Your keyword list is the ON-OFF switch to all your PPC advertising campaigns. Your keywords are the triggers that determine when you want your ads displayed. If you choose the wrong keywords, you're likely to see poor results, in the form of generating little or no traffic and whatever traffic you do manage to generate probably won't translate to sales. Of course, the wrong keywords could also take your PPC campaigns to the opposite extreme - lots of traffic, but still no sales. This can cost you dearly and is likely to deplete your advertising budget in short order.

As you can imagine, building a good keyword list is a vitally important step in creating a highly successful PPC campaign, so you need to give it the attention it deserves.

Tips for choosing keywords -

When promoting a newly released affiliate program, you'll usually do well if you concentrate on the actual product name. Most big product launches are preceded by lots of publicity in an attempt to build suspense and interest for launch day. This means that a lot of people will be in the market to buy the product, and they're quite likely to search for the product by name. In many cases, these people have already made up their mind to buy, so using the product name as one of your keywords can lead to a significant amount of highly targeted traffic.

If you're in a highly competitive market, steer clear of the general keywords. You'll find that a great many people start out their search using these keywords and since they get so many results, they soon refine their search terms to narrow the resulting choices. A good example here is the keyword 'mortgage'. That's an extremely crowded business and if you want to rank high for this term, you'll find the bidding level will probably be out of your budget range. You'd be much better off to concentrate on more specific terms, such as bad credit mortgages, interest only mortgages, no document mortgage, flexible mortgages, etc. By going this route, you'll be attracting traffic that's more targeted and your cost per click will be lower than for the main term 'mortgage'.

Another good tactic is to go after misspelled keywords. You'd be surprised at the spelling habits of many searchers. When they're searching for 'mortgage', they might actually spell it as 'morgage' or some other variation. By adding misspelled keywords to your list, you can potentially get loads of targeted clicks at a very low cost per click.

Building your keyword list -

You can do this the hard way or the easy way. The hard way is thru exhaustive personal research. Start with the main keyword that comes to mind for your product. Then expand on that keyword by brainstorming to come up with as many variations as you can. You can also try misspelled variations. This is really a hit or miss proposition, since you could easily overlook a great many profitable keywords. Next, go to the search engines and search for each keyword on your list to see how much competition there really is for that particular keyword. You might want to drop the keywords that show too many returns and concentrate on the less competitive keywords instead. Sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?

The easy way is to automate the keyword list building function with specialized software made especially for the task. While there are a great many choices of keyword software packages, wouldn't you prefer to go with the one that offers the best performance and results? Face it, you'll be spending quite a bit of money with the PPC advertising campaigns - doesn't it make sense to use the best tools to get the most for your advertising money?