Joel Orr's World

In the biz, it's called "pay per click" or PPC marketing. Yahoo! initiated it, but Google greatly refined it.

It works like this: You design a very limited text ad according to a template. You select a number of key-word phrases (generally just called "keywords," even though they are phrases). Google shows the ad on pages that have thos e keywords, and on search-result pages where someone searched using one of the keywords.

You bid on the keywords. How much you pay determines how high on the stack of ads your ad will appear.

For example, for my book, "Every Man a Hero, Every Woman a Coach," I learned that the top bid for "good marriage" was .18. So by bidding .19, I could ensure that, whenever my ad was shown in response to the appearance of "good marriage" on a site or in a search, it would be #1.

It was a thrill to put "good marriage" into the Google search field and have my ad come up in the #1 spot - within minutes!

However, days later - no clicks.

So I added words: "better marriage"; "avoid divorce"; and a bunch more. No change.

Then I heard a suggestion: Use the names of competing or related products! I put in "Focus on the Family"; "Dr. Dobson"; and "Dr. Laura." That got things moving.

More on AdWords as I learn more.