I’m glad that the contest is taking off so quickly – hopefully we’ll have lots more readers for all the information we have in store. It’s time to get back to business though and get into writing ads for PPC.

Writing the ads themselves is the next step. A well-written ad will definitely boost your click-through rates and ultimately translate into sales, and you’ll need to write two or three ads per grouping you made in order to fully track and test your results. In addition to that, most of the PPC engines reward you another way by giving you lower bid prices and higher rankings. These are all excellent reasons to make your ads as great as possible.

Of course, as with anything, there is no magic bullet here � no pat formula for writing an ad that you can plug your keywords into, Mad Libs style, in order to instantly get sales � but there are a few guidelines that will help. And remember, two or three ads per group!

� Work your keywords into the ad as much as possible without it sounding goofy. This should be easy to do if you’ve grouped your keywords together tightly like I suggested in the previous chapter.

� Be bold. Putting those keywords in bold fonts is eye-catching for visitors, which is a good thing.

� Get creative with how the ad looks. Different structures help your ads stand out from the crowd, whether you choose to graduate each row of ad text up or down like an arrow or just keep things really short.

� Give it a great headline. The headline is by far the most important component of the ad, so it needs to be clever. Try asking your visitors a question in the headline – �Ready for That Plasma TV?�

NOTE: If you are using AdWords, you can also use a little trick to make sure you get bold font headlines. The trick involves making those headlines dynamic, and you do it by typing the following into the headline field: {KeyWord: Enter Default Headline Text Here}

What this does is ensure that the headline is automatically changed to include the search term. It makes the visitor think you have EXACTLY what they are searching for, and it will be right there in the headline and also in bold. It must have the squiggly brackets around it, and �KeyWord� must be capitalized like that in order to make the words in the headline capitalized.

If you prefer lowercase, then use �keyword� instead. The only caveat here is that the keywords must appear in that ad group in order for AdWords to display it. If they are not found in your list, then whatever you enter in the �Enter Default Headline� part of the code will display instead.

� Include a call to action (CTA). An example of a CTA is �Click here now!� It’s simply a directive to your reader, and it’s very effective.

� Keep it simple. Avoid using extra and unnecessary words. Your ads should be grammatically correct, but you are also limited on space, so keep it as short as possible.
� Spy on your neighbors. Look at other relevant ads and make note of what they do. Which ones caught your eye? Mark it down and mimic it in your own ad writing. Take the best ideas out of everything you see and mix it all into one super ad for yourself.

� Use negative keywords. You make a keyword negative by putting a minus sign in front of it in your keywords list in your PPC account. It allows you to filter out certain words so that your ads do not get triggered for search terms that are not relevant to your ad’s subject matter. It will prevent you from paying for any clicks that won’t do you any good. To figure out which words to make negative, think back to the things you filtered out of your keyword list for being irrelevant when you used the
keyword suggestion tool. If you see people searching for something that includes your keywords but has other modifiers or words attached that make it wrong for what you’re doing, add those extra words as negative keywords in your list.

� Make the ad match your landing page, whatever it may be. If you offer a benefit or expound on some virtue in your ad, the visitor expects to see that on the page they are going to. If they don’t, they’ll leave.

� Proofread that sucker. 5 times if you have to. Spelling mistakes undermine your authority, and even the most accidental of mistakes can hurt you. There are editors having a look at your ads and they will yank them if they aren’t spelled correctly or are using silly grammar.

Don’t get frustrated if you are unsure of whether or not your ad is any good. Since you’ll be writing 2 or 3 different ads per keyword group, you will have multiple chances to cobble together a good one. And if you need a little boost, adwriting-
wise, check out ShoeMoney’s easy tool to help you generate good ad content quickly.