TCC Podcast #55: Paid search for copywriters with Amy Hebdon

Paid search expert (and copywriter club member) Amy Hebdon joins Kira and Rob for the 55th episode of the podcast to talk about search marketing, the tools and skills you need to do it right, best practices for testing and messaging, and whether copywriters can drive quality leads for their own businesses with paid search. Here’s what we cover: •  how Amy went from inexperienced copywriter to web designer to paid search consultant •  what paid search is and the various places you can participate in it •  why copywriters need to know about paid search, keywords, ads and landing pages •  how writing for search is different from typical ad writing •  when you should write for Google and when you should write for people (you can do both) •  why you should work backwards from your landing page before writing your ads •  why traffic and clicks are a terrible metric in paid search •  best practices for testing ads so you get better insights, and •  the tools Amy uses to monitor her accounts and ads We also talked about what copywriters can do to attract clients who understand search (and want to work with a paid search specialist), how copywriters might use paid search to drive traffic to their own sites, and where the opportunities are for paid search today. Don’t miss Amy’s straight-forward perspective on the future of paid search and why there needs to be more collaboration than ever in this area in 2018. To hear hear it all, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Amy Hebdon, Paid Search Magic Find Amy on Twitter AdWords Adsense Joanna Wiebe Unbounce Leadpages Supermetrics DuckDuckGo Indeed Upwork Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal and idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the Club for episode 55 as we talk with paid search expert Amy Hebdon about search marketing, the tools and skills you need to do it right, best practices for testing and messaging, and whether copywriters can drive quality leads for their own businesses with paid search. Kira: Amy, welcome. Amy: Hi! Good to be on here. Kira: Yeah, thanks for hanging out with us today. I think a great place for us to start is with your story and how you got into paid search. Amy: Sure! So, I am one of those people who always wanted to work in advertising. It’s been my dream career, basically, since I was seven, and I majored in marketing communications in school and I spent the next several years temping, trying to find jobs. At the time, I was living in the Bay area and it was right around the time of the dot com bust, so I wasn’t able to find anyone who wanted to hire a brand new copywriter with no experience. I ended up a few years later... I got a job in New York as a web designer, so I was going to work every day basically hoping that wasn’t the day that I got fired because really, my web design skills were not that great. I was not that good at coding and I had all these design challenges that I had no idea how to solve. Looking back, I don’t think they actually would’ve fired me, like I think it was fine for what their clients needed, but it was really stressful for me to not know what I was doing and not really know how to do a good job with that. Working in this little design agency... it was a really cramped office space and the woman who sat behind me - there was no space between o...