PPC

Sometimes paid advertising is more effective.

Because it’s so targeted and immediate, Pay Per Click advertising is a surefire way to grow your business. Since Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world we’ll refer to its PPC product AdWords, however you can run virtually identical PPC campaigns on Yahoo and even on some of the larger private websites – particularly newspaper sites.

What is PPC?

Pay Per Click means that you pay a certain amount to Google every time someone clicks on your AdWords ad.

The cost of the click is set by a blind auction on the Adwords website and depends on the popularity of the keywords you are bidding on and how much other advertisers are willing to pay to be high up the stack of AdWords ads to the right of the organic search results for those keywords.

(By the way, a ‘keyword’ can be a single word or a phrase)

Research says that you need to be in positions one to four to get a good click-thru rate (more than 2 clicks per 100 page views).

Here are two, very handy, free tools to help you find keywords:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

There are a couple of tricks with Adwords.

• Find keywords that have low bid prices, but convert well. In other words find phrases that people use when they want to buy, not when they’re just browsing for entertainment.
• Success with AdWords is all about testing – seeing which keywords and ads convert the best compared to others, and then putting your money into the ones that perform best.

You also need to make the headline in your AdWords ad be more relevant and compelling than the websites Google has displayed to their left.

That’s why you see all the shock-horror headlines in Adwords for online products,  like ‘Don’t buy First Date Magic – until you read this’ or ‘Hear the terrible truth about First Date Magic’ or ‘First Date Magic stole my baby, find out how’ etc etc

AdSense is exactly like AdWords, but instead of appearing on the search results pages on Google, AdSense ads appear on websites where the content is relevant to the ad. That’s why Google call it the content network.

AdSense is much cheaper than AdWords – and some PPC experts say that it is a clever option. The reason is that people type in keywords to find websites, not to find AdWords – but then once they’re at a site they are willing to be distracted by a very good offer – which has already proven its relevance by appearing in a website they’ve chosen to visit.

It can all seem confusing at first, but to be a successful affiliate marketer you need to understand PPC, because it is a very useful way to get traffic to your website fast.

So what you need to do is go to the Google home page and click on Advertising Solutions, open an account (free) and take the excellent tutorials and play with the keyword and AdWords tools .

There are also some good ebooks to read if you want to get serious about PPC .

And one last piece of advice – an AdWords campaign that has a high CTR (click thru rate) can drain your bank account very fast, so it’s best to stick to pre-pay in the early stages while you’re still learning.