Recommendations are what people trust, share and live by today.
Does your advertising match what people are saying about your product/service?

Using social media is what everyone should get involved in, if not you are falling behind. The stats tell the whole story…

Have you seen great results from social media?

What Niche is your blog in? List it below and a link

I wouldn’t usually start a post by saying this, however, there may be a number of people who don’t even use Google AdWords to drive traffic to their websites. Is this you? What is your preferred method of driving traffic to your blog?

This blog post IS for those of you who would like to create a successful AdWords campaign – as I am about to show you the only 4 tips you will need this year for building a high quality score. This is especially important when learning how to set up a WordPress blog as one of the most common questions about blogging is… how do I get people to my blog?

Now I will get to that shortly, but first I just wanted to let you know that there are MANY ways of generating traffic to your blog, if you have read my eBook (A Simple Blogging Guide) you may have found out a few of these ways which are working for you already! Today, I wanted to take you through the process of setting up a successful Google AdWords campaign – this is how you get people to your blog using Paid Traffic Methods.

Let’s start from the beginning…

Google can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It really depends on what you are using! I have mentioned before about AdSense and how you can get cut off without word of warning, well AdWords is a little better. I plan to help you avoid having your account suspended by getting higher Quality Scores (see below).

Ad Examples

Put simply, Google AdWords is essentially a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising platform. You have seen examples of their ads everywhere, they are the results that are targeted to your keywords when you search in Google. How did you get here? Did you search for terms to do with Blogging? You may have clicked one of those links…

Basically, if you want to have your ad on Google, you need to use Google’s AdWords platform.

Don’t know what this is? Well, I didn’t want to bore you with a detailed explanation, so I have found a short video that explains it really well. Head over to the media section or click What Is Quality Score and Why Does It Matter? This will open in a new window so you don’t have to worry about losing your position.

I want to now take you through the process of creating a quality ad, which in turn will hopefully increase your quality score and provide you with lower costs. There are a few steps involved, so bare with me! The most important part probably comes closer to the end, but it needs to be combined with the next few pointers.

LANDING PAGE

This is where the relevancy of your ad is extremely important. When AdWords provides you with a quality score, they will look at how relevant your landing page is and the type of experience they feel a user will have for your targeted keywords. Sounds complicated, right? It is less complicated than you think. Just follow some of these steps;

• Ensure you have your targeted keywords in your Title and meta tags (Description and Keywords). Below is the real example of my Simple Blogging website (click image for larger view).
  

Meta Tags

• Include your keywords approximately 2-3 times in the body of your landing page.
• You must ensure what you are offering in your Ad you are delivering on your landing page.
• Provide a few links to authoritative sites in your footer. This may not be easy for everyone, and it wasn’t for me either. So all I did was link to a few articles I created on a couple article directories.
• Put a couple of links to your website, including any Terms & Conditions you may have, Privacy Policy, a Contact address and also an About page if you have one. This shows Google you are legitimate and not misleading the person clicking through to your landing page.
• Create a folder on your domain with your keywords as the name.

These are the main points you should consider for your landing page. You can see an example of my landing page that managed to get a Quality Score of 10 just recently in a small test I did. I will show you the results shortly, but for now, check out my landing page to see all the above in place – Simple-Blogging.com/WhatIsBlogging/

Notice how I created a folder on my domain and used the keywords I was targeting?

OK so hopefully you have made a few changes to your landing page if necessary. If you have done all the above and are still seeing a low quality score, then it might be your Ad in Google AdWords, the keywords you are targeting or the current bid you have in place. Let’s talk about these now.

AD CREATION

Staying consistent with the example above, I will go into depth on the keyword of ‘What Is Blogging’ – as this is the keyword phrase I performed my test with.

Here is an example of the AD that I used, so you can see EXACTLY what I did. I will later show you the proof of how this Ad performed and stats that you might not expect to see.

The exact ad I used

Now to be honest, I wouldn’t say this is the greatest ad ever created. I think many people would agree with me! However, the results of this ad were great and it all comes down to how you create the users experience from searching to delivering what you promised! Let’s take a closer look at this ad;

• My ad title is the keyword I am targeting. This will be highlighted (or bold) when a user searches this exact keyword phrase.
• What I offer in the ad is exactly what I deliver on my landing page. I mention the guide I am offering and it sums up what the guide will achieve!
• The URL that is SHOWN has to be exactly the same as the URL you SEND the user to. So, what did I do? I created a new folder on my simple-blogging domain and put my landing page in there!

Now there doesn’t seem to much to it, right? It is one of those ‘Ahhhh’ moments. It will become common knowledge to you (like it did for me) as soon as you see your quality score rise! There is more to it though, and the next part might just be the most important part of creating your Ad and having a high quality score.

RESTRICT YOUR ADS TO ONE KEYWORD

For so long I had been constantly told to build a keyword list, and I strongly believe in that. However, it is what you do with those keywords that is important.

What you want to do is take your keyword (in this example, What Is Blogging) and create your ad around that one keyword. So, you create your campaign, then create an ad and then add your keyword(s). All you want to do is add the following keyword phrases;

• what is blogging
• “what is blogging”
• [what is blogging]

This is the important part. By limiting each ad to your selected keyword phrase you are targeting a very specific set of people. Rather than having 30 keywords and your ad trying to stay relevant for each keyword, you can create SPECIFIC landing pages based on the keywords you want to target.

You may want to read that paragraph again…

In summary, if I want to target “How to setup a blog” I would create ANOTHER ad, ANOTHER landing page by substituting the keywords (you may need to reword a few sentences) and ANOTHER keyword list with only;

• how to setup a blog
• “how to setup a blog”
• [how to setup a blog]

Yes! You are seeing the pattern here… So you want to know how this campaign went for me? I will show you right now! (click to view larger)

What Is Blogging – Quality Score (10)

Unfortunately, you can’t see what my maximum CPC bid was, but I will tell you; $1.40. As you can see my average CPC’s are $0.84 and $0.59 respectively. So you can see, even though I have bid up to $1.40 per click, I have spent much less than that because my quality score is high and the overall user experience is above average! I am not here to brag, as there isn’t anything to brag about. You can see there was only a few hundred impressions.

An important statistic above is that my CTR (Click Through Rate) is @ 13%. Depending on who you talk to, a figure of approximately 2% is seen as a decent CTR. This means that Google will love you EVEN more because you are creating a great experience for their users.

SET YOUR  MAX CPC BID

You want to set a bid that is slightly HIGHER than the bid required for a 1st page listing. I know what your thinking, ‘I don’t want to spend that much’ – I agree. It should be noted, you don’t want to be targeting keywords over $2 or so, if your bids are required around this amount, I would suggest looking for better keyword phrases. If you must target those keywords, then you will know the competition is VERY HIGH!

That said, you want to monitor your progress, by bidding higher you are telling Google you believe your Ad is relevant and it should be shown. You might start off with a quality score of 5-7 but once you have some stats behind you this will change. You will start to see your average CPC cost come down as your quality score increases.

All that said, what I wanted to show you though is that YOU CAN have a good quality score by simply following these few steps. I created this Ad about a week ago and have been very pleased with the results. You’ll notice I don’t have what is blogging as a keyword by itself (so no “” or []), I hadn’t seen many impressions at all for it (even less than “what is blogging”) so I didn’t feel it was valid for this blog post.

Then you have to try this method.

Not everyone wants to throw money at their blog, I mean let’s be honest starting a blog is seen as a very cost-effective way of starting your own business for whatever niche you are in. However, IF YOU DO then you want to make sure you are getting the best possible value for your money.

Once you master getting your high quality score, you should think about looking at the ROI (Return On Investment) of your ads. Just remember, it is tough to make money without first spending money.

I hope you enjoyed this post, I certainly enjoyed the past week monitoring my results and being able to share this with you. After all, I want to see you succeed – If somewhere a long the way I can help you get to where you are going, that is what makes this all worth while!

Let me know if you have had any success with the following method! What is your highest quality score? Did you see your average CPC costs come down?

This video by Google UK outlines what Quality Score is and why it matters to you.

Are you seeing a good quality score in your adwords account? If not, let me know below and we can go through some ways to help improve your quality score!

This great video takes you through a presentation how you may not necessarily need the highest bid in order to rank the best. There is an emphasis on ensuring quality experience for the user, so you may have a lower bid, but a user has a better experience on your Ad – so you will rank higher.

Does this finally make sense now?

I bet you are wondering how far we have come in a year, right?

Social Media is incredibly important for your brand, regardless of whether you are one of the top brands in the world or your own personal blog.

Do you agree?

I personally love this kind of technology, anything that pushes our imagination.

Is this the direction you see social media and technology taking us?

Here is the video that takes you through the new Theme Customiser, created by Otto.

To find out What Is New In WordPress Green see the blog post for more details.

Have you tried using the theme customiser yet?

With this new release comes some great features that all WordPress users and developers will be excited about. If you haven’t upgraded already, I highly recommend you get the update and start taking advantage of the new features below.

Arguably, quite possibly the best feature that has been released across the WordPress 3.x platform. Have you been looking for a theme in the theme directory and wandered what it would look like with your current content? Or have you downloaded 30 themes to find that you really only want to use 1 of them? No longer do you need to worry about this.

What you need to do to see the new Theme Customizer with Live Preview, is head over to Appearance > Themes and you will see ‘Live Preview’ link underneath your themes. For any loaded theme, you will see a new link right underneath the description called ‘Customize’.

Once you click on the ‘Customize’ or ‘Live Preview’ buttons you will be taken to a new screen where you can edit any available options in real-time. You can then save your options and activate your newly edited theme. There’s a great article that shows just how to utilize the theme customizer in your themes – Otto goes into great detail about this new tool and has some great content directed to developers. However, he created a video that shows just how the Customizer is used, which is located at the top of this post.

When WordPress 2.1 came out a new theme feature was introduced, the custom header. This is the image that is shown in the theme’s top header section. You can see how to implement a custom header into your theme.

The greatest thing about the update to Custom Headers is that they are now flexible. What this means is that previously they had to be a specific width and height and if you didn’t have the dimensions right your blog would look off.

Have you ever tried to post a link in the caption to the author of a photo you have added to your post? Or just wanted to provide a link to another website or post from the caption of your photo?

With WordPress 3.4 you can now add HTML into your captions. So you can now credit your sources!

Previously if you wanted to embed your tweets into your posts, you’d have to download and install a plugin. A new format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL, known as oEmbed has made this possible. It is now easier than ever to include a tweet into your posts… All you have to do is simply take the link to your tweet and add it on a new line in your post editor.

The Top 7 WordPress Social Media Plugins: Free traffic, that is the most important thing for any blogger.. simplewpgenius.com/?p=465

— SimpleWPGenius (@SimpleWPGenius) June 6, 2012

Note: In order for your Tweet to show, make sure you remove the link so it is simply shown as text. e.g. http:// twitter.com/SimpleWPGenius/status/210249549372063744 (I put a space in so it wouldn’t load the tweet)

There was a huge number of updates in development, themes and plugins. Not to mention a heap of additional feature updates that I simply just can’t cover here.

Click to view a full list of updates for WordPress 3.4

There are some additional resources below which helped in the creation of this post.

How to leverage the Theme Customizer in your own themes
WordPress 3.4 “Green” – Release
What’s New in WordPress 3.4

As a blogger you know that the competition is high therefore, it is necessary for you to find a way to make your blog more interesting than other blogs; and how do you achieve this – WordPress social plugins. There is an endless number of social WordPress plugins with diverse functionalities and advantages so much that you could get totally confused about choosing the right ones.

In this post you’re going to learn about the 7 top wordpress social plugins that you can start using now to help drive the needed traffic to your site.

This is a social plugin that allows you to place buttons for people on your post as well as help you choose any type of social media website that you want to target. There are also customization capabilities where you have the freedom to customize the plugin according to your website theme. Share This provides you with tracking reports, and you have a pool of display options to choose from including a series of widgets, a series of icons or buttons and a single icon.

Click to view plugin

Sociable is by far one of the top WordPress social plugins available now. On every single post of yours the plugin adds a button on a wide variety of social bookmarking website and allows people to easily vote for you and submit your post to various other social media. Sociable gives you the chance to select any buttons of your choice.

Click to view plugin

The lunch of Google plus one came also with the plus one plugin and it has become very popular ever since. It may be too early to decide if it can compete with Facebook and Twitter buttons, but adding this plugin is essential for traffic purposes even more that it is now incorporated into search engine results. Apart from adding it to your site, you can also customize it to share your favorite url in search results.

Click to view plugin

Adding to the recent facelift it received recently Digg Digg has become of a must have social media sharing tool for every serious blogger. This plugin has been reported to increase traffic from social media for up to 7 times. Just like Mashable, the plugin gives you the chance to add floating share bar to your blog post. Digg Digg is one of the most updated plugins with new features being added every now and then.

Click to view plugin

Get social is another easy to customize tools bar that allows your readers to effortlessly share your articles. Even though it doesn’t allow for buttons before or after your content, you have the chance to utilize the floating bar on the lefthand side.

Click to view plugin

These two are definitely one of the 7 top wordpress social plugins and they have become a fundamental for any blog so it is relevant to mention it here again, just to emphasize its general importance. Facebook and Twitter are indispensable since they have the highest number of social media users in the world. The plugins can easily be implemented by copying and pasting code snippet into the text widget on your site or blog.

Click to view Facebook Subscriber Widget

Click to view Show Twitter Followers

Knowing how your posts are performing on social media network is important for strategizing and reorganizing, and one plugin that can help you do that easily is social metrics. With a slick dashboard you can monitor, track and compare how well each of your posts is performing. You also have the chance to know which of your posts is winning the viewership race in Google +, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and more. For Social Metrics to work you obviously need to add the plugin from all the major social media sites to your blog or website.

Click to view plugin

Many bloggers especially the ones that have sites that seems already doing well with traffic make a terrible mistake of overlooking the benefits of taking full advantage of these plugins. If you’re one of them it is advisable that you make a u-turn so that your site can begin to perform better and yield the kind of traffic you couldn’t have imagined.

Are you using any of these plugins?