I duly signed up with Google Adwords, which was a doddle, gave them my credit card details (they take $5 or £5 from you just for signing up, depending on where in the world you are) and setup my first campaign. The first thing I did was set a daily or monthly limit (or budget), as this prevents Google from charging you a fortune in clicked advertisements. I chose a small amount, $5 per day. Keyword choice was my next endeavor – I decided to target specific keywords, so I included square brackets ( [ ]) around my keywords, meaning that the advert only displays when all of the keywords are typed into Google. One last task, I made that my campaign was paused as I did not have my actual target landing page in place yet.

With Adwords and my campaign set, next I purchased a domain name from my favorite provide, name.com. A quick setup of my virtual host (I’m using a VPS from Linode) and a Wordpress installation later I was good to go – except I needed a landing page template. After some Googling (and this being a bargain experiment) I settled on a free landing page I found, compliments of a user on the BlackHatWorld forums (download here). It’s relatively easy to setup and is very simple to use.

In terms of the landing page itself, I made sure that the following pages were present, as Google has some minimum requirements in place in terms of landing page quality.

- Sitemap, I used the Sitemap Generator Plugin for Wordpress to add this;
- Privacy Policy, used the Privacy Policy Plugin to generate this;
- Terms and Conditions, search the web for one of these specific to your country, I used this resource as a base;
- Contact Us, make sure you include a full physical postal address and telephone number; and
- About Us, use your imagination for this, be sure to include a description of the purpose of the website and the business operating it, most likely you.

I also included a “testimonial”, a reason to buy and a background on the item that the prospective buyer was looking for. I chose to include 4 auctions pertaining to the product I was promoting and left it at that. I then proceeded to test and retest the page to make sure it was all working, as you don’t want to send clicks you are paying for to a non-functional landing page.

I then proceeded to start the campaign and then ran a “tail -f access.log” from the command-line in order to observe the traffic activity. It certainly seemed that I chose the right niche, as my $5 was quickly used up in clicks. I left things running and the following day my $5 limit was reached again, within the first few hours of the monring. I ended up with a average cost per click of 0.35c which translated in approximately 28 visitors. The results? I’m not sure at this stage, as my EPN stats have not been updated, but I will certainly post an update when they are available.

Update: results here!

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

Related posts:

1. Breaking even with EPN and PPC
2. Fear uncertainty and doubt or what I think about eBay and QCP
3. Google slaps or why you should diversify