Pay per click advertising, which is essentially about how to make the most money from relevant keywords, is a 3 step process.

1. Find suitable keywords 2. Use them correctly in your Google ads 3. Manage your campaign with the right adwords software

By the time we get to part three we will need software to manage our PPC campaign and there is nothing finer than the wonderful Ad Grenade.

For now we will focus on how to find a suitable list of keyword phrases to use in your ppc campaign – at zero cost !

Both ‘Keyword Tool External’ from Google and the first class Traffic Travis are free and do a first class job.

If you are not too experienced in internet marketing and/or money is tight, I would recommend sticking with the free tools to begin with.

How To Compile A Large list Of Relevant Keywords – FREE

To begin with, compile a list of obvious phrases from your niche, for example ‘grow roses’, ‘how to grow roses’, ‘how to grow climbing roses’, ‘how to grow hardy roses’ etc. Another free tip, enter your phrases into the Google search box and see if the dropdown menu comes up with more gems.

Run all of these, one by one, through Traffic Travis, when you get to the ’send to sorter’ stage, eliminate any phrases of less than 2 words or greater than 10 as well as any references to ‘free’ or ‘freeware’. You are looking for buyers not those just after freebies. Download your this list to your Notepad or some other kind of *.txt file where you will eliminate all inappropriate phrases.

Now copy and paste the whole list into the Google tool and hit the ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ key, Google will suggest more keywords which you should consider using. Now download your new list to a text file where you will find it conveniently sorted into alphabetical order.

Your final task is to re-arrange your list into very targeted groups of keywords, that is phrases that are very tightly related. I cannot over emphasize how important this is, your pay per click ads must take your customers to pages that not only use the keywords in those ad groups but must focus completely on the subject they suggest.

I haven’t taken a step-by-step approach to working with these two keyword tools, however Traffic Travis has great tutorials and I’m sure you will have little difficulty with Google’s product.

In other articles I will describe how I use keywords within a campaign and how to manage the campaign itself. When you get to stage three it will become all too clear why, without some kind of adwords software, this whole system would be impossible to manage.

John Rivers