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Pay per click marketing is soon expected to
dominate, if it doesn't already, all paid for
advertising on the Internet. The reason for
this is that unlike banner advertising which
you may have to pay hundreds if not thousands
of pounds for and never ever get any visitors
from, you only pay when someone clicks through
and visits your site. This makes it good for
both large and small numbers of visitors since
generally speaking you can start from as little
as £5 and you can go up to as many clicks
as you can pay for.
Do I need pay per click?
If you hope to make money from your website
then the answer is almost always YES, for 3
different reasons.
1. You want traffic immediately. - Pay per click
campaigns start to generate qualified traffic
in as little as 5 minutes (yes I did say 5 minutes)
2. You want to increase current traffic. - Unless
you are happy with your current level of visitors
then pay per click used properly is guaranteed
to get you more visitors (though of course how
many depends on how well you use it).
3. You don't have the time (or inclination)
to optimize your site to win the traditional
search engine ranking wars. - For all highly
searched keywords and phrases it is all but
impossible to get a permanent high search engine
ranking without a great deal of continual time
and effort.
Who runs these PPC programs
Google - Worldwide
Google runs google adwords worldwide (if you
visit google they are the square boxes on the
right hand side). You can start from just £5
and have a daily budget of just £1 so
anyone should be able to afford it. If you want
to you can restrict the ads to just one country
so you don't waste money advertising to people
who can't receive your product/service. Find
out more
Espotting -
Europe/UK
Great for UK and Europe with ads appearing prominently
on Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Lycos and others. You
can start from £100 and ads go live in
48 hours
Overture - Worldwide
The first and possibly biggest PPC search engine
with ads appearing on Yahoo.com, MSN, Excite.com,
Altavista.com and others. Possibly the most
expensive to advertise on (minimum spend $20
per month and keywords can be more expensive
here) but generally large amounts of traffic.
Find
out more
Others
There are many other smaller engines such as
Go-click
and FindWhat.com
which tend to offer cheaper pay per click prices
including prices from $0.01 per click. They
tend to have lower traffic volumes but can provide
first class value for small/medium sized businesses
or where pay per click prices are too expensive
on the larger engines.
Major Advantages
You get to choose where you appear in the rankings
simply by deciding on how much you are prepared
to pay per click. For example - This means that
you can get on the first page of Google or at
the top of the Overture by paying for it. It
gives small/medium sized businesses the chance
to compete with larger companies that have a
big internet presence simply by paying a few
pence for each visitor. You can often get a
higher search engine postion than the brand
leader especially if your industry is specialised.
All your visitors are targeted because
first they searched for one of your search terms
and second they thought your ad described what
they were looking for.
Things to watch for
Keywords and phrases are all important as it
isn't much use getting top position at 4p per
click on a phrase that gets searched only twice
per month. Consider using Wordtracker
to decide on keywords, if you're unsure of the
need then see our wordtracker
review.
Secondly, don't be tempted to bid too high for
words and phrases until you have a good idea
of how much you make from each visitor as it's
easy to get carried away in a bidding war. Also
remember to be honest and straightforward in
your ad copy since you are looking for people
who might want to buy rather than just a paid
visitor.
Finally
Wortracker is an excellent system purpose designed
to increase sales. If you investigate keywords
carefully with Wordtracker
and judge your bids carefully you should
be able to get plenty of paying visitors.
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