Completely, Utterly, Totally New

[JASpencer]

There are newbies, and then there's me. I have been looking for a way to market my wife's alternative medicine practice. We've slowly been building up her practice using word of mouth - but now we want to put some money into marketing her practice. The return on investment model and quick testing using Google Ads seems to be compelling.

When I say we don't have any marketing, I'm including a website. So I'm going to make a virtue out of necesity. Is there any advice out there about setting up new websites specifically to use Google Ad Words and similar programmes?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[fspezia]

You can build a landing page on line to begin with. That would be a one page site that you can point your ads at.

Check out Google's page creation tool:

http://pages.google.com/?pli=1

[JASpencer]

You can build a landing page on line to begin with. That would be a one page site that you can point your ads at.

Check out Google's page creation tool:

http://pages.google.com/?pli=1

Thank you. I will investigate this.

[Discovery]

Spencer, my advice to anyone new to Pay Per Click or online marketing is this.

Do not create anything, including your website, until you understand the fundamentals of how Pay Per Click (PPC) works, SEO works, and how to track your marketing campaigns using Tracking URLS, analytics coding and other techniques. Most all of this is explained in simple language at the search engines help and tutorial sections.

If you spend a day taking the free google course (https://adwords.google.com/support/?hl=en_US) (sign up for a google account, but do not create and publish ads).
Read and watch tutorials on MSN's Adcenter
Go to adcenter (http://adcenter.msn.com) on the resulting page click the help link BOTTOM RIGHT then search for "Adcenter tutorial"
Take the Yahoo Seach Marketing (YSM) Tutorial (http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/migration/index.html)
Read through the SEO sections here on SEW and sign up for a SEW membership.
Then you will have the good grasp of the basics to move forward.

You need not be a refined guru on PPC and SEO, but the basic rules of Marketing apply to all online marketing campaigns and you need to have them in place from the get go.
First set your goal then: Test, Analyze, Refine, Test again.

If you do not have your website set up to track your efforts, or your PPC campaigns set up to pass the data and do not understand how to structure your PPC campaigns or track your SEO efforts, you will simply be guessing what works and what does not. You will have no data or incomplete data to test, analyze and refine. That will be an expensive, frustrating experiment and one that I see lead to many postings that "PPC doesnt work for my business".

PS: if your wifes product involves anything that could be considered a drug you will have to apply for special permission to advertise on most search engines.

Get reading - Discovery