Various Articles

Pay Per Click advertising is known as PPC. With PPC marketing, payment is made to the search engines each time someone clicks the link in your ad and goes to your website.

The fact of the matter is, it can take between 6 and 12 months to evade being deliberately filtered out of the SERPS by Google. And after that, you will still have to wait until your website begins to rank high enough in the search engine results to start receiving clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the SE pages by using PPC marketing

Akin to many other areas of Internet promotion, keyword research is an important part of PPC marketing. You need to know which keywords and keyword phrases the majority of people are most likely to use to seek out what it is that you are selling.

When you start a PPC marketing campaign, you are actually involving yourself in an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are used by most people, with the highest listings going to the highest bidders. The more that a website is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher they will be listed in the search results, which are most often found at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

PPC marketing has become highly aggressive for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

PPC marketing is often filled with falsified clicks. Your competition will click on your ads to drive up your PPC marketing bill in order to try to get you to quit advertising and competing. There have also been some allegations and lawsuits regarding fraud that is perpetrated by the search engine companies themselves. And the Plaintiffs won at least one of these lawsuits that I read about.

I could write a lot about this area of promotion. But I think that your interests would be better served if I just "cut to the chase." Conversion rates vary widely by industry on the Internet. But the average is similar to what is experienced in the mail-order business, which is between one half of one percent, and two percent. And in the real world, projecting a one percent conversion rate would be fairly safe, though there are thousands of variables that can make the one percent estimate much too high.

What that means is that out of every 100 clicks on your links, you might get one actual sale. So if the markup (Gross Profit) on your average sale is $50.00, and your clicks cost you fifty cents each, you can't afford PPC marketing because 100 clicks X .50 per click = $50.00 and you only broke even.

Remember, "Gross Profit" doesn't include your cost of doing business. It is only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the above example there was in reality a loss of money. You must know what it costs you to be in business, and that includes how much it costs to own your equipment, pay your rent, ISP, etc., plus the value of your time.

The bottom line is that most PPC has been bid up way too high by the larger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using pay per click advertising.

Be wary of the companies who will offer to manage your pay per click advertising for a fee because they can't change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the proficiency to help you succeed, and they might. But they still can't change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that pay per click advertising can work, but you must cautiously do the math. Can you make a reasonable profit based on the above if you pay the current bid price for the keywords and get only about a 1/10th of 1% or 2/10ths of 1% conversion rate (sales rate)? If you can, then pay per click advertising might work in your case.

I urge you to stick with niche terms that haven't been bid up to high. Personally, in my industry I'm only willing to pay between fifteen cents and forty cents maximum per click, and my products sell for between forty and one hundred and fifty dollars.

Pay per click? Do the math first, and then make a decision. But you should be willing to lose money while you find out how to make it work effectively!

Personally, I've found several search engine optimization methods that are much more effective than PPC marketing. These other methods have helped me to advance my site to the first page on Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. One of the reasons that these other techniques are much more effective is they cost little or no money. And most people searching the Internet attribute a lot more trustworthiness to websites that rank high in the organic listings vs the paid listings.

By using these techniques, in well under one year, I've been able to make my website rank better than other websites in my industry that have been promoting themselves for 10 years or even more!

In the longer term, you will want to optimize your site and work on getting backlinks to raise your ranking in the organic listings. Many people have used reciprocal linking to promote their website.

However, one-way backlinks are much more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I have been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented the steps that were taken to drive lots of free traffic to my website to make it successful by relying on article spinning and marketing.