Pay Per Click StrategiesBetter Pay-Per-Click Results Start Here – We Guarantee It!

It’s not hard to make money with Google AdWords, but many fail to do so because they make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Keep it simple by doing the following:

Decide On Your Offer: Putting together a successful AdWords campaign starts NOT with keywords, but with your offer. Why? Because you have to be very clear about this before you move on to selecting your keywords.

For example, if you operated an online bookstore, do you want to send readers to the romance section, the science fiction section or the history section? “But,” you may be thinking, “I don’t care what they buy, as long as they buy something.”

We counter with, in order to get browsers to “buy something,” you have to first get them interested in “buying what interests them.” And, this is where you get specific.

Think of it like a local bookstore they may wander into. A reader may pop in to buy a specific book, but once there, they start to browse and come out with two, three or four things.

The bottom line here is – web surfers don’t care about making a purchase from you. What they do care about is getting that book that their friend, mother, aunt, etc. recommended.

If your specific pay per click ad landed them in your online store, you have a chance of making that sale.
Use Keywords Effectively: Once you have tightly focused your offer, now you can move on to doing effective keyword research. Here again, be specific. When choosing keywords remember, it’s not about how much traffic a keyword will bring, but how much “qualified” traffic it will bring.

Rock the Landing Page! Round out your campaign by having a clear, concise, professional landing page that gets prospects where they want to be. Don’t make them surf to find what your ad promised. Land them there directly.

If you do these three things, you will be well on your way to Google AdWords campaign success.

*******
About the Author
Want to out perform your Google AdWords competitors? Attend the AdWords Advantage Online Summit (Dec. 1-17) and learn how to fast-track your pay per click marketing profits. Register now and save 40% at http://www.AdWordsAdvantage.com.

When most people think of pay per click marketing, they think of tiny little “word” ads that you click on. Video doesn’t usually enter the picture. However, “PPC video marketing,” so to speak, has been around for a couple of years.

In 2006, Google bought YouTube (for an astounding $1.65 billion, no less). This allows it to offer a very valuable service to internet marketers via an already established outlet – loyal “YouTubers” who like receiving content via video.

The Beginning of Video in Pay Per Click Advertising
It took Google about a year and a half to capitalize on their acquisition of YouTube. In February 2008, they started testing the use of video ads in their pay per click advertising model. Now, video ads appear as display ads on MySpace and other social media networks.

How Video Ads Appear in Pay Per Click Ads
Experts generally agree that it is very easy rich medium platform to master. Video ads show up as a single link under a normal pay per click ad.  This link is next to a plus-sign icon, indicating that there is a video (or more information to be found if the surfer clicks).

When a web surfer does click, a small window (about 160×140 in size) appears in which the video will show.  A timer shows how long the video is. Most are very short – less than 30 seconds. At the end of the video, a URL of the advertiser’s site appears.

Ready to Set Up Your Own Video Pay Per Click Marketing Campaign?
Learn more about how to set up and run a PPC video campaign (via Google). If pay per click marketing confuses you altogether, it’s a good idea to invest in some training (Pay Per Click Summit is coming up soon in Chicago on Nov. 4-5) to make sure you’re doing it right – from the beginning.

Last week at PPC Summit in Los Angeles, the Search Marketing expert trainers shared a wealth of Pay Per Click knowledge with the 100+ marketers attending the event. Keyword targeting is always a hot topic and the use of long tail keywords was one of the tips discussed.  

In our last post, Long-Tail Keywords In Pay Per Click Advertising Works, we covered the value of using long-tail keywords. Today, we want to continue this discussion, highlighting how to get more value out of the long-tail keywords your visitors may already be using to find you.

How to Get More Value Out of the Long-Tail Keywords Visitors Are Already Using to Find You
Many pay per click marketers don’t realize that a lot of their traffic may already be coming from some long-tail keywords. This presents a golden opportunity to get even more traffic and sales. How?

Quite simply, your web presence already has good search engine juice (ie, good organic rankings) for this term. However, it may not be ranked as high as it could be, since you have spent any time specifically optimizing it for that/those specific long-tail keywords.

Once you do this, you can exponentially build on traffic you are already getting. Following are two ways to do this.

Write More Content: Writing and distributing articles is one way to optimize a site quickly for popular long-tail keywords. This will give your site higher visibility quickly, especially if you distribute the content far and wide (eg, article directories).

Put Together More Offers: If a popular long-tail keyword is bringing you more traffic, look to see if you have any special deals, discounts, or other offers that can convert this traffic into sales. If not, put together one (some).

These are just two ways to make your pay per click campaign pay off with traffic you may already be receiving. 

In the post, Pay Per Click: How to Use Google Trends to Capitalize on the Slow Summer Months, we alluded to how and why things slow down during the summer months. So right now, sales may be a little sluggish.

But, the busy season is right around the corner. As many pay per click marketers set their pay per click campaigns and forget them, now’s the time to give your site a pre-season tune up. Following are three areas to assess to.

1. Does my site load quickly enough? When was the last time you checked this? It would suck to spend money on a fantastic PPC campaign, only to have visitors clicking away because your site loads too slowly.

2. Can browsers easily find what they want on my site? Prospects should have to click no more than two or three times to find the product/service they’re interested in. If it’s more, you need to simplify your site.

Beyond this, a rule of thumb to live by in pay per click marketing is to direct prospects to what you promised them in the ad.

For example, let’s say you owned an online clothing boutique. You carry apparel for every member of the family. If a surfer clicks on a “cheap children’s shoes” ad, then that’s the page they should land on, not a generic home page with your.

3. Keyword Research: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is mercurial; not static. When was the last time you evaluated your keyword choices. Are they still the best keywords for pay per click campaign? Do you need to add more local keywords to the mix to gain more of this traffic?

By paying attention to areas like these, you can significantly increase your pay per click results with little or no further investment. 

Pay Per Click marketing is known for its effectiveness in generating quick sales. And, this is a good thing. Quick sales, however, should not be the foundational goal of any online marketer. The ultimate goal is to create long-term relationships with customers. For, over time, these are the customers who will bring you the most profit.

So, how do you use Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing to cultivate lifelong customers?
Quite simply, you take the time to educate them. Sometimes, this means foregoing the quick sale and employing more multi-step marketing strategies.

The Best Way is to Educate PPC Prospects and Get Them to Buy More from You

In order to accomplish this, you must become a go-to source. You must be thought of as an authority. On your landing page, for example, you might ask prospects to sign up for an informational brochure that addresses a certain problem they have – in detail.

For example, if your client sold organic baby food, a free e-report entitled “How to Sell Organic Baby Foods to New Moms” would be a good informational brochure to distribute. In it you would address the problems inherent in selling to new moms and how to overcome them.

Of course, the solutions you offer would be ones that your company provides. Then, when it’s time for prospects to purchase the type of product/service you offer, your firm will be top of mind – all because you’ve used a pay per click strategy that “educates” instead of “sells.”

Learn more pay per click marketing strategies like this by attending the next PPC Summit.

The reason Pay Per Click advertising is so popular is that everyone can do it – with a budget as little as $50 or $100 (or less). But, not all clicks are created equal. Some can cost mere pennies, while others can go for tens or hundreds of dollars each.

So, how do you determine how much you want to spend per click? Well, it’s an art.

Pay Per Click Marketing: 2 Tips on How to Spend Little and Gain Big

Budget: Start with the amount in your budget to determine how many clicks you can get. For example, if you have a $100 per month budget and you bid on a keyword that is 25 cents per click, then you can afford 400 clicks per month.

If you bid on a keyword that is $5, then you can only get 20 clicks. So obviously, the larger your budget the more clicks you can afford. And, this is why you’ll always see the big boys at the top. You won’t be able to outbid them.

Now comes the cool part though that does allow you to spend a little, and still gain a lot.

Position Smartly: As in, don’t even shoot for being number one. As we discussed in the post, Pay Per Click Marketing: 3 Tips for Quicker Results, “research has proven that being number one isn’t necessarily the best spot to be in . . .because you get a lot of curiosity seekers who’ll click on ads in this spot. . . . [but won’t buy].”

This wastes money.

The best strategy is to position yourself high enough to bypass the tire kickers, while keeping your cost per click as low as possible. In order to do this, you have to know which keywords to use to get you in this “sweet spot.” It’s an art, and takes time and testing, but well worth learning. 

At PPC Summit, we teach you this and a whole lot more about how to be successful as a pay per click marketer.

It’s belt-tightening time for all businesses–from mom and pop shops on Main Street to skyscraping halls of Fortune 500 companies. The one area small businesses can compete with large corporations is online with pay per click marketing. But, you have to be careful not to break the budget doing it.

No matter how large or small your business is, following is one handy thing you can do to keep a tight rein on how much you’re spending – ie, recession-proof your PPC marketing efforts.

Pay Per Click Marketing: How & Why to Avoid Bidding Wars on the Information Superhighway
You know how sometimes you’re driving down the road and a car passes you. And, you speed up just a little, trying to keep pace. It happens to the best of us, even if we’re not speed demons. Well, this can happen with pay per click marketing too. After all, it is the information superhighway, and we want to keep pace with the high rollers. Sometimes, the urge to be number one or two can be so strong that we spend too much.

As discussed in the post, Pay Per Click Marketing: 3 Tips for Quicker Results, “. . . research has proven that being number one isn’t necessarily the best spot to be in. . . . Because you get a lot of curiosity seekers who’ll click on ads in this spot. An ad in the third, fourth or even the fifth spot can convert [even] better.”

If you’ve ever wondered what your competition was doing, you can easily find out. Knowing specifics like who is bidding on what keywords and how much they are spending can help you boost your PPC campaign results.

SpyFu: The Pay Per Click Campaign Equalizer
Spying on your competition to better your PPC campaign is possible with SpyFu.com. This neat little tool allows you to see what your competitors are paying for specific keywords. Some say this tool straddles the black hat marketing fence, but you can use it in an ethical way, ie, to garner information that can give you a competitive edge.

How SpyFu Works
By typing in a keyword or a domain name, you can quickly determine the cost per click for a specific keyword or domain name, how many people are clicking on these keywords daily and even track the keyword’s ad history.

Let’s take the term “internet marketing.”
>The average cost per click is $0.96 to $13.20.
>The average clicks/day is 120-129.
>The cost per day is $97.33 – $1.71k.

If you move further down on the page, you can see that Google dominates this keyword with a daily ad budget of $45.43k – $112.81k. If you are just starting a pay per click campaign you can see that this would cost you a significant amount of money to compete with Google, so you can search for other keywords that fit your budget.

Using this PPC marketing tool can help you plan which keywords are out of your price range before you even set up your campaign, saving you the trouble of testing and tweaking keywords you can’t afford.

Now that’s internet marketing done smart!

It seems that everyone has their own method or tactics to get ranked higher in the search engines or to promote their products. But, the truth is, it all comes down to common sense. Pay Per Click advertisers — especially those new to the game — are prone to making mistakes that not only waste time, but a significant amount of money. 

Following are a few common mistakes many make when running Pay Per Click programs. Are you guilty of any of these? 

Using Untargeted Keywords

Avoid the keyword craze when setting up your campaign.  It’s not the quantity of keywords you choose, but the quality of them.  It is important that you use keywords specifically related to your niche, so that you attract targeted traffic.  More means less when it comes to untargeted keywords – as in – less money you can make.

Not Adding Keywords

When creating copy, it is critical that you include keywords in your title and within the body of your copy.  You want your ads to be direct and to the point, so your visitors will know exactly what they are getting without all the fluff. Remember, web surfers are primarily looking for information. Give it to them.

Directing Visitors to Your Homepage

Many online businesses don’t give a second thought to directing visitors to their home page.  If a visitor has read about an incredible product and they want to purchase it, direct them to that page on your site – not the generic home page. They may not take the time to try to locate the info for themselves.  

A few minor changes can go a long way to converting clicks – which is the goal of every pay per click campaign. Avoid these common mistakes to increase your profit potential.

Did you know the PPC Summit search engine marketing experts are coming to New York on May 13-14? Learn more here www.ppcsummit.com

Remember trying to solve the rubik’s cube? Getting all the colors to match was a feat only a few managed to achieve. Pay Per Click campaigns can be like this — finicky little creatures with the power to drive you mad. But, you don’t give up because the fun is in trying. Luckily, pay per click campaigns are simpler to solve than the rubik’s cube. Following is one straightforward way to maximize results.

Split Test Campaigns: A Magic PPC Bullet?

A key step in every successful pay-per-click campaign is optimization. But to know which elements of optimization works best, you have to test, test and retest. This is why split testing can be the magic PPC bullet.

What is split testing? It’s when you create two different versions of some parts of your PPC campaign, then run them against each other. For example, take the headline. Leaving everything else alone in the ad, you would change the headline, run the ads and see which one pulled in better results.

Split testing can even be done on elements within elements. Say you used the same headline but used different punctuation within that headline, eg:

>Mothers Day Flowers: $20

>Mothers Day Flowers – $20

Something as simple as punctuation can dramatically improve your click thru rates. Obviously, the ad with the highest click thru rate would be the winner of the split test.

Successful PPC campaign managers know that split testing is vital to their online marketing success. You can use it to improve landing page results, headlines, AdWords copy, etc.

In essence, you can split test your way to PPC campaign success.

Learn all of this and more at PPC Summit, register now and save $400!