Pay-Per-Click advertising is one of the very best ways to quickly and (often) cheaply get the word out about your business. A new campaign can be “live” in just a couple hours and can bring in thousands of visitors and sales in its first week.
It can also drain your bank account like a bandit.
In my last article I looked at the first two steps in choosing winning keywords. (You can view that article here: http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/cg-bin/at.cgi?a=274293&e=/imm/20041210)
Here are the last two steps to choosing your best keywords:
Step Three: Know How Much You Are Willing to Pay Per Click
If I am willing to pay $40 in advertising to get a new customer, then I need to determine how many visitors I will need to get that customer.
If you already have that figure, use your actual results. If not, here are some rules of thumb you can use:
If you have a single product sales site with a price-point below $50, use a figure of 1 sale per 100 visits.
In the case of a single product sales site with a price-point over $50, use a figure of 1 sale per 200 visits.
If you have a free trial site, use a figure of 1 sale in 30 visits.
If you have a free report lead generator, use 1 sale in 20 visits.
For our subscription site example, I will be offering a 10 day free trial, so I will go with 1 sale in 30 visits. So, I am willing to pay $40.00 divided by 30 clicks or $1.33 per click.
Step Four: Get Your Keyword List and Prices
Generating a list of keywords is crucial to getting affordable traffic to your offer.
Most people get the top 25 or 30 keywords according to traffic and end up paying top-dollar for all their traffic.
For example: My main market niche is people who are interested in working at home. In order for me to get a top 10 listing with Overture.com for “work at home” I would have to pay over $1.50 per click. Number 1 would cost me $2.67.
At 300,000 plus searches per month, that could run into some money pretty fast unless I can offset that with high volume sales.
But we want to take a different approach. We want to get a high volume of traffic from a much higher number of much less costly search terms.
“at home work” at Overture.com only costs 77 cents to break the top 10, though the search volume is 1/100th.
My “trick” to finding those keywords is to “pretend” to set up an account with Google Adwords here:
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/adwords
(You will likely want to “really” set one up, but just going through this exercise will allow you to use the keyword suggestion tool…)
Using their keyword suggestion tool you can identify hundreds of related keywords and put them to work for you.
By choosing hundreds of lower priced but still targeted keywords rather than a few high-priced keywords, you can still get solid traffic but at a much lower cost.
Kevin Bidwell is owner of
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/cg-bin/at.cgi?a=274293
Kevin just finished a complete report on building a passive
income. Grab your copy here:
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/cg-bin/at.cgi?a=274293&e=/pi
