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Goodbye Adwords
cubemonkey
subscriber Posts: 11
I recently let my Adwords account exhaust of money. Not because I couldn`t afford it, but because I wanted to challenge myself to see if there was a way to gain an equal amount of customers each month freely. This also had to involve a MINIMAL amount of time each day so I allotted 20 minutes maximum to do my promoting. That`s just one less coffee break during the day. AND it had to be automated, I didn`t want to spend time searching out places to advertise. After all, Adwords does this automatically so its only fair.
Here is what Adwords was doing for me -
Adwords: 800 clicks a month with a 71% conversion goal rate (meaning they hit a page I consider a sale, since I dont actually sell anything)
The key for me was to instead use 2 other great Google tools...of course.
1. I got a feed from Yahoo! Answers. I set up an RSS feed in Google Reader that only pulled quesitons containing the term "my service" ( <- whatever your product is). Simple but great! There are about 100 questions a day posted about "my service", 95 of them have nothing to do with my business directly, so I scroll past. The ones I find that do I log in and help answer them leaving a link to my site since it relates directly (its encouraged on Yahoo!..but no follow tags). I get targeted traffic not only from the asker, but days of people searching out answers to their problems.
2. Google alerts. I know it`s been mentioned. But there is a catch, you can use Googles Advanced Search Operators to your advantage. Just like a normal search. So in addtion to blindly searching the web for "my service". You can setup a search on popular forums/craigslist/blogs specifically that you have accounts to post on and know pertain to your product/service. Your alert would be setup like this ( "my service 1" OR "my service 2" site:craigslist.com ) Which would return any new posts on Craigslist that contains what you put in the quotes. ....... This way you can focus your findings instead of pulling info randomly.
Anyways, turns out not only am I able to recover the 800 clicks from Adwords, but I was able to gain an additional 700 visitors steady each month from just 20 minutes a day..... Freely
Here is what Adwords was doing for me -
Adwords: 800 clicks a month with a 71% conversion goal rate (meaning they hit a page I consider a sale, since I dont actually sell anything)
The key for me was to instead use 2 other great Google tools...of course.
1. I got a feed from Yahoo! Answers. I set up an RSS feed in Google Reader that only pulled quesitons containing the term "my service" ( <- whatever your product is). Simple but great! There are about 100 questions a day posted about "my service", 95 of them have nothing to do with my business directly, so I scroll past. The ones I find that do I log in and help answer them leaving a link to my site since it relates directly (its encouraged on Yahoo!..but no follow tags). I get targeted traffic not only from the asker, but days of people searching out answers to their problems.
2. Google alerts. I know it`s been mentioned. But there is a catch, you can use Googles Advanced Search Operators to your advantage. Just like a normal search. So in addtion to blindly searching the web for "my service". You can setup a search on popular forums/craigslist/blogs specifically that you have accounts to post on and know pertain to your product/service. Your alert would be setup like this ( "my service 1" OR "my service 2" site:craigslist.com ) Which would return any new posts on Craigslist that contains what you put in the quotes. ....... This way you can focus your findings instead of pulling info randomly.
Anyways, turns out not only am I able to recover the 800 clicks from Adwords, but I was able to gain an additional 700 visitors steady each month from just 20 minutes a day..... Freely
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Comments
I`d love to know the process for setting up the RSS feed in Google Reader toonly pull questions containing the term "my service". I love this idea, and this fits perfectly into my marketing style. Am also going to try out your Google Alerts tip, as well.
Thanks!
Donna