Squeezing the Long Tail for Lower Costs

The long tail is basically those thousands of variations that don’t appear frequently but, when taken in the aggregate, have a very large volume of activity.

There are a two areas where you can significantly lower your costs and capitalize on a fraction of search engine traffic.

• Misspellings – For every hundred people that type icon conversion there’ll be some that type icon conversoin, or icon convrsion.  There will be far fewer ads showing for a misspelled keyword phrase, which means your cost-per-click (CPC) will go down significantly.
• Removing spaces and appending ‘.com’ – Some naive users of the internet think that the Google search bar is where you type the address of your intended website.  They’ll type freeicons.com and your ad will be there at possibly the lowest CPC possible. (We’ve found the appendage of .net, .org, and .edu to bring virtually no traffic of this kind).

Employing these techniques can bring traffic with a very high ROI because the CPC will be so small.  We highly recommend automating this process as much as possible.  We’ve found a tool at LowerYourBidPrice.com which creates every likely misspelling (due to key proximity on the keyboard, the switching of letters, the omission of letters, etc.) of your keyword list.  It also has some nice tools to automatically remove spacing and to append the .com to the end (among other things).  If you’re going to be an AdWords user, the small monthly fee will be well worth the time you save.

The key to profitability with AdWords is to be as detailed as possible.  The 80/20 rule applies:  20% of your keywords will drive 80% of your results, so make sure you’re working on improving the higher volume 20%.  Bearing in mind that we want to be detailed, take some time to organize your keyword list into meaningful groups.  You can see from the mindmap I did above that they’re already fairly organized into groups.  You’ll use these separate lists now when we begin creating the actual ads that will be shown on the search results pages.