Good Morning Folks,
Its been a busy few weeks. I launched a private business website as well as another free Voice Over community website called I Love Voice-Over Work I’ve also been on the hunt for a new apartment outside of Cairo (specifically in a new area called New Cairo … yes very original) and then finding an apartment and then finally leasing the place. It’s been pretty hectic and add to all that I’ve also had a crunch at work put all these different things together and you have a pretty stressed out Mahmoud Taji.
But I did have time during this period to get myself involved in some self promotion with Google Adwords.
Lets first break down a few of the different services that Google provides and that might help you promote your services or monetize your blog.
1. Google Adwords
This service allows you to use google’s search engine and targeted advertising system (adsense) to bring in more customers. In Google Adwords you can post pay or pre pay google to distribute a text based (or image based I guess) advert through out its network of advertising areas. This doesn’t just include google.com (the search engine) but also includes the different areas that google adsense ads are posted. You pay google per click. Google provides you with data regarding how effective your advertising is as per the impressions (how often your advert is shown) per click (how often people click on that advert) ratio.
2. Google Adsense
This service allows bloggers, webmasters, publishers of online content to make money off their websites by displaying advertising on their digital content. They are paid per click. This money is sent in the form of a check to you directly. They do not deposit the money into your Paypal account because paypal is a direct competitor of Google Wallet or whatever its called so … that kinda sucks.
The process
Google wants to make the process of giving them money as painless as possible… But they’re smart about it so once you decide you want to advertise with Adwords then you go to adwords.google.com and register. The registration process is (once again) pretty straight forward. If you have a gmail account then you can tie that gmail email account to the adwords service or you can create a new email account specifically for the adwords service so that you don’t mix the two. Or if you are a busy person who gets loads of emails daily then it might be a good idea to get a separate email account for security reasons and so you don’t miss any important emails from them.
Once you are registered you will be asked to give them your credit card information. If you are pre paying then you are setting a limited budget for google … they will run your ads until the money runs out and then your advert will be stopped. If you post pay then your advert will run until you tell them to stop.
Creating your first campaign is as simple as clicking a button … and within that campaign you can include as many variations of ads for your website as you want. This is beneficial because ultimately Google will provide you with data on how well each of you different advertisements pieces are doing. If one of them is doing better than the others… catching more eyes … making more people click… then it might be a good idea to delete the other ads so you don’t waste your money and time with an ineffective ad.
The Multiple Advertising Campaigns
So to recap … Google makes you create a campaign and then under that campaign you can create different ads for the same website. But why call it a campaign? Well the truth of the matter is that if you have several websites with different URLs that provide different services Google will allow you to manage all of them under the same Adwords account. Its straightforward and convenient and it allows you to utilize the same billing information to pay google for multiple advertising campaigns.
I have chosen to pay Google using the prepaid service and have been able to promote 2 different websites of mine using the same budget. The learning curve is not that steep, you’ll pick up most of the system’s operating logic pretty quick and are also provided with tutorial videos by Google to help make the learning process short and sweet.
How Much Do YOU Want To Pay?
The nice thing about the Adwords system is that you decide how much you want to pay Google per click. The Google Adwords system is an auction based system that is built on the ability to bid on Key Words so if you want to advertise to people who specifically search for the term “Arabic Voice Over” then that is one of the Key words you want to bid for. You can pay Google as little as 1 cent per click or 1000% times that depending on how much you are willing to pay to get on the 1st page when someone decides that they want to search for a term you are bidding for.
As you can expect the keyword Voice Over is not cheap … but ultimately its not as expensive as keywords like Cars or iPhone so choose your budget and keywords wisely.
Budget Per Day
The other thing I did with Google Adwords to limit my spending is give the system a per day budget. I told google that I don’t want to spend more than 1$ per day for my voiceover campaign (for the other website I put 75 cents) This means that Google will display my ads as many times in 1 day per that keyword as is required to use up that 1 dollar per day. The adwords system is tied in to the Adsense system … for publishers (like me) who have online content the possibility of making a little money from your blog or website helps because you can use it to promote yourself using one of the many online advertising networks like Adsense (there are many … but today I’ll just be talking about google’s network… I’ll post a list of alternative online advertising networks to place ads on in a later post).
How the Adwords system ties in to the Adsense system is pretty simple. When someone wants to place ads on their blog or digital content page ( I don’t advise that you put ads on your personal site… very tacky) then you tell google what kind of website it is and who it targets and what kind of people visit it. That tells google where it should show its targeted advertising segment of ads. So on Taji’s voice emporium I place voice over related ads… you might then suddenly find my adwords advert (which is promoting my voice over website) displayed on my own blog.
Thats it for now
As you know I try not to continue beyond a certain article length… and I’ve pretty much reached it now with 1200 words.
I hope you enjoyed the article and found it beneficial to promoting your voice over (or any other) business. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments section.
And remember to visit the ILVOW voice over community stories website and leave a story!
Taji