Before you start an account with MSN AdCenter, I recommend you look to see what promotions are available. To find this, go to the following website:

http://www.reviewsolution.com/affiliates/free-credits.php

At the time of writing this, they are giving each new Advertiser a $50 advertising credit to use for their account, but this amount varies from month to month (sometimes it's as high as $200). To apply this credit to your account use the promo code they supplied and enter it when you are at the billing section of your account setup.

To start an account with MSN AdCenter, you need to go to the following web address:

https://adcenter.microsoft.com/

Once you are there, click on the text link that says "Sign up today to start advertising right away". At the time of writing this, it is directly under the user sign in.


Entering Your Account & Billing Information

After you click to "Sign up" for AdCenter, you will be taken to the AdCenter account signup page. This is a pretty basic page, you enter in your name, address, email, etc. If you don't have a company or organization, you can just enter "None" into the "Company/Organization" text box. You can also choose "Other" for your Industry type. Now submit your information by clicking the button at the bottom of the page, this will take you to the billing page.

Once your at the billing page, enter you billing information. If you have a promotional code, you enter it at the bottom of this page. Once you are finished, click on the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page. You will be charged a $5.00 account setup fee. After you click "Submit", your account will be created and you can setup your advertisements.


Creating an AdCenter Campaign & Order

First off, I will explain what a campaign and an order are. These definitions may seem a little crude at first, especially if this is your first time to advertise online. It will be easy to understand within a page or two.

An order is where you organize your text advertisements and your keywords and keyword bids. You will most likely have several orders within your account.

For example: If I was selling Sony Laptops and Dell Laptops, I would have two orders. One order would be titled "Sony Laptops" and in this order I would have all my keywords for sony laptops and I would have a text ad targeted towards people looking for sony laptops. The other order would be titled "Dell Laptops" and in this order I would have my dell keywords and my dell text advertisement.

A Campaign is where you organize your orders. Within a Campaign you will have several orders. In the campaign you specify the locations you want your advertisement to be displayed and you specify how much money you want to spend per month in advertising for that campaign.

For example: If I was selling computers (laptops and desktops), I would have two campaigns. One campaign would be titled "Laptops" and within this campaign I would have my two orders "Sony Laptops" and "Dell Laptops" (from the example above). The other campaign I would title "Desktops" and within this campaign I would have several orders, each order created for a specific desktop computer manufacturer.

If you're having trouble grasping the structure of the campaigns and orders, you can look at the picture to the left. This picture was taken from MSN AdCenter. You can see that within your Account you have one or more campaigns, and within your campaigns you have one or more orders, and within each order you have one or more advertisements and several keywords.

Creating the AdCenter Campaign & Order

When you first log into your MSN AdCenter account, you will see a welcome screen. Simply click on the "Get Started now…" button to continue.

Now you will see a somewhat empty screen that may look a bit intimidating to first time users. If it does look a little scary, don't worry, it is extremely easy to use.


To create your campaign, click on the "Create Campaign" button in your AdCenter account.

A new page will load and you will see several options for your adCenter account. The main things you will want to change are the Campaign Name and the Order Name. You can see where to edit them in the picture below. You can also set the appropriate time zone.

For now we are just going to create a quick basic order for the campaign. So I recommend naming your campaign "Review Site". I would just name the order "General" since this first order we are creating is just going to be a general order (we will create more orders later).

You can name your campaign and order anything you want, the names will never affect the performance of your account.


Now you will want to select the locations you want your advertisement to be displayed. Please don't select "All Locations". Only choose places that will actually buy your product, otherwise you will just be hurting your campaign and wasting money.

I recommend choosing specific countries and regions to advertise in. To do this, simply click on "Select Countries/Regions". This will display a new box where you select the countries you want to advertise in.

When you are finished selecting your countries (I recommend selecting more than one), make sure that "All days of the week" and "all times of the day" are checked. This will keep your advertisements online all day so you will receive the most amount of traffic.

When you are finished click on the "Continue" button at the top or bottom of the page.


Writing Text Advertisements

You will want your text advertisements to be catchy, accurate, and attention getting. I recommend using the text ads ReviewSolution has supplied. To access these text ads go to the page you want to advertise and click on the link titled "How to Advertise this Page" located at the bottom of the page.

If you decide to write your own text advertisements, I recommend basing your text advertisements after the text ads ReviewSolution supplies.

The Title should draw the users attention towards your text advertisement. Then the description should convince the user to click on your text advertisement to go to your review site.


Getting Keywords

In case you don't know what a keyword is, a keyword is basically a search term that someone enters into a search engine to find related webpages. So if you search online for "dog food" the word "dog food" is your keyword.

When you're prompted to enter keywords for your advertisement, I recommend you use the keywords that ReviewSolution has supplied for the review. You can see these keywords by going to the review page you want to advertise and clicking on the "How to Advertise this Page" link located at the bottom of the review page.

If you don't want to use the keyword list that ReviewSolution has supplied, you can always create your own keyword list by using the techniques below:

Here's how to get keywords for your Review:

1.) Go to Google's Keyword tool by visiting the following website: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal 2.) Click on the tab titled "Site-Related Keywords" 3.) Where it says "Enter a webpage URL…" enter the URL of the webpage you want to send your visitors to (remember I mentioned this earlier, this should also be your destination URL used in your test ad) 4.) Then click on the "Get Keywords" button.

Google will now display a large list of keywords relevant to the review site address you've entered. Next to each keyword you will see a link titled "Add". Click on this link to add that keyword to the keyword list you want to use (your keyword list will appear on the right side of the page). Go through the list and add all the keywords that you feel are relevant to the review website.

Once you've selected all the keywords you feel are relevant to your keyword list look towards the right side of the page just under the last keyword in the keyword list that you've added keywords to. You should see something that says "Download These Keywords". When you see this, click on the link titled "text" to download these keywords in the form of a text file to your computer.

Now you have your keyword list for this review created.


Adding Keywords to Your MSN AdCenter Account

Now that you have your text advertisement and your keywords, it's time that you add the keywords to your account. To do this, go to the page in your AdCenter account which asks you to enter keywords (it's the page after you create your text advertisement). Once there you will see several different options you can use to add keywords. I will go over importing your keywords from a list and adding keywords by copying and pasting.


Importing Keywords from a list – This is the option I recommend you use. I find it very easy to use and very straight forward. Basically all you do is download the AdCenter Keyword Template (you can find it in the tools section of the Data Center) and on the template you enter your keywords, bids, and destination URLs to upload to MSN.

To upload your keywords to AdCenter choose the "Import or export keywords" option from the drop down menu.

Now click on the "Browse" button to find the AdCenter Keyword Template which contains your keywords (I show you how to use the template on the Tools page in the Data Center). Once you find and select your keyword list, click on the "Import" button.

It may take a while for AdCenter to import your keywords, but be patient. You may or may not see an error message like the one below flash on your screen. If it does appear, don't panic. This message just means that AdCenter found some keywords that it doesn't like and it is going to remove those keywords for you. So this message should disappear soon.

After the keywords are added to AdCenter, they will appear on your page. When they appear you can click on the "Continue" or "Submit" button at the top or bottom of your page.


Adding Keywords without Importing through a list – If you are going to add keywords without importing a list, you will need to make sure that the "Add multiple keywords" option is selected in the drop down menu on the keyword page in AdCenter. Once this option is selected (it is usually the default selection) open the keyword list on your computer. When you open the keyword list, select the keywords you want to add and Copy them (you can do this by highlighting them, right clicking, and then choose Copy). Now Paste the keywords into the text area on the left side of the page in AdCenter and click the "Add to Keyword List" button. AdCenter will now add the keywords to your account. When the keywords are added they will appear on the right side of the page, and when this happens you can click on the "Submit" or "Continue" button on the top or bottom of the page.


Finishing & Submitting Your Order

You are now at the last page you will see before your Order is successfully added to your account. On this page you will see a list of all the keywords in your account.

Three columns you should become familiar with are the "Status", "Base Bid (CPC)" and the "Avg. Pos." columns.

Status Column – This column tells you the review status of your keywords. If your keywords have not been reviewed yet, the status will display "Pending". If your keywords have been reviewed they will either display "Approved" or "Rejected".

Base Bid (CPC) Column – This column lists your current maximum bid (the amount of money you pay for each click) for each of your keywords. If you want to adjust the bid for a specific keyword you can do so by typing in a new bid into the box. In the picture above, all of the bids are set to $0.20 per click. I created this account for one of my clients and this is the bid price my client specified. I don't recommend starting off with a bid quite that high, unless you know what you're doing. If you want to re-adjust all of the max bids for all your keywords, you can do so at the top of the page. There you will see an option that allows you to enter a new bid price and apply it to all of your keywords.

Avg. Pos. Column - This column displays the predicted average position of your keywords. This is the rank your advertisement will be displayed at for that keyword. You will want this number to be 8.0 or lower. This is because MSN usually displays eight advertisements per page for the average search query. You will want your advertisement to be on the first page as often as possible, but don't risk losing profits to increase your rank. If the your rank number is higher than 8.0 then I recommend that you increase your bids to increase your rank, but as I said above, don't increase them so much that you risk losing your profit. As far as rank goes, any rank on the first page is good. Everyone tells you that the number one, two, and three ranks are the best, but just focus on getting your ranks at the number one position for now.


Now that you have adjusted your keyword bids you will want to save your order, but before you do so, you will need to specify your budget options.

To do this scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see something that looks similar to the following picture:

Make sure to check "Do not use incremental pricing" and if you want your advertisement to be displayed as often as possible, select "Spend budget until depleted". Now enter in your monthly budget. I recommend setting it at about $100 - $200. Don't worry, this doesn't mean you're going to spend this much. In fact, I doubt you'll even spend half that much.

When you are finished with this, then you can click on the "Save" button at the bottom or top of the page. After you click that button you will be taken to a new page which tells you that your campaign and order have been successfully saved and are waiting to be activated upon editorial review. It also gives you the option of returning to your campaign or creating another order for your campaign.

When you have finished this you have successfully created your order for MSN AdCenter.


Adjusting Your Bids for MSN AdCenter

Having perfect bids will allow you to keep a first page position as well as give you affordable traffic with a good profit. MSN AdCenter's minimum bid is $0.05 per click. I recommend starting your bids at $0.05 and then increase your bids so you can receive a higher position, but don't increase your bids so much that you risk losing your profit.

After you've adjusted your bids to increase your ad position, I recommend you wait 5-7 days before you adjust them again. This is so you can get a good idea of how much your new bid has helped or hurt you. If you wake up the next morning and see that you have a keyword that has received too much traffic with not enough results, then I recommend that you immediately lower that bid.


MSN AdCenter Rejected Keywords

MSN AdCenter is a little different from the other search engines because most of the time they only reject keywords when you are submitting them so they never really are rejected once they are in your account.

So if my keywords are not rejected, why does it say they are?
This may seem a little different, but when you think a keyword is rejected it is not really rejected at all. Instead it is your text advertisement that is rejected for that keyword. You see the way MSN AdCenter works is they only allow you to advertise certain keywords with certain text advertisements. This means that text advertisement A may be displayed for 80% of your keywords while text advertisement B will be displayed for 20% of your keywords.

When your keyword says it is rejected, it really means that none of your text advertisements have been approved to display whenever that keyword is searched.


How to Gain Favor with MSN AdCenter

To compete with Google and Yahoo, MSN AdCenter was created to give favor to advertisers who have relevant orders, text advertisements, keywords, and websites. If you have all of these things it is a big boost for your account. This is why I'm going to tell you how to achieve this with MSN AdCenter.


Basically, since the technique for avoiding the Google Slap works very well for all search engines, the MSN technique is going to be very similar.

The way you gain favor with MSN is to organize your account with your website. If MSN looks at your account and sees that your advertising looks more like gibberish than a work of mathematical art, then you're going to get penalized. You see, MSN uses computers and robots to determine whether or not your account is relevant or not. If your account setup is sloppy then MSN will tell you that your keywords are pending or declined even though your keywords could very well be active. But if your account is very organized then you will be rewarded with very low bids for your clicks and all of your keywords will be active in MSN AdCenter.

Here's what you need to do:

Make sure you organize your keywords. By this I mean group your similar keywords together and put each group of keywords into its own order. This way MSN will look at all of your keywords in your order and think "These keywords are all related to each other, now it is much clearer to see what this advertisement is about".

Next MSN will look at your text advertisement in each order and will compare it to each keyword within that order. If your text advertisement is related to your keywords then you will be rewarded by MSN again. This is why we grouped similar keywords together and put the keywords into their own order.

Now come the tricky part. You will need to link your keywords to your text ad, your text ad to your website, and your website to your keywords. What this does is tell MSN that you are the ideal advertiser. Instead of having random keywords with the same text advertisement you have specific keywords pointing to a specific text advertisement that goes to a specific website. To do this try to include the same keyword in your text ad and your website. Like if your keyword is "make money", include the phrase "make money" in your text advertisement, and also make sure the phrase "make money" is in your website text.

If you do all these things then MSN will be appreciative and will reward you with much lower bids, higher quality scores, and better rankings.


If you want one on one help with MSN AdCenter I recommend signing up with the Affiliate Data Center at www.AffiliateDataCenter.com. There you will receive one on one help from me for Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter.