That’s pay per ‘click’ . . . meaning that you pay only when a visitor clicks through from the search engine listing to your site. The concept is rather simple. You buy or ‘bid’ on keywords and search terms that relate to your product, and in return you receive targeted traffic to your website. Oftentimes, relevant terms are available for just a few pennies per click.
Believe it or not, this advertising/marketing venue, when done right, can beat the pants off even ezine advertising for cost effectiveness.
Think of it like this. Even with your best placed ezine ad, you’re still paying for the ability to only ‘hope’ that a profitable number of those subscribers will click through and visit your site. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. In either case, you’re stuck for the cost of the ad itself.
Not so with pay per click search engines. Your account is debited only when someone clicks your listing and actually visits your site. The beautiful part is that you will decide, or ‘bid’ how much you want to pay, or better still how much you can afford to pay for each click.
For reference, here are five of the top pay per click search engines working at the time of this writing.
Overture (formerly GoTo.com) ==> http://www.overture.com
FindWhat ==> https://secure.findwhat.com
7Search ==> http://www.payperranking.com
GoClick ==> http://www.goclick.com
ePilot ==> http://adcenter.epilot.com
And here are the fundamental steps to setting the pay per click process in motion.
Your Account First of all, you must open an account by going to the PPC site and depositing your bidding funds, in many cases as little as $10 to $25. Some of the newer and smaller PPC engines will even bonus you with additional account credit over and above the amount of your initial deposit.
Your Search Listings Next, compose each listing to be focused on one product and one product only. Resist a generic broad-based listing that might be pertinent to your entire site, but lacks in focus. That will not bring you the kind of highly targeted clicks you need.
Instead, choose several keywords that relate strongly to a single product, and lace those heavily throughout the text of your listing. Typically, you’ll be allowed only 250 to 300 characters of space to accomplish this, so your listing must be carefully crafted to attract only those readers who are genuinely interested in that particular product.
Omit any mention of free items or promotional give-aways. This is apt to attract a horde of freebie-seekers who have no actual interest in buying. Yet they will still cause your account to be debited for each click they make.
Providing that your listing is well done, you can narrow those clicks to receive some of the most highly targeted traffic available through any advertising venue.
Choosing Search Terms to Bid On While you can and should bid on keywords and phrases used in the text of your listing, you’re by no means restricted to bidding only on those alone. Most PPC engines provide a listing of the top search terms that have been recently queried. Take advantage of that information in choosing search terms to bid on.
However, you must place bids only on search terms that directly relate to the product you offer from your listing. Otherwise, you may end up paying for a lot of clicks from visitors that have no interest whatsoever in your product.
Additionally, at least the larger PPC engines will review your bidded search terms to be sure they are relevant to your listing. This is done in an effort to maintain the integrity of the searches the PPC engine provides for their visitors.
Placing Your Bids The amount of your per-click bid will directly relate to the position of your listing. The higher you bid on a certain search term, the higher your listing will be placed in the search results for that term. So, in theory, if you have an unlimited ad budget you could maintain a #1 listing forever. But that may or may not be a profitable situation over the long haul.
In order to guarantee a profit with PPC listings, you need to know two things about your business.
#1 – The net profit per sale on your product. This means how much money do you have left over from a single sale when any shipping expenses, overhead costs, and the wholesale cost of the product itself have been deducted.
#2 – Your average click-to-sales ratio. In other words, how many times must you show your salespage before a sale is made.
For example, let’s say your product returns $20 net profit per sale, and you average one sale for every 50 pageviews.
50 clicks/$20 = 40 cents Your maximum allowable search term bid for that product will be 40 cents. Keep in mind however, that a 40 cent bid in this case will allow you to only break even, not earning a penny of profit. Bid more than 40 cents and you will be losing money on each sale.
There are many tactics and techniques for refining this process into a highly profitable marketing venue, and much information has lately become available toward that end.
However, even the beginner who will stick to the known fundamentals will find that PPC search engines can and will provide some of the most highly targeted and highly profitable website traffic available anywhere.
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Dan B. Cauthron runs several websites and publishes his 100%
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please visit: http://DanBCauthron.com Dan also operates:
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