When expanding your campaigns you may find using phrase and broad match useful and profitable. However, along with these match types comes unwanted searches which can wreak havoc on your campaign.

The most notable ways it can affect your bottom line is: inflated impressions this can lower your CTR, which lowers your quality score and can raise your CPC. Not good. Another way is directly getting a lot of clicks, which will drain your budget. Enter negative keywords. Crafting a well developed negative keyword list can bring your campaign back in sync and give you a better ROI.

Below are 7 tips to help you in your negative keyword research:

1. Use the Search Engines

Take some time to search in google/yahoo/msn your core keywords and skim the results. Sometimes you will find sights that have different themes than what you are after. If it doesn’t match your product or service you might consider adding it as a negative keyword. For example search abs in google. Most people immediately think of 6 pack abs. But skim the results and you will find the organization of American Bureau of Shipping, site on anti-lock braking system, as well as ABS being a type of plastic … who knew?

2. Check out Google Suggest/Keyword Tool

Google suggest and their keyword tool are excellent ways to uncover phrases you’d never think of. You may also want to do a quick search in google news to make sure nothing current relates to your offer.

3. Thesaurus

Use this to get your brain juices flowing. It can also be a good tool to expand your keyword list and add parallel themes to your campaign.

4. Run a Search Query Report

Few people utilize the reports section in Google. Don’t be one of them. A search query lets you know the exact keywords being searched for in your campaigns. It does have an annoying category of other unique queries. Most tracking software can flesh these out …

5. Other Keyword Tools

There are a handful of keyword tools out there, some paid others not.

• WordTracker
• Keyword Discovery
• KW Map

6. Ebay!

Ebay sells anything and everything. If you’re doing retail type products, this is a good way to see if other product descriptions are similar to yours. Take for example “Maximizer” which is the product of a popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management – these things are very pricey) software. however a quick search in Ebay will also show curling irons, vitamins, indoor tanning lotion, audio plug-ins, pool cues etc…

7. Don’t forget your brain

This is your #1 tool hands down. We all want some fancy software where we type in a few keywords and *bam* it spits out everything we want. If you just take the time for a few hours to sit and think and brainstorm, both your keyword list and negative keywords will be much more accurate and worthwhile. Don’t be lazy!

Got another way of getting negative keywords? Share it with us ..

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Not. I remember when I was growing up, a good family friend would always get flustered and uptight when tax season came around. Now I can understand why. Having setup my corporation last year and 2008 being the first full year with significant profits, it stinks having to write out a massive check to hand over to the government.

I guess having a big tax bill is a good problem, but what is the government going to do with my money but throw it away after some failing company or how about into the black hole of social security. That is one good thing though, about having your own entity as a business instead of self-employed. You can save a lot on social security taxes. (Here are some standard deductions for small businesses)

I have an S Corp., and the way it works is, say you drew a $50k salary throughout the year from your company while your business made $200k in profits. That 200k flows through to you ultimately but is not taxed on social security which is about 15%+. So you just saved about 30 grand on taxes because you had a business entity setup. Same with the LLC I believe.

If you are heading into the realm of doing this full time or are starting to make decent money with affiliate marketing, it can only help to setup a business entity. Choosing an LLC or S Corp. is up to you, but the benefits are mostly equal.

(Disclaimer: I am not an accountant and know nothing about taxes so do your own due diligence)

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If you’ve never heard of Jeff Walker, his name is synonymous with very successful product launches. Anyways, he has a video out about a guy who went from food stamps to six figures with a tiny list in a very obscure product niche.

Interesting to say the least. If you have a list of your own, own a product, or are thinking of creating your own product, you should really check out this video. I’ve had a chance to look at some of his material and it’s pretty solid. Just wanted to throw this out there for you guys who are going down this path. Watch the video here

I have some plans to develop my own product …. someday, it’s just that I got a million other things to do before that

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So I was up late last night working on a test campaign to get it going. As usual Adwords Editor was taking its sweet time to upload the campaign, after I had finished the keywords and ads. It was fairly late around 1am and I was sleepy, for some reason I get more done late at night

Well, I woke up this morning to find out I was over $700 in the hole! In my rush to finish I forgot to disable the search network as this was suppose to be a content only campaign. That little check box cost me a pretty penny. I hate to lose money, so any amount is not fun.

Yeah I could have had a lower budget, but content is usually slower to be approved so I figured by the time I wake up it would have just got going. Unlike search where it is usually pretty fast for me.

Moral of the story is don’t get sloppy when launching campaigns. I think I’m going to write up a pre-launch checklist just because of this as there are a handful of things that should be checked.

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Ever wonder how some affiliate are able to dynamically insert the searched keywords on their landing pages? I remember for the longest time, I was always baffled by it, since I’m not much of a programmer or developer. Once I learned I felt kind of dumb since it is extremely simple with just a few lines of code added on your page. I’m sure there are a handful of ways to do this, but here’s how I do it:

Step 1

There is just 1 simple change on your destination URL’s in adwords. Just add
?kw={Keyword} to the end of your destination URL and you are done. For example if your destination URL is http://www.lander.com then the new URL would be http://www.lander.com/?kw={Keyword}

Step 2

Next at the top of your landing page insert this snippet of code

<?php
if(isset($_GET['kw']))
$key=$_GET['kw'];
else
$key=’Everything Else’;
?>

This picks up the value of the keyword being searched with an alternative text of “Everything Else”.

Step 3

Now every where you want your keyword to appear in your landing page just insert this piece of code
<?php echo $key;?> and your done! It is as simple as that.

Here are 3 examples:
http://www.ppcfool.com/keyword-insertion.php?kw=Whats up?
http://www.ppcfool.com/keyword-insertion.php?kw=Anyone Can Do This
http://www.ppcfool.com/keyword-insertion.php?kw=Sign-up for my RSS Now!

Why this is important?

Adding the searched keyword can help your conversions. Anything on your landing page that the searcher is familiar with boosts your credibility and relevancy. How many times have you searched for something, landed on a page and thought ‘this has nothing to do with want I’m looking for?’

Dynamic keyword insertion will give your page more relevancy which will help conversions

Want more landing page tips? Check out my 10 day series on landing pages!