Pay Per Click
Advertising
As I have discussed elsewhere it can
take a few months to get good search engine rankings,
even with a well-optimised site and a lot of incoming links to
your site, particularly in Google and Yahoo. However there
is a way that you can get on the first page of results for the
major search engines, even with competitive keywords, and
that's through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
There are a lot of search engines offering
this service but the two major ones are Google Adwords and
Yahoo Search Marketing. If you visit these search engines and
do a search for a particular keyword, you will probably have
seen the boxes on the right hand side of the search result
pages. Well these are adverts that advertisers have bid on,
with the highest bidder being the advertiser showing
at the top, and therefore the most prominent position on
the page.
Advertisers bid on specific keywords based
on the price per click, so every time a search engine user
types in that keyword and then clicks on your advert you pay
the search engine this specified price per click. Bids can
sometimes be as low as $0.05-$0.10 per click for less popular
keywords, but as high as $50-$100 for the ultra competitive
keywords. The higher you bid the higher you will appear in the
sponsored results.
Obviously you need to make more from any
sales you make from PPC advertising, than you are paying out in
advertising costs. Therefore when starting out you should track
your sales conversions closely, and determine what you can
afford to pay per click. Look at what keywords are working and
try different adverts. I also recommend starting out with less
competitive keywords with very low cost-per-clicks to start off
with.
The PPC ads themselves consist of a
headline, and a few lines of text so you need to make them
stand out from your competitors, so the person clicks on your
ad and not any of your competitors. This can be a good way of
paying less per click but getting more clicks than the higher
bidding advertisers. For example say you are the 4th highest
bidder and therefore appear 4th in the sponsored results. If
you write a more compelling ad than the three other
advertisers above you, then you are likely to get more
clicks than them, so in this case you don't need to try and
outbid them for a higher spot.
Also Google Adwords isn't based entirely on
the price you bid. This is a factor, but it also rewards PPC
ads that get high click-throughs with higher rankings.
Therefore if you can't justify paying the highest bid, then you
should start with a lower bid and then aim to write the most
compelling advert to boost your click-through rate, and jump up
a few places.
For a more comprehensive study of PPC
advertising I can thoroughly recommend the following two
ebooks:
- Adwords Miracle - This is an outstanding
package which, along with Perry Marshall's course (see
below), will give you all the information you could
possibly need to profit from pay-per-click advertising. One
of the best and most comprehensive guides I've ever
purchased.
- The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords -
Perry Marshall is generally regarded as the main man when it
comes to Google Adwords, and this top-selling ebook is an
excellent guide for anyone wanting to make money from PPC
advertising.
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