Advertising Your Website

To increase traffic and to learn about Google’s advertising services, I became an AdWords advertiser. I designed simple text ads, chose queries and keywords the ads should match, and specified the maximum we were willing to spend on an advertising campaign. Google charges us only when someone clicks on one of our ads.

AdWords contributes greatly to Google’s bottom line, i.e., it’s profits. Google offers many resources to educate website owners about AdWords. Rather than developing tutorial material on AdWords, which is likely to get outdated when Google enhances AdWords capabilities and features, I encourage you to learn from Google’s material and those of third parties.

We increased the effectiveness of our advertising by following wonderful suggestions from Perry Marshall’s free 5-day course and from his Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, which you can learn about at www.perrymarshall.com/google/. We tested lots of ads targeted on many different queries and keywords until we found ones that got favorable responses from users, i.e., the ads that users clicked on. And Google has rewarded us by overrunning our ads, i.e., showing some of them from time to time at no cost to us.

Keep your website up.

If your website is not accessible for an extended period of time, Google may reduce the ranking of your site.

Give away content.

I publish Google Guide under a Creative Commons License to enable others to copy, distribute, and make derivative works, as long as they give Nancy Blachman credit and link to Google Guide.

If most of your site’s content is commercial — e.g., pages about your business — consider adding other pages with useful information for the public. For example, if you sell bicycles, include pages or a blog about bicycle paths, bicycle gear, or with tips on bicycling. Publicize these and encourage others to link to them.

Translate your website into foreign languages.

If you don’t know a foreign language, find others that do. Erik Hoy, a librarian, emailed me asking if he could use some material from Google Guide on Copenhagen Main Library’s website. I suggested that he translate the whole thing into Danish, which he did.