Reader: Can you give me a list of directories to submit my blog to?

Gayla: I’ve never used blog directories and some of my blogs have gotten fairly high on the search engines without them. I have focused on using the proper keywords and did just fine.

Reader: Is there any place I can go to learn more about how to use keywords?

Gayla: What I do for keywords is:

Watch Technorati to see what people are searching.

I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find variations of keywords and phrases.

Example: Say you’re wanting to use the keyword HOLIDAY — the Adwords keyword tool will tell you all the variations of the word holiday in how it was searched recently. I personally try to utilize as many keyword combos as I can with searches of 1,000 or greater. You’d be surprised at just how many visitors you can pull in that way.

Go to the Google Blog Search and see what other blogs similar to yours may be writing about, how they are tagging etc.

Yahoo Buzz is another great place to watch to see what the movers and shakers in the search world are. Try to incorporate as many of those top search terms into your blog posts as you can and tag them as the keywords that are being searched.

Another tip I’ve found to help is by bolding out the keywords within your post. You don’t have to do this on every single occasion, but it does help to do it once in a while. In as much as your eyes will pause on the bolded words, so will search engines.

That’s not saying I’m totally against blog directories — it’s just that I’ve never found the need to spend my time submitting to them.

If someone has an opinion that supports directories, I’d love to hear it.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So make sure you scoff at anyone who tells you something is “free.” If you receive traffic from some place and it costs nothing, but you had to spend 300 hours to generate it, was it free? No, at worst, you could have earned minimum wage for those 300 hours. That is—at worst—it cost you 300 hours multiplied by minimum wage.

At best, you could have been doing something productive with your business that would have earned you ten times more than minimum wage during each of those hours. So don’t listen to this “free traffic generation” nonsense. Even traffic that comes from search engines has a cost – and that’s your time.

Now, with that caveat in mind, there is such thing as relatively cheaper traffic. If it takes you very little time to optimize your search for the search engines—and the result is considerable “organic” search engine traffic—well, great; you should generate traffic through search engine optimization.

In general, traffic that comes from search engine optimization does actually turn out to be quite cheap. In exchange for the time it takes to create some relevant content, use the proper tags, and exchange a few links, you could get a steady flow of several hundred visitors per day to your site.

If your wage is the only cost, this will be relatively cheap in comparison to pay per click traffic, which could cost you several dollars per visitor.

Other than simply being cheap, organic search engine traffic is also good for a number of other reasons. One obvious reason is that you do not have to spend time monitoring the flow of organic SEO traffic for fear that you will exceed your budget.

With PPC, you have to constantly check your Adwords account and other PPC accounts to determine how well your ads are performing. This is not so with organic search engine traffic. And the less time you spend thinking and actually generating traffic, the more you profit per visitor. If you spend your whole day watching statistics and you think you’re in profit – then you’re not adding your own wage to the equation.

Another major benefit to using organic search engine traffic is that it tends to convert better. In fact, many experts would argue that it converts much better than links from “sponsored” sections – even if they are on a search engine.

People tend to be considerably more skeptical of anything that looks like an advertisement. In contrast, if your site comes up as the first non-sponsored result on Google for a particular keyword, you will gain enormous credibility for that fact alone.

Last, there is one other major benefit of organic search engine traffic: high rankings tend to beget high rankings. That is – if you maintain the top position for certain keywords on Google, there’s a good chance sites will start linking to you, as you will be considered an “authority” on your topic.

This will solidify your top ranking and also improve your ranking for other keywords. In this sense, high search engine rankings can beget high search engine rankings.

And there you have it: there are several major benefits to using organic search engine traffic over popular alternatives, such as pay per click traffic.

Even though organic search engine traffic isn’t truly “free”—it costs your time at the very least—it may be considerably cheaper than other forms of traffic generation. Not only will it covert better than “sponsored links,” but it may beget future traffic; and will cost comparatively less.

Bidding to make a profit on Google Adwords might not seem as obvious as the experts tell you. In their 5 minute videos, they’ll show you some quick technique to figure out how much to bid and for what keywords.

You’ll walk away thinking you understand the process. And then something strange will happen: you’ll be absolutely unable to implement their suggestions. No matter what you try, you’ll struggle to break even with your campaigns.

So why is this? Why can’t you experience the success that the experts suggest is completely within your reach? One common culprit is inept bid-setting. Many people who are new to Adwords do not know how to calculate profitable bid amounts. In fact, it is quite simple, but you have to work through it carefully. Here’s a step-by-step process for doing it:

1. Based on past selling experience, determine a rough conversion rate for the product you are selling. For instance, if you can usually convert 4 people out of every 100 who land on your salespage, then you have a conversion rate of 4%. Even if you cannot estimate this perfectly, try to come up with some rough measure before moving on to the next step.
2. Now that you’ve determined your conversion rate, you now need to calculate how much you profit per sale. Don’t get lazy here. If you sell an affiliate product and make a 50% commission, you might be tempted to simply multiply the price by ½. In reality, if you’re using Clickbank or Paypal, they will extract a fee, so you’re not earning 50% per sale. You need to calculate this, too.
3. Next, take the profit per sale and multiply that number by your conversion rate. If, for instance, your conversion rate is 4% and your profit per sale is $50, then you would multiply 50 by .04 and get $2. This means that the maximum amount of money you can afford to spend (if your conversion rate is 4%) is $2 per bid – your break-even point. Spend more than that and you’re actually losing money.

The most important thing to observe here, however, is the relationship between all of the variables.

For instance, think about what increasing your conversion rate means. It means that you would either profit more (without changing anything else) or it means that you could increase the amount you could pay per bid without exceeding your break-even point. i.e. if you cannot break into profit with your current conversion rate, you may have to improve your sales page.

Additionally, if you increase the price of your product (and it doesn’t decrease conversions significantly), then you can afford to bid more without exceeding your break-even point.

In addition to simply setting prices below your break-even point, you will eventually want to refine your bids so that you are deriving the greatest amount of profit.

Let’s say, for instance, that you will earn $50 per sale on a product that has a conversion rate of 4%. Given the keywords available, you can bid $1 per click and get 700 visitors per day or pay 30 cents per click and get 300 visitors per day. Which should you choose?

In the first instance, you would sell a total of 28 units and make $700 ((28*50)-(700*$1)). In the second instance, you would sell a total of 12 units and make $510 ((12*50)-(300*$1)). Even though you are spending more per click on advertising in the first instance, you will still profit more, which means you should select this option.

At first, using this entire math may seem unnecessary, but it isn’t. Without tracking these variables and making decisions based on them, you will have no idea how to set bids; and will suffer as a consequence.

Pay per click is perhaps the best advertising medium available for Internet-based businesses and for small businesses in general. It allows them to carefully cut the advertising fat by choosing exactly what they will pay for and what they won’t.

They not only get to select the keywords they want to bid on, but they only pay when someone actually clicks through one of those ads and is directed to their site. This is a far cry from paying for advertising on a billboard, which might generate a lot of “impressions,” but few actions.

Unfortunately, though, advertising through PPC programs, such as Google’s Adwords, is no piece of cake – despite what many gurus may tell you during a sales pitch. In fact, it may be extremely hard or even impossible to get a reasonable return on your investment in certain niches using pay per click advertising.

However, if you keep a few basic principles in mind, earning an excellent ROI on your PPC advertising investment is nearly guaranteed. So where do you start? Arguably, the most important part of creating a successful PPC advertising campaign is writing an ad that will increase your click through rate (CTR), so this is a good place to start.

Writing an ad that commands a high ROI can be broken down into the following steps:

1. Pick the right keywords for the ad. While this seems like it has nothing to do with writing the ad, it actually is the first and most important step. If you want your ad to have a high click through rate, it must be narrowly focused around a set of keyphrases that all have the same root keyword in common. This will allow you to repeat that root keyword 1-3 times throughout the ad. Whenever someone searches for one of those keywords and your ad pops up, the root will appear in bold, since it is part of the keyword they searched for. This will make it stick out clearly, drawing them to click on it.
2. Avoid fancy stuff in the headline. Here, all you want is a simple description of the product or service offered: “Grand Piano for Sale.” Also, remember to include that root keyword in the headline to make it stick out more. People need to immediately see whether or not your ad is relevant. And the best way to communicate that is to say exactly what you’re selling.
3. Communicate the best feature associated with your product on the first line of your ad (below the headline) or clarify exactly what is you are selling. For example, in the “grand piano” ad above, you could ad something like the following: “Choose Between 700 Grand Pianos” or “Pay Only $500 for Your Grand Piano.”
4. In your second line, communicate a benefit associated with your product. Here, rather than saying something physical about your store or product, you will explain what the product can do for the person. The product might “Save You Hundreds” or “Teach You How to Make Millions.” Make sure it is compelling and relevant. Ask yourself (and possibly a friend) whether or not this is something that would make you take action.

There you have it: a 4-step blueprint for creating an “attention-grabbing” PPC advertisement. Once you put your first ad up and allow it to rotate, you will then want to start testing competing ads.

The best way to do this is to alter one part of the ad at a time. For instance, start off by altering your headline until you get a better CTR. After that, work on your first line – and so on. After a few weeks of working out changes, you should have an effective, powerful ad.