Adwords Strategy/Help

[snousain]

Hey all, I am a newbie to the whole affiliate marketing business and am in the process of planning/developing my first site which will be primarily a credit card directory for specifically business credit cards. The site will offer some other products to promote, but the meat of the site will be marketing credit cards. I am looking at PPC advertising but am a little confused about a few things. First, with almost any popular niche (especially financial services) there is so much competition for adwords slots. Its the same theory with regular search rankings, if your site doesn't show up on the first page of a google search it is essentially non existent to the searcher who's probably not gonna look past the first page. For example the phrase "small business credit card" is searched for 33,000 times/mo, but how many of those times is my ad going to actually be shown? My guess is not very many bc of the competition. Anyone have any ideas how sites like these are successfully promoted on adwords? How many keywords should I bid on. I'm afraid that if I bid on too many my conversion rates will stink. Thanks for any and all advice.

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi there,

Not that I want to put you off from the outset, but the credit card niche is an expensive one in which to play the Adwords game - i.e. you're going to find that the minimum bid for those keywords is extraordinarily high.

So, unless you have a BIG advertising budget, you're right, your ads won't come to the top of the heap very often.

I'd definitely go for the low-hanging fruit in that market where and if you can find any.

May I suggest that you try some social marketing techniques first? Become a respected provider of great information on forums and in blog comments on relevant sites to get some free traffic and search engine standing. What you earn from those efforts can go back into advertising.

I hope that helps!

Cheers,
Ros