You’ve got your domain name and web hosting, spent hours tweaking your website into looking just the way you want it, and finally added all the information or products you need to add for launch. You’re all poised to send out orders, answer questions or interact with the public. So, how do you get ‘the public’ to find you?

Well, if you’ve built your website with SEO in mind you’re off to a good start (and if you haven’t, here’s our trio of articles about search engine optimisation to guide you) in terms of organic traffic, though that won’t be immediate. So now you need to start thinking about actively advertising your site. One of the quickest, and arguably the most measurable, routes is Pay Per Click advertising: think the sponsored links at the top and down the right-hand side of any Google search you do. It’s quick, you can track where every penny goes, and it’s targeted at people who are already looking for something you provide – frankly, if you’ve got some budget to spare (or a free voucher with one of your Daily.co.uk services), why wouldn’t you do it?

So, where on earth do you start?
Don’t go running off to Google just yet – the most effective PPC campaigns are carefully planned, so you need to do some thinking before you sign up. You’ll be needing keywords to target, and it’s going to make your life much easier if you’ve thought about it in advance. The general consensus here is that the first things you should do when you’re considering a new campaign are to settle down with a cuppa and open up a brand new spreadsheet!

That done, you need to do some pondering and some research: think about what sort of keywords and keyword phrases you think people will use to find whatever it is that your website offers. Some things to try:

• Imagine you wanted to buy your products. Now do several searches for them (yes, all of the products or services you want to promote -it might be time consuming, but at least you’ve got a cuppa handy to keep you going!). Similar businesses show up? Fab, you’re on the right track. Make a note of what seemed to work.
• Take a look at the competition – explore their sites and find out what keywords they’re using in their site titles and description. Use these for inspiration
• Is your business specifically local? If so, don’t forget to include your place name – if you’re a hairdresser based in Northampton then ‘hairdresser’ on its own probably isn’t going to get you very relevant traffic, whereas ‘Northampton hairdresser’ is likely to be used by people who live nearby and are after your service: in other words, your target market.

Make a note of everything you’ve come up with so far. This is your starting point.

Expanding your keyword list
Now you’ve got your basic list, you can use online keyword suggestion tools to expand upon it. There’s a good one at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, but it’s also worth checking out http://www.google.com/insights/search for seasonal trends and related terms.

Impose some order on the chaos
By now, you’ve probably got an enormous and possibly unwieldy list of keywords and keyword phrases. So, how are you going to impose order on the chaos? Start by identifying some broad themes – for us, for example, it’s product types: Web Hosting, Domain Names, eShops and so on. These will form your ‘Campaigns’.

You’ll probably then want to break each campaign down further into several sets of related keywords – so, our Web Hosting campaign also includes ‘Linux web hosting’, ‘Windows web hosting’, ‘Low cost web hosting’ and so on.

What next?
You should now have a huge but well organised spreadsheet full of keywords and keyword phrases. This provides the basic structure of your pay-per-click campaign. I’d make sure you’ve got backups, if I were you!

Next, you’re going to need to decide on your preferred keyword match types, write some compelling creative and set your budget and bid prices. We’ll talk you through all of this, plus tracking and campaign management, in future articles, so subscribe to our RSS feed or keep checking back for updates.

If there’s anything specific you’d like us to cover, just drop us a line at blog@daily.co.uk and we’ll do our best!