PAY PER CLICK AFFILIATE

Is Pay Per Click As Good As They Say It Is?

2008-07-09T05:02:00.000-07:00

How effective a Pay-Per-Click Advertising campaign will be depends upon the products or services you have to offer and how well you promote your website.

This type of advertising involves selecting a Pay-per-Click advertising company and setting a pre-determined amount of money aside for your advertising campaign. You only pay when someone clicks into your site. You set the amount you wish to spend, which is good if you have a limited advertising budget.

In order for Pay-per-Click advertising to work, you must make sure that the websites your PPC company choose to use are visible enough for the advertising to be worthwhile. Doing this means choosing the right sites where people may be looking for the type of products and services that you are selling. For example, if you sell women's sportswear, it is not likely to be beneficial for you to post your PPC links on a site that sells car parts. On the other hand, it can be effective to post it on a site that sells music, fragrances, or even menswear since many people are looking for a quick way to find clothing for all members of the family.

You have to make sure you understand the advertising policies of the company you choose because if you choose a company that allows you to set your own price for each click, it's also possible that your ad will appear on more sites if you are willing to pay more for the service. You want to make sure that you have control over the types of sites where your advertisement will appear. You want to be choosy so that you don't allow your ad to show on sites where people might just click through to see what you have to offer. It's important to target those who are interested and ready to buy, even if it may not be the same day.

Before you choose Pay-per-Click advertising, talk to other people you know who have used it to get a feel for the right company to use. Do your own research as well, reading their websites and what they offer in return for placing your advertising on other websites. Find out as much information as you can before you make a decision about using this type of advertising. Like any other type of advertising, you must keep in mind that certain types of advertising work better than others, and PPC works better in some industries than others. Before you make a long-term commitment, you may want to try it and see how well it works for you. Use tracking links if possible to determine if your PPC advertising campaign has a good conversion ratio.

Always remember, if you MAKE more money than you SPEND your advertising is worthwhile. Once you get the hang of PPC advertising and determine the best places to use this type of advertising, you could end up enjoying a tremendous boost in sales.

By: Anthony Inteso Jr.

The Pay Per Click Mistakes Of A New Marketer

2008-07-07T06:32:00.000-07:00

My first real foray into Internet Marketing was a Pay Per Click ad campaign. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into and the results were predictable. I soon had a mountain of debt with little in the way of results to show for it.

It wasn't the Pay Per Click company's fault. They basically did what they pronised to do. They got people to my website. The blame was all mine. I had made a couple of serious mistakes during the planning of my campaign. I will share those mistakes so that you can avoid making those same errors yourself.

My first, and probably biggest, mistake was not "looking before I leaped". I did not take the time that I should have in researching Pay Per Click and learning just how much it could potentially cost. As a result, I was completely caught by surprise by how quickly my credit card was being charged over and over again. Take the time to do the proper amount of research before beginning a Pay Per Click campaign or any other business or advertising opportunity. You should always be aware of the cost or risks of any program before you invest money or time on it.

I made another major mistake when I did not set a daily budget for my campaign. That was a direct result of my ignorance about how much Pay Per Click could actually cost. I did learn an extremely valuable lesson though. Always set a budget. Determine beforehand exactly how much you can afford to spend per week or per month. Be disciplined and stick to it. You should always try to avoid going into debt unless it is absolutely necessary.

The final mistake that I regret was waiting too long to pull the plug on the campaign. I suppose that stubborness set in and I just did not want to admit defeat. However, admitting defeat is sometimes not so bad. If you sense that an opportunity is not working out, then cut your losses. No purpose whatsoever is served by throwing more good money after the bad. Always know "when to say when".

Learn from my mistakes. Alway do your research before pursuing Pay Per Click or any other new opportunity. Be sure to set a weekly or monthly budget and stick to it. And, finally, if an opportunity is not working out, then don't give in to stubborness. Cut your losses right away.

By: Ronald Gibson

Pay Per Click

2008-07-01T07:25:00.000-07:00

Pay per click or PPC advertising is possibly the easiest and most effective way to market your business online. Getting your website listed in the search engines is vital due to the fact that the majority of website traffic (statistics say over 80%) comes from the search engines. Effective PPC management begins with devising a strategy to drive qualified traffic to your website.

PPC (PPC) advertising is simply advertising your website through the use of the search engines’ “sponsored listings”. When using PPC you bid on keywords or keyword phrases that your targeted prospects may use to find whatever your website offers. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture) for instance, only considers the bid amount in ranking a site. The most popular PPC Google Adwords uses bid value and your success (click through) rate.

To develop a your PPC strategy and plan, you must conduct market research. This should consist of identifying your target market (preferably a niche market), identifying keywords that your target market uses to search for what you are offering, and analyzing the keywords and alternative keywords that will appeal to your target market.

During your keyword analysis, you will want to find out how popular keywords are and what the average bids are for certain keywords you are considering for budgeting purposes since defining a budget is a necessary part of PPC management.

Budgeting for PPC advertising involves not only determining how much money you can spend on your campaign, but basing that on the monetary value of a click to your website since you are paying per click.

Your conversion rate, the number of unique visitors divided by the number of sales, plays an important role in determining the value of a click to your site for PPC advertising budgeting purposes as does the average net profit per sale. By dividing your net profit per sale by your conversion rate, you can accurately determine the value per click to your website. The price per click that you pay for your PPC advertising should not, of course (!!!) exceed this value.

So if your selling a product that gives you a £10 profit, and a particular keyword takes 50 visitors to create a sale you would bid no more than £0.20 per click to break even.

A few tips about PPC if you DIY.

1. Don’t put more money than you have to into your account – sounds obvious but….!

2. Test, test, test have at least two separate ads for the same product at the same time. Drop the lower performing adverts and add a new one until you are satisfied with the results.

3. Make sure to keep up with your results daily at the very least and adjust your strategy according to results.

4. Continue to look for new keywords and as you find new ones lose the poorer performers.

If you approach PPC advertising logically, follow the direct marketing mantra of test, test, test, monitor results regularly and make adjustments only according to results PPC advertising is a powerful tool for driving profitable traffic to your site.

By: Richard D S Hill

Pay Per Click - Choosing The Right Keywords – Part I

2008-06-30T06:22:00.000-07:00

It is very important that you choose the right keywords for your PPC marketing campaigns out of the shoot so you don’t start with a crack in your PPC marketing’s foundation that will ultimately lead to a low, or even a negative, ROI. A very common mistake that businesses make when they first get into PPC marketing is giving into the temptation of just picking the top searched keywords in your industry to begin with.

This is tempting because they are generally the most searched on keywords and would provide a lot of traffic. And they plan on using them to start with and expanding their keyword list later if they see good results from the “basic” popular keywords. But they are also the broadest, and the most expensive keywords for your industry.

So when you get this “brilliant” thought in your mind thinking that it will save you time, and give you a taste of PPC marketing, think of a really loud pulsating siren going off in your ear and bright red flashing lights in your face telling you to STOP! DANGER! DEAD END!

This is most certainly the quickest way to get into PPC marketing, and the quickest way to burn your PPC campaigns to the ground, burning through your money getting little to nothing in return. And end up convincing yourself that PPC marketing doesn’t work, that it’s only for big companies that have huge advertising budgets that they don’t know what to do with, and you’ll get out of PPC marketing faster than you got in.

For example, if you are an internet web site hosting service, you don't want to begin by bidding on the keyword “web hosting”. Sure web hosting is what your business does, and that's the main keyword that people type to find your kind of service, but the cost likely be much higher than your initial return.

As of this writing, the keyword “web hosting” costs over $5 per click to be in the top two positions, (yes, that's every time someone clicks on your listing you would get charged $5 whether they become a customer or not.) And over $2 per click to be listed somewhere in positions three through eighth positions, obviously a really high cost per click, to high for most small or medium sized businesses to afford. And I don't recommend bidding on this keyword to begin with, and depending on your profit margins on both up front sales and the life time value of a customer, possibly never.

A much better keyword that is more likely to have a higher conversion ratio any way, and have a much lower cost per click is a keyword like, “cheap web hosting inexpensive” that costs any where from $0.40 - $1.00 per click to get in the top eight positions. And even that might be little to rich for your blood to start with.

There are many keywords that cost much less per click. I personally try to have an average cost per click of about $0.15 - $0.25 cents per click. Which mean that you would have a lot of keywords that cost $0.05-$0.12 cents per click, and a handful of keyword that might cost $0.30-$0.75 cents per click. But it will of course depend on your industry and what your profit margin will justify paying to acquire a customer.

You may be thinking, but that longer search phrase and other keywords like it get a lot less traffic than the keyword “web hosting”. You are right; it does get less traffic, a lot less! But believe me, there are thousands of keywords like this that when you build a large list of keywords like this collectively you have keywords that get a lot of people searching them.

None the less you will be using your main industry keywords that get a high search volume in your keyword mining process to build a more relevant and highly targeted keyword list. The PPC marketing game is a little different than traditional marketing; the more targeted the keyword the better. It’s nice to get a lot of traffic to your web site from the most popular keywords, but since you are paying for this traffic you want the traffic to turn into sales dollars.

Now I’m not saying not to use the most highly searched keywords, I just don’t recommend doing so to start with. So you have to slightly adjust your thinking when choosing which keywords to start with. We will cover how to use the more popular, highly searched, broader keywords too, because there is a lot of positive revenue that can come from them.

But you don’t want to put the cart before the horse on this one. You want to do it in a strategic way. So we’ll cover both how to tell when it’s a good time to bid on these keywords, and how to do it in a controlled profitable way.

By: Chad Holland

What Is The Best Pay Per Click Plan?

2008-06-30T06:17:00.000-07:00

A brief and general description of the major pay per click plans at Google and Yahoo and a discussion of the drawbacks and benefits of each.

There are scores of search engines online that offer comprehensive pay per click plans that could become a part of your overall SEO strategy. For instance, Yahoo Search Marketing Solution (also known as Overture) and Google Adwords, guide you through the process of creating, submitting and activating your pay per click advertisement. Of these two options, Google Adwords is the most popular possibly because Google is now the biggest and most searched of these engines in the world.

Google Adwords is also more expedient than Yahoo’s program. Your per click campaign can be up and running within an hour if you are used to these things – within the three days if you are newbie to it all. Yahoo, on the other hand, takes longer because there is an application process that is overseen by actual humans who decide whether or not you are pay per click program worthy. Once your campaign is launched through Yahoo it isn't visible until it climbs to a top position in the rankings. This is just too much SEO politics for some people and they end up at Google, which is less fussy. If you want those pay per click ads up and running quickly, then you are better off to choose Google.

Getting used to Google Adwords however is no picnic for some and some can’t make it work it all. Furthermore most newbies to the program have found it difficult to keep their click through rates (CTR) high enough so that their ad is not disabled. Google ads are disabled (and an email sent to you to "try again") if your ad does not meet a minimum of 1% CTR to support itself. After a while this can get obnoxious, not to mention expensive. Still if you must go for a pay per click SEO program then Google is the lesser of two big evils.

By: Chris Angus

Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs - Still Worthwhile?

2008-06-28T03:42:00.000-07:00

Pay per click affiliate programs have received plenty of criticism in the last few years. They have been a victim of click fraud and many affiliate marketers do not find them worthwhile because of the low revenue per click and prefer instead to promote other affiliate program models like pay per action and the ever popular and traditional pay per sale model.

In truth, pay per click affiliate programs can still work as long your website provides valuable and updated content. This will make your visitors repeat visitors; they will want to return, making it far more likely that they will click on your ads, giving you a commission.

One of the main downsides of pay per click affiliate programs is that they usually require more traffic to earn a substantial income. Since you earn so little per click, you have to drive lots of traffic to earn a worthwhile income. For the pay per sale and pay per action models, it is possible to earn hefty commissions even with little traffic, especially if the visitor is very targeted.

As of the current situation, pay per click affiliate programs are becoming less popular. More affiliate marketers are moving towards the pay per action route. This is evident even with search engine companies, as they are looking to bring out more cost per action models for advertising. Pay per click affiliate programs will remain for some time to come, but expect it’s popularity to decrease even further as time goes on.

By Fabian Tan