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10 Ways to Increase Web Traffic
Internet traffic is the life of any website or e-commerce business, and if you are an internet marketer, you already know that good traffic is not always easy to achieve. There are however, some simple and effective strategies for getting quality...
Drive Traffic To Your Site Without Breaking The Bank
Driving traffic to your web site at a reasonable cost is one of the biggest challenges you'll face. It makes no difference how good a site you have; no visitors, no business. But, if you pay too much for your visitors you will either lose money or...
Microsoft and PPC Advertising -- Not Quite a Flirt Anymore
Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) face new competition from Microsoft's newly released PPC program, MSN AdCenter .
Currently, MSN still displays search ads from Yahoo! Search Marketing, through a contract that...
PPC Easy As 123
What are PPC (Pay Per Click) search engines? How do they work? How can PPC search engines benefit my business? How cost effective are PPC search engines? How fast can I gain new cliental by using PPC search engines? Where do I go to find the...
Starting A Home Business: Step 6
Have you been a good student? Congratulations for making your dream of owning a home business a reality. Today you will learn how to get qualified traffic to your product web site and how to build your house list of email leads.
(If you missed...
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Pay-Per-Click Advertising – The Basics
Search engine optimization can take a long time to show results. The Google sandbox alone can delay optimization results by 6 to 8 months. So, what can you do to get traffic while you wait? Pay-per-click [“PPC”] campaigns fill the time gap. This article discusses the basics of PPC advertising.
What Is A PPC?
A PPC search engine allows you to bid for placement in search results. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and most others bolster their organic search results with sponsor advertisements. If you search on Google, links in blue across the top and the little ads down the right side of the search results are PPC listings. In one form or another, similar listings appear on every major search engine.
How Does It Work?
When you use a PPC, you will bid for placement in the search results under particular keywords. Instead of optimizing your site to appear high in the listings, you simple pay for the position. While this may sound great, keep in mind you are paying for the listing and have to watch the return on investment closely.
To get started, you must open an account with the PPC in question. The two biggest PPCs are Google Adwords and Overture. You will need to register with the PPC, provide a credit card number and, depending on the PPC, deposit money into the account. Next, create ads with a title, body text and link to the landing page of your site. The title of each ad should correspond to a particular keyword you want to promote. If at all possible, include the keyword in the actual title. Finally, you will be asked to bid on placement in the search results.
Bidding for placement is not as simple as it my sound. Ideally, your ad should be in the top 3, but never below the 10th position. This has to be balanced, however, by the return on investment of the campaign. If you sell a product that produces a $10 dollar profit per sale, you probably can’t afford to pay $.90
per click. If your site converts 1 visitor out of every 100 into a sale, you will spend $90 for every sale. Obviously, that is going to work out very well. The one caveat to this situation is a business with reoccurring revenue.
If you site charges clients a reoccurring monthly fee, you can bid in excess of your immediate profit margin. To do this safely, you must determine how long the average customer will stay on your site. For example, if you make a $10 profit per month and the average customer pays for 5 months, the total profit is $50. In this situation, you can spend $20 or $30 to obtain a customer and still turn a profit. To properly manage a PPC campaign for a reoccurring charge site, you must recalculate the profit per customer ever week to protect yourself.
PPC Cons
Why not just use a PPC campaign instead of pursuing search engine optimization? There are a number of reasons. First, you are paying for each click with a PPC, which requires a budget and may impact your cash flow. Second, PPC bidding is competitive and that translates into higher costs, so much so that a profit may be hard to make. Third, many people simply do not click on PPC ads with the figure being as high as 20 percent. Fourth, you run the risk of having people click on your ads with no intention of buying, whether they are just browsing or are trying to exhaust your advertising budget.
PPCs definitely have a place in the online marketing field. Manage your campaigns with an eye for detail and you should fine.
About the Author
Halstatt Pires is with Marketing Titan- an Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego, California comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.
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