Creating a personal ad on Google was done in three easy steps – headline and description; keywords and billing. Well, I didn’t really go through the billing process as that wasn’t the purpose of my experiment.

As a soon-to-be-graduate, I have started working towards my bright future by testing various tools and practices. The most recent one is Google Adwords and its efficiency in personal branding. The first step I took was to decide on an appropriate headline and description of my ad.

Taking into consideration the fact that I could define myself as a specialist in only one area – communications – the decision to use “Communications consultant” as a headline sounded most logically. In the description I included some more specific words on what I am good at or interested in from a professional point of view.

Google kindly suggest an enormous list of keywords that relate to the words entered in the description of the ad. For me having the options to choose from various keywords is handy if you do not know what to enter. However, for more experienced online ad writers knowing the right keywords means getting more hits from the target audience. As Google suggests in its “How do I build the best keywords list” page and a communications specialist I am aware of the fact that the better you know your target group the greater the chance to reach it and provoke some action.

In my case though, the target audience would be organisations looking for communication specialists/consultants to assist them in various aspects of this area. By including most keywords which Google suggested under the categories of social media, branding, advertising and marketing gives opportunities for my ad to appear in various search results.

Here’s a list of the keywords chosen for me:

  • personal branding
  • branding marketing
  • social branding
  • online branding
  • marketing branding
  • self branding
  • branding yourself
  • branding strategy
  • branding strategies
  • corporate blogs
  • business social networks
  • social media monitoring
  • social media marketing plan
  • enterprise social media
  • social media for business
  • using social media
  • social media solutions
  • social network marketing
  • facebook marketing
  • weblog marketing
  • social marketing
  • social networking marketing
  • brand marketing
  • cause related marketing
  • marketing blogs
  • social networks marketing
  • marketing social networks
  • social marketing strategy
  • social marketing examples

After you have chosen your keywords, Google can give you an estimate of number of Clicks per day together with the costs responding to the budget you entered in the very beginning of the Ad-creation process. An estimate of 4-5 clicks per day would cost me between 4.50 and 5.50 EUR.

Despite its minimum costs and efforts, Google Adwords is not considered to No1 tool for personal branding, it is a way to enhance awareness, but might be more effective as a call for action.