Thread: advertising on google

does anyone here advertise on google? get any response from it? you have to put in a monthly budget, but i cant find what would be a good average budget? good and bad experiences with this?

artemisia

I like it. I set my monthly budget at about $20-30 I think. Some months it goes over by a few dollars, which really made me angry at first, but it seems to average out.

I'm VERY specific with my keywords, I make sure the name of my city or surrounding area is part of the keywords so I don't waste my money on a lot of general bellydance hits.

I really like it.

i run google ad word campaigns for clients as part of my day job.

the main trick is to use specific key word language to generate the most qualified leads. finding these keywords is a chore, but worth it. these ppc ads can get very expensive, very fast, depending on the amount of competition on your keywords.

i cant give away all my secrets here b/c it is viewable by the gp. however, if you have specific questions you can email me
info at sabrinabellydancer dot com

thanks

i've mainly typed in "bellydance" "bellydancer" etc in dutch, paired with my city/location... i'll have it going for a few months, or even just weeks, and see whether or not it pays off... (as in brings enough business to justify the costs)

How about just adding more keywords and meta tags etc to your website? I paid for google ads a few years ago and noticed no difference at all. But agreeing with what the others already said, choose your keywords carefully. I wish I had more time to do it..

Personally, I think Google ads can be a good way to drive traffic initially to your site, but ideally it's better to have a long-term strategy to get your site to the top of the index. I'd rather pay the money to rank well naturally than to hope people click on an ad. Obviously it's harder to nail the more competitive keyword phrases, but local terms are generally pretty easy to do.

Also, be aware that "belly dance" and "bellydance" are two different things. "belly dance" is the more common version.

It is good as an additional advertising strategy. The best is optimizing the website for good ranking. The next best is buying advertising online at sites like this one.

I would agree that it can drive some traffic to your site but if the traffic is not converted into customers this can prove frustrating. Targeted advertising, bellydancer sites like this one for example - best way.

I repeatedly notice the google ads for two dancers in my area. I can't say for sure that I'd notice them if I didn't know them personally, but they come up almost every time I search for anything belly dance related.

Ok, that came out sounding wrong. What I meant was that I'm not sure I would have noticed the ads if the names I recognized didn't catch my eye. (not that I wouldn't notice the dancers themselves!)