Does Anyone Care About Your Product or Idea?

Ten minutes from right now you can have a Google Adwords campaign up and running, sending visitors to your web site. The speed at which you can do new things to drive traffic to a website and make changes in Google’s system to increase or decrease potential traffic is stunning.

Having said that, if you launch an adwords campaign for a product or service that only 5 people in the USA look for a day, you might be waiting a long time for a sale! “Bright ideas” quickly made into a website, and hastily launched ppc campaigns will end in nothing but frustration if there is no one actually in need of your product.

There’s nothing more frustrating than building a web site and waiting for people to just “show up.” It’s worse than watching paint dry. That’s why PPC management is one of the most important parts of the online world. Your bright ideas and rush to market can also be a trap. Sometimes people do rash things when they haven’t properly researched their market.

It’s really easy to blow money on PPC management—you can pick a keyword, write an ad, and get a bunch of visitors who cost you money but have no chance of ever wanting to buy something from you. The following question will help make sure you don’t embark on a new business venture or buy the wrong kind of traffic for your web site. Ask this:

Are people interested in this Product?

Doing some preliminary searches with keyword tools can give you answers that will keep your expectations realistic and prevent you from running into disappointment later if you discover that there isn’t as big a market for your product as you’d hoped for and that online marketing can’t bring you as many new customers necessary to create a sustainable cash flow. Even if that happens, you may still discover other untapped traffic sources that may be profitable.

You can get a quick estimate of the possible interest in your product in a matter of seconds. Google has a helpful search-term suggestion tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Enter a handful of your main general keywords, and Gogle will tell you how many searches its servers got last month for each one.

For example, you have a company which sells a skin-care product designed to slow the aging process. Let’s imagine you’ve just started and wants to bring more folks to your web site through Google. Where do you start?

The first thing to do is to brainstorm a starter list of possible keywords. You’ve got plenty to work from:

skin
beauty
acne
cosmetics
makeup
cosmetic surgery
dermatology
anti-aging
wrinkles
oils
moisturizers

And this is nowhere near complete. But if we go to Google’s  keyword selector tool and enter these terms to see how many searches they get in a month, here’s what we find out:

KEYWORD  /  LOCAL SEARCH  /  GLOBAL SEARCH
skin   24,900,000  /  24,900,000
beauty   16,600,000  /   20,400,000
makeup  9,140,000  /  9,140,000
cosmetics  5,000,000 /   6,120,000
acne   5,000,000  /  4,090,000
dermatology  1,220,000  /  1,000,000
oils   1,220,000  /  1,000,000
anti-aging  1,000,000  /  673,000
cosmetic surgery 823,000  /  673,000
wrinkles  450,000  /  301,000
moisturizers  301,000  /  165,000

Notice what’s going on here:

The keyword “skin” got over 80 times as many searches as the bottom term, “moisturizers.” That term may be one of your most valuable players.

When you run your Google Keyword search on any one of these keywords, you’ll invariably get a list of irrelevant terms as well. Those will become your negative keywords.

There’s a huge number of people who may want skin-care products but who’ll use different word combinations than are on the lists we’ve come up with. So for a successful PPC management, we’ll need to brainstorm for more, and then search Google’s Keyword  tool again. You can make sure the “use synonyms” box Is marked when you do your searches and Google will suggest additional terms you may want to consider.

According to Google, the skincare terms we selected are very high traffic words, suggesting that we could conceivably get tens, even hundreds of thousands of US searches in a month on those top keywords and confirms that there is a strong market for skin care products.