Explains PPC Marketing...

Add another channel to your online marketing mix
- PPC! A subset of Search Engine Marketing, PPC
enables you to drive more and better traffic to
your website while easily managing budget
constraints and determining ROI. It also provides
a strong complement to traditional search engine
optimization efforts.

Compared with the ineffective crapshoot that is
traditional advertising, there's no better way to
get traffic than through
pay-for-performance keyword advertising in search
engines. If you're not clear on what pay per
click ads are, those are the sponsored links that
show up when you perform a web search in Google,
Yahoo and other search engines.

While more targeted than offline advertising or
banner ads, it's certainly possible to throw away
a lot of cash with pay per click. The way to do
that is to fail to think strategically about
where you send people who click on your ads.
The goal of pay per click advertising is to get
in front of searchers who are looking
specifically for what you have to offer. This
takes careful keyword research, strategic
bidding, and compelling ad copy just to get the
click.

The problem is, that's where most people stop.

They make the mistake of sending that targeted
traffic to the home page of their website or
blog. Even worse, they make no attempt to
establish a relationship with those that don't
buy, so as to boost conversion rates for every
dollar spent.

Unlike traditional advertising, the Pay Per Click
model can track the Internet users from initial
search results to online purchase. You can
closely manage the campaign to give the best
returns. As an increasing number of people buy
online, those companies that become adept at
managing the online budget today will reap the
rewards tomorrow.

- No changes are required to the front end of the
website design.
- A cost only occurs when an ad is clicked on and
someone visits your site, unlike traditional
media where the ad is paid for whether it is
viewed or not.
- A pay per click campaign can be activated or
de-activated rapidly. It can be turned up or down
at a moments notice.
- A pay per click campaign can be directly
assessed against an return on investment
requirement.

The difficulty of pay per click advertising is
monitoring that the daily expenditure achieves
good click-through and sales results. When
choosing more than a handful of keywords, this
can become quite difficult and we provide bid
management technology to ease the campaign.
So, if you're selling products or services, it
makes sense to make sales and build your fan club
at the same time. Here's how to boost your
conversion rates from any pay per click campaign
while also boosting your subscriber numbers.

1. The first thing to do is build a
ultra-specific page to send the search traffic
to, called a landing page. Depending on the
variety of key words you are bidding on, you may
even build several landing pages that each
narrowly address the specific needs of that
searcher.

2. When I say "searchers," I mean searchers. Do
not participate in contextual advertising
programs on publisher sites. I think we've all
seen enough AdSense spam to understand part of
the reasoning here. But even on reputable sites,
contextual advertising brings too many "curiosity
clicks" that kill your return on investment. You
want people who are actively looking for what you
are offering. You can choose to opt-out of
non-search traffic with both Google and Yahoo.

3. The landing page does not sell your product or
service. This is the key. You instead offer a
quality free resource -- a mini-course, ebook,
teleseminar, or other type of tutorial that is
directly related to what you are ultimately
selling. By teaching people about the subject
matter of your product or service, you are
actually engaging in a highly effective form of
selling, all while establishing a relationship.

4. Whatever your free offer, it must be delivered
by an email or RSS auto responder that allows you
to stay in contact with the prospect.

5. You should explicitly inform your prospects
that in addition to the free resource you are
offering, they will also be receiving your email
newsletter / blog updates. Make sure you make
this part of your offer as enticing as possible.
You're delivering valuable, relevant content on a
regular basis, right?

And there you have it. You'll likely make some
sales right away, but your real profits will come
from the people who warm up to your offer thanks
to the ongoing value you provide with your blog
content.

This technique is by no means new. But it's
shocking how many people still don't use it, as
they waste good money sending traffic to
a home page that is not laser-focused, and also
fail to offer true value to the searcher that
results in a relationship.

You don't propose marriage before you get a first
date. And you likewise shouldn't expect people to
just automatically jump at the chance to give you
money upon arriving at your home page.

Pay-per-click marketing is a great way to get
visitors when you need traffic and you need it
now. But it's risky: You can spend a fortune,
generate many visits, and end up with nothing to
show for it. This article will provide you with a
high-level view of pay-per-click marketing
provide some general strategies and provide an
example of what to do, and what not to do.

What Is Pay Per Click?
Pay per click search engines (also known as Pay
per Ranking, Pay per Placement or Pay per
Position) and pay per click advertising provides
web site owners the opportunity to buy their way
to better positions on search results pages.
Learn about pay per click, the costs, and if it
is a viable option for your site. Pay per click
advertising on search engines allows you choose
keywords you would like your site to appear for
when a search is performed. You decide how much
you are willing to pay each time a person clicks
on the search results. The more you are willing
to pay per click, the higher your site will
appear in the results for the keywords you
choose.

On its face, pay-per-click marketing, or PPC, is
pretty simple: Search engines and services, such
as Google or Overture, provide listings on a
per-bid basis. This is in addition to their
'natural' search results, which are still powered
by a combination of keywords found on your site,
link popularity and other formulae.

If you place the highest bid for a specific
keyword or set of keywords, then you rank number
one in these paid listings. On Google, PPC
listings show up in the Adwords column on the
right-hand side of the screen. Other engines,
such as MSNSearch or Yahoo, display PPC listings
as 'sponsored listings' in the same column as the
natural search results.
If someone clicks on your PPC listing, they
arrive at your web site. And you are charged the
amount you bid. So, if you bid $.15 per click on
'widgets', and that's the highest bid, you'll
show up first in line. If 100 people click on
your PPC listing, then the search engine or PPC
service will charge you $15.00.

It is a dynamic marketplace, the higher you bid,
the higher your advertisement will be displayed
in the list.

You pay only when a searcher or clicker clicks on
your listing and connects to your site. You don't
pay to list; you only pay for clicks or click
throughs. This way you only pay for the traffic
to your site, there are no other hidden costs.

Pay Per Click is now not only available on search
engines. Publishers can also include PPC
advertisements on their sites. For example, we
use Google's PPC Adsense product as you can see
in the left-hand column.

An account with a PPC search engine is a great
way to drive traffic to your site
because you only pay for actual clicks to your
site. It allows you to get maximum exposure,
while you control the amount you want to spend on
your marketing campaign. You can clearly track the
effectiveness of your ad campaign.

Advertisers need to be wary of PPC search engines
that offer clickers money or incentives to click
through their results. Our advice is to steer
clear of these search engines or programs as the
clicks you pay for may not be the best quality.

The industry has grown into a multi-billion
dollar industry and PPC providers have become
more sophisticated, providing enhanced account
features. Such features enable you to select
which countries you want your ads displayed in
and in what language. There are also more
companies providing bid management services such
as Atlas One Point, to help you manage your PPC
campaigns across multiple engines.
The Pay Per Click Guide provides an overview of
several pay per click programs on offer. Each
program is reviewed using the following four
criteria:

Price: How much do you need to spend to open an
account?
What is the minimum bid amount?
Traffic: You want visitors to your website. Find
out what traffic volumes you can expect.
Interface: Find out where your listings will be
published.
Extras: Allows us to share any extra tidbits
about the service with you.

One of the main appeals of PPC is the level of
targeting available to advertisers. By placing
advertisements that only appear when specific
search terms are used or on websites that have a
specific type of readership, advertisers can
market to a reasonably well matched audience to
their business and bring through quality traffic
- visitors that are more likely to be interested
in what they offer. Add to this the benefit of
only paying for clicks and detailed real-time
statistics on advertisement performance and you
have an unparalleled advertising medium.

PPC evolved as a better option to CPM (cost per
thousand impressions) advertising that was the
original metric used to sell advertising on
websites. CPM charges advertisers for displaying
their advert regardless of whether it is clicked
or not. While beneficial for branding purposes
the often low click-through rates suffered by CPM
campaigns in the early days (often due to poor
targeting and visitors mentally "screening out"
banners) made the enhancements provided by PPC a
much more effective option in most cases. With
Google commanding the lion share of the search
industry the AdWords system quickly became the
most popular method to advertise online and now
represents 95% of the income earned by the search
giant.

From the user point of view PPC advertising is
not easy to come to grips with initially but will
reward those marketers that spend the time
learning to use the system and optimize their
campaigns. Google's system has been widely touted
as ingenious, offering highly customizable
campaigns manipulated via a reasonably simple
interface. Results can be attained within hours
of placing an advertisement and offer businesses
of any size an affordable and effective means to
promote online.

Important Considerations
A very important point to keep in mind with pay
per click is you must test, test, and test some
more. Don't start off with a major investment.
Start with the minimum and see how the search
engine performs in terms of the traffic it
delivers and how well that traffic converts into
paying customers.
An essential part of your testing is having a
method in place that allows you to track your
return on money invested.
For example, if your goal is to bring in new
subscribers to your newsletter, you could direct
visitors arriving from your pay per click link to
a subscription form set up just for them. You can
then monitor how many clicks actually result in a
new subscription. As such, you will know how much
you are paying for each new subscriber.
Before spending any money with a pay per click
search engine, be sure they can answer the
following questions:

- How many searches a month are performed at the
search engine?
- What major search partners or affiliates does
the search engine have?
- How many searches are generated each month by
the search partners or affiliates?
- Is it possible to opt out of having your
listing appear in the results of the affiliate
sites?
- What fraud prevention mechanisms are in place?
- What is the procedure for filing a "fraudulent
clicks" report?
- Will an account be credited for fraudulent
clicks discovered?
- Is it possible to opt out of having a listing
appear for searches originating from specific
countries?

Is there a posted terms of service for search
partners or affiliates. Look for search engines
that have very strict guidelines for dealing with
their search affiliates. This is important
because you want to be sure the search engine is
working hard to prevent fraud among its
affiliates.

Good Luck,