PPC Management: When To Give Up On A Loser

PPC Management: When To Give Up On A Loser

by: Dave Brown

Pay per click (PPC) advertising can be a dream come true. You can get traffic almost immediately from some PPC search engines. And it can be mighty cheap too. Next to joint ventures, PPC search engines have been responsible for most of my online income. Iกve gotten some great returns on PPC campaigns. And I know other people who have too.

Right now, I have one PPC campaign thatกs making me $56.69 for every $1 I spend. I know, thatกs pretty incredible. And itกs not typical. But I have another thatกs making me $8.84 for every $1 I spend. Yet another makes $7.73 for every $1.

But I have other campaigns that have lost me money. Making money, instead of losing it, with pay per click search engines involves wise management. There are many different factors that decide whether youกll be in the red or in the black. And you need to be aware of what these are.

In fact, there are times that even the best management of your PPC campaign won’t save it. Some of them will be losers and thereกs nothing you can do about it. But you need to know when to decide that you have a loser on your hands. At what point should you bury it and move on?

There are a number of different factors to consider. Thereกs no simple answer. I can’t tell you to simply abandon your PPC campaign after 200 clicks without a sale. Or to quit after youกve lost $50.

First of all, you need to know how much your profit will be on each sale (before advertising costs). For example, if you’re selling your own product for $47 through Clickbank, then youกll make $42.48 on each sale after Clickbank takes their fees.

But if you sell someone elseกs product for $47 through Clickbank, and you get a 50% commission on each sale, then youกd only get $21.24.

But you need to know even more than that. You also need to decide how much of that $42.48 (or $21.24) you’re willing to spend on advertising. In other words, whatกs the least you’re willing to earn on each sale? This will determine how much you can afford to spend on advertising.

Letกs assume you make $42.48 per sale. If you decide that youกd be happy with a $20 profit, then you can spend as much as $22.48 to make each sale.

So now you know what your advertising budget is. Next, estimate what your conversion rate will be. If this is a brand new product you’re promoting, then you may have no idea. In those cases, I tend to use 1% as a rule of thumb. That means that 1 out of every 100 people that visit the site will buy. Letกs use 1% for our example here.

So if you’re willing to spend $22.48 to make each sale, and you expect to make one sale out of every 100 visitors, then you can afford to spend 22 cents to get each visitor to the site. This means that you can afford to bid 22 cents on each keyword on the PPC search engines (max).

At this point, you can go ahead and set up your PPC campaigns. Find your keywords. Place bids. I won’t cover these issues right now because they’re off the topic. The purpose here is to know when to drop your campaign because itกs a loser.

Now, just because you *can* bid 22 cents on each keyword, it doesn’t mean you should. You should bid as low as you can to get good traffic (whatever you consider *good* to be).

In our example, letกs fast forward. Imagine youกve already gotten 150 clicks, and your average bid has been 22 cents a click. So youกve spent $33, and you haven’t made a sale yet. Should you ditch this campaign?

No. *On average* you can spend $22 per sale. But thatกs an average. Which means that sometimes youกll spend more, and sometimes less. And if your conversion rate is 1%, then thatกs also an *average*. So don’t freak out if you haven’t made a sale after 150 clicks.

When you decide to drop a campaign though, make the decision based on how much you’re spending on it. Not the conversion rate.

When I first start a campaign, Iกll often wait until I spend at least double my advertising budget with no sales before I consider dropping it. Maybe even triple my budget if Iกm emotionally attached to it. 😉

But if I haven’t made any sales by then, Iกll usually stop the campaign. However, you may want to wait longer if you’re willing to spend more money to see if it works. I think Iกm probably more of a conservative.

At any rate, I *rarely* end a campaign before I get 300 clicks. 300 is typically the minimum number of clicks before I feel I can judge whether a campaign will pay off. And I will generally only end it then if Iกve had *zero* sales.

Sometimes, though, youกll make a quick sale and get excited. But then you see few or no sales after that. If you find that you’re consistently spending more than your budget for the first few sales, then get ready to end it if you don’t figure out how to make it better.

I want you to realize, too, that when you bid less on your keywords, you can afford to live with a lower conversion rate. But when you bid more, your conversion rate has to be higher to provide you with the profit you want.

Iกve only talked about *starting* a PPC campaign so far. But sometimes, you may have a PPC campaign thatกs paying off, and then it starts choking and gasping for air after a while.

In that case, you need to decide when to pull the plug and retire it. Otherwise, it may eat up all the profits youกve already made.

Iกll usually be more lenient in this case. Since the campaign has made me money in the past, Iกm more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt and keep it running. I don’t know if thatกs a good idea or not. But sometimes, itกs just hard to say goodbye to an old friend. After all, maybe itกs just a temporary downturn.

But you still have to cut it off at some point. If I find myself breaking even (or even losing money) on each sale for any length of time, then Iกll start thinking about ending the campaign.

In our example here, if you notice that youกve been spending $45 per sale lately, then start thinking about the future of this campaign. Try to figure out whatกs changed and see if you can fix it.

How long should you wait before you abandon it? Two weeks? A month? Ten sales? A hundred sales?

Itกs completely dependent on your situation. If you make 20 sales a day, then obviously worrying after only 20 sales is unwarranted. On the other hand, if it takes you 4 months to make 20 sales, then maybe you shouldn’t wait quite that long. Listen to your gut.

In the end, be aware that PPC management is not a rigid science. You have to use a certain amount of judgment. But try not to be emotionally attached. If a little voice in the back of your head is telling you that you’re spending too much for too little, then listen to it.

What Iกve given you here are guidelines based on my own practices. Iกm sure there are other people who do it differently and are also successful. But these strategies work for me. And Iกm sure you can adapt them to work for you.

About The Author

Dave Brown is a selftaught marketer and software developer. He also publishes the uncommon and uniquely original newsletter on making the most of your life A Fresh Perspective. You can learn more at

http://www.davebrown.com

dave@davebrown.com

This article was posted on January 23, 2004

by Dave Brown

PayPerClick Advertising & Search Engine Optimiza

PayPerClick Advertising & Search Engine Optimization

by: Carrie Reeder

There are proกs & conกs to both PayPerClick advertising and optimizing for natural search engine traffic.

PPC advertising has many great benefits. First of all, you get your traffic going quickly. I have used this advantage many times. I test new products and even new websites through PPC advertising before making a decision to promote or scrap my new website or product idea.

I am a firm believer in testing new products before throwing large amounts of money into advertising. PPC advertising is a great way to do this. For example, with Googleกs Adwords program, you can post your ad, pay a $5 signup fee and have highly targeted traffic to your website within an hour. How is that for efficiency?

Also, you can moniter your click charges and stop them before they get too expensive. By the time you have spent your budget on clicks, you should have a pretty good idea of how successful your product is going to be.

I think of PPC advertising as being the most useful when starting a new business or product. WIth PPC advertising, you can quickly and efficiently find out which keywords you need to target and which products are the most popular.

Once that testing period is over, however, itกs time to look into Search Engine Optimization. PPC advertising can be very expensive, costing hundreds, even thousands a month in advertising costs. Once you know what keywords to target, itกs time to put together a plan on how you are going to optimize your website. The drawbacks to search engine optimization is that it requires a lengthy amount of time to get your site to rank high with your keywords. That is why I suggest using this method after the testing period is over, when you already know your business will be profitable.

Search Engine Optimization is definately a slow way to get your website traffic if you plan on not using PPC traffic. It could be a long, expensive road before you even begin selling your product. Search engines can take months, even years to start pulling up high with the search engines. But, natural search engine traffic is definately the best long term way to get the majority of your traffic.

When getting your site to start pulling up in SE natural listings there are 2 main things that need to be done:

Add Content

Add Backlinks

Search engine traffic requires you to submit your site to many different search engines and wait, maybe even months for them to spider your website.

I have had much better luck with another route. You can pay a fee to have your website listed in a very high ranking directory like www.dmoz.com (free), www.yahoo.comกs directory ($299), sbd.bcentral.com (only $50), or another website where your link is on a page that has a page ranking of 4,5,6 or higher. The sites I mentioned above have rankings of 8 or 9. When you have your link on a site with that high of a ranking, the search engines are spidering those sites constantly and will find your website and spider it very quickly. Not only will they find it quickly but because you are linked to a high ranking site, you will also rank higher with the SE.

When looking for backlinks, focus on sites with content related to yours and high page rankings of 4 or higher.

As for content on your site, try to include about 200500 words of content or text on most of the pages of your site. Text makes your site bulkier. Make sure to integrate all of the keywords you want to target within the content of your site. Don’t worry about cramming the same keywords in over and over. Search engines may possibly even blacklist your site for keyword stuffing, if you try to do that.

There is a lot to know about Search Engine Optimization but, those are the 2 main factors when getting started.

In summary, when starting out, I suggest using PPC advertising for testing products and keywords. Spend time optimizing your site for search engine traffic after you have tested your products and keywords.

About The Author

Carrie Reeder has been a web marketer for 3 years and has various websites where she sells a variety of products from software to clothing accessories.

www.thelevelcollection.com

carrie@thelevelcollection.com

This article was posted on November 02, 2004

by Carrie Reeder

Testing PayPerClick To Build A Subscriber List F

Testing PayPerClick To Build A Subscriber List Fast

by: Tom Beal

Every successful salesperson knows the value of owning a list of targeted potential customers. Itกs a strategy I used to break sales records and also taught in my sale training sessions.

Coming from ‘realก world selling into virtual world selling presented some unique challenges.

How does one build a list online?

Research revealed many successful marketers recommend using PayPerClick (PPC) search engines to quickly and effectively build your list.

Selecting targeted keyword to reach your ideal potential customer give PPC a distinct advantage over other list building methods.

I decided to put PPC list building method to the test. I choose to set up a advertising campaign at Google Adwords and the lesser known http://www.mpstrategiesfirm.com. The two companies can have your campaign up an running in a short time.

They display the ads differently. Google Adwords displays the ad on search engine results and mpstrategiesfirm.com uses contextual advertising showing the ads on keyword topic based pages within their network.

Every test needs an objective outcome to gauge the results. The objective of this test? Visitors sign up to receive a free health report from a new affiliate program I choose to promote.

The Test Results

Google Adwords

number of clicks 700

cost per click .23

total cost 161.00

MPStrategiesfirm.com

number of clicks 800

cost per click .20

total cost 160.00

Even though they used different methods to display the ad, both produced excellent traffic results for the investment.

Sending traffic was only one factor of the objective. Remember the ultimate goal is to gain subscribers to build the list.

Here is where PPC marketing provided a valuable lesson in online marketing.

1,500 people clicked for the free report, but only 89 put in their name and email address. I receive 53 subscribers from mpstrategiesfirm.com and 36 from Google. Surprisingly

About The Author

Tom Beal assist his clients at positioning themselves as the experts in their field and creating the law of attraction in their business. He is also the President and Founder of numerous successful companies and websites including the recently formed membership site for top performers at: http://www.nobossclub.com Contact Tom at tom@nobossclub.com or 5857485818

This article was posted on September 08

by Tom Beal

Why Paid Inclusion is better than PPC advertising

Why Paid Inclusion is better than PPC advertising

by: Kristian Pulz

When search engines pay website owners a percentage of the bid cost, you’re just looking for trouble. This is the problem with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, especially with smaller named search engines. Many websites request or even pay there visitors to search a specific search engine and click on a result. This just sends advertisers fake leads and causes problems for the advertisers that paid for the keyword listing. Many PPC search engines offer webmasters up to 80% of the bid price. For example, letกs say I pay กExample Search Engineก $1 for the keyword Viagra, they then pay webmasters $.80 per visitor they send that searches and clicks on a bided search term. You can see why PPC can be a problem.

Paid Inclusion offers a safer, less expensive form of search engine advertising. You pay one price to have your site listed in a specific search engine, often under a specific keyword. Your site will also be updated on the search engines data base more often then non paid sites. Paid Inclusion costs and average of $25 a year per URL submitted. Plus the cost goes down the more URLกs you submit at one time. PPC usually starts at $.01 per click being the cheapest bid per keyword, but youกd be lucky to find a keyword that low that would result in any clicks.

Something to be aware of when advertising on PPC search engines. Although you are paying for your site to be viewed in a search engine, many times your site will show up on other people websites. This is a common practice on both Google and Overture search engines. Advertisers have to opt out of this service if they only want to be shown in the search engine,. In my opinion, this will help reduce fraudulent clicks of your paid search term.

This isn’t to say every PPC search engine is bad. For example, Mamma.com offers a fixed price per website category. They then rotate all the websites in a category evenly. Websites big and small get their advertising site seen the same amount of time. Before spending money on a PPC search engine be sure to read how they protect advertisers against fraudulent clicks. This will help make sure you get more for your money.

If there was only a way to eliminate fraudulent clicks in PPC advertising. It would make using this method of search engine advertising well worth the extra costs. After all, you are getting targeted hits to your site by people searching for precise keywords.

About The Author

Kristian Pulz is the owner of http://www.Links2See.com an internet directory and http://www.barterNsave.com a direct partner of the First Barter Network. He can be reached at webmaster@links2see.com.

This article was posted on October 19, 2004

by Kristian Pulz

21 Search Engine Terms Every Web Marketer Should K

21 Search Engine Terms Every Web Marketer Should Know Part 1.

by: Kamau Austin

1. Search Engine Is a database of web sites that is ranked according to the computerized criteria that the programmers decide upon called an algorithm. Various search engines determine ranking on their own different factors of importance or relevancy. For the last few years the Google search engine was the most popular search engine supplying the search results for Yahoo and to a lesser extent MSN and AOL. This all changed recently after Yahoo purchased different search engine companies and developed its own search engine. Soon MSN will enter this market with its own search engine algorithm.

Searchers input keyword queries into search boxes and are given results from the databases of the search engines in accordance with the ranking algorithm from whatever search engine they are using.

In other words, search engines index sites it feels will be of value to its customers, which are Internet surfers searching for information.

The most important concept to grasp with a search engine, is that it uses an automated computerized system to find and rank the sites within its database of web sites.

2. Internet Directory An Internet directory is a large listing of categorized web sites however the concept that should be understood with the Internet directories, is that they actually have editors that decide what goes into the directory. Remember an Internet directory is decided and managed by human editors, while in contrast, a search engine is ranked by a computerized algorithm or system. Directories are important to get links from because, they will raise your rankings in the Google algorithm (which is based on PageRank™ or links from other sites to a great extent).

3. SEO Search Engine Optimization From the Tao of Search Engine Promotion represents the Ying or Female Principle in that it is more fluid and receptive to the algorithms of the search engines, which of course you do not control. SEO promotion is using known conventions and in some cases deconstructing the algorithms of the developers of the search engines and working with them. In other words it is like Judo where you use the momentum and power of the search engines to build your business. You will have to be constantly vigilant, in order to try to stay abreast of the latest developments in SEO promotion.

4. PayPerClick (PPC) advertising with the search engines is bidding for particular keyword phrases or search terms used most frequently by Internet users related to information on certain niches and sectors. Overture was the first great payperclick advertising sales channel for the search engines. It presently represents Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, and related partners allowing advertisers to bid on particular keywords. Google presently runs its own PPC Search Engine advertising branch called Googleกs Adwords Select. Since PPC advertising is so expensive use it in moderation by setting daily and monthly budgets (otherwise for high volume searched keywords you could go broke).

After setting budgets, which you do in the Overture and Google advertising interfaces, use PPC to test your conversion rates for subscribers, sales, etc., and constantly monitor it and finetune it. You want to increase your conversation rates. This is critical because as we alluded to the expense of PPC in earlier in this article the typical major ad agency or corporate brand only spends $5 $15 dollars to reach a thousand people (CPM). Although they may go higher for a responsive direct mail lists like $100 or $150 to reach a thousand people. In PPC advertising small business are usually paying at least 35 cents on the dollar (for any word with any real competition) to reach a thousand people or $350 dollars. I have seen and experienced people paying $2.50 a click or $2250 dollars to reach a thousand people.

The true expense of PPC is never discussed by experts in that industry. Any small business using PPC should have an outstanding product ready for prime time, to see any return in investment. Alternately, they should only use it for limited testing or to get a product quickly to market online. Given the expense of PPC some small business people might be better off buying classified direct response advertising in a niche publication or obtaining ad space in ezines.

Another point to discuss in PPC is how the major companies hurt their advertisers (stab them in the back) by using popup blockers, which hurts the advertisers ability to collect email addresses on the front end, and with spam filters block even legitimate marketers ability to reach optin subscribers on the back end. Google is more of a front end popup blocker, AOL is more of an email blocker, while Yahoo is both. There are better ways to stop email and web site spam. What is important is that small business, if it is not careful with PPC could be paying AOL, Google, and Yahoo/Overture to put them out of business.

5. Pay Per Inclusion is paying to be included in the database of a search engine or Internet directory. Presently it is free to be included in the Google search engine. You just need a link to your site from a few other sites already in the Google database and your site will be spidered in many cases. Recently it has been announced Yahoo will charge a fee to update your new content into their search engine database. From what I understand if you are already listed in Yahoo its all well and good, but any new content that you put on your site will not be indexed.

6. Search Terms (AKA Keywords or Keyword Phrases) Search terms and more specifically keyword phrases are words searchers put in a search box to find information on a particular product, service, or item. Keywords and Keyword phrases have different tiers. For instance the top tier keyword กbusinessก probably receives 500,000 searches a month. But it is so general that it would not be a good keyword for which to optimize your site. However, the second tier Keyword phrase กsmall businessก would have less searches, but it is more of a targeted search. The third tier keyword phrases are even more targeted and would be ideal for persons to optimize their sites for although there are less monthly searches for them.

7. Search Engine Algorithm Algorithms are sets of rules according to which search engines rank web pages. Figuring out the algorithms is a major part of SEO. The thinking is that if you understand how they calculate relevance, you can make specific pages on your site super relevant for specific search terms. For more on algorithms and SEO in general, please check out http://www.searchengineplan.com .

About The Author

Kamau Austin, helps small and minority business make more money, by creating, search friendly web sites. He is the owner of http://www.Ebizbydesign.com, http://www.Einfonews.com, http://www.carolsartshows.com and the creator of the Free Search Engine Promotion Telecourse. See the free telecourses at: http://www.SearchEngineplan.com

This article was posted on October 21, 2004

by Kamau Austin

Paid Search Advertising that Delivers Maximum ROI

Paid Search Advertising that Delivers Maximum ROI

by: Ivana Giardi

Paid Search Advertising (also PayPerClick, PPC) has gained a significant influence in the search engine industry over past couple of years. Whilst a traditional search engine optimisation still remains the online marketing strategy number one, more and more emarketers discovering the potential of online advertising campaigns. Properly designed and managed, PPC campaign can deliver highly qualified visitors to your online shop.

1. Quick Overview

PayPerClick (PPC) Search Engines are built on the similar principle as auctions. The difference is that you bid on keywords terms people use when they search for stuff on the internet.

The concept of PPC bidding is rather simple: you buy (= bid on) keywords that relate to your product. The highest bidder gets placed at the top of the search results, the second highest bidder gets the next listing and so on. Every time someone clicks through to your website, you pay the amount you bid on that particular search term.

Advertising with PPC search engines basically gives you three key advantages:

• Cheap and Highly Targeted Traffic

With bidding on keywords that relates to your product or service, you actually prequalify the type of visitors you wish to attract. You determine how much you are willing to pay (bid) for the click and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This implies that PPC search engines can cheaply direct qualified visitors to your website.

• Fast Exposure, Immediate Profits

Traditional search engines usually take few weeks (sometimes even months) to list your website. If you are having problems to get your website indexed by search engines or if you would like to get a quick results from the search engines then PPC is the best alternative. Most of PPC search engines will set your website live within a couple of hours (maximum few days) and the impact on your site traffic and sales is practically immediate.

• Guaranteed Top Position

Search engine optimisation is the classic method of getting your website on the top of search results for free. Simply said, the process of optimisation involves choosing keywords that are directly related to your website and placing them meaningfully within your pages. However, as easy as this sounds, for an average webmaster this is usually a quite daunting task without any guarantee on the success. This again brings me to PPC as the best solution to gain high rankings on the search result list. Often, by spending just few cents per click, your website can get to the top three positions within 24 hours!

The bestknown and most popular PPC Search Engines are Google AdWords (www.google.com/ads) and Overture (www.overture.com). Advertising with those two industry leaders will get your website lots of exposure and traffic. Furthermore, top 3 listings in Google AdWords and Overture appear on an extensive network of sites (including Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, Excite, and many others) so you can reach up to 80% of all active Internet users. However, at the same time be prepared that their top listings tend to be rather expensive and you need to pay quite a bit.

Generally, the more popular keyword you choose for bidding the higher is the price. You can start your bid from 1 cent per click and finish paying $5.00 (or more) for very competitive keywords.

2. Designing Successful PPC Campaigns

The golden rule of PPC bidding is: ขAttract highly qualified buyers and keep your bids as low as possibleข. Since you are paying for each single visitor landing on your website obviously you wish to maximize the effectiveness of your PPC campaign. Let’s take a look at some basic guidelines to help you optimise your campaign and ensure your ROI:

• Determine your bid cost

The calculation of the bid cost (also cost per click) requires a rather complicated formula. For the purpose of this article I mention just a baseline that helps determine how much you can afford to bid:

Firstly, you need to know the conversion rate of your web site. That means how many unique visitors you need to close one sale. For example, if you need 50 visitors (= clicks) to close 1 sale then your conversion rate is 2%. If your bid is 10 cents per click than one sale has $5 of bidding cost.

Secondly, you need to know your profit margin. If your profit margin is high enough to justify the cost you can consider increasing the bid and getting a higher position for your ad. This way you may increase the number of clicks through your website and acquire more sales.

Finally, calculate if the extra sales justify the extra cost and adjust the bid accordingly.

• Focus on highly targeted keywords

As mentioned earlier, PPC Advertising can deliver cheap and highly targeted traffic to your website. To use this advantage to your benefit it is important to choose wisely the keywords you wish to bid on. The key is to be specific. For example, instead of bidding on ขskin careข you can consider bid on ขanti ageing herbal treatmentsข. More targeted keywords attract more qualified buyers. It is easier to convert them into paying customers because they found exactly what they were looking for. This strategy is also a big money saver more specific keywords tend to be less expensive than the general ones everybody is biding on.

• Customize your advertisements

You will attract more attention from qualified buyers by writing ads specifically for each of keywords you bid on. Speak directly to the type of visitor you want to serve. For example, instead of writing an ad for ขpiesข you can write ขhome made meat piesข.

When tailoring your ads to a specific audience, be also sure that you direct your visitors to a page on your website where itกs easy for them to buy these items.

• Use less popular PPC search engines

Overture and Google AdWords are clearly the PPC market leaders. However you can still benefit from the less popular ones such as:

FindWhat http://www.findwhat.com

Espotting http://www.espotting.com, (biggest PPC engine in UK and European market)

7search.com http://www.7search.com

Kanoodle.com http://www.kanoodle.com

Enhance Interactive http://www.enhance.com

Sprinks http://www.sprinks.com

Bids on these less popular PPC search engines are much cheaper and you can purchase your listings for as little as one cent per visitor. Even though you may not get the same exposure as you would get with Overture and Google, you still generate a decent amount of traffic. And while you only pay for actual clicks to your website, you never waste your money.

• Choose the best position for your advertisement

To be listed first on the search results is not always a smart move. It certainly helps to attract lots of visitors, but may cost you lots of money at the same time. People usually visit first 5 top listings before making a final decision about their purchase. Therefore, it is more profitable to have lower ranking for highly competitive keywords.

3. Managing PPC Advertising Campaign

You have designed a killer selling ad copy, chosen highly targeted keywords, calculated the maximum you can afford to bid on each of search terms and determined which spot on the search results you wish to secure. Yet, there is no guarantee that your ad always remains on your desired position.

The key to managing the desired position is to adjust your bids correctly in accordance to the PPC market conditions. It’s like monitoring shares on the share market to get the best deal you need to constantly watch prices and react immediately to any change.

The main factor influencing the price of the bids and your position are your competitors. Let’s make few examples of bidding strategies you can consider using in your PPC campaign: assuming, your maximum cost per click is $1.00 and your goal is to secure position #3 at the most effective cost.

(a) Maintain Target Position

Your aim is to target the position #3 however your ad appears on the position #10. Knowing that the current holder of the position #3 pays $0.51 per click you can improve your position and take over his place by bidding $0.52. This strategy sometimes tends to drive up the keyword prices so be aware you don’t cross the limit of spending $1.00 per click.

(b) Remove Bid Gaps

Overture defines the bid gap as ขthe difference between the amount you are currently paying for a click and the minimum you could be paying to still remain above your next highest competitor in the search results.ข

For example: You pay $0.70 per click and your next highest competitor pays $0.60 per click. You can pay just $0.61 per click and still be placed above your competitor. By closing this bid gap you save $0.09 per click which in 1,000 clicks is saving of $90!

(c) Control your Maximum Cost per Click

As mentioned earlier in this article, the calculation of your maximum bid cost (cost per click) requires you to collect a list of statistics about your website. Based on our assumption, you are willing to pay maximum of $1.00 per click. Therefore you should not pursue any positions where the bids are over your $1.00 limit. Wait till the price falls under $1.00 to prevent any possible losses.

To get the most accurate bidding results without having to babysit your advertising campaign, I would recommend relying on one of the automated bid management software available on the market today. In general, those tools constantly check your bids and adjust them accordingly to maintain your desired position so that you don’t have to be alert 24/7.

The more sophisticated tools allow you to set your daily budget to prevent spending more than it is efficient for your business. Below I have listed the main features you should be looking for when choosing the bid management software for your campaign:

The ability to create and identify targeted keywords and phrases that convert leads in sales.

The ability to set the maximum amount your want to bid.

The ability to fix bid gaps so you don’t pay more money than is necessary

The ability to set your desired position.

the ability to compile comprehensive reports on your keywords, bidding cost, bid position and current bid for each keywords.

The ability to monitor competitor’s activity by checking competitors ranking and current bids.

If you would like to download a demo version of bid management software, there is one available for free at website http://www.keywordbidmaximizer.com/bidmaximizer. It will help you to better understand the whole process of designing and maintaining PPC campaigns so you always manage to costeffectively allocate your budgets and increase your revenue.

Paid Search Advertising presents an excellent opportunity to immediately address your offers to the proper online audience. Focus on identifying highly targeted keywords that convert for your website. Calculate your bids so your sales justify the cost. This way you will maximize your return on investment and ensure your website’s success with PPC advertising.

About The Author

Ivana Giardi is Marketing Director at Apex Pacific, developer of smart internet marketing solutions to help companies increase sales and profitability online. If you would like to learn more about Paid Search Advertising, visit Apex Pacific at www.apexpacific.com or email Ivana at marketing@apexpacific.com.

This article was posted on October 17, 2004

by Ivana Giardi

Are You in for a Safe Landing? PPC Landing Pages

Are You in for a Safe Landing? PPC Landing Pages

by: Shawn Campbell

Youกve paid for your ticket and your ads are up on Google AdWords and Yahooกs Overture, but have you set up a safe landing for your clients?

Run a test landing. Do a search and find your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad in Yahoo or Google. Click on it. Where does it bring you? Your home page? I hope not. You should create a specific landing page for your PPC ads. A landing page is the page you create to convert your PPC traffic into sales. This page should get your potential customers (that you have already paid for!) to go exactly where you think they want to go.

Here are some tips to create a good landing page:

1) Focus! Focus! Focus!

The landing page should be about your product or service. No links to other sites, no advertisements, no กhow do you doก. When people arrive at your landing page, they should already be predisposed to buy (since you wrote such an excellent ad to get them here in the first place) and are trying to either: a) Get more information about your product or service b) Find the กBuy nowก button Use the search term on the page, because searchers will key into the section of the page with their search term. If the search term is กbuy skidooก then have a button that says กBuy Skidoos Hereก. Don’t distract them give them what they want.

2) Customize your landing page

Use a different landing page for each group of keyphrases. If you sell seadoos and skidoos, don’t use the same landing page for each. Create a new landing page for each product (or each group of products) and send the clients directly to the page they are interested in.

3) Give them information

If they are not yet sold on your product or service, then they are going to be looking for more detailed information when they arrive at your landing page. Give it to them. You have to convince them that you have the perfect product or service to solve their problem. If they run out of information before they make a commitment to buy, then you have lost them. Nobody will spend money until they are convinced that your product or service is the right choice for them. So prove it.

4) Tell the reader what you want them to do

Use callstoaction. If you want them to buy your product, than tell them often how to do it (กClick here to buyก). If you want them to call you, post the number up with instructions (กCall us now at 18777173667ก). Repeat it throughout the text, then again in big and bold at the end.

5) Use graphics

Use pictures to sell your product or service. Pictures of the product or pictures of satisfied customers sell. Use them and use them often.

6) Run tests

Set up two landing pages to see which one converts better. Set up two identical ads and send one to each landing page, then compare conversion rates for each page. Figure out why one converts better and try to improve the other one. Then, run more tests until you are completely satisfied with the results.

Set up your landing pages so that your potential customers arrive for a safe landing. If all goes well, they will step out of the plane with their credit cards already in hand and their money almost in your pocket.

About The Author

Shawn Campbell is an enthusiastic player in the ecommerce marketplace, and cofounded Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. He has been researching and developing marketing strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998. Shawn is one of the earliest pioneers in the search engine optimization field.

shawn@redcarpetweb.com

This article was posted on April 07

by Shawn Campbell

Internet Marketing – Short Term Strategy

Internet Marketing – Short Term Strategy

by: Halstattt Pires

After spending a lot of time and effort on building a site, many wonder where they should start with Internet marketing. Site owners can be bombarded with pitches about marketing and it is hard to sort out what should be done. In this article, a short term marketing strategy is discussed.

Short Term Marketing Strategy

The single best short term marketing strategy is payperclick marketing campaigns. A ขPPCข campaign simply involves placing advertisements on the results pages of search engines. In essence, you open an account with the PPCs, develop a list of keywords and create ads for those keywords. The two best PPC platforms are Google Adwords and Overture.

Google Adwords lets you place ads on Google search results. In addition to its own search engine, Google also supplies search results to AOL and other sites. When you create your ads, you can choose to place your ads on ขcontentข or ขsearchข results. Select only ขsearchข results until you are sure the advertisement and your site coverts traffic into revenues.

Yahoo purchased Overture a few years ago for 1.8 billion dollars. Overture places advertisements on search results for MSN and, ta da, Yahoo among others. To build your ads, you search for keywords from a list provided by the PPC and create individuals ads. It can take a long time, but it is worth it.

Which PPC is Best?

Both Google and Overture have serious benefits. Google will send more traffic to your site than Overture. Getting your ad in front of AOL users is particularly advantageous because AOL users are buyers. For whatever reason, they simply seem to be more amenable to buying what you’re selling.

If Google is so great, why use Overture? In many ways, Overture has serious advantages over Google Adwords. One of the biggest advantages involves the size of ads.

To effectively run a profitable PPC campaign, you must get the maximum bang for your buck. One strategy for doing this is to qualify your traffic by explaining details in your description. If you only carry one model of a product, say that so money isn’t wasted with people who are looking for a different model clicking on your ad. With Google, you only get two to three words in your title and 8 to 10 in your description.

PPC advertising is a tremendous short term marketing strategy for a number or reasons. First, the advertising gets traffic to your site immediately. Second, it allows you to test the ability of your site to convert traffic into dollars. If conversions are low, you can modify the site and get immediate feedback.

If its time to get working on your marketing, research the PPC possibilities. Google Adwords and Overture have a lot to offer.

About The Author

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com a internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego, California.

This article was posted on September 02

by Halstattt Pires

TenStep Guide to Boosting Your Siteกs Traffic and

TenStep Guide to Boosting Your Siteกs Traffic and Revenue

by: Nadeem Azam

1. Hunt for Catchy Domain Names and Get a Quality Paid Host

You probably have a domain name already, but you might consider getting new ones for different sections of your website or for different target markets. Gone are the days when it used to cost $50 to register a .com and most people can afford to have several domain names. Nameboy is a fabulous free tool to find available names. However, don’t register your domain names with Nameboy: they are expensive. Instead, we recommend you use this registrar who charge half the amount.

If you are using a free web host, then ditch it their intrusive advertising will stop people returning to your site and most directories will not list it. Spend some time at Webhosting Talk, which is worldกs number one forum for webhosting. There are literally thousands of hosts out there, so it can be an arduous process finding a reliable one which will provide a good level of service. The one we use for most of our sites is here.

2. Put All your Energy into Creating the Best Website Possible

Now its time to create your site or, if you have one already, make it even better! If you need a userfriendly yet advanced HTML editor, we would recommend 1st Page 2000. It is 100% free and far easier to use than the likes of Dreamweaver. Try to make your website look as impressive as possible: it is worth burning the midnight oil to make it look just perfect. We can’t stress how important it is to have a professionallooking logo; most webmasters underestimate their significance. In this day and age, image is everything and a jawdropping logo will impress potential advertisers. If need be, pay for a graphic designer to create one for you.

3. Write Unique MetaTags for Each Page of Your Site

Although metatags are no longer as important as they used to be, with search engines like Google and Yahoo no longer using them, it is worth the effort to create unique metatags for each and every page of your site. That way you will receive multiple listings in the search engines. An invaluable free metatags generator can be found here.

4. Do Some Market Testing and Then Tweak the Site if Necessary

When you have finished your website, ask your friends to surf around it and get their feedback. Big businesses spend billions of dollars on getting consumer feedback on their products and services, but by asking family and friends, you can gain an invaluable insight into how other people will perceive your site for free. You can also ask other webmasters for suggestions on how to improve your site on one of the many forums such as SitePoint or IHelpYou

5. Submit Your Site to the Search Engines

Now comes the fun part. You can either submit your site to the major search engines manually or, to save time, use a submission tool. There are lots of companies which will try to rip you off by asking you to pay to use their submission service, but thereกs no need to pay a penny. We have spent hours surfing the net to find the best free submission tools for you!If you are pushed for time, you can use either

this or this service which will submit details of your site to various top and middleranking search engines. However, we would strongly urge you to spend an afternoon using the excellent SelfPromotion.com to let scores of search engines and directories know about your new fangled creation. A word of caution: never ever use your real email address to make site submissions. Despite what they claim, many of the search engines, particularly the smaller ones, sell the email addresses of webmasters who submit sites to them and you will start receiving more and more spam. Make up your email address or open a new Gmail or Yahoo Mail account and use that when submitting.

6. Don’t Forget to Submit Your Site to Directories

The most important directory to submit your site to is Dmoz which syndicates its content to thousands of other portals. Read the instructions about how to submit your site carefully. Yahooกs directory used to be equally significant, but we don’t think itกs worth the investment any more. Yahoo now gives prominence to its payperclick listings and being in their directory will not pull enough traffic to most sites to justify the cost. Yahoo charges an exhorbitant annual fee for a site to be listed in its directory. Alongside Dmoz, don’t forget to submit your newfangled creation to niche directories in your field and in your geographical region. The more links you have to your site, the greater your link popularity and the higher your site will feature in King of Search Engines, Google!

7. Also Consider PayPerClick Search Engines

Free search engine traffic is great, but sometimes it takes months to properly optimize and tweak your web pages until those pages show up high enough in the rankings to do you any good. PPC Search Engines are based on the premise that you, the web site owner or affiliate program promoter, pay a fee to have your site/product listed before others. You can end up paying a considerable amount of money for PPC listings in search engines, but it can provide a valuable source of targeted traffic if you play the game with caution and guile.

Make sure you do your research first to choose the most costeffective PPC search engines for you. If you do a search at

Webmaster World, for instance, you will discover that many webmasters who paid for listings at Enhance Interactive have considered it a complete waste of money as it partners with poor quality search engines. Other PPC search engines we suggest you avoid are Xuppa (awkward to navigate, poor customer support), Brainfox (terrible control panel) and the European PPC search provider Espotting (very high minimum bid). A couple of PPC search engines we have had a good experience with are this one and this one

8. Optimising PayPerClick Marketing Campaigns

A good way to create a collection of keywords for PPC advertising is to view the source on competing websites. You may do this with as many sites as you want, create as large a collection as possible. Here are some other useful tools to dig for keywords to add to your PPC campaigns: Overture USA and Overture UK toolboxes shows both keywords and traffic; 7Search’s and Google’s are equally good.Patiently build a large collection of search terms. If you only use 2030 กgoodก keywords you have to bid high on them and the traffic will be expensive. But if you use hundreds of words you can receive an equal amount of traffic without having to bid high amounts. Also don’t forget the landing page people first see when they click on your PPC link must be optimised to generate the sale, signup or whatever your aim is.

9. Banner exchanges are a Brilliant Way to Build Your Brand and Traffic

Banner exchanges will allow you to spread the word about your site on thousands of others at no cost. If haven’t got a banner, there are hundreds of excellent freetouse templates at AAA Banners. We have tried over 100 banner exchanges over the years, but most of them seem to be run by amateur webmasters from their bedrooms and, as time progresses and their interest in the project wanes, the level of service deteriorates. The most professional banner exchange we have ever come across is this one. We receive hundreds of visitors from them every day. If you decide to give them a go, spend time getting to learn how to target your banner(s). That way they will only appear on sites in your category and you receive more traffic back to your site.

10. And Finally, the $$$s…

Itกs only when you have finished promoting your site that you should consider adding prominent advertising to it. If, say, you have inyourface affiliate links from the start, directories are more likely to reject your site. Therefore wait until your site has been included in directories, accepted by PPC search engines and banner exchanges, before adding banners and text links to the top of your pages.

When looking for merchants to promote, avoid the ones that merely pay a oneoff lead or sales commission. Most of the wealthiest people in society can enjoy a high standard of living because they have residual income streams: they don’t work 100 hours a week to pay for their Mercedes cars. Therefore look for stores that pay you commission for each and every purchase a customer you send to them makes even if it is years down the line. Visit Azam.bizกs directory for the best companies to consider partnering with.

About The Author

Article by Nadeem Azam URL: http://telecom.Azam.biz

This article was posted on October 22, 2004

by Nadeem Azam

Common Ways People Waste Their Marketing Dollars!

Common Ways People Waste Their Marketing Dollars! (1 of 2)

by: Blair Ballard

1. Why paying to get your web site automatically submitted to ten zillion search engines doesn’t pay off.

The key search engines prefer you to submit manually in order to get the best results. In fact some view automatic submissions as spam, persistent submitting may result in more harm than good for your site.

Search engines get their listings by either surfing (spidering) the web like you and I, or from the 2 key directories Dmoz and Yahoo. To my knowledge you cannot automatically submit to these directories, nor would you want to as they are manually updated.

If you still insist on going the automatic submission route there are lots of free submission sites out there just do a search for กFree search engine submissionก. I just entered that phrase for an exact match on Google and got 268,000 results!

2. Ignoring the importance of กNegative Keywordsก in PPC campaigns.

Why? First let me explain what is a negative keyword in this context. When you create a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign through the likes of Google or Overture you want your ad shown when people search for certain keywords. These keywords are probably not that different from the contents of your meta tags. A negative keyword is a word or phrase that you do not want to appear along with your keyword. For instance an internet marketing company might choose กWeb Promotionก as a keyword. Their ad will now appear whenever someone searches for those two words.

Consider this company may not want to do web marketing for a particular line of business. The web company may want to add กFreeก as negative words. By adding the negative keyword, when a User does a search for กFree Web Promotionก the companyกs ad will not be displayed. This saves a potential wasted click by the User and stops the company wasting money on a useless Sales Lead.

So just as you may have hundreds of Keywords in a campaign, you could have 10100 Negative Keywords, depending on your target audience. But that just goes back to the point above Marketing Plan!

3. Running a PPC campaign and don’t check your own web site logs.

Why? PPC sites give you lots of stats telling you how many Users saw your ad, whether they clicked on it, what keywords were most successful etc. But a PPC siteกs idea of success is a User clicking to your site and making them money. Your idea of success is the User staying a while on your site, and hopefully you making a Sale.

You need to follow Users coming to your site through these campaigns and watch what they do next. By tracking the referred url, it will tell you what PPC campaign and keyword they used. This can be done easily enough by adjusting the urls within the PPC campaign itself. But now you need to track their stay on your site. Did they actually look at more than just that one page they landed on, how long did they hang around for, etc?

You can buy software to do this, but you can also do a rudimentary job of this yourself looking at your web stats. It depends on what type of traffic volume your site gets and what type of stats you get about your web site. I have to recommend some freeware software that does a great online tracking job http://www.statcounter.com. For larger operations , you can upgrade to a more detailed analysis.

PPC campaigns have 2 parts. a) Listing your ad on search engines and b) Listing the ad on กPartner Sitesก. Usually you can turn the latter off if you want, but not always. The Partner Sitesก listings are better known as those little boxes you see on the side of web sites saying something like กAds by Googleก at the bottom. Iกm not picking on Google, but they are the most obvious.

Often the volume of click thrus can be much greater from Partner Sites, but the longevity of their visit at your site can be very short. It depends on your keywords and which PPC company you choose. We actually dropped using one PPC company due to the ineffectiveness of their Partner Sitesก listings.

About The Author

About the Author: Blair Ballard is founder of the MARKET YOUR WEB group. His experience spans from that of Corporate Project Manager to Webmaster for a Non Profit organisation. http://www.marketyourweb.com.

© Copyright http://MarketYourWeb.com 2005. All rights reserved

You may only reproduce this article ขAs Isข and where URLs are live active links.

blair@marketyourweb.com

This article was posted on March 19

by Blair Ballard

What is PayPerClick?

What is PayPerClick?

by: F. Terrence Markle

Payperclick (PPC) advertising is when an advertiser pays for each qualified click that sends a search engine user (i.e., visitor) to the advertiser’s web page. PPC requires the advertiser to bid on key words or key word phrases chosen by the advertiser. There are many PPC advertising services available to choose from. Google AdWords and Overture are probably the two most popular in use today.

The PPC search engine allows you to buy a top position in the search engine results for the particular keyword or phrase you choose. The PPC search engines can deliver targeted and qualified visitors to your web page at an economical advertising cost if you manage the program carefully with a clear objective. PPC provides the advertiser with assurance that their ad is being delivered to the targeted audience.

PPC advertising uses a bidding process where the highest bidder or highest activity value, depending on the search engine, for a particular keyword or phrase will receive the top placement on the search engine results page. The PPC search engine will place your ad text in a special location on the results page when a user searches on your PPC keyword or phrase search term.

As an example, Google AdWords appear on the right side of the search results page while the organic (i.e., natural) search results appear on the left side of the page. In the case of Yahoo! Search, the sponsored ads appear on both the left and right side of the search results page. The top 23 sponsored ads appear in the top positions on the left side above the natural search results and the next 3 sponsored ads appear at the bottom of the left side and on the right side of the search results page along with other sponsored ads.

PPC advertising is a good way to obtain web page visitors when you don’t have a top ranking web page to get you the necessary natural search engine placement. Statistics show that over 80% of search engine users prefer the natural search results as opposed to sponsored ads. Nevertheless, the search engines deliver a huge amount of visitor traffic to the sponsored advertisers especially in the competitive keyword markets.

The typical PPC advertising campaign is based on the bid per click. For example, you bid $0.10 for a particular keyword or phrase that is accepted by the search engine. Whenever a search engine user clicks on your sponsored ad then you are charged $0.10 by the search engine. This amount is deducted from your account funds. Your placement in the search engine results page depends on the search engine. For Google, the placement is determined by your bid price and the ad’s clickthrough activity. For Yahoo, the placement is determined by your bid relative to other bids.

PPC can be an excellent method for getting visitor traffic to your web site but it can also cost you a lot of money. You need to be extremely careful and monitor your cost of using PPC versus the revenue generated. As the old saying goes, do the math. Calculate your return on investment (ROI) on a continuous basis to determine if you are making a profit on your PPC campaign.

As an example, assume your bid for a particular keyword is $0.10 and the product you sell has a profit margin of $15 after product costs (excluding PPC costs). If your conversion rate (the number of visitors that buy your product) is 1.0%, only 1 of your visitors will buy your product out of 100 visitors. Your net profit for every 100 visitors from your PPC campaign will be $5 ($15 profit margin less $10 for PPC).

It is a good idea to experiment with the different PPC search engines to find the one that works best for you. In addition, you need to spend the necessary time and effort to select the keyword or keyword phrase that has a profitable conversion rate for your specific web page. A higher conversion rate implies more profits to you.

Try to avoid the senseless bidding war with your competitors. Seriously evaluate whether having the number one placement position is worth the PPC price you pay. What about position numbers two, three and so on. Will you get enough clicks in one of those positions to make your PPC campaign a success? Do not automatically assume that you have to be in position number one to make a lot of money using PPC. It all comes down to experimenting and testing.

There is no such thing as the perfect PPC campaign. Evaluate the performance of your PPC campaigns on a continuous basis. Are you leaving money on the table by not adjusting your PPC bid to a lower level? Should you increase the bid price to get more traffic? Is your conversion rate changing? What are your competitors doing? Should you be considering different keywords in your campaign? PPC advertising is a great way to get traffic but at a definite price. PPC requires a thorough knowledge of the PPC search engines that you use and constant monitoring and evaluation of your campaigns.

Copyright (C) 2004 F. Terrence Markle – All Rights Reserved

Get my F.R.E.E multipart series on generating targeted and quality traffic to your web site. http://www.QuikSystems.com/WST/TrafficSeries.htm Get my F.R.E.E newsletter on building your own targeted mailing list: http://www.QuikSystems.com/EzineSub.htm

About The Author

Copyright (C) 2004 – F. Terrence Markle has worked for over 20 years with public and private companies. He has an MBA in marketing and finance. He has been involved with Internetrelated businesses for over 3 years. His primary focus is the marketing of affiliate programs.

tmarkle@quiksystems.com

This article was posted on November 15, 2004

by F. Terrence Markle

Earning from PPC Search Engine Affiliate Programs

Earning from PPC Search Engine Affiliate Programs

by: Jonathon White

What are PPC Search Engines?
PPC Search Engines are search engines that allow advertisers to list their site within their search results on a pay per click basis. Advertisers bid against other advertisers for the same keywords or phrases. The highest bidder will then have their site ranked #1 in the PPC Search Engine results for a certain keyword followed by the second highest bidder for the same keyword followed by the third highest bidder for the same keyword, etc.
When a visitor then does a search in the PPC Search Engine and clicks on an advertisers bided link, the advertisers account will then get deducted for that click. This only happens once per unique visitor. So if that same visitor clicked on the same advertisers bided link twice, then the advertisers account will only get deducted for the first click.
Why is it easier to earn from PPC Search Engines than other affiliate programs?
PPC Search Engine affiliate programs are a good and easy way to earn some quick cash online. It is a lot easier to earn from PPC Search Engines than most other affiliate programs because you earn from your visitors clickthru’s to an advertisers site and not per action or sale.
Where can I find PPC Search Engines that offer affiliate programs?
There are only a few good resources on the Internet that lists a large amount of PPC Search Engines. Most of these are either outdated where they have a lot of PPC Search Engines that don’t exist anymore or only mainly gives information about a PPC Search Engines advertising offers.
If you were looking to join some PPC Search Engines that offer affiliate programs so that you can earn some quick and easy cash, then a useful resource to use would be http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ppcaff.php.
This is because it lists over 375 PPC Search Engines where you can easily compare what each PPC Search Engines affiliate program has to offer and you can even organize the PPC Search Engines results by Date Added, Minimum Payout, Earnings, etc.
I have joined a PPC Search Engine. How do I go about advertising it so that I can earn from it?
Once you have joined a PPC Search Engine, you can then easily get promotional links/ material from the affiliate section of the PPC Search Engine account where you can then use them to advertise the PPC Search Engine that you have joined.
Most PPC Search Engines allow you to advertise them by using search boxes, an xml feed, text links, referral links, banners, a portal page, and more.

About The Author

Jonathon White has been doing advertising/ marketing on the Web for over three years. He is the Webmaster of three sites, which are: http://www.affiliateseeking.com a categorized affiliate programs directory. http://www.simplysearch4it.com a general web portal where people can play FREE online games, add free articles, search the Web, and much more. http://www.1hostseeking.com a web hosting directory.
The above article can be reprinted as longs as the bio lines stay in place.

This article was posted on July 20, 2004

by Jonathon White