During conversations with web business professionals about pay-per-click search engines, “traffic volume” is always a hot topic. Over the last year or so, Google Adwords has emerged as the pay-per-click (PPC) search engine most enamored for driving “traffic volume”.

Indeed, with Google Adwords providing paid listings for Google Search, the #1 search engine in the world, as well as American Online (e.g. AOL), Ask Jeeves and MySearch.com, the fourth, fifth, and seventh spots, respectively, for the most popular search engines per a 2004 study by Neilson/NetRatings, it deserves strong recognition.

However, successful web marketers understand that “driving traffic volume” is only a means to an end – the “end” being website conversion.

Website conversion is when a visitor takes action (ideally your most wanted action) on your website after clicking through your ad. It is important because it leads to financial results for your web business and generates a return on your advertising spend (ROAS).

Every web business consists of unique characteristics created by their market demographics, psychographics and product/service benefits. A PPC search engine that generates visitors who convert well for one web business may fail miserably for another. Therefore, when developing your PPC strategy consider the search engines’ “usage demographics.”

Usage demographics are the profiles of Internet users who prefer one search engine over others based on their perceived functionality, content, and search result placement and relevance. By understanding usage demographics for the search engines Google Adwords and Overture supply paid listings to, a web marketer can develop a relevant message and target an ad placement that most effectively connects and converts their most qualified buyers.

Although Google Adwords and Overture’s partner networks consist of thousands of content and search-based websites, the highest percentage of their traffic originates from the five most popular search engines. Among these, Google Adwords supplies paid listings (i.e. Sponsored Results or Listings) to Google Search, Ask Jeeves and American Online (AOL) while Overture supplies Yahoo! and MSN.

Below are the primary search engine usage demographics to consider when developing your PPC strategy:

A. Gender: Male versus Female

A May 2004 study by Hitwise showed that “55% of women prefer MSN Search while a majority of men favor Google Search”. Yahoo! Search was split even on gender with a greater focus on people 18-34 in age.

A 2004 MarketingSherpa study indicated that MSN’s user profile consisted of time-limited, married females who searched less frequently yet performed greater e-commerce searches. While Google Search was favored by professional males who performed greater news, media, entertainment and education searches with a lesser intent to purchase.

For AOL and Ask Jeeves, AOL is favored by women with less buying intent than MSN Search while Ask Jeeves is preferred by children.

Furthermore, an April 2004 iProspect study uncovered that, “women found paid ads to be more relevant than men did when searching across Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.”

These statistics are startling when considering their influence on your PPC strategy since women represent roughly 75% of major household purchases and as stated in a Women.com study, control 80% of all purchasing decisions.

B. Relevancy: Paid versus Organic Listings

Another usage demographic to consider for your PPC strategy is “perceived relevancy” of paid versus organic listings. Ads perceived as having greater relevancy lead to higher website conversions.

The iProspect study referenced earlier also discovered that “Internet users are more likely to click on an organic search link on Google, and a paid search result on MSN.” Organic listings on Yahoo! were considered 61% more relevant than paid listings while AOL was split 50/50.

C. Age: Young versus Adult versus Seniors

A third usage demographic to review is age. Preferences among the top five search engines are fairly mixed among age groups; Yahoo! is a strong favorite with 18-34 year olds; while MSN and AOL have a stronger preference among the 35-55+ age group. As stated earlier, AskJeeves is favored by teens and adolescents which is growing in their buying power within American households as stated in a recent BusinessWeek research study.

So what does this all mean for your PPC strategy?

First, it is highly recommended to run Google Adwords and Overture campaigns concurrently using keyword-level tracking systems to determine which PPC search engine generates the most cost effective and best converting visitors. Usage data generated from your website is the best market research.

Second, consider your writing style. By understanding the common characteristics of your customers and writing PPC ads best suited to the search engine’s usage demographics, you will increase your probability of connecting with your audience and improving your website conversion. Also make special note that women have a stronger propensity to buy AND a higher “perceived relevance” for paid listings on MSN Search.

Third, although Google Adwords accesses a larger traffic pool, Overture’s partner network, mainly MSN Search, has the highest perceived relevancy for paid listings and the highest propensity for purchasing. Although counter-intuitive to current conventional thinking, Overture may deliver better “converting visitors” than Google Adwords.

In closing, a greater focus on the search engines’ usage demographics when writing your PPC ads, targeting PPC channels and developing corresponding landing pages will enable your marketing strategy to ultimately achieve stronger financial results for your web business.

Kevin Gold is a writer, speaker and co-founder of Enhanced Concepts, Inc. Enhanced Concepts specializes in turning website visitors into leads or sales through web conversion strategies and ROI-driven search engine marketing. If you want to increase your leads or sales and get, a free copy of “Understanding Your Conversion Rate” and “12 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion” visit http://www.enhancedconcepts.com.

What I find is a lot of marketers do have a great set of keywords, they have a great product to promote (whether it’s their own or someone elses), BUT, they go and ruin it all by structuring their campaign all wrong.

What I mean by structure is the preliminary stages you should go through to set up targeted ad groups that work WITH the ad.

It’s important not to just lump all your keywords into one adgroup, but it’s also important to have some initial, central key terms that you are going to write your ad around.

Here’s how (as in my video) to set up and structure a targeted adwords campaign. Follow this step-by-step everytime, you should be fine )

- First, find your main niche keyphrase. This is the most general, ideally 1-word term that encompasses your product’s or service’s niche. IN my example for promoting a grant claiming service, the top level keyword is, yes, “grant”

- Next you need to split this top level keyword into ideally 2-word phrases that cover what different searchers on Google will be looking for. E.g. look at the different areas your product covers such as (in my example again) EDUCATION grant, BUSINESS grant, DAYCARE grant etc.

These will also be your Adgroup names and what your ads will be written around for various benefits such as emboldened text.

- write your ad (you will look at expanded keywords later, and my course goes into this in part 2)

so if the first adgroup is BUSINESS grant, we want to write the ad around that central term so we are targeting a specific type of person here – someone who is looking for info on how to claim for a bizz grant!

- first, put that central term as the first line in your ad, followed by a trail off (a trail-off is where the reader has to go onto the next line to finish the sentence or phrase)

With trail-offs, this makes them read the whole ad, rather than just getting closure on the first line and clicking on your ad without getting the full picture – ver important they read ALL of your ad to get the full idea of what you’re offering them.

- include 2 hard hitting benefits. Take these from the website you’re promoting, so when the visitor clicks through, they will see these benefits almost uncannily and as a familiar kind of reinforcement. Psychology! Again, use trail-offs on line 2 so they have no choice but to read onto the final line…

- Close with a call to action such as “get yours now” or “don’t miss out”. I’ve found the cliche and classic action phrases work the best, people don’t seem to turn away from them even if they sound cheesy!

A call to action will push the reader to click on your link, and now they’ve read all your ad, and seen a couple of benefits, they should be primed nicely for a sale.

TIP: to prime them even more, send them onto a landing page that compares similar services or products so they have a choice and they have a chance to take another positive action.

TIP: liven the URL in your ad up a bit by capitalizing each word – e.g. www.futureaffiliate.com would just be FutureAffiliate.com

Follow these preliminary steps and you should be in a great position with your sponsored ad!

Again, you can watch my video on this (sinks in better) as a gift to you at http://www.futureaffiliate.com/ppc1.html

If you enjoyed that video (or found it completely boring but learnt from it) you should see the rest of my course which looks at promotion methods for affiliate products and inventive affiliate marketing to earn money online. It’s free…

The video is located at: http://www.futureaffiliate.com/ppc1.html (afterwards, if you’re interested in seeing the rest of my course, go to http://www.futureaffiliate.com)

Mike Beatham runs a free video e-course on affiliate marketing. If you’re interested in making money selling other people’s stuff online sign up at http://www.futureaffiliate.com

On June 24, 2005, a lawsuit was filed against Google for alleged click fraud on the Adwords pay-per-click program. The Plaintiff, Click Defense, claims Google failed to enact appropriate measures to guard against fraudulent clicks resulting in unwarranted marketing fees. Click Defense claims it has lost over $5 million to click fraud.

Click Fraud

“Click fraud” is a term with a unique meaning on the Internet. It refers to the deliberate clicking of pay-per-click advertisements by users that have no intent of actually making a purchase. It is common knowledge that unethical companies will set up click centers oversees where individuals are paid nominal wages to click on certain ads. Alternatively, companies will use programs called “click bots” that automatically search out ads and do the same thing. The end result, of course, is a bevy of clicks that drain advertising budgets.

Google claims it takes appropriate precautionary measures. This claim, however, is often met with a snicker since the sole source of revenues for Google is advertising. This causes an inherent conflict of interest since Google needs to maximize clicks to generate revenues. As a publicly traded company, Google is under pressure to continually show increased profits. Taking all of this into account, one must wonder how hard Google works to limit fraudulent clicks. If you have used the “content search” aspect of Google Adwords, the incredible poor conversion rates certainly must raise doubts in your mind.

Click Fraud Percentages

Neither Google, Overture nor any other search engine has been willing to publish click fraud rates for their paid advertising program. Hints have been provided regarding a rate of 20 percent. Active advertisers know, however, the percentages can be much higher depending on the competitiveness of the keywords in question. Click Defense, the Plaintiff in the lawsuit, is claiming a click fraud rate of 38 percent.

Will This Impact PPC?

The lawsuit against Google was inevitable. Every site using Adwords is aware of the problem with click fraud. Frankly, it is a problem with every pay-per-click search engine although our experience has been better with Overture.

So, will this lawsuit force the search engines to clean up their act? It’s hard to say, but there should be one definite benefit. As part of the lawsuit, Google may be forced to reveal the true click fraud percentages occurring in Adwords. If Google moves to quickly settle the case, you should take it as an indication it wants to keep the rates confidential. This, of course, will mean the click fraud percentages are high.

You should watch the progress of this lawsuit if you use pay-per-click search engines to promote your site. Some very interesting information should be revealed. Regardless of the outcome, click fraud is just another reason to pursue search engine optimization strategies.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com – an Internet marketing and advertising company comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.

“Todd” was keen to compete in one of the most notoriously difficult categories ? work-at-home. He was smart, earnest, hard-working and keen to make affiliate marketing more than just a part-time endeavor. He had dreams of living on the beach in Mexico and surfing between sessions at the computer.

He had put together a sweet little landing site. He had 20 keyword groups running about 10,000 unique visitors a month. He was spending $5,000 per month on pay per click on sales of $6,000. He was collecting email addresses at a rate of 100/day through an opt-in form. He had placed his Google tracking data on the confirmation page of his subscription form. He had great data he collected daily over the past 4 months. He had calculated his visitor value based on commissions divided by clicks and was bidding accordingly. He was a dream client.

Could I help him?

I was drooling over this one. In this case I was 100% sure I could at least double his profits, and likely triple or quadruple. Why was I so sure?

1) He was tracking sign-ups, not conversions

2) He was selling 22 different items off of one landing page

3) He was calculating his visitor value incorrectly

The first thing I did was turn off his keyword groups one at a time. When I got to his top keyword group, the one with the highest conversion rate, we prepared for a massive drop in commissions. There was only a slight dip.

He was stunned. He had made a simple assumption ? that there would be a correlation between signups and sales. That is, a keyword that produces twice as many signups would likewise produce twice as many sales. But that wasn’t true. We had seen vividly that there were keywords that produced lots of signups but few sales, and visa versa. He was bidding based on wrong data. His finely-tuned Ferrari of a website was, in fact, a peddler’s cart of clanking pots and pans strapped on with little thought to efficiency.

I had him write letters to each of his advertisers, requesting they place his Google tracking code on their Thank You page. That way he could track sales directly. (Important: Place the code in an attachment; email programs can scramble the code.)

Most didn’t answer. Normal. After three failed attempts, I advised him to drop that particular advertiser. Others refused, to which I reply, “Are you nuts?” No one stands to profit more from an efficient affiliate than the advertiser. I recommended that he drop them, too. He did, all but one, which was a big money-maker.

Now that he was actually tracking actual sales, not subscriptions, the guesswork was gone. We began eliminating keywords ? lots of keywords. Advertising costs plummeted. Sales sailed along at the same pace.

But we were not done.

His landing site was very broad, selling over 20 different products, which was find for keyword groups like work-at-home. Yet about half of his Google ads were related to specific product. I had him create mini-landing pages to receive these ads. For example, a keyword group on medical transcription was no longer directed to the main landing page, but to a mini-landing page with info about medical transcription only. This slashed his bounce backs and upped his sales.

Finally, I had him recalculate visitor value for each keyword group. A visitor who came from a search on “free home-business ideas” is worth far less than one who types, “medical transcription.” We adjusted his bids accordingly.

The results? His sales stayed at $6,000 per month, while his advertising costs plummeted to $2,500 per month. His monthly profit had increased 350%, from $1,000 to $3,500. It took about a month to complete the project, and, yes, it was a lot of work, but it was certainly worth it. Best of all, he now had the information he needed to keep the campaign on track as sectors go hot and cold, and keywords get overbid. Whereas his competitors were working in the dark, he understood why and how his site was performing, and why and how it was not.

So let’s review the steps

1)Turn off one keyword group at a time to test assumptions

2)Add tracking to advertiser welcome pages

3)Remove poorly-converting keywords

4)Create mini-landing pages for certain keyword groups

5)Recalculate bids based on visitor value by keyword.

We had taken a campaign that was producing a modest income and transformed it into a juggernaut, without any SEO, all built around pay per click advertising, a hot website and a killer auto-responder sequence. But none of that would have worked without first tracking the keywords that allowed us to find not just any customer, but the right customers.

Michael Hetzer, The Artful Affiliate, is President of Webster Henrietta Publishing. He is an author, consultant and sought-after speaker. He is the founder of a number of services for Internet affiliates, including the training program, “My 1st Google.” You can learn more about Michael Hetzer at:

http://www.michaelhetzer.com/

An unfortunate byproduct of the pay per click advertising business is click fraud. Many people with an online business spend large amounts of money on pay per click advertising only to discover that many of the people clicking on their ads weren’t really interested in their products or services.

Bogus “visitors” to a pay per click ad represent click fraud. This is a serious scam that threatens the viability of the pay per click advertising business which has become enormously profitable for all of the major search engine operators, namely Google, Yahoo/Overture, and MSN.

Click fraud has different twists, but the end result is generally the same. Advertisers are billed for fruitless traffic generated by someone who repeatedly clicks on an advertiser’s ad without any intention of ever buying anything.

The search engine advertising market is currently about $3.8 billion per year and estimates vary widely on how much click fraud is actually going on. Clearly, the search engine operators would like to downplay the extent of this problem. Some industry experts claim that a little click fraud exists but that it is overblown by advertiser paranoia, while others estimate that ten to twenty percent of all clicks are false (made by someone with no legitimate interest in the ad itself).

Virtually everyone involved with pay per click advertising sees click fraud and knows it’s there, but no one is quite sure what to do about it.

Both Google and Yahoo/Overture acknowledge that the click fraud problem exists, but claim improved internal controls will prevent the problem from escalating. Their stated position seems to be that they are concerned about click fraud, but that it is not a material issue so far. Both of them are touting their increasing internal actions aimed at detecting and combating click fraud.

Such reassurances from search engine companies certainly aren’t surprising, given how much they stand to lose if advertisers cut back on advertising spending. The stakes are huge and the search engine companies are actively involved in public relations campaigns. Industry research firm eMarketer expects $7.4 billion to be spent on search engine advertising by 2008, up from only $108.5 million back in 2000.

The incentives for click fraud have increased along with the money devoted to search engine advertising. Advertising on search engines has turned into a fast-spreading craze as more and more marketers have realized substantially higher returns on search engine ads than on more traditional marketing campaigns conducted through print media.

Most pay per click advertisers set a spending limit and once the spending limit is reached, the ads cease to appear in the search results. Click fraud is a very unethical competitive tactic where someone repeatedly clicks on a competitor’s ad until the spending limit is reached and the ad then disappears from the search results. It seems that it’s only a matter of time before some advertisers become so exasperated with click fraud that they file a class-action lawsuit against a major search engine.

The success of search engine advertising has substantially raised prices that advertisers pay for top spots. Unfortunately, these higher prices have turned click fraud into a dark little industry of its own. Some crooks have hired cheap overseas contractors to just sit in front of computers and constantly click on targeted ads and others are developing sophisticated software to help automate and conceal click fraud.

If you use pay per click advertising it would be wise to carefully monitor your traffic to determine if you are the victim of click fraud. In any event, it’s probably safe to say that pay per click advertisers are going to have to accept a certain level of click fraud as just a cost of doing business.

Kirk Bannerman operates his own successful home based business and also coaches others seeking to start their own home based business. For more information visit his website at Proven Work At Home Business

Webmasters have a revolutionary new method of collecting income from their websites. Whereas in the past advertising revenue was reserved for those sites with large a coming and going of visitors, now even teenagers are making a quick buck with their online hobby blogs. People place adsense on their online family photo albums, their blogs and their business sites. The minimum you would get, even with a small amount of traffic, is for adsense to pay for your hosting costs.

Adsense revolutionized the world of paid advertising; banner advertising is based on the number of visitors you attract to your site, so the number of “banner impressions” dictate the revenue you receive. Google Adsense is quite different; it is the number of visitors that actually click on the advertising that determine how much you earn.

There is also a great disparity between payouts; because advertisers bid up the price for certain keywords, some ads pay more than others. As such, a site with few visitors but expensive keywords in their google ads can potentially still pull in a hefty payout.

Google really has taken the web by storm; attracted to passive income, more and more people are seriously capitalizing on their Google adsense advertising. Some of the highest earners manage to attract enough visitors to make a four figure monthly income, just from using adsense alone! This is not one of those get-rich-quick schemes and Google’s adsense success is largely thanks to the fact that Google already enjoyed a fantastic reputation before introducing the program. They are a publicly traded company with physical headquarters. This, and the fact that anyone can apply to use adsense for free, has caused millions of people to sign up. For google it was a smart move, because now they extend their presence to countless websites and generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue. People were never reluctant to sign up, because the program is free. Google benefits by more people using adsense, so offering it for free was the best thing they could do.

One of the driving forced behind the program are its relevance to each and every page on a website; the program picks up keywords appearing in the website copy and automatically displays relevant ads. This increases the chances of people clicking through, and the webmaster collecting more revenue.

People are leveraging their income by operating several websites and attempting to attract as many targeted visitors as possible; in many instances we can observe that people work hard at a site, then once it is established they can largely leave it alone, yet still collect significant checks.

A major concern for entrepreneurs was the danger of a competitors ads showing up on their site; thanks to the adsense feature where it only displays relevant advertising. However this problem was solved by offering webmasters the option of filtering out unwanted ads. They can submit the URL of the competing site in their account, and any ads from the website will be blocked.

Google recently came out with a new feature: small targeted keywords based on the site’s content are displayed; then as people click on those, a page opens showing a variety of pay-per-click ads based on that keyword. This gives webmasters the chance of displaying more advertising in less space.

Adsense also adds creditability to your website; the more focused the content, the better the ads will be and this encourages people to built high quality websites. These make the net a better place and generally provide a free service; site owners can afford to share their expertise or passions because they can receive indirect revenue’s. The visitor does not pay for the information; instead the advertisers do, making the website’s existence possible in the first place.

It is no surprise Google adsense is the most widely used form of advertising; they have created a program that is beneficial to both advertisers and users with their “no click no pay” mechanism, or more popularly called “pay-per-click”. Advertisers do not pay for ads that are not drawing visitors, and website owners are paid more for each click than they would if the system were based on the number of people viewing the ads, instead of clicking on them.

All in all Google adsense has developed itself into a powerful tool, used by large corporations and the kid next door. They have truly revolutionized how the web thinks about advertising and made the process more profitable for site owners, while less costly for advertisers.

Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter and Entrepreneur Magazine e-Biz radio show host, became a “#1 Best Selling Author” in just a few short hours. He has helped a number of clients target his specialty, opt-in email direct marketing systems. The Powerful Promoter is not only a sought-after internet marketer but has also marketed for some of the world’s top experts whose reputations would shrivel if their followers ever found out someone else coached them on their online marketing strategies. For more information, visit Bacak’s site at http://www.powerfulpromoter.com or sign up for his Powerful Promoting Tips at http://www.promotingtips.com

Google stands to lose millions if fraud continues. It is only a matter of time before the current problem of click fraud implodes on Google.

You’ve seen them, there impossible to miss, glaring at you on virtually every page of your favorite website, those little blue boxes that webmasters have become so fond of, the infamous Google Ad’s. Everyone wants to get in on the big bucks action. If you listen to the stories, Google is writing some impressive checks and the temptation will be just to much for the hackers. The target is so obvious.

You see, hackers don’t care who benefits from their efforts as long as “the Man” suffers. For many years now the man has been Bill Gates and Microsoft. Hackers have done everything possible to disable his empire, creating virus after virus just to mess with him, even the US Government got into the act. Now the new giant on the block is Google and the hackers are drooling with anticipation. It is just a mater of time before some genius hacker figures out how to get a spider to do his dirty work and turns loose a new age type of virus, the “clicker bug.”

Here is a quick overview; the search engine advertising market is currently almost $4 billion per year with fraud estimated somewhere in the 5-15% range. The majority of this fraud is done at the search engine listing page level and most is accomplished by hand. The object is to drive up the click counts of a targeted website to use up there budget and consequently disable there ad or better yet get the company (your competition) to remove them entirely.

Both Google and Yahoo/Overture acknowledge that the click fraud problem exists. Their in house experts claim that improved internal controls will prevent this problem from escalating. Their stated position seems to be that they are concerned about click fraud, but that it is not a material issue so far. Given how much they stand to lose if advertisers cut back on advertising spending, this cavalier attitude certainly is surprising. Industry research firm eMarketer expects $7.4 billion to be spent on search engine advertising by 2008. At the current fraud rates that amounts to $750 million, about three quarters of a billion dollars!

Now along comes the “clicker bug” and instead of attacking the case hardened, almost bullet proof, servers of the search engine giant, they crawl the internet and click indiscriminately on 3 or 4 ads per website every night. The clicks would appear harmless and the bugs effort will only generate revenues of $ .25 for the page owners. After all, the object is to take down the man not generate revenue for any given website. The search engines will be so busy guarding the vault against monsters they won’t notice the ants walking away with the refrigerator, but multiply that quarter times the total number of websites available and in just a few days Google could be overwhelmed. The only way to stop it would be to encrypt every ad or employ pattern gif’s like the “who is” pages do.

Grant it the technology is not quite there yet but hackers are some the industries brightest, if a bit deranged, programmers and they will figure it out. If I can think of it they can do it.

Michael Klasno is an Assisted SEO Marketing Specialist and CEO of Net Performance Group Inc. Net Performance specializes in fishing and outdoor website design and marketing. For more internet marketing articles by this author please visit: http://www.netperformancegroup.com/Articles/articles.htm

First impressions affect your relationship with someone for life. In the pay-per-click world, your business depends on first impressions. By using effective power words, you can turn a lackluster advertisement into a click machine.

Power words create emotional responses. When we learn language, we learn to associate emotions with words. Effectively matching power words to the emotions you intend for your reader can create a huge difference in the responses to your ads.

One Word Impact

My first ad for a support forum on Google AdSense was dismal. I did not even get enough clicks to fill my $3.00 daily budget. I put myself in the searchers place and thought about what I would want if I were searching for a support forum, and the word that sprang to mind was “friendly.” I created a second ad with the word “friendly” added and let the two compete with each other on AdSense. I was shocked! The friendly ad not only drew twice the clicks for twice the traffic, it also increased my conversion rate without making any changes to my web site.

Get the Reader’s Attention

To bring about valuable clicks, you first need to get the reader’s attention. Power words that create strong emotions will naturally draw a reader’s eye and attention to your ad. Use power words such as sex, money, shock, win, incredible, success, love, secret, strategy, discover, reveal, and uncover. Here is an extreme example using a list of words to get your attention. Notice how the power words draw your eyes to the sentence.

Uncover the shocking yet secret strategy to incredible success in love, sex, and money.

Generate Interest

Now that you have the reader’s attention, the next step is to make sure they are interested enough in your ad to click through and see more. Give them a reason to click with effective power words that answer their need for your product and to save money.

* Can you afford not to?

* Invest in your future.

* The -your product- advantage

* Don’t pay more

* Special offer

Motivate the Reader to Click

Now it’s time to close the deal. Use power words to motivate the reader to click. You can use call to action power words along with statements to make the reader feel good about clicking. Be certain you read the advertising guidelines as some search engines, including Google, set restrictions on how you can use call to action power words. Here are some examples.

* Seeing is believing

* You owe it to yourself

* Visit -your company- today

* ______ awaits you.

Experiment with different advertising power words to create that click-through ad sensation.

Elleth Faewen owns and operates the new web advertising support site http://www.WebAdZone.com — an Internet company dedicated to helping you discover proven techniques to generate profit through effective web advertisements.

How I Boosted My Monthly AdSense Profits from $673 to $21,398 in Just 6 MonthsAll of my keyword research/analysis and search engine optimization skills suddenly came together in October 2004.

I had just written my first book, and I just wanted to get some free traffic to my website so I could start selling the it.

Triple Your Income with Ad Layout Changes

I had been making about $600 per month from Google AdSense for a long time. As I was researching traffic and revenue techniques, I ran across a tip on how to triple your adsense income (by tripling clickthrough rate).

I implemented the change (relax, I’ll put all the tips below) and it worked! I went from $20 per day to $40, $50, and $60 days, with the same amount of traffic! My click through rate actually quadrupled in 10 days.

I then wrote keyword-optimized articles on 90 keyphrases I had found. This led to a 150% increase in traffic – no small feat considering that my website already had 300 articles.

The following month, I averaged $98 per day from AdSense – I had some days above $100, and one day I almost broke $200. I was getting pretty excited. I felt I had broken a code, finally developed a cash system that worked. Google was my new favorite sugar daddy!

Get Better Rankings and More Traffic by Targeting Only Vulnerable Keywords

I got into the math of keywords- I looked at those 90 keywords and compared the ones that had ranked well against those that hadn’t. I also compared those that brought in traffic as expected and those that didn’t, despite ranking well.

I developed a keyword evaluation equation that I believe is superior to KEI. I’ve written elsewhere about the weaknesses of KEI – it can tell you the value of a keyword, but not every site can compete on every keyword. Because it overvalues demand and only reflects the exact-match supply, it doesn’t help new websites identify their most vulnerable targets.

My equation, which calculates the “vulnerability” of a keyword. Vulnerability is expressed as a percentage- so 95% is good, 97% is pretty darned vulnerable, and 99% vulnerable is nearly a done deal. Using this equation helped me reduce inefficiency and increase my success rate with rankings, thus increasing traffic and revenue opportunities.

Partner with Writers to Increase Volume of Web Pages

The next major development was my response to discovering there was an immense number of vulnerable keywords to write about. I couldn’t possibly write about all of them. So I found freelance writers who were willing to profit share with me. I gave them 50% of the adsense earnings on any article they submitted. But they could only write on the keywords I gave them, and they had to include the keyword in specific places.

That’s the other key to website ranking success- putting your keywords in the right place in your web page. I worked on this quite a bit as well. As time went on, I got more and more writers, some of whom were very prolific, writing 100 or more articles in a few months.

With everything that occurred, I kept tracking statistics, rankings, success rate, etc.

I fine-tuned the vulnerability equation. I discovered which topics get advertisements that no one clicks on. And I learned some things about what kind of writing leads to better click through rates.

Follow Me to Huge Online Profit Boosts

In just 6 months, we put up 2000 articles, boosted monthly page views more than 5 times, from 100,000 to 525,000, and boosted profits to $21,398.85.

How did we do it? There are so many details that it would take a whole book to tell you everything – which is why I’ve been writing one on this subject – but here are some helpful tips to start with:

1. Strike Gold With More Precise Keyword Targeting: make sure the monthly demand is at least 300. I’m withholding my vulnerability equation right now for those who will purchase my ebook when it’s released, but I’ll tell you the essence of it: check the supply of existing pages on Google for the keyword both in quotes, and not in quotes- this takes care of exact matching and partial matching respectively, and both are essential. If one or the other is too high, chances are the keyword is too competitive.

The threshholds I put in the vulnerability equation are based on my PR5 site, but for newer sites you can use only the 99%+ vulnerability keywords.

2. Boost Traffic With More Thorough Keyword Optimization: without spamming or stuffing, write the whole keyword phrase (exactly as searchers type it) at least 5 times in your article. Include it in the meta keywords, meta description, 1 or 2 image alt’s, and in the <title> tag. Write a <title> tag that not only includes the keyword (just once) but will also look interesting to searchers in the search results. It’s also a good idea to have your keyword in an <h1> tag and in bold somewhere. Finally, if you aim for a word count of about 566 words per page, you’ll please 4 of the biggest search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista).

3. Increase Earnings by Considering Keyword Profitability: Neither every niche, nor every keyword is equally profitable. For example, I found that sports keywords didn’t lead to many clicks, presumably because when fans are looking for game scores, they probably aren’t looking to buy a baseball cap. Also, famous people (perhaps with the exception of musicians) generally don’t generate profitable clicks, because people usually just want free news or free pictures. The most profitable niches will be those in which the best information is not readily available, which require some specialized tools or services, etc. I found that health and electronics keywords were above average in profitability. Again, there are ways to get numbers for the monetary value of keywords- can you guess what? I’m going to explain this in more detail in a special report after the ebook is all taken care of.

4. Increase Earnings by Improving Ad Placement: Google has added a lot of new options to the layout code – I suggest you test with multiple channels to see what works best. Regardless of what I suggest next, testing is the key to all online success- whether you want rankings, traffic, or earnings. The internet affords accurate and detailed metrics- use them.

The tip that initially tripled my AdSense income was: put a 250×250 ad in the horizontal center of your page, above the fold, and make sure the border is white.

I’ve found that making the ads look like any other part of your site is important. The ads are valuable, but if they look like ads, people will tune them out. So make sure the color scheme for your ads in the same as your site’s. Since you can place 3 ads on one page, I’d suggest a dead center one (as mentioned above), a left or right side skyscraper, and a wide banner one at the bottom of the page.

That’s plenty of meat to sink your teeth into. I’ve learned a lot more, but another time, another article… Good profit hunting!

Since 1999, Brian Carter, MS, has reached more than a million visitors with his websites. His PulseMed.org ranks in the top 1% of all major websites. His second book, The Web Site Marketing Success Manual: How One of My Web Sites Made $21,638.49 in a Month, will be available in July, 2005.

Starting an ultimately effective pay-per-click campaign is difficult. Although the paid search engines like Google Adwords and Overture (now re-branded as Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions) want you to believe otherwise. A goal of “getting website traffic” is logically appealing since marketers tend to directly associate website traffic to producing website actions like sales, subscriptions and so on. The problem is “all website traffic is NOT created equal.” Just because you receive “traffic” does not mean you will achieve website actions.

For example, if you are selling a real estate course on buying foreclosures and you bid on the keyword “real estate” ? you may receive thousands of website visitors yet not sell a single real estate course. A large percentage of the businesses that come to us for assistance relate their pain from this experience by commenting, “We were getting x,xxx visitors to the website per month and no sales, we can’t figure out why?”

Let me tell you “why?” ? All traffic is not created equal. What this means is that you need to attract visitors (your target market) who are most relevant to your product or service. In the example above, the keyword “real estate” is so general that its relevance is diluted especially for a niche market for a course on buying foreclosures.

You need to actually perform a search for each of your primary keywords and look at the type of websites that rank high in the natural search listings. They have earned (well…in most cases) a high ranking because they are highly relevant to the meaning of the keyword.

A search engine’s mission is to deliver highly relevant search results to their customers. Therefore the natural search results indicate what the search engines believe most effectively satisfies their customer’s expectations when they search on a particular keyword.

Paid search increases the simplicity of “getting website traffic” yet the difficulty lies at the heart of your primary goal – getting actions that drive business growth like sales, subscriptions or contact us form completions. Here lays the challenge not advertised by the paid search engines ? how to generate website actions.

You are faced with a number of real challenges when aimed at achieving website actions from your paid search engine campaign. The challenges focus on two key aspects: the cost you pay per click and the relevancy you present to the click-through. These are important because they affect your business growth in terms of conversion and profitability ? the intersection of website visitors with website actions.

Paid Search ? Bidding Strategies

The first aspect is your cost per click. It is controlled by your willingness to bid and budget a certain amount for an ad placement. All pay-per-click search engines possess unique bidding nuances. However, for the two largest, Google Adwords and Overture do not become fixated on the top bid position. Test how each keyword performs in achieving your primary website actions all the way up to the seventh bid position.

Depending on your product or service, you may be amazed how bid position six attracts less click-throughs but produces more website actions. Or maybe position four generates more actions. Regardless – test, test and test ? the outcome may mean lower costs and higher actions for you.

One tested strategy is to determine the keyword “click price” you are willing to pay using your performance metrics (e.g. your cost per action, conversion rate, value of a buyer and so on) and then search for that keyword on the major search engines where your ad will appear. Check out where each bid position is listed on the search results page.

Recently Overture and Google Adwords have increased their number of displayed results to up to eight “sponsor results” or paid ads on the first page. In some cases, the fourth and fifth or fifth and sixth bid positions will show at the bottom of the first search results page and again at the top, right margin of the page ? in essence two ads for the price of one. Be aware of this strategic opportunity!

Here is another proven strategy that has worked wonders for our clients. In Overture’s direct advertiser center, a marketer only views the top five bid placements. Bid a penny below the fifth bid position to attain the sixth one. Typically, because this bid placement is not “visible” in the marketers’ control panel, you can obtain a great bid placement at a dramatically lower click cost with sustainable or increasing conversion rate.

For example, we set a real estate client’s bid for a high demand / high cost keyword to the sixth bid position and paid $0.59 less than the fifth position and increased actions significantly while drastically reducing their cost per action. Even better, this bid position was sustained for the keyword for over four months! Because it’s under the “radar screen” in the Direct Advertiser Center in Overture and marketers never bothered to view the actual search listing results, we made a killing! If you want to conquer your competition ? follow this strategy.

Landing Page Development

Have you heard of landing pages? If not, you must get familiar with them this week and immediately start implementing them for your paid search campaigns especially your primary and most competitive keywords. Why the sense of urgency? Because highly-relevant landing pages have proven to increase website actions.

In one of many possible examples, a client’s website actions to website visitors’ ratio increased from 0.7% to 10.8% in one month because of implementing and testing different landing pages. That’s a ten times increase! Landing pages work.

So, what are landing pages? Landing pages are simply web pages designed specifically for a keyword or related group of keywords. They are highly relevant to the keyword searched and consistent with your ad’s claim. They immediately focus a visitor’s attention to a primary action. In essence ? landing pages ask your visitors to take an action.

One of the reportedly major reasons why pay-per-click marketing programs fall short of their intended goal is because businesses direct all of their click-throughs to their home page. Since most businesses’ home pages are designed to serve mutliple audiences (i.e. media relations, investors, current clients, potential prospects, customer services, etc.) they do not provide the level of relevancy and consistency expected from the visitor.

If your pay-per-click marketing is not living up to your expectations, consider which web pages you are sending visitors to. Are they relevant and consistent with your pay-per-click ads and keywords? Do they offer too many calls-to-action? Do they “fit” the expectations of the visitor searching on the particular keyword?

For example, are you sending a visitor searching on the keyword “Sony LCD TV” to a web page with twenty varieties of electronic products? An effectively designed landing page would present the visitor a “Sony LCD TV” with customer benefit oriented copy, an immediate “buy now” call to action and all applicable guarantee, shipping, customer service and return policies.

A study conducted in April 2004 by Atlas DMT called “Search Listing URL and Conversion Rate” connected the use of landing pages to their affect on increasing website actions. The study showed the following astounding results?

? Headline of landing page matches keyword = 0.79%.

? Headline of landing page is on Home Page = 6.31%.

? Headline of landing page matches theme of Keyword = 9.28%.

? Headline of landing page matches specifically to Keyword = 11.81%.

The study showed that the more relevant your landing page is to your website visitors, the higher your website actions.

Landing pages also provide an excellent format to “split-test” different relevancy strategies like changing your headline, changing colors or graphical images, and alternating actions to determine which produce the best outcomes. If you are not familiar with split-testing (also called A/B split-testing) then do a little research ? it has emerged in the mainstream as a proven strategy. But a word of caution, don’t get caught up in the scientific application of split-testing. Instead use a simple tool like www.Hypertracker.com and focus on trends ? like are your website actions increasing or decreasing.

Marketing whether online or offline has historically been viewed as a cost of business which breeds simplemindedness. A laggard’s attitude of “why spend the extra time to achieve a positive ROI?” To some degree in the offline world, the complications and costs of tracking campaign results supported this attitude; however, the connectivity of the Internet enables real-time campaign tracking. It allows the extra effort focused on generating positive ROIs to reap significant rewards to those who learn and implement proven and tested strategies.

For your paid search campaigns, do not take the simple road to get more website visitors. Instead take the “road less traveled” to get more website actions. Start implementing landing pages and strategically building a paid search campaign that generates astounding ROIs and conquers your competition. The strategies are now in your hands ? the rest is up to you.

Kevin Gold is a writer, speaker and co-founder of Enhanced Concepts, Inc. Enhanced Concepts specializes in turning website visitors into leads or sales through web conversion strategies and ROI-driven search engine marketing. If you want to increase your leads or sales and get a free copy of “Understanding Your Conversion Rate” and “12 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion” visit http://www.enhancedconcepts.com