No Good Keywords for Adwords!

I wonder if anybody else has ran into this situatioin, and has any idea of a solution.
I intended to try to sell an e-book for $29 using AdWords but gave up. The e-book is on the topic of 'how to retire in X country.'

Problem here is there are no appropriate keyphrases to use.

The keyphrase 'X country" gets 56 hits per day, a lot of traffic but totally untargetted.

On the other hand the keyphrase 'retire in X country' and all the variations and similar keyphrases thereof, get 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 hits per day - virtually nothing.

I haven't been able to come up with any keyphrases that represent a happy medium - either tons of untargetted traffic, or dribbles of targetted traffic.
With the sale price of my e-book at $29, it doesn't work in either scenario.

If I tried to pay for all the untargetted clicks, the monthly click cost would be well over a reasonable expectation of ROI, and if I just paid for the targetted clicks, I'd earn barely enough to live on one peanut a day.

So I seems like getting AdWords to work very much depends on
1) the sale price of the product. It's got to be right.
2) Whether appropriate keyphrases get good volume of traffic.

I figure I'm just SOL with my product when it comes to Adwords.

Given the high monthly CPC total with the high-traffic keyword scenario, and the low volume of sales with the low-traffic keyphrase scenario, I can't get a moderate volume of well-targetted traffic. C'est imposible!

Has anyone else run into this situation?

This is supposed to say clicks per day, not hits per day:

The keyphrase 'X country" gets 56 hits per day, a lot of traffic but totally untargetted.

On the other hand the keyphrase 'retire in X country' and all the variations and similar keyphrases thereof, get 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 hits per day - virtually nothing.

If you want to hit a gold mine the first few times you use adwords, forget it. I have spent over $500 and promoted everything you can imagine, and I'm still trying to find a good product.

If it doesn't seem to work, trash it and move on, there are thousands of affiliate programs you can try.

what exactly is "X country"?? Is that the main term or is it supposed to symbolize "paris france" and such???

ex: "how to retire in Paris France"
"how to retire in Berlin Germany"
"how to retire in Toronto Canada"

I have a few suggestions but I need to know that variable first.

You need to find webmasters who run English language (assume that is the language of your book) websites for that country and ask them promote your book for a nice percentage of the sale price.

There are lots of webmasters and people who know webmasters here.

Market research, product demand and cost of advertising should all be done before deciding if selling a $30 ebook is viable through adwords. Not every business venture/idea has merit.

That said, I've run ads on AdWords that Google estimated traffic at 0.1 and I got very steady traffic in orders of magnitude greater than what they estimated.

I would suggest advertising on the most targeted phrases and set your daily budget high to capture every opportunity for an impression.

I would suggest bidding on

retire <x>
retirement <x>
live <x>
living <x>

where <x> is the country in question. HTH!

This has happened to me too. Getting underestimated by google.

If you run a test campaign at 5cents a click, that means you could still come out even with 1 sale for every 600 AdWords clicks. That should be quite easy to beat in terms of conversion rate.

My suggestion is making a 'wilcard' category with anything that semi-relates to the subject. ie. retirement homes in country x, social security in country x.......you might be surprised at what gets a lot of impressions...then try to focus your sales towards that........also, digitalpoint.com has a keyword tool that might help you come up with some ideas.

With that you'd end up paying $30 for the clicks and lose a $1 once the sale went through. No profit with a .002% conversion rate.

Since your audience is very targeted your conversion should be better. There are only so many retirement in X packages out there.

I'd suggest doing every possible combination of the top 50 countries or so and do "city country", "country city", "country" and "city" Also variation with keyword structure.

Example for Paris:

"Retirement in Paris France"
"Retirement in France Paris"
"Retirement in France"
"Retirement in Paris"
"Retirement Paris France"
"Retirement France Paris"
"Retirement France"
"Retirement Paris"
"Paris France Retirement"
"France Paris Retirement "
"France Retirement "
"Paris Retirement"
"Retire in Paris France"
"Retire in France Paris"
"Retire in France"
"Retire in Paris"
"Retire Paris France"
"Retire France Paris"
"Retire France"
"Retire Parice"
"Paris France Retire"
"France Paris Retire"
"France Retire"
"Paris Retire"

And so on. Once you cover all your main keywords and 30 countries you should have a huge list. Always do "phrase" match to increase targetting because broad match is a waste of money and no control.

Try Content matching for a week when you setup all your keywords.

NOTE: Most searched consist of 3 keywords and most users dont use articles when they search (in, at, the, to, a, etc.) but it helps if you have both to cover your a$$.

Good luck.

Wow, this is too much. Don't assume by my silence that I'm not following along. Those are superb ideas. I'm digesting all this. If or when I have some questions, I'll post again. Much obliged for this input.

PK,

Good list - lot of work if you wanted to cover several hundred towns/cities eh! Do we know if anyone built a tool to automate some of this?

Regards, S

I think it's called Excel, sweat and tears ;)

Thats how I built my list of 400,000. Took me a month or so but "Fill cells down" is very useful.

I wish there was a prog to do that since it would be a useful addition to any SEO. A simple random script would do the trick I believe.

Ah Excel the swiss army knife in office :-)



Hmm sounds like another item to add to my perl script todo list. If anyone has suggestions for features please feel free to post them here and I'll make it freely available when done (problaby 4-6 weeks down on my todo list).

Regards, S

That would be great! Some possible feature would be:

The ability to have 3 or 4 fields that a user can enter in their keywords and have PERL spit out every possible combination.

The ability to put quotes around each combination for exact matching would be nice. Doesn't have to be on certain combinations but a simple Broad or Phrase dropdown would be nice.

The ability to be able to put in two keywords into one field so phrases like "trips to" stays together and PERL doesn start making combinations like "to trips" because that would be hell to clean up if it ends up as a big list.

Thats that for now Thanks for the effort Spartan!

I whipped up a quick Windows app that will generate permutations for up to 4 keywords (which can be any text) using either quotes or brackets for bounding. It places the results inthe clipboard so that you can paste them into Notepad, Excel or directly into the AdWords keyword input form. Let me know what you think!

It should be self explanatory. ;)

I've posted the latest version at SEO Help:

Keyword Permutation Generator