How To Make Online Money

Google Adwords offers two different ways of displaying your ads. You can have your ads show up as part of the search results, or in the “Content Network”.

The search results ads are shown on Google’s page, when someone enters a search. If someone searches a term with a keyword on which you are bidding, your results will show up at the top or along the right side of the results (if you bid high enough). Search result ads are more expensive because they do get good, quality clicks, and because of the competitors bidding for a given set of keywords.

The Content Network are the pages on the internet that are using Google’s Adsense code to display relevant ads. So, for example, a blog about bicycles might have Adsense ads about bikes displaying on the site.

Content Network (CN) traffic is very different than Search traffic. It’s much less targeted, so people clicking are more likely to be ‘browsers’ than ’searchers’. Browsers generally convert less. Content Network traffic is therefore much less expensive. Your bids for keywords on the CN should be much lower than those for search.

In fact, for search, many times Google won’t even activate your keywords unless you bid a minimum amount…and this amount can go up if the search term becomes popular.

But here’s the trick with the Content Network…some people will type in the displayed URL directly, without clicking.

I’ve had two different websites with campaigns running. On BOTH, I noticed an increase of 3% of DIRECT traffic after I started running my CN campaigns, and that was WITHOUT any clicks.

It feels like cheating Google. Google is displaying my URL tens of thousands of times per month, and I’m not paying a penny. Well, sometimes I pay a penny. In fact, my bid on those terms is set at $.01…one penny. So the times that someone does actually click my link means I don’t pay very much.

The point is this: if you are hesitant to pay for Google Adwords ads, start with the Content Network. Keep your bids to one penny. Enter a ton of relevant keywords (and segment your campaigns as much as possible to test which keyword combos are working well). And make sure that your display URL is something that people will want to see. They are more likely to type in a name that is short and directly related to what they are looking for.

So get going with your super-cheap campaigns and take advantage of the free traffic that will come as folks type in the URL directly instead of clicking!