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The Question

After posting my PPC tip yesterday, a few readers asked me variations of this question: Would bloggers use AdWords to promote their blogs?

The Answer

Well there isn’t one Yes or No answer. A more targeted question might be, What types of bloggers might use AdWords to make money from their blogs?

Most personal bloggers may never have the need to purchase advertising to drive additional traffic to their sites since a lot of niche blogs can get decent natural search engine rankings for their niche markets. This traffic can be obtained for “free” if they go around to enough communities and get strong back links to their site with the targeted anchor text. Or they could buy links like some SEOs.

But there is one blogger in particular who is currently using AdWords to make money online, and you may have heard of him. His name is John Chow.

I ran across his ad today (left) on the blog site SoulCast.com. I was very intrigued since I can’t remember the last time I saw one of his ads, and it was the perfect opportunity for me to address the recent inquiries about this exact topic.

Without even clicking on the ad I knew which page it was being directed to. But of course, I had to click on it to make sure (sorry, John, I only clicked it once!). And my instincts were right, the ad is targeting his Make Money page. It’s actually a really well-written ad for a number of reasons. The headline makes it clear that the ad is for existing bloggers only; non-bloggers need not click! Smart. The offer is outlined as “I’ll show you how to make money” and the benefit for the user is it’s “100% free.”

“Hey…I have a blog. I want to make money. And I want to learn how for free!” That’s what his target audience should be thinking. “Click.”

The Make Money page is called the landing page, so optimizing this page is one of the most important parts of the campaign. The first line of content in the landing page reads: “FREE E BOOK – Download Make Money Online With John Chow dot Com and learn how I went from Zero to over $10,000 a month by blogging.” Most likely a good portion of those who click through to his landing page will download the e-book since it’s free, and it’s exactly what was advertised in the ad. This is what is referred to as a “positive user experience.”

I Still Don’t See Why He’s Buying Traffic!

You might be thinking, “Why is he even paying for traffic if he’s already so popular? He’s already got nearly 8,000 subscribers, isn’t that enough?” No.

He’s an online marketer, and as an online marketer, he knows there is a whole lot more money to be made if he’s supplementing natural search results with other forms of paid traffic. He’s already created the money-maker, and it works, why not push more traffic to the page? There is only so much traffic that a site can get through search engine results and word-of-mouth marketing. My mentor once told me that internet marketing is a zero-sum game: if John isn’t getting the paid “make money” traffic to his site through AdWords, then someone else is. It’s just how it works.

Most likely an average of 15% of his new visitors will download the e-book and/or sign up for one of his affiliate programs. The free affiliate sign-up links on his Make Money page are low risk since they are very trusted systems, verified by John himself, and they’re free to sign up. He makes either a commission or CPA (cost-per-action fee) from the networks every time someone joins. Also, his affiliate links are embedded in his e-book content, another way to capture any sign ups that might not have occurred on the page. For instance, here is a link from the e-book which takes the user to the Text Link Ads site through his affiliate re-direct link first:

My guess is that he started to push AdWords more at the beginning of June. His e-book was officially posted on his blog on May 30th. A screen-shot of estimated US traffic provided by Compete.com shows an exponential increase right around the same time. Click on the image to enlarge it:

Now, I am assuming there is a correlation between the e-book, the traffic increase, and the AdWords advertising, but I have a hunch it’s not far off from what happened. Regardless, it’s smart of him to introduce a product such as his e-book, market it on his site, and drive PPC traffic to it to obtain more conversions.

The great thing about this type of business model is there is no added overhead or cost to providing the product, as would be the case for an e-commerce company that sells apparel or handbags. It took him one day to create the e-book (learning to convert html to PDF) and probably another day to create the ad campaigns. Now he just has to watch the money roll in. This is how the big boys do it.

Conclusion

For those of you wondering what type of bloggers use AdWords to make money blogging, it’s those who have a marketable product or site, who know how to target a specific niche audience, create the right ad copy, have a landing page that converts, and, additionally in this case, provide the product to the user for free. John Chow is one smart cookie! Anymore questions?

[Thanks to Nick, Chris and Jack for inspiring this post!]

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