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

Wanna know the easiest way to capitalize on all the leads your Google AdWords pay per click marketing efforts are bringing you?

Get organized BEFORE you start an AdWords campaign. It’s so simple that most internet marketers don’t even think about.

The Psychographics of the Average Internet Marketer

We say this a little tongue-in-cheek, but really, the average internet marketer is so overwhelmed that they wind up doing only what is necessary to keep things rocking along. This is why most never get around to things like categorizing leads, doing follow up, designing special offers for their various niches, cross-marketing to their database, etc.

You can take class after class, learn “inside secret” after inside secret and buy the latest pay per click campaign management software, but if you don’t take the time to get organized – to use all of these tools – you will never realize their full potential.

Google PPC Marketing Advice: What to Do Before You Start Your Pay Per Click Campaign

So, before you start a Google pay per click campaign, decide:

How you’re going to store leads (do have a way to capture leads don’t you?). You should store them with some type of data management software;

When you’re going to follow up;

How often; and

With what kind of offer.

This is the bare minimum.

Keeping the Pareto Principle in mind (ie, 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers) you should have no problem increasing your bottom line if you get organized – before you start your Google AdWords pay per click campaign.

Have you heard? The AdWords Advantage Online Summit starts this week (Mar. 9)– there’s still time to register and save 40%!  Learn how to fast-track your AdWords profits during 14 educational sessions led by the Pay Per Click experts on March 9-30, 2010.

Just announced….The AdWords Advantage Online Summit (AAOS) has announced the schedule of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising online training classes to be held  March 9-30, 2010.  All AAOS participants will save 40% upon registration by the early bird date (March 4).

“Next week we will unveil the first ever online educational AdWords training summit for marketers to learn unbiased Google AdWords techniques from experts who have run multi-million dollar Google AdWords campaigns,” said Mary O’Brien, Adwords Advantage Online Summit and PPC Summit Founder.

 These 14 educational classes uncover the value of AdWords tools, resources and methodologies, and gives students ample opportunity to learn how to improve their AdWords campaigns through hands-on guidance for results at the top of Google.

Each one hour class will teach advertisers step by step how to leverage AdWords to their advantage and develop more profitable campaigns. Attendees will learn Google AdWords Pay Per Click solutions for all business types — Ecommerce, B2B, SMBs and more. Attendees will be able to access the recorded class for 90 days.

AdWords Advantage Online Summit Training Schedule (March 9-25):

> AdWords Optimization in Challenging Times
> Promoting to the Right People at the Right Time - Ad Scheduling & Geo-Targeting
> Assign Proper Attribution and Solve the Complexities of Measurement
> The New AdWords Interface – Save Time and Optimize Your AdWords Campaigns
> AdWords on Steroids: Implement Advanced Strategies Leave Your Competitors Gasping
> Slash Click Costs (37%) & Increase CTR (82%) Using Mathematical Formulas
> 30 Tips in 60 Minutes: Convert MORE AdWords Visitors into Buyers
> Understanding the B2B Buyer Sphere: How to Apply Enquiro’s Latest Research to AdWords
> Utilizing SEO and Social Media Marketing to Improve AdWords Strategy
> Researching and Managing Keywords-the Key to Google AdWords Success
> Get the Most out of Google Analytics & Google AdWords
> Contextual Advertising – Best Practices and Hot New Secrets
> AdWords for Local: Sort Heads from Tails, Find Free Clicks and Calls 

More information at AdWords Advantage Online Summit.

AdWords or any other type of pay per click marketing, one of the best ways to increase your ROI is to learn how to write headlines that get clicked. You don’t only want headlines that get clicked through; you want headlines that get clicked and lead to sales (or gets the prospect to take some type of action, eg, subscribe, call, etc.).

Following is a simple formula used by successful SEO copywriters that you can use. Even if your writing skills are marginal, if you use this formula, you are practically guaranteed to increase your ROI (return on investment).

Marry a benefit with your main keyword phrase.

That’s it; it’s that simple. The benefit should be one that is unique to your brand AND one that your market research has shown is extremely important to your customers. This part is important because it’s easy to parrot your competitor’s ads, touting the same benefits they do. But, if your benefit is unique to your company/your brand, then it sets you apart.

You become “an industry leader,” or a “world apart.” For example, let’s say you sell ethnic candles – made from soy. You can tout the benefits of your ethnic soy candles, eg, how clean they burn, which makes them green” (eg, safe for the environment) and good for your health.

While there may be quite a few manufacturers of ethnic candles, you can set yourself apart by touting this unique benefit of your ethnic candles in every headline you write.

Your headline must “speak” to web surfers. And, if it speaks their language – and addresses the classic marketing idiom “what’s in it for me (WIIF),” you’ll be well on your way to Google AdWords pay per click marketing success. To learn more on how to fast-track your AdWords success, attend the AdWords Advantage free preview call to learn money-making tips from the experts!

A good argument can be made that landing pages should not sell. “But,” you may be thinking, “I’m spending a lot of money on Google AdWords to drive traffic to this page to make sales.” We know, we know. But, hear us out on this point.

Are You Wasting Money by Using Your Landing Page to Sell?

While Google AdWords is an excellent way to make immediate sales, is it the sale today you want, or a long-term relationship with prospects that lead to ongoing sales?

As anyone with even basic marketing experience knows, loyal customers who stick with you over the long haul are much more profitable. Why? Because you don’t have to “sell” them over and over again. They already know and trust your product/service. Hence, they are a better return on your investment.

Too many businesses make the mistake of taking the short view. And this is especially true in online marketing. They drive traffic to a landing page and immediately ask for the sale. And, while this may be great in certain situations, eg, holiday PPC campaigns, it misses the mark a lot of the time.

Pay Per Click Marketing Tip: How to Better Use Your Landing Page

“So,” you may be wondering, “what exactly should I use my landing page for?” The answer is simple, to forge a long-lasting relationship that can be worth thousands of dollars in the future sales. You can do this by educating prospects about your product or service.

For example, by offering a free booklet or free seminar on your landing page, you “hook” them first. While this is a longer route to a sale, it engages the prospect on a different level than other marketers whose main goal is to get the prospect to “Buy Now!”

And this is the real way to get a better ROI on your Google AdWords campaigns (or any other form of marketing).

Search engine optimization is mercurial. Things are constantly changing, which means that internet marketers must change with it in order to get the best returns from their PPC campaigns, for example. Following are two recently announced changes by search engine giant and ad network Google that every pay per click marketer needs to be aware of.

Site Speed Matters: When a user clicks through from you Google AdSense ad, your landing page had better load quickly. Why? Because Google is considering using site speed as a ranking factor. 

While the company has come right out and said emphatically that it plans to do this, the fact that it’s even a part of the conversation means that at some point they probably will. Also, they’ve rolled out tools webmasters can use to speed up their pages. Learn more about this at Google’s Site Speed site.

Personalized Search: This has caused a big hullabaloo lately. What exactly is it? It means that when you conduct a Google search, it returns results that are tailored to what the search engine thinks is most desired by the individual user as opposed to a more general relevancy for the average person who may be searching the web.

To explain by way of example, let’s say you conduct a lot of searches for home décor tips and click on results from HGTV.com often. Accordingly, Google might rank HGTV.com higher on the results pages it returns the next time you do a search for home décor ideas – simply because it sees that you go to this site often.

Why is this important to you as an online marketer? Think about it this way: if web users are getting more personalized results, it can fragment your target market more. This makes it harder for you to reach larger numbers of prospects.

While you can’t change what ad networks like Google do, you can stay abreast of the changes and adapt your SEO and pay per click marketing strategies to continually maximize your return on investment.

If you’re in a highly competitive PPC marketing niche, eg, credit, weight loss, insurance, and have a very small budget, there are going to be some keywords that you are never going to rank for. So, how do you put together a competitive Google AdWords pay per click marketing campaign? Following is one way to do it.

Taking the Long Road to Google AdWords PPC Marketing Success
You’re going to have to niche it to success – and be patient while doing it. To explain by way of example, let’s take credit repair.

If you ran a credit repair agency and wanted to rank high for strong keywords in this niche, good luck unless you have gobs of money. Keywords like credit repair, credit repair services and credit score repair are in the $5 to $10 per click range.

But, there are quite a few phrases in this niche that go for 5 cents per click, ie:
* New Credit Repair (260 monthly searches)
* DIY Repair (260 monthly searches)
* Credit Repair Experts (110 monthly searches)
* Sample Credit Repair (210 monthly searches)
* Good Credit Repair (140 monthly searches)

These keywords account for almost 1,000 searches per month and they cost pennies compared to higher traffic keywords like the ones mentioned above, which bring anywhere from right at 2,000 to over 90,000 searches per phrase, per month.

You may be able to find 20, 30 or 40 phrases or more like the low-cost ones just above. Combine your bid on these with a good organic marketing campaign (eg, writing and distributing SEO articles via free article directories) and over time, you will start to get steady traffic and sales.

Depending on the pricing of your services, you may not need to get hundreds or thousands of clicks to see a noticeable difference in your bottom line.

Just because you’re in a super-competitive niche does not mean you can’t put together a profitable Google AdWords pay per click campaign. It just means you have to be patient and take a different approach. You can learn more AdWords success tips from the experts during the AdWords Advantage Online Summit http://www.AdWordsAdvantage.com coming in March.

Click fraud is, unfortunately, part of advertising online. Major players like Google, MSN and Yahoo! take great pains to help advertisers prevent it. If you’re a pay per click marketer and you suspect click fraud, following are some actions you can take:

Identify the source: There are primarily three culprits when it comes to click fraud. They are listed below.

3 Types of Click Fraud Culprits

Your Competitors: By draining your account as quickly as possible, you are less competition for them. Except in the case of Google, this actually gives you a higher ranking (after all, if you’re getting a lot of clicks, your product must be good/popular, right? Google rewards this). While it may suck for your bank account, in the end it helps you.

Affiliates: Google AdSense affiliates make money every time someone clicks, so some are unscrupulous enough to click (or get someone else to click). 

Traffic Thieves: These are probably the most insidious of the bunch because it’s so hard to identify them. They can be a company that sells traffic to other sites, or an individual who is stealing traffic from you because they sell a similar product, or another type. 

4 Ways to Combat Click Fraud

Track Your Traffic: Knowing where your traffic is coming from is vital to preventing click fraud. You’ll have to provide this to Google anyway if you suspect it, so make it a habit to track it. You can find this out by looking at your web log referrer reports, or by using various tracking tools on the market.

Report Suspicious Activity to Google: Gather all of your evidence, eg, logs of the source of your traffic, normal activity report compared to a suspicious one (comparison click charts), region traffic is coming from, spike dates, etc. Give them everything you think they may need to do a proper, thorough investigation.

Contact the ISP. If the suspected click fraud is coming from an identifiable ISP, contact them to let them know. Do it in writing (email) and by phone.  If this doesn’t work, you can always resort to the following . . .

Retain an Attorney: They will be able to help you, for example, get a court order to release the name attached to the ISP from which the suspected click fraud originated, as well as several other options.

While this may not be cheap, it can literally cost you less if you spend thousands on pay per click marketing.

Marketing online via Google AdWords is one of the quickest ways to start generating sales and leads online. And, it’s so easy. Many pay per click marketers make it much more difficult than it needs to be.

To simplify the process, ask yourself the following three questions when preparing your AdWords campaign. If you can provide the answer, you are probably doing 75% more than your competition, which means more sales for you.

 Will my prospect use this keyword to find my product?

About 10 seconds after you decide to research how to run a successful Google AdWords campaign, you probably read that keywords are the foundation to your success.

And while terms like “keyword research”, “cost per click” and “return on investment” may be running through your head, what it all boils down to is this: “Would the person searching for my type of product/service use this keyword/keyword phrase as a search term?” If you think the answer is yes, then try it.

Remember, keyword research – and indeed, pay per click marketing itself – is not an exact science. If a keyword phrase turns out to be a dud, you can quickly change it. That’s the beauty of advertising via Google AdWords. Nothing is set in stone. You can change it at the drop of a dime.

What do I want them to do when they land on my site?

Okay, so you got’em to click through to your site. Don’t lose your prospect now! Tell them exactly what you want them to do – buy, subscribe, ask for more info, etc.

Have I done thorough keyword research?This is the mother lode. Spend time up front to do thorough keyword research. Build a master list and keep it handy. Google’s Keyword AdWord research tool makes it soooo easy.

You can use it to find keywords based on your site content; identify negative keywords; create separate ad groups; specify a language and/or location – and so much more.

If you ask – and answer – these three questions, you should have no problem running a successful Google AdWords pay per click campaign.

In pay per click marketing, keywords are the foundation of every successful campaign. But, your competition uses the same Google AdWords tools you do to discover profitable keywords. However, you can still beat them at this game. How?

By using noncompetitive keywords. Here are two ways to dig up some good keywords your competition may have overlooked.

Use Google Trends: Google Trends displays keywords web surfers are looking for on a daily basis. And, it’s updated throughout the day. It even shows “how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.” [Source: About Google Trends]

This is an excellent tool for digging up profitable keywords your competition may be overlooking. And, the best part about it – as these are “hot topic” items, your ads will probably get a higher CTR – and a higher ROI as it’s highly targeted to exactly what surfers are searching for.

Use Keyword Subsets: If you’re in a highly competitive niche or you don’t have the ad budge to compete with the big guys, use less competitive keywords – but choose them wisely.

For example, “make money online” is a very competitive keyword phrase. Good luck getting any good placement with that one. But, there are other phrases similar to this that are less competitive – and less expensive. Finding a lot of these can really add up – in traffic and sales.

 Some subsets of “make money online” — which is highly competitive at 246,000 monthly searches – are the following:

• Make money online today: 1,600
• Need to make money: 1,300
• Making extra money: 1,300

While the traffic doesn’t compare to “make money online”, by using various subsets, it can really add up. And, not for nothing, the longer a keyword phrase is (long-tail keywords), the more motivated the searcher is to buy because they are looking for something specific.

Keep this in mind the next time you do keyword research for your Google AdWords pay per click campaign. Monitor your results. You may never want to use same keywords everyone else is bidding on again.

New Google AdWords pay per click marketers can waste a lot of money if they don’t know how to property set an ad budget. There’s an art to it. Here are two things to keep in mind that will keep you from wasting money with this online marketing method.

Set Limits:  Figure out how much you can afford to spend monthly, then break it down by day. This will prevent you from going over budget.

For example, if your monthly PPC budget is $500, then your daily limit is $16.66.

Set Dollar Limits on Keywords: As in, set a maximum of how much you’re willing to pay for a click on a certain keyword. To do this, use Google’s Keyword AdWord Tool to see what the average spend is for a certain keyword.

Using this info, bid higher if you want to obtain a higher listing on a page. Or, bid lower if you want to be in a lower position. Nothing is set in stone; you can change these at any time if you want. Check your campaigns often, and if your current bids aren’t giving you the results you want, then change them.

Google AdWords Pay Per Click Campaign: Setting Your Bid Tip

Strive for the Top Spot: Often, this is not the most profitable spot to be in. Oftentimes, the number three, four or five position will get you better results. The reason is, a lot of curiosity seekers may click on the top spot. But, those who are “ready to buy” mode will often click three, four or five ads to comparison shop.

So in essence, the person in the top spot is paying for a customer who’s going to click on lower-placed ads anyway.

Keeping these tips in mind will not only keep you from overspending, they will increase your Google AdWords campaign ROI as well.