[Reader Acquisition] The Importance of Paid Search Marketing for Authors and Writers

Unit 4: Reader Acquisition

Part 2: Paid Search Marketing

An authorpreneur should understand the importance of using SEO as a tool, optimizing all website content to ensure it contains keywords that will help promote natural and organic search marketing. Paid search marketing takes this a step further, by allowing you to pay to appear at the top of the page in a search engine. You know the first few lines where the sponsored links appear? That is where you are paying to be. You will be using your marketing skills and money to target specific locations, keywords, or even interests via a search engine. Paid search marketing services also provide you with a precise analysis of how many people see your listing, how many click on it, and also the percentage of people who take a specific action once they land on your website. You are basically creating targeted ad copy to entice as many people as possible onto your website, by paying for prime search engine result space.

Before you launch into paid search marketing be sure to do your research and determine whether it is going to provide a great return on investment for you — there is no point wasting money if this marketing tool won’t really work for you just now.

You may have already heard about Google Adwords, even done some research for yourself on the process, and understand that when used correctly it can work extremely well. An Adwords campaign has a pretty simple process: you choose the words or keywords that you want to use to trigger an advert, and Google makes sure that your business appears in front of a potential new customer when they use those words in a search. What Adwords does is put business and client in contact via an ad, based on what either side wants from each other.

To help you choose keywords, use the Google Search Console. Your first step will be to verify your website. After your website is verified, it will take about 30 days for the console to populate with search information. To access the report, log into Search Console, and then click “Search Traffic” in the left-hand navigation.

Using this report, you will see how people find your website. Although Google doesn’t give you 100 percent of your website’s query data, the Search Query report is still is a goldmine of information — if you take the time to sift through it. For example, you could use search query information to determine which types of content pages to create that might be missing from your website.

The Kissmetrics Blog is a wonderful resource for getting in-depth with keyword selection:

As an author, you will first need to determine what you want your potential customers to search for when they are looking for you, and then what you would like them to do once they have found you. Adwords is super smart in that it allows you to really target your audience.

Go to Google and do a quick search. You will see that right at the top are the sponsored or paid searches, and then if you scroll through the search results below you will see that Google has provided you with targeted search results based on location, personal preferences, and even previous searches. Keep this in mind when you create your own Adwords: you want to target the right people, with the right content, at the right time. Make your money go a long way! Adwords will help you stand out from other authors with the same reader base, and bring you to the top of the list, even if other businesses are a lot bigger than you. This will give you the advantage to really make yourself seen and heard, as long as your listing is captioned correctly. Adwords gives you the opportunity to step in front of your customer, but you have to do the work to bring them to purchase your books. It is therefore important to research what works and what doesn’t before you launch your own Adwords campaign.

It is also important to track how well your paid marketing campaigns are working, in order to make sure you are getting a good ROI. Adworks has an efficient tracking system that will provide a LOT of data, so it’s good to be able to pinpoint the metrics that provide the most information. Our advice would be to keep the following at the top of your list:

• Quality score: this measure how well your keywords are working and how relevant they are towards attracting your target market. A high quality score will help your ad rankings remain in good standing. A low quality score means that you need to revisit your keywords and captions as something has probably fallen through the cracks.
• Click-Through Rate: this will help determine your quality score, and also helps see whether you have created the right keywords and ad copy.
• Conversion Rate: this is the number of people who click through and end up performing the desired action on your end. This could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or something else. This is where you will be able to see if you are making a good return on investment.
• Cost per conversion: this is where you can see if your investment is costing you more than it is bringing in.
• Wasted spend: this is where you can calculate how much money you are losing with the clicks that don’t become conversions. You can help reduce this waste by adding negative keywords to your campaign to filter out certain searches that can result in wasted clicks.

Adwords Performance Grader provides a free overview of your Adwords campaign in terms of metrics and measures you up to other similar competitors to give you an idea of where you stand, and where you can tighten up your process a little. In any case, understanding how Adwords can help your business is important, and understanding how to make it work can really open your business up to a larger public who are interested in reading your work, even if they don’t yet know it!

Did you take a moment to find out which keywords readers type to find your website? Did you find a new tool to use? What is your experience with keywords and SEO?

Hop on over to the AuthorpreneurLaunch Forum with comments. I’ll get back to you asap.

Warm Regards,

-Marquina

Growth Hacking Tip: Send emails from a real person

Rather than sending emails from info@yourcompany.com or even “Tom at Company”, send them from real people with their first and last names.

We’ve found people respond better to actual people when compared with generic company emails.

Photo of the Week: 📖My budding author!📖 Lil dude created “Rocket Plane Book” 🚀✈️ with looseleaf paper and tape.

Meal of the Week: Dinner at the Yamato’s house — Roast chicken🍗, boiled baked & fried potatoes🥔, glazed carrots🥕 and green beans almondine 👍. YUM

Originally published at Authorpreneur Launch.