Researching keywords is exhausting.  Lots of time perusing the web and taking notes on what you find.  Ugh.  Oh sure, we could pay some firm for that data, but we want to spend our very small budget on the actual ads, not the research.  Which meant that we would have to do the research ourselves.  And since my wife was busy taking care of the kids, that meant I had to do it myself. 

Special Note: I love my kids.  And they are fun and all, but when you are trying to get something done, they sure can be a handful.  So I am forever appreciative of my wife taking care of them so Daddy could “play on the computer”.

Where did I do my research?  Well, I was all over the web doing my research, so I cannot recommend one particular site for figuring out what keywords to use.  But I can say that Google supplied 50% of the tools I needed to come up with the advertisement.

Part of it is the actual AdWords tool.  I won’t go into the details of how that works (because I think I am violating my agreement with Google by talking about it).  If you are interested in advertising, I recommend you create an account with Google and just give it a go.

The other tool I found to be quite useful in my research was the “Google Suggest” search page.  I could explain how it works, but it’s easier to understand if you just try it, so, well, try it!  It’s in the Google Labs, so instead of a link (because it’s location may change), I recommend you go to google.com and search for “google suggest”.

If you recall from the last post, the ad we are choosing is structured like this:

  [ Line 1 Underlined Somewhat Capitalized Title]
  [ Line 2 (and sometimes wrapped
    into Line 3 if it’s a narrow ad)]
  [ URL of advertising website ]

So based on our research, we determined our first ad should look like this:

  [ Free Coin Inventory Software ]
  [ Free Web-based coin Collecting Software ]
  [ www.ikollect.com ]

And although the URL on the bottom line shows our home page’s address, we are actually going to send them to a  page on our a site that is specifically designed for this ad campaign.  Something like:
 ikollect.com/ourawesomelandingpage

As I’m typing this, I am realizing that some of our readers of this site will go our and try to search for us to see our advertisement.  Please oh please don’t do this!  If you click on the Google advertisement, it will cost us money.  So please keep this in mind!

What’s up next?  The landing page!