How To Get Instant Traffic To Your Website For Only A Nickel A Lead

by: Brad Callen Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most cost-effective methods of getting leads known to Internet business owners. It gives you instant traffic, and allows you to test your business model in real time.

At the same time, pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is not as simple to use as the PPC companies will have you believe. If you jump into the system without preparing for ‘tracking’ your results, doing deep keyword research, establishing your ROI and most importantly, testing your ads, you’ll lose a lot of money really fast.

Before we start talking about the major PPC engines, here’s a brief overview of what you need to know.

The Basics Of Pay Per Click

There are some terms that you should know if you want to understand any discussion on PPC. Some of these are self-explanatory, some you might have heard before. Either way, go through this section and make sure to read those parts that you don’t know of.

The PPC Model

In the PPC advertising model, you have three core elements - keywords , ads , and bids . These three elements are combined with ‘ placement ‘ to create an advertising model that displays ‘relevant’ ads on search engines (in response to keyword searches), portals and websites that opt to display such ads on their pages (the ads to be shown are determined by a keyword analysis of the page).

For a PPC campaign, you need to know the keywords that you are targeting. For example, for a niche site that promotes a time management product, I would create a list of keywords that included keyword groups containing terms related to time management, productivity, saving time, self improvement and maybe even business soft skills. As I’ve told you before about keyword research, you should have a big list so that you capture most, if not all, of your target traffic.

The next step is to write the ad copy for the ads that will be displayed for your searches. The ad copy is extremely important because along with your bid amount, this will determine the ‘conversion rate’ (explained below) of your ads. Write concise, compelling ad copy that highlights the benefits of your website / product, and avoid fluff.

Once you’ve written your ads, it’s time to bid . The bidding mechanism differs from PPC engine to engine, but the idea is the same - your bid amount is the maximum cost (usually calculated in U.S. dollars) that you are willing to pay for each keyword. It’s important to know how much you can afford in terms of bidding costs so that you avoid going into bidding wars with your competitors, and also so that you don’t spend more than you make through this campaign.

Cost-Per-Click

Cost-Per-Click ( CPC ) is the amount you pay each time a potential customer ‘clicks’ on one of your ads that they see on their search engine results or on websites. This is often less than the maximum bid amount you set for each keyword.

Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate is the ratio of clicks over impressions (the number of times your ad is displayed on searches or page loads on websites). A typical conversion rate is between 2 to 3 percent - that is, for every 100 impressions, you get 2-3 clicks on your ads.

Conversion Rate is closely tied in with the quality of your ad copy , and also with Placement , which I’ll discuss next.

Placement

If there is more than one person bidding for a keyword (as is almost always the case), the placement of the ads (which ad comes in on the first slot, which comes in on the second, etc.) is determined by bid amounts of each competitor. The higher your bid, the better your placement (Google adds the conversion rate into their placement calculations, and I’ll tell you how later). Your conversion rate to a certain extent depends on how high your ad is placed on the ‘rankings’ and this leads advertisers to place high bids just to rank at the top. The trouble with this approach is that you might enter into a bidding war with your competitors and lose a lot of money.

Tracking

Tracking refers to measuring which keywords are bringing you the best leads or sales, and which keywords are bringing you ‘window shoppers’ - people who are ‘compulsive clickers’ and don’t buy or sign up. Tracking your ad campaign will help you further fine-tune your ads and improve your ROI.

ROI

Your Return-on-Investment (ROI) is determined by how much you are spending over how much you are earning in net profits from your ad campaign. It’s important to establish a base ROI before your start your ad campaign - assume a conversion rate of 1 percent - so that you don’t over-spend and are able to run this campaign within your budget.

The Pay-Per-Click World

Currently, there are two major PPC engines, Google AdWords and Overture (now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing ). While there are many alternatives such as Espotting (now Miva), MetricsDirect and Kanoodle, the top two PPC engines are a class apart when it comes to delivering results.

However, one of the first pieces of advice you’ll hear from most people is that bigger PPC engines such as AdWords and Overture are too ‘expensive’ to break into (with CPC for top positions easily passing $3-$4 for many keywords, and reaching $10 for really competitive keywords).

In reality, if you are just starting out, it’s critical that you pick one of the top two PPC engines. Why?

Traditionally marketers judge PPC engines on the following criteria:

Reach - How large your potential target market is.
Cost-per-click
Quality of traffic - Do the leads fit your customer profile? Are the willing to spend on your products?
Quality of service - The tools and help offered by the PPC engines.
Overture and AdWords beat their competition on all of these metrics except CPC. However, the benefits of ‘cheaper’ clicks are more than compensated for by the ease of use of the big two, and more importantly, as any PPC expert will tell you, the quality of traffic from Overture and AdWords is far better than from other PPC engines.

Overture

Overture was purchased by Yahoo!, and recently renamed to Yahoo! Search Marketing. The name’s not catchy, but with Yahoo! Behind the ’second-largest’ PPC engine on the Internet, you can expect that the quality of traffic and services will improve over the next year. Yahoo’s acquisition of Overture is the single biggest reason advertisers have started paying attention to Overture again, although Google AdWords still commands leading respect.

Overture is a manually edited PPC engine. When you write ads for your website, these ads (and the keywords you specify) have to be approved by human editors before they can appear in search results on Overture partner websites. While this ensures that the quality of ads remains above a certain level, this is also a hassle, as new ad campaigns can take several days to be approved, and there is a distinct lag between the time you plan to improve a section of your campaign (for testing) and the time those changes actually go live.

Overture keyword bids are totally transparent, meaning that any advertiser can see at any time what other advertisers are paying for that particular keyword. This is both useful and harmful - advertisers can accurately target their ‘ad placement’ positions, but knowledge of the top 2 or top 3 bid amounts can easily lead into a bidding war, and competitors undercutting your ads by posting a bid that is $0.01 higher than yours.

Google Adwords

Google AdWords is the leading PPC engine on the Internet, although it’s closely followed by Overture. Combined, the two PPC networks are distributed on nearly every search engine or portal.

Google is totally automated - your ads go live within minutes of being written. This is one of the two significant advantages AdWords has over its competition - no need to wait for ‘approval’ of your keywords and ads, which can take a few days on other PPC engines.

Google AdWords, like Overture, does not charge you your maximum bid amount, but just one cent more than the bid lower than yours. On the other hand, AdWords bids are not transparent like Overture - bidders have no idea what their competition is bidding. This reduces the threat of bidding wars.

The second advantage of AdWords is that it includes conversion rate calculations in its ad-ranking algorithm. Simply put, your ad may rank higher than your competitors’ even if you are bidding lower, just because you have a higher conversion rate. AdWords rewards ads that are better written, and thus provides a subtle barrier against ad spam.

PPC advertising has become the ultimate marketing tool for testing new ad campaigns, business models and landing pages without spending too much money. Where else can you test a sales page by sending it 100 leads for $5?

If you are looking to promote your website / product effectively but cannot wait for your search engine rankings to show on Google or Yahoo, you should seriously consider PPC advertising as an advertising tool that not only brings in instant traffic (and sales), but is a hedge against ranking fluctuations by ensuring that you stay on the top page for your target keywords.

This is just a general overview of Pay Per Click marketing/strategies. Stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon, where I’ll go into some much more advanced techniques to really ramp up your traffic, all the while spending less money!

About the author:
Brad Callen

How to Do Effective Email Marketing

by: Jeremy Hoover Recently, there has been a lot written about email and its (impending) death. From what you read on forum boards and in newsletters from well-known internet marketers, email marketing is dead. Too many ISPs are taking it upon themselves to limit the number of emails you can send at one time, or are blocking your emails from even getting to your subscribers’s inboxes.

As a way around this, many marketers are telling you to get a blog and an RSS feed. This makes good sense, and there is some indication that RSS and related technology will become more popular in the near future, but before you invest in an ebook or multimedia course from a marketer, ask yourself if that marketer has a vested interest in moving you over to an RSS system (i.e., they conveniently sell an RSS starter kit, or affiliate for someone who does).

On the contrary, though, email marketing is not dead. Recently, on a membership-only forum, discussion centred on how Getresponse and Aweber have improved their open and deliverability rates for emails, even as high as 85% for deliverability. One contributor, who owns an autoresponder company, noted that many tricks marketers use to get their messages past spam filters (such as using “f^ree” for “free”) are actually backfiring and triggering spam filters, resulting in emails being blocked. Instead, marketers should focus on trick-free, valuable content in their emails.

Apparently, email marketing works much the same way as search engine marketing (and, really, all good marketing) does: in the long run, you are rewarded for building (and sending out) trick-free, useful, and informative content.

So how should you build your business? With one quality blog post or article at a time. And how should you market with email? With one quality email message at a time.

The hottest new craze to hit the Internet - Pixel Ads

by: Rebecca Gilbert Every website needs traffic in order to generate business. Without traffic, your product will never be seen by the general public and your Internet Business is doomed for failure.

I generate traffic to my website through traditional channels such as writing articles, submitting to directories, link exchanges, Search Engines, etc. I also have supplemented this traffic through paid advertising methods such as Pay per Clicks (PPC), paid inclusion, and banner rotations to name a few.

I remember a few years ago when I could target a high traffic keyword through the Pay per Click search engines for .01 cents a click. Wow! Those were the days. Now, you’re lucky to get that same keyword for less than a $1.00 a click.

While some of these advertising methods bring decent traffic, most are becoming oversaturated with advertisers, which automatically brings the price up and the effectiveness down.

Recently, I stumbled across another advertising method that is affordable (and sometimes free) that is highly effective. In fact, I’m seeing these sites Alexa rankings shooting from 800,000 to the 1,000’s in less than a months time. The upward trends on the Alexa charts are without a doubt astonishing.

This new type of advertising is called Pixel Advertising. Go to any of these pixel websites and you will see a multitude of small boxes. Each box is usually equal to a 10 x 10 pixel in size. The costs of renting these boxes are ranging from $5.00 a box to $25.00 a box, and some of them are actually free. Simply select the quantity of boxes you want and upload your image.

The ‘BEST’ part of this is that your image will stay on that site for up to 10 YEARS!

The demand for this type of advertising exposure is in high demand and these sites are popping up all over the Internet. My suggestion is to find one of these sites that are just getting started and offering the free or low cost pixel boxes. (Example: http://www.best-pixel-ads.com)

Get your image on these sites and sit back and wait approximately a month for the traffic to get going good. As the traffic surges, the free spots will not be available any longer and the cost of the pixel boxes will rise.

You have nothing to loose and absolutely everything to gain. This type of advertising is sure to get oversaturated and less effective over time, but at the moment, it’s the cheapest most effective advertising method on the Internet today.

About the author:
About the Author:

Guide to Pay Per Click Search Engines

A pay per click search engine is designed for pay for performance advertising. That means that an advertiser pays the search engine owners only for traffic that is delivered to his web site in accordance with key words that the advertiser chooses to bid on.
Example: An advertiser has a web site that advertises vacations to Thailand. The advertiser can bid on “vacations to Thailand” as a key word. If he wants to be in the number one position on the search results page he can place a bid that is one cent more than the existing high bid for the key word term “vacations to Thailand”. Let’s say that the present high bid is $0.20 per click. A bid of $0.21 would than gain the top position for the advertiser.

If his key word was clicked on 10 times in one day he would pay 10 X $0. 21 , or $2.10 for the traffic that was delivered to his web site for that day. The advertiser is paying only for performance. There is no charge for the number of times that the advertisers ad appeared on the search engine web site that day. The charges are based only on the number of times that a visitor clicked on the key word and was delivered to the advertiser’s web site. Thus the name “pay per click”.

Why Use Pay Per Click Search Engines?

In just a few words it is because the leading Pay per Click Search Engines (PPC) can quickly deliver quality targeted traffic to your web site. Anyone who has build web sites know that building web sites is the easy part. The tough part of the process is in driving enough qualified traffic to the site to make it worth while from a commercial view point.
Even if you are successful in building a web site that the search engines love it will take some time, probably two or three months, perhaps longer, for the search engine spiders to find your site and for your site to be listed in the search engine. If you are trying to make money on the Internet that is a long time to go without traffic.

No traffic means no sales and no income. That should not be your objective unless you enjoy building web sites no matter how few people ever visit them.

With pay per click search engine accounts you can almost immediately drive qualified traffic to your web site. If you are serious about building a business on the Internet that is a pretty good reason to use Pay Per Click Search Engines.

Pay Per Click Search Engine Tips.

1. Use quality pay per click search engines that already have a high volume of traffic. It doesn’t matter how cheap the bid for your key words may be if there is little traffic on the search engine and your key words are never clicked on.

2. Know your market. If you are selling “vacations to Thailand” do some research to find out what words and phases folks who are thinking of traveling to Thailand are actually using in their searches. An excellent tool to assist in this research is Wordtracker . Wordtracker will quickly help you to decide which key words are truly worth bidding on.

3. Quality pay per click search engines will have starting bids from one cent to five cents per key word. It is important to know that about 80% of the traffic for any key word will go to the top three bids. So if you want a lot of traffic to your web site try to position yourself in the top three spots. Just as with real estate location makes all the difference in results.

4. Set up a realistic budget for each search engine. Quality pay per click search engines get a lot of traffic so be prepared for a lot of traffic to your site if you bid on popular key words.

5. Popular key words can be expensive so choose your key words with great care. It is best to stay away from key words that are too general in nature. Thus to continue with the example above bidding on the key word “vacations” would not be wise if you are selling vacations to Thailand. Yes, you would get a ton of traffic but it would be more than likely be too general and you would spend a lot of money for poor results. It is almost always a better strategy to bid on phases instead of one general keyword. Therefore bidding on “vacations to Thailand” would be a far better choice than bidding on “vacations”.

If you are selling vacations to Pattaya Thailand it would be better to bid on “vacations to Pattaya Thailand” than on “vacations to Thailand”. The more keywords that you can find that exactly match up with whatever it is that you are selling and that folks will be searching for the more money you will save (less money will get you in the top three spots) and the better your results will be.

Wordtracker is an excellent tool that can find key word phases that are actually being searched for and that you would probably never think of going it alone.

6. Think about using a lot of keywords rather that a common few. The common few will be expensive and will likely deliver to your web site a lot of poorly targeted traffic with poor conversion ratios (traffic to sales). People search for the darnest things and those who actually plan on buying something usually search by using phrases. With some effort you can find phrases that are cheap and that will deliver highly targeted traffic…the kind that converts into sales.

7. No matter how much traffic you drive to a web site if you are marketing sorry products or services or if you have excellent products and services but you have a sorry website you are wasting your time and money. Everything must be right to achieve business success. Make sure that your site is “order taking ready” before you turn on your pay per click traffic.

About the author:
Online since 1997 the author early on achieved some degree of success with MLM programs. By late 1998 he was able to work online full time only to suffer the diappointment of the MLM companies not surviving the dot.com bust.

Since 2001 he has worked as a full time promoter of various affiliate programs and is once again a happy online camper. David currently resides in Thailand about eleven months of the year while maintaining a US office in Honolulu, Hi. His laest project is

Great Website But where are your customers?

by: Kim Valentine You have a great website now where are the customers?

A great website without customers is like a mega mall in the middle of a desert with no road leading to it. In order to sell you need customers, but how do you get the traffic to your website?

There are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website, in this article we shall examine the paid methods of getting traffic.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Nothing new to anyone on the net. Every major search engine offers it in one form or the other. A great way to drive traffic to your site. But only if you know how to use it.

You must select keywords that will drive traffic to your site but will not cause your CPC bill to skyrocket without converting prospects into sales. Your description must also complement your keyword so that it reinforces your products and services.

The persons who click have interest in your goods but are still prospects. What goods are they interested in however. If my food site should use a keyword phrase “oral pleasure” relating to food and tastiness, I might be surprised to get a lot of clicks but no sales. Why, you might ask? Most likely the persons clicking on my link got there while searching for adult links for oral pleasure.

Funny you might think, but everyday, advertisers haphazardly choose keywords that have no bearing on their site. They now start to receive customers but have no conversions as these were not targeted visitors. By now the CPC bill is high and sales are still low to non-existent.

So for my food site, a better choice of keyword would be “jerk seasoning”, and if I wanted to narrow my target market more with specific searches, I would use “Jamaican jerk seasoning”. This would be sure to send me only targeted customers searching for my products. My conversion rate will be higher out of this batch of qualified prospects.

2. Text Ads

Advertisers can sponsor text ads for varying periods on different search engines.
These text ads run from as little as $12 per 3 month period and give good exposure to a wide market, but is again dependent on keyword and description choices.

3.Buy Traffic

There are sites that are wholly designated to selling web traffic. The rates vary but traffic can be bought from as little as $2.99 per thousand visitor.
The type of traffic is dependent on where the traffic is from. Traffic is generated from expired domains and redirected traffic. Traffic can also be classified into geographic regions and by shopping preferences. The more targeted choices are more costly but give a better quality visitor.

If your business is in the USA selling golf shoes, a US visitor who is a golfer is going to be a more qualified visitor than one who lives in Bahrain and does not know what golf is.

Some traffic sites send visitors based on auto generated views. This might boost the stats on your site but will not generate sales. You need to ensure that real people are viewing your site and not automated software. If you are going to pay for traffic then you need to get real traffic.

Some websites will tell you they are sending visitors, when they mean hits. 1000 hits is not the same as 1000 visitors. Everytime a visitor comes to your site they generate hits. Every image that opens generates a hit. So you can see the difference between the promise of 1000 hits vs 1000 visitors. 100 visitors just might, depending on your landing page, generate a 1000 hits.

4. Links

Joining paid link exchanges is a great way to get incoming links to your site. This method until recently was a good enough method, but Google’s recent change to its view on paid Link Exchanges means that less value is placed on incoming links.

It is still a fairly valuable tool as the other members with whom you link, the traffic from their sites now have a link to you. The drawback is when your link is so far down the page that customers to that site will never have easy access.

5. Search Engines

Not by any means last or the least effective method. The major search engines will drive most of your traffic tot your site. Google delivers at least 60% of a sites search engine traffic, and so websites must be optimized and tweaked to achieve higher ranking in the engines. Higher ranking translates to appearing in the first few results. the higher up you rank and place the more your traffic from the search engine. With this method, optimization and submission of the site is paramount. A good SEO can tweak your site to make it search engine friendly including optimizing your meta tags such as Keywords, description and title.

About the author:

Take Advantage Of Google’s Linking Algorithm To Maximize Links To Your Site.

by: Chris Ellington Links to your site are one of the key components of Google’s PageRank technology. With a high page rank, you get higher position on the search engine results page, resulting in more visitors to your site and improving your chances of earning a living online.

As the founder of articlemarketer.com, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that writing articles results in a ton of links to your site. Of course it does.

But there’s a trick to it.

Many of the internet marketers who submit free reprint articles go about it all wrong. They fail to take advantage of Google’s linking algorithm and they lose some of the power of their articles.

What is Google’s linking algorithm? 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the googlebots are spidering the web, seeking out content, classifying and indexing the billions of web pages available to web surfers.

This results in a standard “Bell Curve” of links to your article around the web. A few links begin to appear within a few days, rising to a peak at about 8-10 weeks, and then tapering off over time. That’s the Google linking algorithm at work.

Over time, Google eliminates many of the links generated by a given article. Some call this the Google “Duplicate Link” penalty. I wouldn’t call it a penalty. It’s just the way things work on the web. And with a clever approach, you can take advantage of it.

You can keep your links high using the Article Marketer Bonanza approach. Our authors use it all the time. That isn’t to say that you can only use it if you’re an articlemarketer.com subscriber. I’m giving you the approach here and now, absolutely free. You can use the Article Marketer Bonanza approach if you use phantomwriters.com, Article Announcer, or even if you submit your articles manually.

What is the Article Marketer Bonanza approach?
The Article Marketer Bonanza approach keeps your links high by taking advantage of the Google linking algorithm. Google wants fresh content and they begin to “penalize” (although I still wouldn’t call it a penalty) you when your content becomes stale. With the Article Marketer Bonanza approach, you never rely on stale links to drive new traffic.

Article marketing is just like every other form of advertising. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s don’t run just one television commercial and expect a continuing stream of customers to buy their products. Of course, they have the benefit of zillions of dollars and the resources at their disposal to continually buy new commercials.

Your resources are a bit more limited. You have less money and fewer people. Time is of the essence. That’s what makes the Article Marketer Bonanza approach so successful.

Most internet marketers can produce a quality article in about an hour (it took me exactly 27 minutes to write this one.) That includes spell checking and everything. But let’s say it’ll take you more than twice as long to write 500-700 words on your favorite topic.

Write a few articles. How many? Let’s say you write 3 articles. If you write them and submit them all today, Google’s linking algorithm will give you a few links over the next couple of days, a lot of links over the next 8-10 weeks, and then they’ll taper off. It’s like turning off the faucet.

The Article Marketer Bonanza Approach - Step by Step:

Bonanza Step 1: Submit one of your articles today. This allows the algorithm to begin working. Watch your links increase.

Bonanza Step 2: Submit the second article next week. Google goes to work on that one. You just added several new links, and you’re not near the peak yet. Now you’ve got two articles climbing the charts.

Bonanza Step 3: Submit the third article the following week. Again, Google gets busy. More links on top of the growing links from article two, which have been added to the large number of links that are already pointed at article one. You’ve set things in motion.

Bonanza Step 4: Ok, it’s been three weeks, it’s time to write a few more articles. Set aside a few hours and capture your wisdom on paper.

Bonanza Step 5: Submit your articles, one per week, over the next three weeks. You’ve now got six articles in the market place, and you haven’t yet reached the peak. Your link count is going crazy.

Bonanza Step 6: It’s now week 10. Your first article is dropping off the charts as Google “settles in” on the links it’ll keep. That’s ok because article 2 and 3 are holding your link count high, and you’ve got three more climbing the charts.

Bonanza Step 7: That’s all there is to it. You keep submitting new content and Google rewards you with a permanently high link count. You can keep this going indefinitely. Your link count will never drop.

Depending on how prolific you are as an author, you could submit your articles faster - two or three per week. If you love writing and you write articles on several topics, you could submit new articles every day. You’ll always have new fresh content bringing new links to your site

See, it’s not always about resources. With the Article Marketer Bonanza approach, you’ll be doing something Bill Gates wishes he could do - you’ll be staying one step ahead of Google!

About the author:

Tips for Successful Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

by: Eddie Machaalani Introduction

Pay per click (PPC) is by far one of the easiest and quickest methods of driving targeted, consistent traffic to your website. While this may seem like a daunting method of advertising for some, it’s actually quite easy and can end up becoming that one marketing method that you can’t live without.

What I’d like to do today is provide some tips and techniques that I personally use when creating and monitoring PPC ad’s. Hopefully these tips will help you in your future marketing endeavors.

Experimenting With Different Search Engines

There are many PPC search engines, with some being better than others. The top two are Google and Yahoo, which was previously known as Overture. It’s a good idea to start your PPC campaigns with a small budget, spreading it out over a few different search engines to experiment and see where your target market may be lurking.

Generally speaking, I’ve found Google Adwords is better for more technically orientated products or services, including software, hardware, web design etc. Yahoo, on the other hand, is better for general consumer products, including insurance, toys, music etc.

What I wrote in the previous paragraph is very general, and you should analyze your campaigns carefully to see where they are performing their best. We’ll discuss this in detail a little later in the article.

Selecting the Right Keywords

The keyword selection process is probably the most important of all when it comes to creating your PPC ad’s. You’ll need to select keywords that are specific to your product or service offering, but you need to be careful not to select keywords that are extremely popular, as this may deplete your PPC funds sooner than expected.

The keyword selection process begins by asking yourself just one question:

“If I was searching for a product just like mine, which words or phrases would I search for?”

Using your answer(s) to this question as your base, you can then use a thesaurus and common sense to start building your keyword list with plurals, synonyms, similar words, etc.

To see which keywords your competitors are using, simply try searching for them. If you see a PPC ad along the side for your competitor, then note that keyword down and add it to your list.

Another way of coming up with great keywords is to use the overture search suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in a set of keywords and it will list similar keywords, including the number of times that keyword has been searched for on Overture (Yahoo) in the last month!

There’s often a fine line between selecting keywords that are either too specific or keywords that are too general. Try to keep away from these, as they can often result in wasted PCP funds.

A typical example of this would be an ad that I created recently for our latest product, TrackPoint, which — not coincidently — is an internet marketing return on investment (ROI) tracking tool. Although the product is heavily geared towards internet marketing, using such a broad term would have made it virtually impossible to compete with the other advertisers.

The term “internet marketing” is searched for 825,674 times per month on Overture alone. Combined with the huge number of different advertisers that target this keyword, the top bid for “internet marketing” on Google AdWords is $13.84 per click! With an average of 240 clicks per day, a single day of advertising alone would cost $505!

Now, unless you have an extremely high conversion rate of visitors to sales, or you’re selling a high priced item that usually has a high customer acquisition cost, I suggest targeting more specific keywords. Not only will this decrease your overall competition with other advertisers, but it will also increase the chances of turning your newly found web site visitors into customers.

Back to my earlier example, I chose to be specific with my keywords. One keyword was “ROI tracking”, which is searched for 1,828 times per month on Overture and has a much cheaper top bid. This keyword is also more targeted to the product I was marketing, meaning that a large percentage of people clicking on my ad should turn into customers.

It’s also helpful to note that taking the top bid is not always necessary, and anywhere in the top 5-10 can generate great leads. This really does come down to budget and analysis.

Attracting People to Your Ad

Now that we’ve selected our keywords, we need to get those searching to click on our ad, which in turn will result in them clicking through to our web site and potentially purchasing our product.

One of the simplest ways to get peoples attention is to use their search keywords in the title of your PPC ad. This has been proven to increase click-thru rates on ad’s by over 50%.

Why? Simple. If the potential customer is searching for “ROI Tracking” and the title of a PCP ad begins with “ROI Tracking”, then their attention will be grabbed instantly. He or she doesn’t need to know much else, other than that the PPC ad is catered specifically for him or her.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can sometimes create a more relevant title by combining your different keywords into one PPC ad. For example, I could have easily used something like “ROI Tracking PHP Script” as the title of my ad, which effectively would have decreased my click-thru rate, but definitely caters my ad more to a specific audience. Once again, this comes down to analysis and adjustment.

Another important technique to attract attention to your ad is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In our particular case, the majority of our competition offer hosted solutions, whereby they manage the software on their servers in return for monthly or per traffic fees.

Our product caters to a different audience, those that want more control over their software, as well as those not wanting to pay monthly fees. So, in this example, I would make the title of my ad “Pay no monthly or per traffic fees”.

Next — and this is where experimentation is extremely important — we need to create a description for our PPC ad that will attract the potential customer and let them know that our product is exactly what they are searching for. To do this, I start my ad’s description with “Track PPC, campaigns & search”.

Finally, it’s good practice to add a “Call to action” at the bottom of your ad. If you’re not familiar with this term, its usually an instruction to tell the person to do something, such as “Click here to view a demo”, “Download Now”, etc.

Marketing experts seem to agree that the average human needs to be prompted to click on an ad or take action, so we’ll add this line to the end of our PPC ad’s description:

“Track PPC, campaigns & search. Try demo!”

Reducing Click-Thru’s

Sometimes it’s important to reduce the number of clicks your PPC ad is receiving. This could be because you are attracting people who are only after free products/services, or even the wrong target market.

The two quickest ways to reduce click-thru’s are to make the description of your ad more targeted and to add the price of the product to the ad.

Making the description more targeted (as I’ve discussed above) can reduce your overall click-thru rate, but potentially increase the likelihood of a click resulting in a purchase.

In my earlier example, by adding the words “PHP script” to the description, we are effectively filtering out those looking for a hosted solution, downloadable software or even those with a server that isn’t capable of running PHP scripts.

We also increase the targeting of our ad because we now know that the majority of those clicking on the ad are looking for a PHP script, which is exactly what our product is.

Secondly, by adding the price of the product you are selling to the end of the ad, you instantly eliminate those looking for free products, and target those willing to purchase your product or service.

Tracking Your Clicks and Conversions

The fundamental core of a successful advertising campaign — whether it be a PPC ad, banner ad or even newspaper ad — is knowing whether or not your ad’s are actually converting into sales or not.

If your ads aren’t making you money then you’re more that likely better off saving your advertising dollars and adjusting your ad’s or using your marketing budget elsewhere in your company.

Both Google and Overture have built in tracking and conversion tools that you can use to get a holistic view of your current PPC ad campaigns. You can even use external tools which let you add conversion code to your website to tell you exactly which of your ad’s are converting into sales and which aren’t. This is often referred to as knowing your ROI or Return on Investment.

We need to know exactly how much money we are making per dollar spent on every PPC ad. If the ROI is positive and we are making more money than we are spending, then the ad is working and we can use this knowledge to further improve our other ad’s or increase ad spending for that particular ad/set of keywords.

If, however, our ad’s are costing us more than they are returning, then we can reduce our spend, change our approach, or remove these ad’s altogether. It’s a rather simple formula, but frustratingly ignored by many advertisers.

You must track your ads if you want to succeed with any form of Internet advertising. You should also constantly monitor and adjust your ads according to how they are performing, your return on investment, etc.

Conclusion

Hopefully I’ve provided you with a clear insight into PPC advertising and techniques that you can use to improve your advertising campaigns. It pays — pun intended — to do your research and understand your target market, because the rewards can sometimes be much more than you expected.

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