Keyword wars with AdWords

I have a number of ezines or newsletters that I publish and it's always fun trying to work out what the best way is to boost subscriber numbers. It's highly testable in that you can make a few changes to your site and see what happens. The key figure is simply the fraction of visitors to your subscription page who sign up and there are some simple tricks that work well. The best one for me was removing all other options from my sign-up page.

The logic was simple: don't give people a choice and they won't do something you don't want them to. What I will not do though is "mousetrap". That is a technique which causes the same page to re-load whenever the back button is pressed. It is one of the most annoying techniques on the internet.

Anyway, today I've sent a little email about Google's AdSense referral program to my subscribers and alerted them to a private deal I've set up with an ebook publisher who has produced an interesting book on adsense arbitrage. Under the terms of the deal I can't mention the details online - it is exclusive to my subscribers. (More info about my AdSense newsletter here.)

What else has been going on?

I'm fighting an aggressive keyword battle for an AdWords client and so far we seem to be winning.

The interesting thing here is that with AdWords, the winner takes all if he dares. If you can bid high enough to rank at the top, especially in the blue strip, your click through rates can rocket which helps sustain your ranking. This means you generate more business than your competitors do and so, provided you are running your business competently and don't suffer too many episodes of plain bad luck, you can continue to afford to outbid them.

This is a psychological game because it takes guts and knowledge about your profitability to really go for this approach. The winner is often the person who is armed with the best conversion data.