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Putting together a comprehensive keyword list for PPC campaigns is a time-consuming task that probably most Internet marketers wish they could pay someone else to do. That’s if they were making enough revenue from their efforts to justify paying someone else to do this mind-numbing labor. So until I achieve mind-blowing success, I will continue to gather and group my own keyword lists.

That’s OK, though, since “paying my dues” in this manner has given me some great insights into what sort of keywords should go into a tightly-focused Adgroup. It’s also made me alert to the kinds of keywords to add to my negative keyword lists.

One thing that I had read about, and didin’t begin using until recently, was the use of “smushes”, keyword phrases that have all the words run together. So for example, say my keyword phrase is “nikon dslr lenses”. A smush of this phrase would simply be: “nikondslrlenses”. Now, it might seem that most people would not be this lazy and would actually make the effort to insert the proper spaces between the individual words in the phrase they’re searching on.

That’s what I used to think too, until I began checking my tracking stats and found that smushes show up a few times each week. It’s not a huge occurrence, but enough to warrant adding smushes to my keyword lists. So why not take advantage of our fast-paced culture and grab a few extra click thrus from the people who don’t have the time to bother with white space?