The most important aspect of any pay per click campaign is the keyword research and brainstorming. This is the first thing you should do in any campaign and you should spend considerable time on it. Leave it out at your own peril.
Keyword research is necessary, but many people leave it out, choosing instead to rely on intuition or inspiration, but those are poor substitutes. The success of your campaign will be in how effective you are in choosing the right keywords based on search engine statistics and relevancy to your topic.
My recommendation is to first begin with a brainstorming session in which you write down all the keywords that you think will be relevant to your ad campaign. Then you should research the search statistics for each of those keywords using a keyword research tool, either a free one provided by one of the search engine companies or a paid one that is just as effective in helping you achieve your PPC goals.
After you have identified several hundred potential keywords you should then go through them and determine which ones are most relevant for your campaign. Some keywords might be relevant to your overall campaign but only be relevant for certain ads within that campaign. Others might be relevant for every ad in the campaign. Be sure to carefully note the limits and expectations of each keyword. This will help save you a lot of trouble later.
So how many keywords is enough? It depends. If you have a narrow niche then you might want to limit your keywords. But honestly, you should use as many keywords as you can use without watering down your niche concept. You don’t want too many keywords, but you want all that are relevant. That’s why keyword research is so important.
