We return this week with our penultimate post in the #SEO4Bloggers series.
This week, I’m going to look at how purchasing Google Adwords can help to drive traffic to your blog. Seems legit, right?? You pay Google, they make traffic go to your blog… that’s the way it should be. You shouldn’t pay for a service that doesn’t work!
Here’s how Google Adwords works: it’s based on a Pay-per-click system. You create an ad, and that ad is based on keywords, both in your ad copy, and behind your ad copy. Every time someone sees your ad (in the sidebar of Google search), that’s an impression. They can look at it for free. But once they click, Google charges you. The price they charge is based on lots of things: how popular (and therefore how much demand there is) your search terms and keywords are and how high you set your budget, for example.
The great thing about PPC is that you get to totally be in control. You set your daily budget, you set how high you want to go with your payment per click.
Here’s the thing, though… if you are just driving traffic to your site, that’s great. But you need to make sure you have something in place once they get to your site to reel ’em in. Ideally, you want to get them to not leave without subscribing to your RSS. Make sure you have those options in place.
The second challenge I’ve found with Google’s PPC ads is that my blog is about food, yes, but it’s about all different kinds of food. So it can be hard to write an ad. 
I finally settled on flogging the gluten-free recipes on my blog. I thought that would be a popular place to guide people to. I created this ad, and had the URL point to the section of my blog with all the gluten free recipes:
Does it work? Oh, yeah, baby! It works!
I was doing this as an experiment, for fun, so I limited my ad budget to $5/day. But the more you put into it, the higher your response will be.
BONUS: if you want to try out Google Adwords, click here for a coupon that will give you $75 in credit when you spend $25. Good deal, right?