Is Paid Search Useful? Using Paid Search Advertising

You’ve been blogging for a few weeks and haven’t made $10,000 yet. After hours of researching for ways to make money with your blog, you found out about paid search advertising. Now you’re wondering if you should do paid search advertising or not.

Paid Search Advertising Works

If you have your own product to write about and sell then yes, definitely! Use paid search to bring in more traffic to your new blog. You can promote YOUR product to those visitors and make a good profit as long as you keep everything relevant. Basically, never use paid search advertising to acquire visitors wanting a flying cat tee and then try to sell them on your dancing dog tee.

Now if you don’t have your own product, don’t waste your money on paid search advertising if you’re not experienced. The price of paid search has increased over the years so you’ll want your own product with decent margins to win this game. I’ve been doing paid search campaigns for years to bring cheap relevant traffic to my blogs but it has backfired on me many times because I didn’t have a good plan or product. I was using a paid search for affiliate products like a dummy. The reason this failed is that I was spending $10 a day to make $6 a day in commission, so basically, I was spending more than I was making. Having your own product usually solves this issue.

Paid Search Advertising Mistakes

My first mistake in using paid search advertising was because of not have my own product. I did the proper keyword research for low-cost keywords to bring visitors to Blackandise. And then those visitors would click on my affiliate links to go to Amazon. After those visitors were on Amazon, I had no more control and those visitors would buy a $50 product from Amazon instead of the $500 product that I wrote about. Even though I spent about $20 to acquire those visitors, my commission at the end of the campaign would be $10 instead of $50.

My second mistake in using paid search advertising was a lack of planning. I didn’t have any type of funnel or email-grabbing promotions set up. All of those visitors were basically gone forever since I never tried to capture them in my mailing list. I gave Amazon free traffic and all of the power. This is the area that most new bloggers always fail in because of feeling overwhelmed.

My third mistake in using paid search advertising was having shiny object syndrome. I started looking for higher-paying affiliate programs. I saw some affiliate programs that paid $50+ per signup and thought that I could compete with the hundreds of thousands of bloggers doing the same thing but better. This was a waste of money, I wasn’t experienced enough to acquire the right visitors to send them to a high-paying affiliate. Even though I was able to sign up a few affiliates, I ran out of money because these high-paying affiliates usually made me wait 45-60 days for a payout.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you’ll remember that blogging is a slow game, and using paid search is simply a way to speed up the money-making process. Hell, I’m finally seeing my first 50 posts slowly climbing the top 30 of Google and that was a year-long wait.

With all of that said, as a blogger, I focus on the tech area which is highly competitive. If you’re a blogger in a non-competitive niche, you may not have so much competition for acquiring visitors so paid search advertising may be a great option to try. If you’re interested in learning about Google Ads and using their paid search advertising then please check out our article, Paid Search Marketing on Google Ads.

Related: Use Link Building