Nine months ago, when I blogged my 5-step advice for paid search affiliates, I wrote:

Use negative keywords (or keywords for which you do not want your ad to show in paid search results, as they are unlikely to convert into the desirable action)

Using negative keywords not only helps you improve the clickthrough rate (CTR) and quality score of your paid search campaigns, but also prevents ad impressions for irrelevant keyword combinations, and saves you the money wasted on undesirable clicks.

Well, it appears that today the process of compiling lists of negative keywords has become one step easier. 50 minutes ago WordStream announced the launch of “the world’s first” Negative Keyword Tool. The best part is that its completely free. Here’s the video on it:

Affiliate program managers and affiliates alike will love this. Thank you, WordStream!

Earlier this morning, Roxana Patrichi of Avangate published a list of 150+ negative keywords for software selling AdWords campaigns. This reminded me of one of the questions that I was asked in a recent interview to Affilorama. I was asked what advice I would give to newbie affiliates that are getting involved in paid search. I believe that there are at least 5 things PPC affiliates must know at the outset:

1. Educate yourself thoroughly (a good place to start would be a book by Marshall and Todd called “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords”)
2. Remember to constantly test (watch your CTR and work on improving it on an ongoing basis)
3. Don’t rush (you can burn a lot of money overnight, take small steps until you really know what you’re doing)
4. Develop inventories of long-tail keywords (looking at things through the end user’s eyes and using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
5. Use negative keywords (or keywords for which you do not want your ad to show in paid search results, as they are unlikely to convert into the desirable action)

Below I am including a list of 90 negative keywords to help all kinds paid search affiliates. Let me stress that this is a basic list to start with. Affiliates want to develop such lists for each PPC campaign they run. Thorough negative keyword lists include hundreds of keywords.

While not all merchants may be willing to share their keyword inventories with affiliates, I believe that sharing the list of the negative keywords is a must. After all, if they burn themselves (and loose cash, with low or no conversion), it is the merchant, who they will eventually stop promoting, that will loose too. So if you are a merchant or an affiliate program manager reading this, compile your own list of negative keywords (the above one will help you get started quickly) and offer it to your affiliates.