Some neophyte bloggers seethed how their Adwords expenditures literally GOBBLED their Adsense / Chitika / Clickbank earnings. I snuck a peek and figured the cause - Generic keywords.

One blogger does camera reviews. He deployed the keywords “Reviews” and “Digicam Reviews” in Adwords panel. He forked out $1000+ a month on Adwords, and earned $200 in Adsense.

Another friend blogged about dating and women. He chose “dating”, “women” and “girls” for his Adwords campaign. This robbed him of $800+ a month on adwords, and he pocketed $96 in Adsense.

Makes sense??!

I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it’s a strategy gone awry. When these friends chose generic, highly competitive words, Google imposed a heavy premium: to appear in the search results, cost per click skyrocketed to astronomical amounts. For the word “reviews”, for instance, my bud bid almost $50 per click- just to appear 6th on the Google sidebar! The few that do click his ad aren’t targeted viewers. Chances are, they’d surf in, then surf right out.

Isn’t it like throwing pearls to swine?

Understand this: when running adwords campaign on competitive high search volume terms, the short generic word costs oodles more and suffers a lower conversion rate than the specific 4 or 5 word phrase.

I learned this the hard way when I used to advertise my leadership executive coaching firm using words like “executive coaching” and “training services.” This term bled me dry. I bid up to $100 just to appear on the Google sidebar. Expenses ballooned to $2500 a month. For that money, I could have gone trimedia.

Fortunately the solution is simple. Buddy Marcus Wakefield, who reviews tech wizardry taught me that long tail keywords are they way to go. These consist of 5 specific words that constitute a targeted phrase. The ideal phrase bears:

• an action word
• the subject
• and the location.

Combined, you have an explosive, targetted phrase that few fight over. This rapidly lowers your cost per click, and brings in more targetted consumers who are bound to subscribe to your services.So, if you were a marketer of Mp3 players in New York, you’d avoid Adwords Campaigns employing “mp3 players”, “Ipods” or “Creative Zen”. You’d judiciously sprinkle phrases like “Buy ipods in New York” or “Purchase cheap mp3 players New York”

Launch this campaign and you’d notice three things:

1. Impressions drop dramatically. Generic words like “sex” would bring 10,000 untargetted impressions, but “sex techniques for mutual orgasm” would reap 200 targetted, passionate viewers.
2. Cost per click goes down almost 70%. Overnight.
3. The few that click your cheap ads end up buying from your affiliate links or clicking on your adsense ads. This translates to coins rattling your bank!

You’d be pleased to know that the use of long tail keywords works superbly whether you patronize Overture, MSN or Google. You can quickly start carving your slice of the internet pie right now and building a massive empire on a shoestring budget with this technique alone.

Now before you plunge in, arm yourself further with these tools to mine for cool keyword niches:

• http://www.goodkeywords.com
• http://www.keywordiscovery.com
• http://www.adwordanalyzer.com

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