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Search engines are a good way to bring free traffic to your website, the problem with this method is that it takes time to rank highly in Google and other search engines…and we all only have a limited amount of time.
The challenge here is to create a money-making machine that attracts prospects, reels them in, converts them into customers and repeats the process all over again.
There exists such a system for bringing in instant traffic: pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Up to now, Google Adwords, is the most effective search engine to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into customers. The bad news is that about 95 percent of PPC advertisers end up throwing several hundred bucks down the hole before they even begin to understand how pay-per-click works. What’s more, there are many business owners who, after being burned to the tune of several thousands of dollars, give up on PPC advertising because they don’t get how it works.
The main feature of pay per click marketing –and an advantage as well- is that you pay only for visitors that come to your site (no upfront costs - every “click” while being an expense is also a chance for you to convert that visitor into a customer). You pay a certain amount “per click” on your ad. If nobody clicks on your ad, you don’t pay a dime… and also get no visitors. The goal is to get many TARGETED visitors, while paying as little as possible per click. Really clever!
Your ads are displayed in the search engines according to what people are searching / looking for. (i.e. If someone search for “newborns care” and you’re bidding on the term “newborns care”, your ad will be displayed when someone searches for that phrase.
There are two major PPC ad engines:
1. Google Adwords 2. Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture)
While they are both very effective in pulling in traffic, I normally use Google Adwords (and I’ll explain why later).
I don’t discourage you from using Yahoo Search Marketing. In certain niche markets the YSM network is still not hyper-saturated (unlike Adwords, where the competition is higher) and you may be able to realize serious short-term gains if you play the PPC game right.
What I would discourage you from is to using a PPC ad network other than Adwords or YSM. Beyond these two, the situation is pretty bleak with poor traffic quality, click fraud and lack of a sizeable user base; all contributing to an abject failure.
Successful PPC campaigns are based on three things:
. Focused Keyword Research · . Compelling Ads . Effective Landing Pages
Each of these subjects will be treated separately in future articles as they require a full explanation.
For now, I would like to cover some basics of Google Adwords Campaigns.
Campaigns
A campaign consists of one or more Ad Groups. The ads in a given campaign share the same daily budget, language setting, location targeting, end dates and syndication preferences. You normally create separate campaigns for separate projects as these are intended to promote different products or sites. For each campaign you create Ad Groups to target sets of related keywords.
You can have most of your questions answered about Google Adwords features at Adwords Help Center
This concept is quite often underused and hence the high percentage of failure in Adwords ppc campaigns. It is VERY important to make good use of this feature.
An Ad Group contains one or more ads which target one set of keywords. This comes in extremely handy when you are targeting focused keywords, as you can set up different Ad Groups for different sets of keywords. This is particularly important in competitive markets. For example, let’s say you start a campaign for the “insurance” term. As this is a extremely untargeted and very expensive term (you could not compete with the “big sharks” bidding on this term) it is preferable to set Ad Groups for targeted terms like Auto Insurance, Affordable Insurance or Health Insurance. Each of this terms will have a separate list of related keywords, separate ads (you can have in Google 2 ads for each Ad Group for split testing of ad performance) and separate landing pages with relevant information targeted for each Ad Group.
This is how you play the Adwords game….
In your campaigns your Ad Groups should ideally be tightly focused around a sub topic, but how you select this sub topic and how you determine if it’s profitable to put that set of keywords into a separate group is a different matter.
This will be discussed in future articles.
If you want to have a blueprint to Keywords Research and Google Adwords Domination, there is available a free download of an excellent 86 page ebook at this link:
http://www.21centuryaffiliate.com/cgi-bin/t/c.cgi/adwords-ad
