Archive for the ‘Pay Per Click Marketing’ Category

Web marketing has taken on many different shapes during the last 5 years. It has gone from banner advertising to e-mail campaigns, and now we are in the age of pay-per-click systems like Overture and Google Adwords. While everybody may not agree about the effectiveness of using pay-per-clicks advertising, the one thing nobody can take away from them is their ability to drive traffic to a website.

We all know that the traffic that pay-per-clicks drive is only effective when the traffic is made up of targeted customers. What would you do if I told you there was another benefit to the traffic that pay-per-clicks produced? That’s right, even the non-targeted traffic that doesn’t help your bottom line is slowly helping you move up the ranks in the search engines. How? As search engines become more saturated with websites that contain very similar content they are searching for alternative methods to rank websites effectively. Both websites link rankings and traffic rankings have become popular in many search engines including the large sites like Google. The link ranking is the number of sites that link to your website.

This ranking depends on the number of links, how relevant the sites are, and how popular the sites are. On the other hand the traffic ranking is the total number of visitors who are visiting your site each month. Search engines figure if a website is generating 100,000 visitors each day while another is generating 5 this must mean something. And while it’s usually never the first thing search engines use to determine rankings it can be a deciding factor later on down the road.

So what did we learn today? When you want to start moving your website up the search engine rankings you can use pay-per-click systems to help you. While it’s always a good idea to make sure you are getting a good return on your investment (ROI) with any marketing plan, you need to know that your return may come later down the road when your site starts getting listed the natural way in search engines. By generating traffic using pay-per-click ads, you are placing your website just a single step up above your competition. And when it comes to search engine placement a single step might be all that is needed to turn a website into a successful venture.

About The Author

Craig Neidel has worked for NetSource Communications Inc. (a web development company) for 6 years and has experience in web development and web marketing. www.ntsource.com

So how do people find my website? This is by far the most frequent question asked by businesses wanting to increase the number of visitors to their site.

The answer to this question is that there are a number of different ways to attract visitors, these include; search engine optimisation of your website, banner advertising and link campaigns, as well as Pay Per Click. This article focuses on Pay Per Click which evidently the most effective and efficient method.

What is Pay Per Click?

The majority of search engines provide a service whereby they sell the top positions on search engine results pages.

For example, if an internet user wants to find an exclusive gift shop for Christmas presents, they would go to their prefered search engine, and type “Christmas gifts”. If this search term is a keyword we have set up for you, then your website listing will appear at the top of the results page.

How and why does it work?

It works because it allows users to find what they are searching for and your company details will be one of the first items they are likely to read. They can read your summary about what products or services you provide. Because of this, the user does decide to click through to your site, they are more likely to make an enquiry or generate a sale.

Where will my listing appear?

Your website will appear in search results in the following search engines ..

Google

Yahoo

MSN

Altavista

Lycos

Ask Jeeves

AOL

and many, many more

How much will it cost?

This is one of those “how long is a piece of string?” questions. However, we won’t end it there and leave you in the dark.

Most companies have a budget for a day, week or month. We then select the most appropriate keywords which we think your target audience will enter into a search engine. For each keyword enter a price you want to pay per click (depending on where you want to be positioned). The higher your budget, the more click throughs, the more leads, the more sales.

It’s important to remember that you only pay if a user actually clicks on the link to your website and is taken there. So only if they are interested enough in your summary and want to find out more about your products and services are they likely to click on your website link.

Elaborations Ltd is a Design company with offices in West London. It was founded in 2003 by Brad Bagherian. Elaborations specialises in helping small to medium businesses create an image with an impact. A company’s image is just as important as its products and services, so we produce designs and create an image to give potential customers that crucial first impression and reflect what their company is all about. The main area which we concentrate on is presenting that image on the web, website design and development, as well as graphic design, internet marketing and multimedia.

Pay per click marketing is one of the simplest and fastest ways of sending targeted traffic to any website. Whether you are trying to send visitors to your own website, sell a product online, or build an opt in email list, pay per click marketing has been a guaranteed way to see instant traffic results.

But there is one major problem with pay per click marketing that many individuals have. This problem has been a recurring problem for the past 5 years and it’s getting worse every minute of the day. This problem involves the over excessive cost and non-profitability that occurs when marketing through pay per click search engines. Many marketers deplete their income extremely fast when marketing online through pay per click engines. They set up a pay per click campaign, and within 24 hours , all of their money is drained with no sales, and no leads gained at all. After having this occur, the marketer ends up giving up on pay per click marketing and establishes in his heart that pay per click advertising is the most unprofitable form of advertising on the web today.

This scenario occurs every single day and many marketers give up on marketing their websites because of these tragic results. I was one of these individuals. I spent countless dollars on paid advertising solutions like pay per click search engines and I set up in my heart that I was never going to pay for advertising again. If you lost over $500 in one day from a paid advertising method like pay per click marketing, you will feel the same way! I was determined to find other alternatives for marketing online.

But I decided to read a lot of information from other marketers who were having great success online marketing via pay per click search engines. I tried to extract as much information as I can from them on how to market online using ppcs. I kept enquiring and enquiring about their tactics until I came up with a few key concepts that will help anyone immediately profit using pay per click engines!

These key concepts have nothing to do with the pay per click search engine themselves. As a matter of fact, don’t even think about the various ppc engines on the web today. Your major concern right now is to make money using this form of advertising. And the only way you can do this now is by discovering highly profitable and hidden keyword phrases that will generate income for months to come.

Here is what I learned:

1. Find Hidden Keywords With High Search Volume and Low Competition:

This is one of the most important keys to profiting using ppc engines. Your goal should be to find keywords with a high search demand, but with a small amount of internet advertisers marketing with that keyword.

Why?

Because the smaller the competition, the lesser your bid will be for that particular keyword. For example, if you are using google adwords to market your site, and you notice that there are only 7 advertisers marketing for a particular keyword, then you can bid for the lowest amount of .05 per click while at the same time being on the first page! You will have the opportunity to send a lot of traffic to your site and at the same time, increase the return on your investment (ROI). It is a beautiful feeling when you can find these types of keyword gems. I just recently discovered a keyword that gets over 1,500 searches a day and the number one bid is only .06 with 3 competing websites only!! I used the tool below to do this:

http://www.free-traffic-generation.com/adwordiser/

2. Generate Hundreds Of These Hidden Keyword Gems:

The next key is to find as many of these hidden keywords as you can. If you can find at least 500 hidden keywords to market your business with, you’ll find great success with pay per click marketing. And I am very serious when I say this. There are a lot of hidden niches and keywords that you can use to instantly send thousands of visitors daily to your website. As soon as you find these keywords, you can do a number of things to guarantee profits. One thing that I always do is set up a niche specific lead capture page that includes google adsense on it. (Ha!! I can’t believe I just gave you one of my most valuable secrets for earning income online! Well, take note of this, and use it to your advantage!)

Well, you’ve just discovered the 2 most important keys for being successful with pay per click marketing. I highly suggest that you take into account these two keys if you expect to generate a nice supply of targeted, yet cheap and profitable traffic. But I have to warn you about something. Discovering these keyword gems can take a lot of time. If you have a lot of time to spend, then go and do all of the research yourself. If you do not have a lot of time, then I highly recommend that you pick up this resource that will help you to instantly find these profitable keywords. If you need to check out this resource, go to:

http://www.free-traffic-generation.com/adwordiser/

Melvin Perry is an internet entrepreneur whose been marketing online since mid 2002. During his marketing journey online, he has created various ways of sending tons of targeted traffic to websites. He is the author of an informative report that shows anyone step by step how to easily build a 50,000 member double opt in list in only 90 days. This report is considered to be a highly sought after report. We highly recommend it. Visit http://www.workingonyourown.com/50kreport .

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 Google’s Adwords program, you can post your ad, pay a $5 sign-up 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, it’s 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, it’s 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:

1. Add Content

2. 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.com’s 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 200-500 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.

Carrie Reeder is the owner of The Level Collection, an accessories store, offering: leather wristbands and leather cuffs for men & women.

Her email address is: carrie@thelevelcollection.com

Carrie has 3 years of experience in web marketing. She is the owner of various websites marketing products from software to clothing accessories.

The cycle of affiliate programs and money making ventures goes something like this:

John Doe makes niched website.

John Doe inserts affiliate links.

John Doe waits a week, gets no sales, he soon realizes that he has little to no visitors!

John Doe doesn’t have time to build traffic the SEO way, and decides to start with some PPC campaigns.

John Doe decides to use Overture, and spends almost a 1.07 a click for “blue widgets”.

Spending over 22$ his first day, he recieves 20 clicks, no sales, and wants to quit his website permanently.

DON’T GIVE UP YET!

Don’t be another John Doe. John’s main mistake was that he didn’t go into his campaign with a plan. He just slapped some bids on his most important keywords and watched his money fly out the window.

1. Determine your keywords. Programs like WordTracker are good for this, as well as the even more free Overture.com tools. Rather than focusing on paying big for the most clicked on keywords, try to get positions 1 – 5 on many smaller, more targeted keywords. Rather than drop 2$ on “blue widgets”, you’d be better off spending .35 on “Buy Blue WIdgets”, or “Cheap Blue Widgets”. Sometimes you simply have to outsmart and outwit the competition.

2. Set your bids and spending limits low! You don’t want to spend more than 5$ a day when you first begin. Set all your bids to at least show up on the first 15 result pages. You don’t want to pay for position one when position 2, 3, 4 and 5 are 20 cents cheaper, and will still get massive clicks.

3. Carefully write your ads. Get your ad message out there! Don’t be excessive on the capital letters or exclamation marks either. If your ad is targeted to your keywords you’ll get more targeted clicks. If I was selling blue widgets I would rather have clicks for “Buy Cheap Blue Widgets” than “Blue Widgets”. Only keep one keywords active at any one time, as you want to see how they react in terms of sales!

4. Monitor your results. Keep an eye on what keywords are getting the most attention, and which ones seem to be converting the best. The rule of thumb is that you can judge a keywords (or anything really) performance after 36 clicks. From here you can determine what’s doing the best, and keep with it.

In conclusion, by using the 4 steps listed, you can set yourself a bit ahead of the competition. The only way to make it on the internet is to outsmart, outperform, and outlast your rivals.

http://www.TheRealIncome.com

Learn the Marketing Secrets of the Internet Guru’s.

http://www.emoneyreport.com

Daily reviews and articles of programs that have made myself and others cold, hard Cash.

Never mind the irritating, but effective, pop-up window. There is another type of interruption advertising that is much more subtle, much less annoying, and just as effective.

It is the negative interruption.

A negative interruption is when an expected pattern is removed or “restrained” from an expectation causing a noticeable non conformity.

I’ll give an example, and then I’ll show you. (And I’ll bet you a buck you’ll want to use it for yourself.) Here goes:

You’re viewing a web page and you scroll down a bit to see more. But a small image off to the side, instead of moving “with” the page, “stays” in the same relative position.

It doesn’t move, while everything else moves. It doesn’t conform, thereby causing a persistent interruption, forcing you to notice its quaint existence until you act on it. It’s like a child that just stands there and stares at you until you respond.

I am in the act of witnessing a marvelous phenomenon, as people not only just “have to have one” but I’m watching the results grow daily. Let me give you two examples, so you won’t think I’m pulling your coat tails.

By the way, neither of these is mine. I’m just a monkey in the middle watching this unfold like the crazy magic I told you so. In one of these you’ll be able to see with your own eyes how effective it is.

First is the “Instant Buzz” plug-in/ad-delivery system. It’s free, and highly contagious. You’ll likely get this from a small floating window that can’t be ignored, though you can dismiss it with a click.

It works so well, that in the last two days I’ve seen a mushroom of new subscribers to it. It’s a truly beautiful and contagious and viral method of getting your ad to potentially thousands yourself. Take a look:

http://www.SeducingTheBuyer.com/tools.htm

Now, what if you could use this very viral, persistent negative interruption method with YOUR OWN message, going to your own ad? And what if you didn’t have to share this technology with others? And what if you didn’t have to sign-on!

You can. And here’s the second tool.

It is a persistent child with many faces and many locations, and you can edit with any message you want. And you can include with it any picture you want.

And you can include a “hide me” button, or you can make it appear only on the first page view, or every X duration of time, etc. And you can open it to a pop up or a new page, or in the same window, if you want to.

In short, you control every aspect about its presentation to your prospect AND you can make it viral because its code is in the HTML of the page. Or, you can refer the code like a site-wide CSS sheet that would be off-page, if you wanted to do that instead. Its versatility is phenomenal.

Here’s a live example: http://www.seducingthebuyer/Persistent/example-1.htm

As you can see, the sky’s the limit with your imagination and creativity. But most importantly, you can have the power of the pop-up without the annoying side effects. Now, isn’t that a gift worth respecting your customers with?

About The Author

Dorian Greer is the publisher of Top Articles on Marketing. Discover the most up to date techniques on Internet marketing from over 340 sources twice-monthly.

http://www.TopArticles.com

As marketers and business owners, we’re always looking for “the next big idea or strategy” to maximize our business performance. Yet, the application of time-tested principles consistently achieve greater results over efforts to create newer ideas and strategies.

For example, Stephen Covey’s New York Times best-selling and world-renowned book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a self-proclaimed synthesis of principles taught by great teachers and philosophers over 150 years ago 1. The world-wide success of this book is evidence to the time-resistant power of principles.

In addition, many hugely successful Internet Marketers generated significant fortunes from applying 50 to 75 year old direct mail principles to the new Internet medium. Marketing strategies used by greats like Claude Hopkins, Robert Collier and John Caples have significant application in today’s digital environment.

Although pay-per-click marketing is a relatively new Internet marketing strategy, its performance relates well to an old principle called “Pareto’s Law” or better known as “the 80/20 Principle”.

The meaning of the 80/20 Principle is best explained by a recent book, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less”, written by Richard Koch:

“The 80/20 Principle states that there is an inbuilt imbalance between causes and results, inputs and outputs, and effort and reward. 80/20 relationships typically will show that 80% of outputs result from 20% of inputs; that 80% of consequences flow from 20% of causes; or that 80% of results come from 20% of effort.” 2

When applied to pay-per-click marketing, 80% of outputs (or desired visitor actions on your website), result from 20% of the inputs (your keywords.)

Applying the 80/20 Principle to Pay-per-Click Marketing

One of the benefits of running a pay-per-click marketing campaign is the control gained from selecting keywords to bid on. In essence, the keywords you select enable you to target specific types of individuals among varying demographics and at various points within their buying cycle.

But because it is difficult to know specifically which keywords (inputs) will ultimately generate the most actions (outputs) the process of “keyword selection” should be applied liberally. This means that all possible keyword variations and associations should be selected to figuratively “blanket” or span across all potential search queries for your products or services. By relying on your keyword-level tracking system, over time, the resulting website actions will sort the top performing keywords from the poor-performing ones.

Under the 80/20 Principle, if you initially select 1,000 keywords for your pay-per-click marketing campaign, over a month or two depending on visitor volume, your keyword-level tracking system will uncover 20% of keywords that produce 80% of your results. Likewise, the 80/20 Principle will expose roughly 80% of the 1,000 keywords selected that produce minimal to no results.

Aside from seasonality variations and marketplace trends that effect keyword performance, the 80/20 Principle pinpoints a significant operational process that all Internet marketers should implement immediately. By tracking your pay-per-click marketing campaign at the keyword level and identifying the specific keywords that produce maximum results, you can eliminate roughly 80% of your poor-performing keywords. Through this “keyword filtration process” you will re-allocate budget dollars to the top performing keywords and reduce keyword management time spent on poor-performing ones.

Remember These 5 Keys?

1. During your keyword selection process, “blanket” your target market with every relevant keyword variation and association used by your target market to find your products or services. Use Overture or Google Adwords’ editorial review to define the relevancy boundaries (or “the ends of the blanket”) for your target market.

2. Define at least one value-oriented action such as an opt-in, subscription, registration or sale that you seek a visitor to perform on your website. This action (called your “marketing objective”) is the determination point for measuring how your keywords are performing.

3. Implement keyword-level tracking to identify which 20% of your keywords produce 80% of your actions.

4. Pay close attention to seasonality variations and marketplace trends that may cause fluctuations in keyword performance. Instead of eliminating all 80% of your poor performing keywords, identify the most relevant ones to your products and services and the ones with the highest demand volume and work on adjusting their bids, re-writing their titles and descriptions or re-engineering their landing pages to increase their performance.

5. If branding is your primary objective as opposed to “performance” remove your brand-oriented keywords from your 80/20 Principle analysis and associated performance metrics.

Analyze your pay-per-click marketing against the 80/20 Principle to see if an imbalance exists between your inputs (keywords) and outputs (actions). You will discover that a simple revamp of your pay-per-click marketing campaign will significantly increase your visitor-to-action conversion rates, reduce your cost per action and enable a more efficient allocation of your budget across your top performing keywords.

Sources:

1 Stephen Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1989) pg. 18.

2 Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less (New York: DoubleDay, 1998) pg. 4.

Kevin Gold is a Partner and Co-founder of Enhanced Concepts, Inc., which specializes in turning website visitors into leads and sales through tested website conversion strategies and performance-focused search engine marketing. To learn how to generate greater performance from your search engine marketing and to turn more website visitors into leads and sales go to http://www.enhancedconcepts.com.