As you probably know, Google is the world largest search engine serving around 200 million requests of information a day at the time of writing this article. With such a large users based, no wonder many internet businesses are currently making use of Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com) to GROW their internet business.
With a small activation fees of US$5.00, you can start getting high quality traffics to your website. Bidding for Adwords start from a range of US$0.05 - US$100
However, it doesn’t mean that you should rush into Google Adwords without any proper plans.
First determined which MARKETS are you TARGETING and how you want to market your products or services. For e.g. if
you are selling an affiliate product, first find out information like:
- is it a global products/services that is available and delivered for every country
- the Language of the Target market
- which countries are internet savvy and more likely to buy your products/services
- is there any payment restriction for e.g. clickbank and paypal both have their countries restriction where payment will not be accepted. You will be wasting your money if you include those countries in Google Adwords.
Next, with the above information collected, you can start to write out your Adwords bidding strategy.
You will burn a hole in your pocket if you just bid for two keywords like [home business]. To lower your cost per click, try bidding for a combination of words.
For example:
- based business home home make money online work
- make money at home easy home business
- business earn home make money money online work
Bidding for adwords required research, trail and error. Normally, PPC like Google Adwords will have a keywords research tools which allows you to research common search words. Try to think of as many different combination of words that you think you’ll used to search for a home business opportunity. Also, you can asked your family members or friends what word will they used if they were searching for a home business opportunity.
With the bidding plan in place, you should now think about how you can capture as many email address as you can when the visitors click through to your website. The COST per click is already there and normally, it take a human 7 days to consider before they take any buying actions.
Many PPC Marketers will have either a free ezine or short marketing course with an autoresponder to capture their web
visitors email address so that they can follow-up with them.
Finally, monitor your Sales Conversion result for each PPC promotions and check whether are you targeting the correct
markets with those keywords which you have bid.
If you plan wisely before embarking your PPC promotion, you can actually maximize your Income against your cost.
Pay per click or search engine optimization, which one should you use? Many view PPC marketing as a colossal waste of money while others disdain search engine optimization. In reality, the two marketing strategies form a perfect marriage.
Pay-Per-Click - PPC
PPC marketing is a love it or hate platform. For the “love it” crowd, PPC marketing is a way to get instant exposure and feedback on site designs. In a matter of minutes, you can start receiving traffic and adjusting your site to convert the traffic at the best rate possible. For those in the “hate it” crowd, bids are to high and one never knows how may of the clicks are fake and worthless.
Search Engine Optimization - SEO
As with PPC, seo marketing has its proponents and detractors. Those who love it look at the free traffic and glorious profitability of a site that converts the traffic at a decent rate. Detractors view seo as an unnecessary waste of time since it can take a year or more to get high rankings, particularly on Google. Detractors also argue that high listings are subject to changes in the search engine ranking process, which means you can lose your rankings.
So, who is right? In truth, both sides make accurate arguments. PPC is expensive and click fraud is a monstrous problem. Seo produces free traffic, but it takes along time to get to the top and rankings are subject to the whims of search engine ranking changes. The truth, of course, is both marketing platforms should be used whenever possible.
Marketing Marriage
Every site is unique, but most should combine PPC and seo marketing as part of an overall internet marketing strategy. When starting out, the PPC campaign is critical for getting immediate traffic and tweaking the site to maximize conversions. At the same time, a seo campaign should be undertaken. As the site rises in search results, the PPC campaign should be fazed out for the relevant high listings.
Making Money Online with Pay Per Click Search Engines
It is not surprising if online entrepreneurs ask if its true that sales conversion from Pay per click Search engine traffic is as good as what everyone is talking about. Well, as true as it seems, it is now a fact that Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engines is one of the most powerful advertising methods available online which provides very targeted traffic. Pay-Per-Click is a fast growing industry accounting for 30% online advertising in the year 2003. This industry is predicted to be worth 7 billion dollars by 2007. Pay-Per-Click search engines are growing in popularity due to the following reasons:
1. Very Targeted Traffic.
First and foremost, it’s a ready targeted traffic source for advertisers. Advertisers only pay for a targeted audience that is ready to buy your products. Like Spidering search engines, the traffic represents people or prospects who are searching using specific keywords. Therefore, it can’t be argued that the traffic from Pay-Per-Click search engines are very targeted depending on how niche the keywords you choose to advertise in.
2. You pay for guaranteed traffic only.
In Pay-Per-Click search engines, as the name implies, advertisers pay only for the traffic sent to their site. For each click that the advertiser’s listings have received, the advertiser pays a bid amount. For example, if you as an advertiser bids $0.10 for a listing position in a Pay-Per-Click search engine, every hit that your listing gets and the visitor is sent to your registered site, you will be charged $0.10. For a period of time, if a thousand visitors click on your listings and are sent to your site, you would be debited $100 for $0.10 per visitor.
3. Control of ranking position
In most Pay-Per-click search engines, the position of your listings in any particular keyword results page is predetermined by the amount you bid for. The higher you bid, the higher listing position your listing will get. As you are able to bid for the position in a PPC, to a high extent, you have the control to where or which position you want your advertisement link to be placed in the Search Results Page. To advertisers, they would want to bid for the highest positions they can afford. This is because like Spidering search engines and directories, the higher postioned listings will receive more traffic.
4. Rapid setup
Another great advantage of using Pay-Per-Click search engines is that the setup can be fast. Setup and account approval can vary from a few days to even a few hours. Imagine your website having the potential to receive very targeted traffic in just a matter of hours or days.
5. Cheap niche targeted traffic
You may think that such traffic from Pay-Per-Click search engines can be very expensive especially with very general, popular and high volume keywords. This may be true but for niche or more specific keywords, where the traffic is even more targeted, the top bidding prices may be very low. In some cases, the prices are as low as a penny. Compare this low cost and very targeted traffic to the cost of sending expensive offline advertisement paper fliers.
For all these reasons, it is small wonder that the Pay-Per-Click search engines are considered by many as the “Untapped market”! Let’s take a look at some tips and strategies when you use Pay-Per-Click search engines.
Tip 1. Relevant keywords.
The most fundamental concept in keyword bidding in any type of Pay-Per-Click search engines is to choose keywords that are relevant. If you choose the wrong keywords to bid for, all your time and advertising money will be wasted. Your targeted prospects are searching for your website through the keywords that best reflect or describe your products and services. If you have chosen irrelevant keywords, you may only pay for the visitors that are not looking for your type of products or services; hence, a waste of your advertising money. Visitors from relevant keywords bring higher conversion rates. Higher conversion rates mean more sales made over the specified amount of traffic sent to your website.
Tip 2. Avoid expensive general keywords.
Try to avoid expensive general keywords. True enough, these popular general keywords may generate high volume traffic but the traffic has a lower percentage of targeted prospects. Furthermore, the top bids for these general keywords will be very expensive. On the other hand, specific and targeted niche keywords will be cheaper for the top positions. After all, specific targeted keywords will bring you higher conversion rates as the niche keywords better describe the products and services the listed advertisers offer. Hence the targeted keywords filter off uninterested visitors that may waste your advertising money.
Tip 3. Attain volume from variety.
By choosing more niche targeted keywords that are cheaper, we can easily gain top positions in these niche keywords. However, these niche targeted keywords may not carry as much traffic as achievable by general or popular keywords . Therefore, to solve this, you advertise in as many relevant niche targeted keywords as possible. Variations of the niche targeted keywords that may all have the same meaning can also be used. This will also help to bring in more traffic. You need not just advertise in one Pay-Per-Click search engine, but also duplicate the advertising campaigns in as many Pay-Per-Click search engines as possible. Maintaining these efforts, you ultimately preserve the goal of having low cost yet targeted traffic and achieve a respectable volume of good quality visitors.
Tip 4. Use relevant description and keywords in your advert listings.
You would want the description of your advert listings posted in Pay-Per-Click search engines to be as accurate as possible in describing what you offer. Your advert listings are placed in the Results pages with other competitor adverts, so your Advert listing description has to be more attractive to the searchers. Thus, you need to layout your precise benefits to the searchers using convincing and relevant words and terms. It will also be a good idea to use the exact relevant keywords within your description as these tend to capture the attention of the searchers who are interested in your products and services. Try to avoid using superlatives. Why? Words like “Best” and “Greatest” are statistically proven to reduce quality visitors rather than attract them to click on your listings. Most Pay-Per-Click search engines disallow advertisers from using superlatives anyway.
There are hundreds of Pay-Per-Click search engines on the Web today. How do
you go around choosing those that you need? The following factors can be used
in your evaluation process.
1. Low Initial Set Up Cost.
Make sure that the Pay-Per-Click does not ask for too high an initial set up cost, which is non-refundable. You do not want to advertise in too few advertising sources. Remember the saying,”Don’t put all your eggs in just one basket”? It applies to this as well. Diversify your advertising money to many advertising sources including several Pay-Per-Click search engines.
2. Traffic Volume.
Find out what the search traffic going through your needed keywords in the concerned Pay-Per-Click search engine is. There should be enough traffic for you to even consider using it. In general, there is no fixed standard on exactly how much traffic is sufficient. Comparatively, it should be at the volume that meets your budget.
3. Customer Service.
Does the Pay-Per-Click search engine respond fast to your questions?
4. Time Taken for your Adverts to be reviewed and posted.
Time is money. You wouldn’t want to wait for more than a few days before your Advert listings get posted.
5. Provided Tools.
There should be simple bidding tools for you to utilize so that your bidding with the Pay-Per-Click system is made easy and automated.
6. Partnership Deals.
Some Pay-Per-Click search engines have partnership deals that tie themselves up with other search engines. Therefore, if you advertise on top spots of these Pay-Per-Click search engines, your advert would also show up in other major search engines. Look out for these partnership deals. Embarking in them can prove to be rewarding in your advertising campaigns.
What are pay per click search engines?
Pay per click search engines (also called pay-for-performance and paid listings among other names) are engines which allow site owners to determine their sites ranking in that particular search engines results by bidding on keywords. Usually the first three to five search results are used by a network of partner search sites. The result for the site owner or webmaster is a lot more highly targeted traffic and a lot more sales.
The underlying idea to pay per click search engines is that you find keywords related to your website and then you bid on these keywords and buy high positions on your chosen engine. Your bid amount is the amount you’re willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results.
The more times a word or phrase has been searched for the higher you’ll have to bid to get high rankings. The only limitation is that your site must be at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on. These engines allow you to skip all the search engine optimization stuff and simply pay for visitors.
Pay per click search engines have a number of benefits to any webmaster.
You only pay for visitors. Unlike banner advertising where you’ve to pay each time someone sees your ad pay-per-click engines only charge you when someone actually clicks on your listing. This means you’re getting guaranteed visits.
Pay-per-click engines provide highly targeted cheap visitors. Often you can buy a good ranking on a decent keyword for as little as 1 cent or 2 cents per click. Overture has of late installed $.05 as the minimum bid however. Popular search terms can cost much more on the big pay per click search engines most notably Google Adwords, Overture.com and Findwhat.com. Even still PPC engines are one of the most cost effective way of driving targeted people to your site.
Hopefully you’ll agree now that using pay-per-click search engines is a great way to increase traffic and profit. Let’s now talk about how to use Overture.com, Findwhat.com and other PPC search engines to make to most of your money. A point to note before we continue, Google Adwords although similar in many ways has some fundamental differences to Overture, Findwhat and other PPC engines it therefore has been covered in its own article entitled Google Adwords guide. That’s not to say however that many of the techniques found within this article can’t be applied to Adwords, I’m simply saying refer to the Adwords article for the definitive Adwords guide.
Relevant terms are the ones that’ll bring you the highest quality traffic. Basically this means only bid on terms that are directly related to your site. Imagine for example if a site decides to use Overture or any other PPC search engine in the future, it would be bidding on terms such as “Internet marketing articles” and “website promotion articles” because they’re the main focus of the site.
Now imagine if you bid for terms that weren’t really directly related to your website, the people that come from these terms are not likely to buy or sign up but you’ve still to pay for them. It’s like giving the PPC search engines free money, therefore it’s vital to always stay relevant.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a good supplement to natural search engine optimization, IF you keep a few tactics straight.
1. Choose the right search terms.
If you go after the broad phrases and terms, you’ll pay top dollar. Strive for more descriptive and specific search terms that reflect your products or services.
2. Map out a strategy.
Don’t go after every possible keyword or phrase. Target your online ads around business priorities–such as seasonal purchases, your most profitable products and services, etc.
3. Use bid management software.
Software can regulate your bids and turn off keywords. You might be interested in clicks during business hours; you might not want to pay for those clicks at 1 a.m. (There’s less of a chance that it’s a business prospect at that time of night).
4. Write effective ads.
Google, Yahoo! Searching Marketing and other services have limits on characters per line. With Google, it’s tough not to push the limits because space is so narrow. With Yahoo! Searching Marketing, focus on getting your message across without consuming every character. Long ads may discourage people from reading them.
5. Test. Test. Test.
Try different keywords, ad copy, landing pages and calls to action. Put your budget - whatever size it is - to the best use after effective evaluation.
The Search Engine Marketing Industry is estimated to reach $23 billion by 2010.
The vast majority of SEM investment in the coming years will involve pay-per-click. We applaud the SEM vendors and companies who can prepare a coherent plan that produces outstanding conversions.
But for all the clicks and conversions via pay-per-click, many SEM players will miss the lead generation that natural SEO offers through greater Internet acceptance and traffic. The fact is, people are far more likely to click on a natural listing. Studies show that about 60%-70% of the links people click on are organic, not the PPC variety.
Again, be careful how you spend your online advertising dollars. Make them work for you!