by your competitors. If those ads are related to your niche or are related to something you want to go into, you can take ideas from there and modify it for your own. Those ideas can also be a goldmine to help you create new and valuable contents which you may not have come across.

Step 8: Put up competitor’s brand bidding. If your competitors are well known for their brands, you can even try to use brand-related keywords to bring targeted traffic to your blog. For example if your competitor is K2 Skates, you may want to put up an ad like below.

Ad Headline: K2 Inline Skates

Ad Description: K2 Inline Skates Produces the Most Trusted Quality of Recreational Skates.

Usually smaller organizations will be less likely to use brand-related Adwords campaign because most of the time they are ranked the top for their branding. However it’s still possible they do that if they are having a promotion or doing some sort of marketing campaigns for their brand.

For huge organizations, many of them may do an Adwords campaign based on their own brands. Firstly, they have a larger budget to do advertisements. Secondly, they are always trying to create brand awareness and exposure. Third, bidding on their own brands are usually cheap as there is no competition. Last but not least, they can dominate the search results with paid and organic positions.

However, this doesn’t stop you from competing against them using branded keywords especially if the cost per click is low and within you budget.

Summary and Taking Action

It’s always easy to read and not take any actions. Besides, using paid search is definitely not for everyone as it means you would need to spend on advertising before you gain any revenue.

However if you are serious in taking your business to the next level, it’s inevitable that you set aside an affordable budget to test out the market and find the winners faster. As mentioned earlier in this article, not many will want to promote their blogs using paid options. You will be gaining an advantage over them if you do so, which might result in more leads and sales.

Hope that this guide can give you a better idea on how to advertise your blog and help you to gain an advantage over your competitors!