So on my travels through PPC I have also decided to jump on Adwords and dump a little money into them as well.

Right away you notice how much more effective Adwords is for serving up ads. The interface is quick and responsive. Microsoft hasnt quite gotten AdCenter up to par on speed. The most exciting part of the jump into Adwords is  that right as soon as I started a campaign I immediately started seeing results. Within the first few hours after my account was setup I made a conversion. Which is something I have yet to see with AdCenter. This will be my first official day with adwords and I am still ahead on my earnings. Tomorrow I’ll go in and tweak the ads and see if I can increase that intake.

One major thing I like with Adwords is you arent just serving ads to the searches but on the “content network”, which basically means any site that serves adsense has a shot at showing off your ad. This kind of stuff reminds me of playing with stocks. Go in doing a lot of research, make your bids and see how things do. The tweak the results to get a better turn out. I havent been giving PPC my 100% attention, but its getting more of it now.

So I have to hand it to Microsoft for making it really easy to set some geographic areas for your ads. This has to be one of the most important things when working with PPC traffic. Purely because you dont want to sell sausages to people in south-africa. Well maybe you do, who knows maybe they love the stuff. Coupling my products with the places its most popular is super important. For one I’m grabbing my demographic and secondly I’m getting some really direct and targeted traffic for my PPC campaign.

adCenter really makes all of that super simple to implement. Another helpful tip when working on PPC is to take advantage of gender and age targeting. If you can get some highly targeted traffic like that it will just further improve your conversion.

On the note of my ongoing PPC experiment, I havent made any conversions yet. I think this is mostly due to the cost of the bid on some of these terms I’m shooting for. Even though I have over 1k keywords for this campaign and all sorts of mispellings and typos I cant seem to break into the right bid point. So I may have to run some more adjustments and settings to get a better foothold in the market.

Lately I’ve been doing a ton of research into PPC marketing. I’m still very much a newbie to it all. But a while back I read a blog post by Shoemoney with his own 40k PPC experiment. Now I wont be dropping 40k on this experiment, but rather 200$ in one shot at marketing an affiliate offer online. Now to be compliant with the TOS of Google and the rest I wont be giving the actual numbers I earn, but more general figures. So even more recently I got the chance to read Jon of wickedfires Super Affiliate Blog. He made an interesting post about making money with PPC and affiliate marketing in 24 hours. So I thought I would take a stab at it.

I picked up a coupon through the eComXpo for 50$ credit at Microsoft AdCenter. If you hurry, you can grab a coupon code too. Which I thought was a good way to jump on it. I wont tell you the niche I’m shooting for but it has been a fun experiment so far learning how to put together an ad and input all my keywords. I chose a lofty amount of keywords then used the Typo Generator to lengthen that list a bit more. Being that I’ve really only scoured the forums and a few websites out there for info. This will be a big learning experience. I dont plan to make any money back. I’ll drop another note soon with some stats on how everything is going.

If you have some experiences with PPC and affiliate marketing drop me a comment. I’d love to hear what other stories people have about their first times trying this stuff.