When you're first starting out with affiliate marketing, you probably glean over blogs like mine and think "OK, noted. I'll get back to that." Well, it's time to get back to that. As the theme of this blog is generally to save you money and increase your overall profit margin, it's my job to make sure you're informed about the best techniques for saving every last penny. One huge way that will improve the over all ROI of all of your campaigns is to use negative keywords.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are the same as regular keywords, except they tell the search engine when NOT to show your ads. For example, if you have a campaign that is focused on (for example) jobs, you'll want to get rid of a lot of obvious keywords: blow, hand, steve, rim, etc. You get the idea. That way, people searching for things like "gay blow jobs" (not that there's anything wrong with that) or "rim jobs' or even "steve jobs" won't pull your ads up and you won't get disinterested clicks.

What Are Disinterested Clicks?

Disinterested clicks are clicks you don't want. They're from people looking for something you aren't offering. In short, they are clicks that drive up your ad spend without increasing your revenue at all.

On the flip side, interested clicks are the ones you want. Even if someone is not looking specifically for your product, an interested click is from someone who is interested in your topic in general.

So How Do I Implement Them?

Different search engines allow you to implement them different ways. For Adwords, it's as simple as putting a dash in front of each keyword, like so:

-rim
-blow
-steve

With YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing), it's a bit different. When you create an ad group, there's a specific box you put the negative keywords into. As far as other search engines go, it's pretty straight forward and similar to what I just described.

Conclusion

Any time you can make your ad group more focused and relevant to the ad text and your landing page text, do it! It will decrease the amount you have to spend each time someone clicks your ads as well as increase interested clicks. That means less money spent and more money made. Hence, profit.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Strategy, Google AdWords, PPC Engines, Yahoo Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.