Google AdWords seems pretty cut and dry — you bid on keywords and serve up ads to potential customers, right?
Yes and no.
Bidding On High Value, Non-Competitive Terms
Yes, it is true that most businesses and regular folks take a very simple approach to advertising on Google: Bid on keywords customers type into the search engine and build ads that motivate them to visit your product/service page. But what if you’ve got a limited budget and want to sell your skills instead of a physical product?
Take a page from Alec Brownstein, who created one of the cleverest ways to get a job interview.
Alec bid on the names of influential creative directors and crafted a fun message that encouraged his targets to contact him for a job interview (see video below). You could just as easily bid on the name of a local business or even surprise a friend on their birthday with a custom wish.
By the way, Alec’s little experiment cost a grand total of $6.
Real Time Rival Attacks
Let’s take this process one step further. Instead of bidding on an individual’s name and sharing a targeted message, what if you pumped up the volume on your ad spend and bid on a competing product?
For example, since we’re speaking about search engine marketing, consider the recent IPO of pay per click marketing firm ReachLocal. If you’re a competing search marketer — even a smaller competitor — you could write an ad such as:
Is ReachLocal a Scam?
Many small businesses think so.
Try Googling ‘ReachLocal Scam’.
www.YourSiteName.com
Admittedly this isn’t the nicest thing to do, but if it’s true and Google doesn’t reject the ad, you can raise some hell for your competitors. The point of all this is to take advantage of searches related to what you want in life.
Finally, give your search ads a little juice by influencing the chatter on social networks (mention your strategy on Twitter, the blogosphere and YouTube — to name a few). Meanwhile, check out Alec’s experiment: