One thing I’m really liking about the PPC Kahuna course so far, is the emphasis on SEO side of things. As a newbie to PPC, I really hadn’t realized how important this part was, and I think it’s been a big reason why I’ve failed in all of my previous attempts. I had always been trying to put up a simple landing page without including other content, and Adwords was continually giving me poor quality scores. Now I know better. =)

The reason I bring this up, is because the past few days lessons are focused on building my own Mini-Net, which is basically a set of different sites that link back to my pre-sell page. Although I was already aware of the basic technique, Jason really shows how to take this Mini-Net technique to the next level. The first step, is to create accounts and add content to Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly, etc. Each site would include a link back to my pre-sales page. Most of these sites have high authority so links from them will help quite a bit. There are a bunch of these types of Web 2.0 sites listed in the resources so I can expand my net as big as I want. I started off by posting the 5 shorter articles I had just written to five of these sites. It took me about an hour to complete the whole process and get all my content published.

Where things get really interesting is how Jason expands his net. The second step is to take advantage of RSS aggregators. From each of my Web 2.0 properties, I can grab their RSS feed from the page and combine all the feeds together with a RSS aggregator. The RSS aggregator will then publish this combined feed as its own public page. There are several of these free services list in the notes to submit to, and this results in an extra layer of links back to my product page, and the Web 2.0 properties themselves. Doing this helps raise the authority of the Web 2.0 sites, and subsequently increases the link juice back to my page.

Finally, the last step is to take advantage of article marketing. By submitting even articles to popular article directories like EzineArticles, you can use the links in your articles to point to both your presell page, and your Web 2.0 sites, further increasing their authority. By repeating this process for all the keywords I singled out in the previous lesson, I should have my site ranking high in the SERPS for all my important keywords.

This is a totally impressive strategy, but I think this is probably where most people are going to fail. I have a feeling, that most internet marketers are lazy, and few will take the time to implement this. I am currently finished with the Web 2.0 part of the strategy, so my goal is to complete submitting my feeds and articles over the next few days. I took a sneak peak at what’s ahead, and I think I will be ready to launch my PPC Campaign soon. Can’t wait!

The first part of day 3, is all about getting my site setup. That means picking a domain name, getting hosting, and setting up a wordpress blog. Honestly, this is mostly basic stuff for me, although there was a neat trick for finding a good domain name which I just used myself. It actually works quite well. The first video wasn’t that interesting to me, so basically just skimmed through most of it. I already use Hostgator as my host and I just setup a WordPress blog on my new domain.

The second part of day 3 is putting some actual content onto your site. The goal here, is to get a pre-sale page done for my product, 5 longer articles to submit to article directories, and 5 shorter ones to submit to web 2.0 sites. I am not the fastest writer in the world, so I think this is going to take me a few days to complete. I was thinking about whether or not to outsource writing to someone else, but I think I will try and write all the content myself for this project. I’ve had mix results when hiring writers from Elance before, and I figure doing it myself will help me stay disciplined.

The pre-sell page is all about getting people in the mood to buy your product, and for that we need to solve their problem. I like how the second video spends quite a bit of time in this area, and Jason shows exactly how to do this. I basically spent a a couple of hours doing research myself and jotting down notes I can use for my own page.

Now I’m off to write my content. I will probably be back in a few days with my next update.

Now that I have this huge list of keywords, I am ready to start with Day 2 of PPC Kahuna. In today’s lesson, Jason introduces two desktop tools, Keyword Corral and the software that this course is named after, PPC Kahuna. After watching today’s video, I am now able to figure out what these two tools do.

Keyword Corral is a software program that works with the data exported from the Google Traffic Estimator tool that is part of Google Adwords. As its name implies, running my keyword list through Google Traffic Estimator will show me how much traffic each of my keywords will potentially receive. To use Keyword Corral, all I need to do is import in the Google Traffic Estimator data for my keywords. Keyword Corral has a several filtering options, including the ability to filter by clicks per day, etc. After doing this on my keyword list, my list now contains only keywords that receive traffic.

Keyword Corral

With this new keyword list, I can then import it into PPC Kahuna. The PPC Kahuna software is supposed to be an ad spying tool. It works by scanning each keyword in a project, and finding how many advertisers are bidding for that keyword. I guess it works on the premise that if an advertiser is consistently showing up for a keyword, then they must be making money off of it. Otherwise, why would they spend the money? This logic seems to make sense to me.

The PPC Kahuna tool is a little intimidating when you first open it up, as it has a bunch of small unlabeled icons in the toolbar. That’s what makes these step by step videos that Jason is doing so valuable, as you can see exactly what he’s doing. Plus, I can pause it if I miss something. Anyway, this part takes some time, as it takes quite awhile for PPC Kahuna to find all the advertisers for my large list of keywords. I also setup the scheduler in the software to run once a day, and I am supposed to let it run for at least a week to get accurate data.

The PPC Kahuna Ad Spy Tool

The last part of the lesson is to input our keywords back into Keyword Corral and filter out the low traffic and high competition keywords. With this smaller list, I can then go through and pick out a small subset of relevant keywords to the product I am promoting. It looks like we will be doing some SEO coming up, so these keywords will be used for that.

I am quite impressed with the tools so far. They seem quite powerful and I’m now starting to understand how to use them properly. Looks like I’m all set for Day 3.