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

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

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

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

The Basics Of Pay Per Click

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

The PPC Model

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

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

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

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

Cost-Per-Click

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

Conversion Rate

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

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

Placement

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

Tracking

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

ROI

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

The Pay-Per-Click World

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

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

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

Traditionally marketers judge PPC engines on the following criteria:

• Reach - How large your potential target market is.
• Cost-per-click
• Quality of traffic - Do the leads fit your customer profile? Are the willing to spend on your products?
• Quality of service - The tools and help offered by the PPC engines.

Overture and AdWords beat their competition on all of these metrics except CPC. However, the benefits of 'cheaper' clicks are more than compensated for by the ease of use of the big two, and more importantly, as any PPC expert will tell you, the quality of traffic from Overture and AdWords is far better than from other PPC engines.

Keyword Elite: Generate 1000s Of Keywords In Seconds!

Overture

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

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

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

Google Adwords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find High Paying Adsense Keywords!

SEO Tools

When you think of SEO tools, the first thing that comes to mind is paid-for, powerful programs like SEO Elite. The fact is, there are many no-cost, small-scale and highly useful SEO tools available on the Internet. Looking for keywords? Got it. Looking to check your website's rankings for particular keywords? Got it. Link popularity? Got it. Keyword density? Got that as well.

Free Link Popularity Check

The folks at Axandra have a useful tool that you can use to check the link popularity of any number of websites across several search engines. A must-have tool to keep a regular check on your websites.

Find out more about Free Link Popularity Check.

NicheBot

If you are looking to do keyword research, WordTracker is the tool of choice for building huge keyword lists. But the service comes with a price, and if you are looking for a free alternative that still packs a decent punch, NicheBot is the tool you should be using. It uses both WordTracker (the trial version) and Overture to generate keyword lists, and pulls data from Google to give you basic competitor information and search results' numbers.

NicheBot also allows you to save and export your selected keywords, making it the ideal choice for new webmasters who don't want to invest in a professional keyword research service like WordTracker.

Visit NicheBot.

Digital Point

With an Alexa rank of 525 (as of June 2005), DP is second only to WebmasterWorld in this article in terms of popularity. Digital Point boasts a vast array of webmaster and SEO tools, including keyword research tools, back links tools and keyword position tools. Registration, although free, is required to use many of these tools. Definitely an excellent choice for business owners who prefer a hands-on approach to their search engine marketing campaigns.

Digital Point also has a vibrant forum community, which has sprung up around the popularity of the various tools and services that DP provides.

Visit Digital Point Tools and Digital Point Forums.

 

SEO Chat

SEO Chat is not only about quality, insightful arguments and a vibrant forum community. They also have an amazing list of practical webmaster tools that focus on every small aspect of your SEO needs. Need to check the PageRank of every search term on Google? Or need an easy way to generate Meta Tags? One of their best tools is the Keyword Density tool that analyses a given web page and returns the keyword density values for all one, two and three word phrases.

SEO Chat Tools also includes nifty keyword tools not usually found elsewhere, such as a tool for generating spelling mistakes (a significant number of searches on search engines contain spelling errors) and a tool for ordering and sorting your keywords list.

Visit SEO Chat Tools.

Learn how I quadrupled my Adsense earnings!

SEO Tools

When you have a whole web site dedicated to providing quality SEO tools for free, you know that you are getting a great deal. SEO Tools betters many of the 'regular' SEO tools by mixing up the staple tools such as keyword density and backlink analysis with search engine spider simulations and similar page comparisons, as well as that almost forgotten tool for checking your website in different resolutions (you still do that, don't you?).

Visit SEO Tools.

There are many other excellent SEO tools available for free on the Internet:

As you can see, there are many, many quality SEO resources, forums and tools available on the Internet for free.

The question is, what are you going to do about it?

If you don't participate in forums, pick one of the 4 (5 if you include Digital Point) from the list above and browse around. Find a topic you want to participate in. Have a problem you want a peer's opinion on? Register and make your first post. Just a simple step towards interacting with the webmaster community will take you a long way towards helping you build your business.

Anything in the SEO tools list that you think you can use? If you are limited to Overture searches for your keywords, try using NicheBot, and then take your results to Keyword Tumbler. How do you manage your website's progress through the search engines? Take Digital Point or the SEO Chat tools for a spin.

Whatever you do, take something away from both of these lists, and I can guarantee that you will improve your search engine rankings in a significant way.

Remember... YOU can use any of these lessons on your own website. You can send the lessons out to your email list.

You can even add your affiliate link for SEO Elite, to the lessons and earn $74 for every person you refer that purchases.

Below you can sign up for the SEO Elite affiliate program where you can earn $74 for every referral:

Click here to sign up for free!

 

Keep your eyes peeled for the next lesson, and keep those lesson suggestions coming!

 

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
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