Pay Per Click

A Modern Day Fairytale: Pay Per Click Search Engine

2008-08-31T21:06:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Based on its recent share price, pay per click search engine, Google,
now has a stock market capitalization of about $107 billion, more than
the combined stock values of stalwarts like Boeing, Ford Motor and
General Motors! Its closest pay per click search engine rival Yahoo!
has a market capitalization of about $45 billion. So what's so good
about these pay per click search engines that has catapulted them in
the Fortune list of America's most admired companies?

To get to the root, you first need to understand the pay per click
search engine programs. Even though Google AdSense and Yahoo! Search
Marketing Solutions, like many PPC programs, are plagued by claims of
click fraud; they are clearly an effective revenue source for many
reputable web businesses. Publishers or webmasters insert a java script
into their web site. Each time the page is accessed or displayed, the
java script pulls advertisements from these programs. These ads are
targeted and related to the content contained on the web page serving
the ad. Google seems to be well content oriented and uses your meta
description and meta keywords, in addition to page content, in order to
serve up ads that are appropriate to the subject matter of the web site.

At its most basic level, advertisers do not pay anything for the ads
displayed until someone actually clicks on them and gets redirected to
the advertisers' website. Thus, advertisers are paying-per-click for
potential customers who have actually arrived at their websites. This
concept of pay-per-click has been around ever since evolution of the
Internet and the rise of search engines. However, this type of online
advertising in its current form began in 1997, when an entrepreneur
named Bill Gross developed an idea for the first-ever pay per click
search engine GoTo.com.

Conclusion

What has happened in the search-engine marketing arena over the last
couple of years, is a paradigm shift from the traditional means of
online advertising to a previously less-employed option called
pay-per-click advertising. Because pay-per-click (PPC) has plenty of
advantages, and only few shortcomings, many more companies are
beginning to experiment with this type of advertising, thus fueling its
growth. The introduction of localized search to the mix is the
decisive, convincing factor that further sways small and medium
businesses to consider this form of online advertising. I myself have
gotten plenty of leads and made sales due to pay-per-click advertising
on the Google search engine.

Pay Per Click Marketing - The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Ads Of Pay Per Click Marketing Advertisers

2008-08-29T02:45:00.000-07:00

f you are a pay per click marketing advertiser then you must have a full understanding of what makes a good, and a bad ppc ad. This article will discuss the good the bad and the ugly ads of pay per click marketers and also show you where to get access to the best pay per click marketing tool for maximum ppc marketing profits.

Bad pay per click marketing ads in a competitive market mean one thing - losing money hands over fist - and fast!

When we talk about good, bad and ugly ads of pay per click marketing advertisers we are talking about not only the keywords that those pay per click campaigns are targeting, but also the landing pages that those pay per click ads are redirected to.

Understanding The Fundamentals Of Bad & Ugly Ads

A pay per click bad ad will be completely unfocused and untargeted, will use only the most general keyword list and will probably send the ad traffic to the wrong landing page.

This will ultimately hurt the pay per click advertiser's click through rate, their conversions, their quality score and their hip pocket!

No matter what keyword their prospect has searched, they'll direct them to the home page, regardless of what specifically their prospect is looking for.

There are several things severely wrong with a bad ad:

1. They've placed every single keyword into the one ad group rather than just similar phrases.

2. Their headline is useless and ineffective.

3. Their description gives no reason for the prospect to click on their ad.

4. Their ad takes their prospects directly to their home page, regardless of what the keywords are that were searched for. It is far more beneficial to have visitors taken to an individual web page specifically designed around the keyword phrase searched for.

Understanding The Fundamentals Of Great Ads

1. The keyword is in the headline.

2. The first line of the ad contains the most powerful and compelling benefit to the reader.

3. The second line in the description contains the best feature.

4. The beginning of every word has been capitalized.

5. The display url has part of the main keyword either in the domain or in a subdirectory.

To get the highest click through rate you possibly can and the highest conversions you need to focus on targeting keyword sets, not a general keyword list. Not only that, you have to write your ads as a sales person would.

Let me show you how I would use the software Keyword Elite to easily separate my keywords into their own ad group.

Open up project 1 "create a keyword list". For this example I'll use the keyword insurance. In step 3 select Overture and in step 4 we'll select 500 keywords related to the word insurance.

Once Keyword Elite has finished processing this list of keywords right click on the mouse and select "export as groups to TXT". This will automatically allow us to separate all of our keywords into their own ad groups for us. It will create 1 text file for each group. All we would need to do then is open up each text file and paste the keywords straight in our Adwords account. For example, the text files for the insurance example would be car insurance, health insurance, home insurance, insurance and life insurance.

5 Reasons To Use Pay Per Click Internet Advertising

2008-08-29T02:26:00.000-07:00

If you want to drive traffic to your website and increase sales, chances are you are working hard on optimizing your website for SEO and trying hard to add new content regularly. The problem is, not only is this approach time consuming, it takes a long time and no doubt, many a webmaster has lost his desire and his hopes have fizzled because of the lack of short term reward. The answer may well be pay per click internet advertising. Pay per click internet advertising is a way of purchasing advertising space on a search engine page by bidding on a search term. If you bid competitively for a particular term, you may well be placed on the same page as hard working webmasters who have optimized website pages to appear naturally on search engine results pages.

Here are five reasons to use pay per click internet advertising:

1. Pay per click internet advertising can work very quickly, even instantly. This is a huge advantage for a webmaster, particularly if you want to get a product onto the market quickly and your advertising is targeting it with the right keywords. Getting a quick response from targeted visitors can also create a momentum that can drive a promotion forward and create positive energy and new ideas to work in tandem with your pay per click internet advertising campaign.

2. Pay per click internet advertising can by-pass time consuming SEO strategies. This is worth mentioning again. It is not easy to create organic growth and appeal to the different search engine algorithms in order to land on the first page of search engine results. With effective pay per click internet advertising, you or advertisement can appear on the first page of search engine results at a reasonable price.

3. Pay per click internet advertising can significantly increase website traffic if you choose a relevant and reasonably popular keyword and write an appealing advertisement. You don't need to spend a fortune to gain the first position, third or fourth position can work equally well and be substantially less expensive.

4. Pay per click internet advertising can be cost effective if used correctly. Not only can you save money by bidding for the third or fourth position, you can save a lot of money by bidding on a misspelling of a name. A lot of people typing in search terms spell the words incorrectly. If you were to research the common mis-spellings of your keyword, you may well be able to purchase it for next to nothing and yet gain a lot of targeted traffic.

5. Pay per click internet advertising can also be used to build an offline business by using geographical parameters. Google, for example, offers a geo-targeting option that is very useful if you are wanting physical visitors to your place of business.

Used correctly, pay per click internet advertising can hasten the success of your business venture and protect you against the pitfalls of growth that is too slow. Long term business success requires momentum because without it any enterprise can stagnate and fail. If you stay within your budget and pay attention to what is working and what is not, being willing to make adjustments where necessary, pay per click internet advertising can be the difference between success and failure.

Affiliate Marketers Will Never Make a Dime Using Google Adwords

2008-08-28T02:17:00.000-07:00

Most people start off their affiliate marketing business by getting traffic from google adwords. I know, because that’s how I started. If your anything like me, you purchased Google Cash or another pay per click ebook and you set up your first campaign. Latter on after many campaigns you found out that it was a lot harder than you originally thought.

Here’s why! Pay per click advertising works well for businesses that can count on repeat business. As an affiliate you usually don’t have that luxury. Your relying on one purchase per customer and then you’ll probably never see that customer again. A good E-business on the other hand knows that with every person that becomes a customer they can rely on x number of purchases from that customer. This also allows them to bid significantly higher than affiliates because they can make their profits from the back-end.. A business that can rely on a minimum of four purchases per customer for example, can burn up their profits on the first and second purchases and still make profits on the third and fourth purchase.

The last reason affiliates have a hard time is because conversion rates for a typical pay per click campaign average less than 1%. Its hard to make a profit with that kind of conversion rate. I’m not saying its impossible, but affiliate marketers utilizing pay per click advertising for their traffic are definitely fighting an uphill battle.

Secrets of Successful Affiliate Bloggers - Discover How They Make It Real Big

2008-08-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

There is no denying the fact that there are successful affiliate bloggers who take home over $200,000 monthly. The fact is that these successful affiliate bloggers have secrets that earn them this huge sum of money.

Discover in this article, secrets of successful affiliate bloggers that they use to make it real big in the world of blog affiliate marketing.

Here are two vital secrets that successful affiliate bloggers use:

Successful affiliate bloggers select the right affiliate program for their affiliate blogs.

Before successful affiliate bloggers decide to start promoting any affiliate program on their affiliate blogs, they must have made sure that they have started generating targeted visitors to their affiliate blogs. This will help them to understand the kind of visitors that they are generating to their affiliate blog. When they have effectively done this, they would then look for the right affiliate program that would interest their affiliate blog visitors.

Successful affiliate bloggers join two tier affiliate programs.

The success of any affiliate blogger comes to reality when such an affiliate blogger participate in an affiliate program that pays out commissions on a two tier level. What this means is that successful affiliate bloggers usually promote affiliate sites where they can earn commissions from people that they refer to the affiliate program, as well as commissions from there own efforts. Any kind of affiliate program that allows you to earn a two tier affiliate commission is called a residual income affiliate program.

There are two vital secrets that successful affiliate bloggers use to make it real big. Begin to use these secrets to your advantage and join the train of successful affiliate bloggers.

Affiliate Marketing- Information On Affiliate Content Sites-Blogs

2008-08-25T01:49:00.000-07:00

In affiliate marketing, there are different kinds of business models that you can choose to promote your affiliate product. One of the ways is call the affiliate content site or blog model.

So what the affiliate will do is to marketing purely through providing relevant content to the visitors. This can be in the form of articles, products reviews or even content that comes come multi media like audio or video.

If the affiliate has already set up one blog, he might just use it purely for reviewing and recommending products. On a normal website, the affiliate might put lots of fresh contents or tools so that the visitors will always come back to the site to look for new information.

So in order to monetize the website or blog that they have, they can actually put their affiliate links in certain places. He can put a link at the resource box which will be at the end of the article or he can even link certain words in the article to the affiliate products that the affiliate is promoting.

The next thing that the affiliate can put is a opt in form. In affiliate marketing, having a list is the most important assets that the affiliates can have. The advantage is that not only will the affiliate be giving visitors valuable content; he will also be able to build his own profitable list too. This is the biggest advantage of using this model to do an affiliate marketing business.

Advertising An Affiliate Program Effectively And For Free

2008-08-24T02:44:00.001-07:00

If a person can find a winning strategy for the free advertising of their affiliate program then success is assured. Yet after signing up for any affiliate program, this is the first major obstacle and challenge affiliates usually face.

Effective free advertising for any affiliate program must involve the generation of as much targeted traffic as possible being directed in the direction of the affiliate site. To accomplish this, the affiliate needs their own web site or blog site with an interesting topic and information that attracts the target market the affiliate is looking to refer to their affiliate traffic.

Well-written informative and valuable information needs to be included in the affiliate site or affiliate blog site. The affiliate should also be careful to ensure that the keyword phrases used are capable of getting him a presence in the top ranking of leading search engines. This is key free advertising affiliate program strategy.

Then every effort should be made to generate lots of links pointing at their affiliate site. This will help generate traffic directly but more importantly will improve on the sites' ranking with search engines.

These simple free advertising affiliate program steps will ensure that after a short while, the affiliate site will be generating a lot of traffic which can then be directed to the affiliate site.

Advertising An Affiliate Program Effectively And For Free

2008-08-24T02:44:00.000-07:00

These simple free advertising affiliate program steps will ensure that after a short while, the affiliate site will be generating a lot of traffic which can then be directed to the affiliate site.

How Much Does it Cost to Bring Visitors to a Website?

2008-08-23T06:37:00.000-07:00

Bringing visitors to your website is a must to make money, and it does cost something and should be considered as part of your marketing budget. The exact price it would cost you depends on a few factors as well as the methods you make choose to use to bring them to your site.

First of all, if you decide to use a method such as pay per click to bring people to your site, pay-per-click would cost you per visitor and your cost here would also depend on how much competition there is in your market. For example, if you start a pay-per-click campaign for the mortgage industry with a major search engine, your cost per visitor would be higher because this is a very competitive market online.

I would say that the average cost per visitor in this market would be about $0.75 using very specific keywords.

Pay-per-click is one of the paid methods to drive traffic online. There are some free ways to drive traffic such as content marketing in the form of articles and blogs. Both of these methods rely on getting listed in the organic search results (left side of the search engines) and would bring visitors back to your site this way.

The good thing about such a method is the fact that you could do it yourself but the bad part would be that it is harder to quantify how much you are paying for each visitor if you are handing all the work yourself, your investment would be more of time.

PPC Advertising - Knowing the Pits and Falls of PPC

2008-08-22T02:31:00.000-07:00

Pay Per Click or PPC Advertising is one of the newest and latest methods used by many marketers to generate traffic on anyone’s site. Although to a lot of people, the idea of pay per click advertising is always a vague, difficult to understand concept, it is apparently a new method that is very refreshing to learn and easily executed only when it is done and performed the correct and appropriate way. The concept of pay per click is to put up special keywords on your site that you think will drive potential clients going directly to your site. So, if you want to know more about pay per click advertising and how you can better do it, the steps below will help you:

a. Deploy the right kinds of keywords on your site. This means that you need to make sure that all relevant keywords that you think will attract people to make a visit on your site, put them all together on your site. It is the only thing that matters on your pay per click campaign.

b. Monitor your clicks. You have to make sure that you put an effective tracking method on how you can monitor the clicks that are derived from your pay per click campaigns. If the keyword is not generating the right amount of traffic then have it changed immediately and deploy a new set of keywords on your pay per click advertisement.

c. Experiment on other keyword combinations. In advertising, it is important that you bring the courage to do an experiment about various possibilities if you really want to know and unleash the right formula to attain success in pay per click advertising. After all, when there is no risk taken, no success is attained. So better risk and be successful.

Initial Steps to Take When Doing PPC Advertising

2008-08-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

Pay Per Click advertising or PPC ads is an evolving marketing technique that most business people used nowadays. Due to its massive capability to produce results by generating more traffic and increase the number of conversions, Pay Per Click advertising has become one of the most effective marketing tools. So, how does one make full utility of this effective tool then? I have cited below some of the ways on how you can ensure that have a Pay Per Click that works.

• It is mandatory that you create an individual landing page for each Pay Per Click campaigns that you have. This is done so that each page can contain the specific search terms that are popularly being used by a net user when he or she tries to search the net.

• Make an experimentation of the wordings on all your pay per click campaign materials. This is done to determine which arrangement of words can actually generate a lot better results.

• On your pay per click campaign materials, always include your call to action button or word box. By having these call to action boxes, you are directly inviting your visiting clients to click on the box.

• Refrain from using highly trademarked terms on your pay per click campaign. You are not supposed to be competing against the trademark of well-established trademarks, as your site will not be getting a favorable result.

• Since some of search engines offer the advertising of pay per click campaign materials with contextual programs, it is best that you take advantage of this privilege. Because thru this, you will be allowed to specifically determine the placement of your advertisement in terms of where it is going to be published.

Earning More Profits With PPC

2008-08-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

Pay Per Click is what most online business people think as a better and comfortable way to advertise their product. Instead of paying more to a lot complicated advertising methods, Pay Per Click is a sure, cost effective, and easy way to generate the traffic you want for your site and earn the best rank you can ever get from a search engine. Below are some the simple guidelines one can follow should he wish to engage on a pay per click advertising technique:

- Remember that when choosing keywords to be enlisted on search engines, it is a lot cheaper to use a keyword that is specific-based and less generalized. For example of a keyword that projects a broader meaning is the search term “shoes”, where in fact you can make it to a more specific one as “children’s shoes”.

- It is suggested that you come up with numerous landing pages for clickers of your pay per click. This gives your clickers a chance to see what they are exactly looking for in a product, instead of directing all of them to your home page and search from there. It is going to be a lot of wasted time for these people.

- Go to the right Pay Per Click search engine. There are numerous search engines offering pay per click. Try to study and learn the in and out of each search engine offering pay per click. It is only by doing this that you can be able to save some amount of money to be shelled out for your advertisement.

Pay Per Click Advertising - An Advantage Or a Waste?

2008-08-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

Website managers do a lot of things to generate traffic in their website. They adopt several marketing techniques, ensure website designing and content, develop trends and techniques that will help them generate traffic to their site. Amongst all these there is one technique known as the pay per click advertising technique which, has become a topic of debate with people into Internet business. To some Internet marketers, the pay per click services have proved to be quite beneficial, where as to others it is a loss of valuable resource. We shall now point out the various advantages and disadvantages that pay per click campaign surface.

Unlike the organic search services, the pay per click campaign is comparatively less tedious and does not require that much of effort. Another effective feature of PPC Services is that they provide a better ROI since, they are quicker is showing response on the search engines. The pay per click campaigns begin reflecting on the search engines as soon as the bid begins to function. The keywords begin to reflect your site ranking in the desired position and soon after, your click begin to generate.

The process being fast is extremely effective too, that ensures better ROI and higher traffic into the website. The paid search engine techniques have also been proven to be extremely effective in online advertising and promotion. The fact that websites are ranked better in the search engines, ensure a higher visibility to the websites than in any other advertising and promotion module.

Coming to the disadvantages of PPC Services, the biggest threat to the campaign is from 'Click Fraud' a mal-technique that has hampered the process of online marketing through paid techniques. There are a number of frauds that tend to hamper the process of pay per click advertising by generating false clicks on the search engines. For this reason, PPC services require rigorous checking and report generation, which will provide a detail description of the clicks that have been generated so far. This detail analysis of the pay per click campaign is necessary to make sure that the clicks are genuine and to find out about the so far unbeatable threat of fraud clicks.

Is Pay Per Click Right For You?

2008-08-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

Most people who market products online know what pay per click advertising is... You simply have a text ad, and whenever someone searches your chosen keywords in the search engines, your ad will appear and you will be charged each time someone clicks on your ad.

In my opinion, this was once one of the best forms of advertising but it has gotten way out of control... There's just too much competition, even if you're better than all of your competitors it still may not be worth it; why? Because no matter how hard you try you're not going to be able to make a good return on investment... Now, this isn't true for all markets, so don't start cursing me out just yet.

Sure ppc can work but if you're in a very competitive market then it's probably not the best thing to do unless you're very experienced with it... You see, pay per click is now so crowded that $1 clicks are no longer looked at as expensive... Just look around, in more seriously competitive niche markets like insurance and web hosting you have cost per click up around $20 or more!

Some people will tell you to just use smaller pay per click companies so that your cost per click will be much less. While this is true, the reason why it is so cheap is because most people realize that it's not worth it anyways, so they don't even bother. You'll get cheaper clicks, but the visitors won't be as targeted.

The main point I'm trying to get across is, pay per click can still be very useful, but you need to be mindful of your niche and keyword competition.

A Fundamental Overview Of Pay Per Click Search Engines

2008-08-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

Forbes magazine has reported that pay per click ad sales are
expected to increase to at least $8 billion by 2008.

The three fundamental core elements that form the basis of a
successful pay per click ad program are constant monitoring,
analysis, and refinement.

Pay per click search engines offer a way to buy your way to the
top of search results for any term you wish. With proper
management, and a clear focus, pay per click search engines can
offer some of the most well targeted and economical advertising
on the Internet.

Pay per click advertising works through a bidding process, and
the ads appear prominently on the results pages of search engines
such as Google and Yahoo. The highest bidder for a particular
word or phrase receives top placement, and depending on the
engine, the top three to five bidders also generally also receive
placement on the first page of unpaid search results.

Fundamental questions to be addressed when formulating a pay per
click search engine strategy include the following:

When is the top pay per click bid necessary for highest
conversion, and when will bidding for a second or third place
position create a more attractive return on investment (ROI)?

How can you keep your PPC bids from cannibalizing your search
efforts on other (non pay per click) search engines?

What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each
search engine?

Does either Google Adwords or Overture work better for your
particular product or service? Or, perhaps neither one is
appropriate from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.

It is of critical importance to focus sharply on identifying
the search terms that convert most frequently for your particular
site, eliminating those that don't perform, and most importantly,
calculating and maximizing your return on investment.

The cost structure of pay per click is action-driven and each
time a user clicks your ad, the pay per click engine deducts the
amount of your current bid from your account. Pay per click
offers a high level of assurance that your ad is reaching the
proper target.

Pay per click campaigns, however, are not perfect. Without

CONSTANT monitoring, you sometimes risk incurring advertising
costs that can spiral out of control, focusing on terms that
don't convert well for your product or services, or falling way
down in position during a bidding war.

PPC advertising can be a great help to a site's success, but only
with very close supervision and a thorough knowledge of the
unique characteristics of each PPC search engine.

The Truth About Pay-Per-Click Ads

2008-08-16T21:00:00.001-07:00

Are pay-per-click ads the best method of getting customers to your website?

Essentially there are two ways your website can get to the top of a search engine's results:

* Pay-per-click ads, where you pay for your site to appear in the “Sponsored Links” area on the right side of the results page

* Search engine optimization, where your site is optimized to be at the top of the natural/organic results on the left side of the results page (link to our SEO page)

JupiterResearch analyst Niki Scevak stated that one in seven searchers click on a paid/sponsored link. If you do the math, that's only 14% of searchers who are choosing the pay-per-click ads to get to the information they are searching for. It also means, if you concentrate all your search efforts on pay-per-click you will only be reaching 14% of your potential customers.

So while pay-per-click methods might get your listed quickly they may not be driving as much traffic as you want. That is why investing time towards a solid search engine optimization and link management campaign is needed to get your site listed highly in the natural results is a step that cannot be ignored. It helps you reach more searchers.

Shell Harris is an Internet marketing consultant and an SEO Specialist.
He provides proven results for Website promotion. More articles can be found at

How Pay Per Click Search Engines Work

2008-08-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

Pay per click search engines are an effective way to attract cheap, targeted traffic to your website. The best and most popular pay per click search engines are Overture (GoTo) and FindWhat.

So, how do these sites work?

Advertisers bid on search result words and phrases. A Pay Per Click (also known as Pay Per Ranking, Pay Per Placement or Pay Per Position) search engine enables you to list your site at the top of the search results according to the keyword bid.

You list your website by selecting keywords that refer to your product or service. For each keyword you determine how much you are willing to spend. The higher you bid, the higher you will appear in the search results.

In pay per click search engine, you only pay for clicks or click throughs to your web site. Pay-per-click search engines play an important role in driving traffic to your site because you only pay for actual clicks. It is risk free and a cheaper alternative to listing with the bigger search engines.

Before you do anything with pay per clicks, you might want to learn more on Pay Per Click Search Engine Theory:

Bizweb.com

A few other helpful sites:

Payperclicksearchengine.com

This is a good site that is full of information and links related to pay-per-click search engines, including Overture.

Compareyourclicks.com

This is a site that lets you see, in real-time, what it will cost to bid for particular keywords on a number of the major pay-per-click search engines

Here is my favorite Pay Per Click Search Engine:

- Google adwords

- Overture

Go to Payperclickanalyst to check out other good Pay Per Click Search Engines or check the resource section for other alternatives.

Lucrative PPC Advertising - The Realities of Pay Per Click Publishing

2008-08-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

Pay Per Click publishing is another online business that is beginning to capture massive audience. It may have not been accepted with confidence at first but with its convincing effectiveness and lesser drawbacks, it has now positioned itself to becoming one of the most profitable online businesses.

The aim or objective of the Pay Per Click -Publishing is to cover the strategy of producing content for the purposes of attracting (contextual or otherwise) advertising revenue on a Pay Per Click basis. This only means that with the Pay Per Click, one is capable of earning a profit on two ways. One is being the publisher, meaning you write the content of the article, publish it. And the other one is accepting other article writers to use your web site to publish their articles in exchange of an ad space on the article. So every click that the article gets is an amount equivalent for you.

So how does a pay per click publishing work?

For a start, you will have to create a keyword for your site. Afterwards, you can start bidding on your keyword. You may be caught up in the bidding that takes place for the top keywords. Or the otherwise, you may end up bidding for the lowest in the rank. This, of course, all depends on your capability to determine what is the best keyword to use.

Finding the best keyword and less expensive pay per click is not a matter of luck, though. You have to be very careful in building your keywords

Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs - Still Worthwhile?

2008-08-15T23:56:00.000-07:00

Pay per click affiliate programs have received plenty of criticism in the last few years. They have been a victim of click fraud and many affiliate marketers do not find them worthwhile because of the low revenue per click and prefer instead to promote other affiliate program models like pay per action and the ever popular and traditional pay per sale model.

In truth, pay per click affiliate programs can still work as long your website provides valuable and updated content. This will make your visitors repeat visitors; they will want to return, making it far more likely that they will click on your ads, giving you a commission.

One of the main downsides of pay per click affiliate programs is that they usually require more traffic to earn a substantial income. Since you earn so little per click, you have to drive lots of traffic to earn a worthwhile income. For the pay per sale and pay per action models, it is possible to earn hefty commissions even with little traffic, especially if the visitor is very targeted.

As of the current situation, pay per click affiliate programs are becoming less popular. More affiliate marketers are moving towards the pay per action route. This is evident even with search engine companies, as they are looking to bring out more cost per action models for advertising. Pay per click affiliate programs will remain for some time to come, but expect it’s popularity to decrease even further as time goes on.

How to plan a pay-per-click ad campaign

2008-08-14T05:40:00.000-07:00

OOGLE ADWORDS and
Yahoo Advertising are the current darlings
of Internet advertising and with
good reason: They are almost instantaneous;
they get the message in front of
prospects at the time the prospect is
looking for the product or service; and
their effectiveness can be tracked!
If you are thinking about giving
pay-per-click a try, here’s the skinny
on setting up a successful campaign.
You will get the best results if you
know where you stand in terms of
Web site traffic and conversion rate
(number of leads or orders as a percent
of visitors to a site). To get this
information you need a “Web logs
analysis” report.
Your hosting company should provide
this as part of your hosting service.
Find the number of visitors (not
hits) coming to your site during a
given period of time. You will also
need to find out the number of leads
or sales made from your site during
the same period of time.
To find the conversion rate go to
the calculator at
www.markneting.com/calculator.asp.
Select “conversion rate” on the dropdown
menu and enter your number of
visitors and leads or sales as prompted.
Click calculate and you will have
your conversion rate.
For even better conversion statistics,
invest in a tracking tool or service. A
tracking tool tracks the source of any
lead right back to the referring search
engine or site and it calculates information
such as conversion rates. It
sometimes can tell if multiple visits
were made before an action (lead or
sale) was made.
Assuming that you are advertising
in order to get leads or sales, the conversion
rate from your site will help
you to determine what your target
average cost per click should be. Your
cost per lead or sale from the site is
basically the number of visitors you
have to bring to the site in order to
generate that lead or sale, multiplied
by the cost to bring each visitor.
So, if your conversion rate is 1 per-cent, you need to bring 100 visitors to
your site in order to get one lead or
sale. If you are paying an average of
$.45 per visitor to your site, you will
be paying 100 x $.45 = $45 per lead or
sale. However, if your conversion rate
is 2 percent, you only need to bring
50 visitors in order to generate a lead
or sale and your cost will be 50 x $.45
= $22.50.
Setting the goal
Knowing the conversion rate of the
Web site and your target cost per lead
or sale, you can determine your target
average bid for your pay-per-click
campaign. You can use the same calculator
as above, but select “pay per
click goal” from the drop down menu
and enter the cost per new customer
(or lead) goal and the conversion rate
at the prompts. Click calculate and
you will get your average cost per
click goal.
Now that you have goals set, you
can think about the keywords you will
want to bid on and the copy for the
listings. We will not go into detail
about how to select keywords at this
point, but rather discuss concepts
about keyword selection.
Yahoo and AdWords are by far the
most productive pay-per-click listing
engines. Each has keyword selection
tools that are helpful for determining
which keywords should be chosen.
There are some basic strategies for
selecting the best keywords for your
purposes. When searching on the
Internet, people are very direct, so
don’t rely on euphemisms or insider
jargon for your keywords. Include
those terms that the public you are
trying to reach will use when trying
to find the product or service you
offer.
The road less traveled may be a
good strategy if you have a small
budget and are in a competitive marketplace.
There are keyword selection
tools available that help you to find
the holes in general bidding strategies.
One example is to stake out common
misspellings. Can’t afford to bid on
the term “phonics?” Try “phonix.”
(The people who find your ad could
probably use your service.)
If your pay-per-click goal is ample
to cover the most costly keywords that
you will want to bid on, then go for
the top two positions in your best keywords.
We have found that there is some
benefit to being lower in the bidding
rank, however — even eighth or ninth
position. For example, Powdered
Technology Inc. provides all kinds of
materials in powdered form including
“glass beads.” The average searcher
for glass beads is not looking for a
powdered form, but by bidding the
term farther down the list, the site has
been found by persistent searchers
looking for micro glass bead for
industrial applications.
We use a spreadsheet with our estimate
of click-through and planned
bids to plan the budget for Yahoo bidding.
It is more difficult to plan the
budget for Google, because the keyword
estimation tool is not very accurate,
at least not in our experience.
Google and Yahoo allow you to set
daily budgets, which helps to avoid
runaway costs.
Both Google and Yahoo provide
free tracking of the “conversions,”
whether they are leads or sales. You
define what a conversion is, whether it
is filling out a form or making a purchase.
If phone contact is made, you
will need to ask if the call was made
from the Web site or provide a unique
phone number for Web site contact.
Phone contacts cannot be followed
with the Google and Yahoo tracking
tools. These tracking tools will report
by keyword the results you are getting
from the campaign, which allows you
to experiment with listing copy and
bids and follow the results in real
time.
You might want to try other payper-
click versions for various reasons.
Listing of most general pay-per-click
engines along with ratings and
reviews can be found at www.payperclickguru.
com.

[contact]
Miki Dzugan is
founder of Rapport
Online Inc., an online
marketing firm in St. Paul:
651.224.2277; mdzugan@roiweb.
com; www.roi-web.com

Site Intelligence Tracking – guidance notes 1

2008-08-13T02:14:00.000-07:00

1. Overview

These guidance notes expand on the overview of Site Intelligence (SI) tracking for web based campaigns, “Campaign tracking tools – Agency briefing 24/05/07”.

‘Pay per click’ (PPC) campaigns are tracked in two ways

Simply placing Site Intelligence parameters on the campaign landing page URL and using these within the Google etc
Using combination of BidCentre tracking and URLs with SI parameters in redirect

All PPC campaigns are required to carry SI tracking parameters to enable identification of traffic channel and type within strategic web traffic flow models.

2. Parameter formats

Site Intelligence parameters for PPC tracking follow a standard format. A spreadsheet template is available to assist with the creation of SI parameterised landing URLs (available from http://www.open.ac.uk/online/p4.shtml)

2.1.Part 1, this section identifies the agency and parent campaign

2.1.1. Format

kwcampaign=<>

2.1.2. Example

kwcampaign=zed_ generic

2.1.3. Standard managing agency ids should be used when constructing this part of the parameter. These are listed in Appendix 1.

2.1.4. Underscores should be used to replace spaces

2.2.Part 2, this section can be used to identify the location, search engine and individual keyword

2.2.1. Format

keywordid =<>

2.2.2. Example

keywordid =ukggl_open_university

keywordid =ukmsn_open_university

2.2.3. Standard international country codes and search engine ids should be used when constructing this part of the parameter. These are listed in Appendices 2 and 3 .

2.2.4. Underscores should be used to replace spaces

3. Appending to campaign landing page URL

3.1.1. Parameters are appended to the landing page URL using a ? unless the landing page URL already contains a ?, in which case they are appended using &.

3.1.2. The join between the Part 1 and Part 2 parameters is made using &

3.1.3. Format

<>?(&)kwcampaign=<>& keywordid =<>

3.1.4. Example

3.1.5. http://www.open.ac.uk/cam/masters/index.shtml? kwcampaign=zed_mba& keywordid =ukggl_specialist_masters_degrees

4. Using SI tracking with BidCentre

4.1.When uploading landing URLs into BidCentre ensure parameters are allocated to the landing page URL as described in sections 2 and 3 above.

4.2.BidCentre creates it’s own URL for the keyword/creative which redirects to the uploaded landing page URL which carries the SI parameters

4.2.1. Example

http://cust011.pool001.bidcenter-14.inceptor.com/74764/adult+basic+learning+skill/Google?source={ifsearch:search}{ifc ontent:content&placement=}{placement}&creative={creative}&keyword={keyword}

Re-directs to http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?A02&kwcampaign=zed_gen&keywordid=ukggl_access_further_education

The OU website

Appendix 1 – Managing Agency IDs

Managing Agency	ID
Green Cathedral	gc
Cybercom	cy
Tim	tod
Zed	zed

Should further ids be required please contact v.l.stirling@open.ac.uk

Appendix 2 – Search Engine IDs

Search Engine	ID
Google	ggl
MSN	msn
Yahoo	ysm

What To Do About Click Fraud?

2008-08-12T05:53:00.000-07:00

There are a variety of best practices, services and technologies
available to identify and protect yourself against click fraud.
Know Your Pay-Per-Click Vendor
Before signing up for a pay-per-click program, research where and how
your sponsored listing will appear. If your listing appears on obscure
web sites that seem irrelevant to your potential site visitors you may be
exposing your self to click fraud. Many pay-per-click programs provide
the option to include or exclude affiliate properties. Make sure you are
comfortable with where your sponsored links will appear. Not only
will it mitigate click fraud, but it helps you control your brand.
Develop a Baseline
Establish expected results for your site visitor behavior from pay-perclick
programs. Many live web site statistics products are available
that are affordable and easy to implement. These online services
typically provide hundreds of web site statistics, pay-per-click
conversion tracking, visitor behavior and more. It is important to have
comprehensive reporting to establish your baseline. Repeat visitors by
campaign are not enough to determine whether the clicks are from a
customer, prospect or an erroneous visitor with the intent of click
fraud.
ANALYZE your Navigation Paths to determine what paths your visitors
usually take. Unusual and repeated paths from a repeat visitor may be
a spider trying to trick you.
LOOK at the Page Depth and Average Time spent per page for your
visitors. Repeated visits with minimal page views and short time spent
per page may again be a spider clicking on your sponsored links.
REVIEW visitors by country to identify increased traffic from suspicious
countries of origin. Unusual patterns in visitor traffic by country may
be a sign of outsourced click fraud.
ANALYZE your referrals by search engine and search term. Make sure
the referral source for your pay click visitors appears valid. Check
these referral sources to make sure your ad is appearing. If you are
getting clicks from a search engine, but don’t see your ad, you may be
a victim of an affiliate scam.
KNOW your typical pay-per-click conversion rates. Review your
campaign activity summary reports to identify any underperforming
pay-per-click campaigns. Make sure to compare these to similar
campaigns over the same time period. All else equal, you should get
similar results from similar search terms with similar ad copy.
Implement Click Fraud Detection Technologies
Tracking repeat visits by IP address from your pay-per-click campaigns
is your first line of defense against click fraud. Comparing this data to
information such as number of visits, page depth and minutes per
session are ways of identifying suspicious activity from your pay-perclick
marketing programs.
You may consider SETTING UP EMAIL ALERTS to notify you of multiple
clicks from the same IP address. By proactively monitoring and
reporting click fraud you can do your part to stem the flow of
erroneous charges to search engine marketing budgets.
In addition, there are some ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES from a variety
of vendors that incorporate sophisticated statistical models that can
analyze your site activity and “predict” potential click fraud behavior.
Beyond the first line of defense these techniques can assist in
identification of click fraud that may go undetected by the human eye.
If your budgets dictate, there are also PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
available to audit the performance of your pay-per-click programs.
These programs are comprehensive and provide a definitive method of
identifying click fraud. If your company has spent hundreds of
thousand of dollars or even millions on pay-per-click and feel they
have been victimized, this option will allow them to look back, identify
and quantify exposure to click fraud.
These items listed in this section are suggestions for steps to take.
They do not constitute a complete list of methods and techniques for
the detection of click fraud.

Tips for Successful Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

2008-08-11T06:11:00.000-07:00

Pay per click (PPC) is by far one of the easiest and quickest methods of driving targeted, consistent traffic to
your website. While this may seem like a daunting method of advertising for some, it's actually quite easy and
can end up becoming that one marketing method that you can't live without.

What I'd like to do today is provide some tips and techniques that I personally use when creating and
monitoring PPC ad's. Hopefully these tips will help you in your future marketing endeavors.

Experimenting With Different Search Engines

There are many PPC search engines, with some being better than others. The top two are Google and Yahoo,
which was previously known as Overture. It's a good idea to start your PPC campaigns with a small budget,
spreading it out over a few different search engines to experiment and see where your target market may be
lurking.

Generally speaking, I've found Google Adwords is better for more technically orientated products or services,
including software, hardware, web design etc. Yahoo, on the other hand, is better for general consumer
products, including insurance, toys, music etc.

What I wrote in the previous paragraph is very general, and you should analyze your campaigns carefully to
see where they are performing their best. We'll discuss this in detail a little later in the article.

Selecting the Right Keywords

The keyword selection process is probably the most important of all when it comes to creating your PPC ad's.
You'll need to select keywords that are specific to your product or service offering, but you need to be careful
not to select keywords that are extremely popular, as this may deplete your PPC funds sooner than expected.

The keyword selection process begins by asking yourself just one question:

"If I was searching for a product just like mine, which words or phrases would I search for?"

Using your answer(s) to this question as your base, you can then use a thesaurus and common sense to start
building your keyword list with plurals, synonyms, similar words, etc.

To see which keywords your competitors are using, simply try searching for them. If you see a PPC ad along
the side for your competitor, then note that keyword down and add it to your list.

Another way of coming up with great keywords is to use the overture search suggestion tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in a set of keywords and it will list similar keywords, including the number of times that keyword has
been searched for on Overture (Yahoo) in the last month!

There's often a fine line between selecting keywords that are either too specific or keywords that are too
general. Try to keep away from these, as they can often result in wasted PCP funds.
A typical example of this would be an ad that I created recently for our latest product, TrackPoint, which -- not
coincidently -- is an internet marketing return on investment (ROI) tracking tool. Although the product is
heavily geared towards internet marketing, using such a broad term would have made it virtually impossible to
compete with the other advertisers.

The term "internet marketing" is searched for 825,674 times per month on Overture alone. Combined with the
huge number of different advertisers that target this keyword, the top bid for "internet marketing" on Google
AdWords is $13.84 per click! With an average of 240 clicks per day, a single day of advertising alone would
cost $505!

Now, unless you have an extremely high conversion rate of visitors to sales, or you're selling a high priced
item that usually has a high customer acquisition cost, I suggest targeting more specific keywords. Not only
will this decrease your overall competition with other advertisers, but it will also increase the chances of
turning your newly found web site visitors into customers.

Back to my earlier example, I chose to be specific with my keywords. One keyword was "ROI tracking",
which is searched for 1,828 times per month on Overture and has a much cheaper top bid. This keyword is also
more targeted to the product I was marketing, meaning that a large percentage of people clicking on my ad
should turn into customers.

It's also helpful to note that taking the top bid is not always necessary, and anywhere in the top 5-10 can
generate great leads. This really does come down to budget and analysis.

Attracting People to Your Ad

Now that we've selected our keywords, we need to get those searching to click on our ad, which in turn will
result in them clicking through to our web site and potentially purchasing our product.

One of the simplest ways to get peoples attention is to use their search keywords in the title of your PPC ad.
This has been proven to increase click-thru rates on ad's by over 50%.

Why? Simple. If the potential customer is searching for "ROI Tracking" and the title of a PCP ad begins with
"ROI Tracking", then their attention will be grabbed instantly. He or she doesn't need to know much else, other
than that the PPC ad is catered specifically for him or her.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can sometimes create a more relevant title by combining your different
keywords into one PPC ad. For example, I could have easily used something like "ROI Tracking PHP Script"
as the title of my ad, which effectively would have decreased my click-thru rate, but definitely caters my ad
more to a specific audience. Once again, this comes down to analysis and adjustment.

Another important technique to attract attention to your ad is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In
our particular case, the majority of our competition offer hosted solutions, whereby they manage the software
on their servers in return for monthly or per traffic fees.

Our product caters to a different audience, those that want more control over their software, as well as those
not wanting to pay monthly fees. So, in this example, I would make the title of my ad "Pay no monthly or per
traffic fees".

Next -- and this is where experimentation is extremely important -- we need to create a description for our PPCad that will attract the potential customer and let them know that our product is exactly what they are searching
for. To do this, I start my ad's description with "Track PPC, campaigns & search".

Finally, it's good practice to add a "Call to action" at the bottom of your ad. If you're not familiar with this
term, its usually an instruction to tell the person to do something, such as "Click here to view a demo",
"Download Now", etc.

Marketing experts seem to agree that the average human needs to be prompted to click on an ad or take action,
so we'll add this line to the end of our PPC ad's description:

"Track PPC, campaigns & search. Try demo!"

Reducing Click-Thru's

Sometimes it's important to reduce the number of clicks your PPC ad is receiving. This could be because you
are attracting people who are only after free products/services, or even the wrong target market.

The two quickest ways to reduce click-thru's are to make the description of your ad more targeted and to add
the price of the product to the ad.

Making the description more targeted (as I've discussed above) can reduce your overall click-thru rate, but
potentially increase the likelihood of a click resulting in a purchase.

In my earlier example, by adding the words "PHP script" to the description, we are effectively filtering out
those looking for a hosted solution, downloadable software or even those with a server that isn't capable of
running PHP scripts.

We also increase the targeting of our ad because we now know that the majority of those clicking on the ad are
looking for a PHP script, which is exactly what our product is.

Secondly, by adding the price of the product you are selling to the end of the ad, you instantly eliminate those
looking for free products, and target those willing to purchase your product or service.

Tracking Your Clicks and Conversions

The fundamental core of a successful advertising campaign -- whether it be a PPC ad, banner ad or even
newspaper ad -- is knowing whether or not your ad's are actually converting into sales or not.

If your ads aren't making you money then you're more that likely better off saving your advertising dollars and
adjusting your ad's or using your marketing budget elsewhere in your company.

Both Google and Overture have built in tracking and conversion tools that you can use to get a holistic view of
your current PPC ad campaigns. You can even use external tools which let you add conversion code to your
website to tell you exactly which of your ad's are converting into sales and which aren't. This is often referred
to as knowing your ROI or Return on Investment.

We need to know exactly how much money we are making per dollar spent on every PPC ad. If the ROI is
positive and we are making more money than we are spending, then the ad is working and we can use this
knowledge to further improve our other ad's or increase ad spending for that particular ad/set of keywords.
If, however, our ad's are costing us more than they are returning, then we can reduce our spend, change our
approach, or remove these ad's altogether. It's a rather simple formula, but frustratingly ignored by many
advertisers.

You must track your ads if you want to succeed with any form of Internet advertising. You should also
constantly monitor and adjust your ads according to how they are performing, your return on investment, etc.

Conclusion

Hopefully I've provided you with a clear insight into PPC advertising and techniques that you can use to
improve your advertising campaigns. It pays -- pun intended -- to do your research and understand your target
market, because the rewards can sometimes be much more than you expected.

About the author:

Eddie Machaalani is the Interspire marketing and project manager. He's most recently been kept busy helping
out with the interface design for Interspire's ROI and Conversion Tracking Application, TrackPoint. To see
how TrackPoint can help boost your revenue, go here: http://www.interspire.com/trackpoint

Pay Per Click Search Engines

2008-08-10T02:32:00.000-07:00

Pay per click search engines can give you instant traffic and allow you to test

new business models in real time. The pay per click market is competitive

though. It is worth spending an extensive period of time learning how to

write and target ads, tracking your competitors, and doing deep keyword

research before jumping in.

Before You Start

Metrics Based Marketing:

PPC search engines provide a highly trackable marketing medium. Frequently

people begin marketing without any idea as to the approximate value of a click. If

you do not set up a value range and track the results you have no way to distinguish

good marketing from bad marketing.

To know the value of a click, you need to decide what the goal of your marketing is.

If you are just branding, then you should expect to lose money to gain mindshare

or reinforce your brand, and tracking may not be that important. If you are using

pay-per-click search engines for direct product marketing, you need to know how

much each click is worth.

Typical Conversion Rates:

Lead generation sites typically have a conversion rate around 10 to 12%, but can go

as high as 30% + if they are properly targeted and exceptionally appealing to

visitors.

Since little investment is needed to arrive at your website and many other sites are

just a click away, selling stuff on the web has a conversion rate similar to direct mail

advertising. High ticket items have a lower conversion rate and unique cheap items

tend to have higher conversion rates. Many stores find typical conversion rates

might be anywhere from .3 to 5%.

Doing the Math:

There are a ton of factors that go into click price. It is somewhat hard to measure

branding, but ad distribution can help with that. Most other things are tangible.

If you know your average order size, profit per order, and estimated conversion rate

you can get a good idea what clicks are worth. Some people also factor in lifetime

Pvalue of a customer, but it is harder to measure and there is still enough opportunity

in many markets to do your math primarily based on direct return.

Before You Start:

It is a good idea to look at the various ads which are displayed in which order over

time. The top guy might be an idiot losing tons of money or a person who is paying

an extreme premium for branding.

If ads from affiliate marketers or smaller sites are ranking around the same ad

position over the course of a few weeks to a month then they are probably doing

something right (generating profits). It is worth it to take a couple weeks to do deep

keyword research and market analysis before jumping into pay per click search

engine marketing.

You Will Lose Money:

Most clicks end up being failures. Even if you have a 30% conversion rate that

means that 7 out of 10 clicks did nothing for you. When you dip your toes into the

pay per click market there stands a good chance you will lose money before you

start making money. The main reasons are:

• You need to learn how the systems work, learning:

o what terms are important and what ones are not.

o how to target the ads

o how to write the ad copy

o how to bid

o where to rank

o what terms are overpriced

• You are competing against the best accounts.

o Some competing advertisers may have other intangible assets

which give them an unfair advantage.

o If you are brand new your competitors have more experience than

you do.

o Some ad campaigns have been fine tuned for months or years.

o Search engines are building trust factors into ad accounts. Some

advertisers may get quality boosts and cheaper ads just for being

long-term advertisers.

Search engines try to sell the concept of pay per click marketing saying that it is so

targeted that everyone makes money, but in the real world that is not how thingswork. Some markets are competitive and will require learning, sound strategy, and

tracking to generate profits.

CLICK FRAUD

2008-08-09T06:05:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Placement & Web Site Promotion

2008-08-08T02:19:00.000-07:00

Advertising and Promotion. The most important thing to understand about advertising is that it is not a one-shot deal. You will always be disappointed if you expect to get a lot of orders from a one time ad. It should be consistent so that readers can become familiar with who you are. Pay for advertising only in those publications that are read by members of your target market. Most newspapers and magazines are expensive for the beginner, but can be very effective once you are established in the market. Consider placing inexpensive ads in e-zines if you can find any that cater to your market. Banner ads on web sites no longer seem to be working. I would not pay for those.

Search engines: Do your own submissions to the top 6 to 8 search engines. Those will cover 90% of the searches done. Placement on the search engines requires submission to each search engine individually. It do not recommend hiring one of the services that promises to send your information to "thousands of search engines." There are only a few that handle the majority of inquiries and you can do a better job of submission yourself that an automated program can do. Each search engine is a little different. Some, like Yahoo, are directories (D). For them, you need to find the best subdirectory to be listed under on their site, and then click on "submit URL" to enter your information. Some are crawlers (C), meaning that their software sends out "spiders" who look at your site and categorize it by your keywords and the words on your home page. Some are pay for listing (PL) search engines.

These are the most important search engines and their type:

MSN D

Yahoo D

Google PL

AOL.com D

Ask Jeeves C

LookSmart D

InfoSpace D

Netscape C

Overture PL

AltaVista C

The relative importance of these search engines vary from time to time, although Google is the champion at the moment. I recommend first going to the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org where you can make a submission that will cover several of these search engines at once. Currently, they state their submissions go to “AOL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search, and hundreds of other sites.” Click on “Suggest URL” to see the rules and which search engines are currently members.

Most of the search sites allow you to pay to get better listings or faster consideration. The most important considerations are your key words and metatags. Text on your homepage is important for listings, images are not considered. Some rankings are also affected by how many links there are to your site. If you have some money to spend, you can become a “Preferred Site” by signing up with Overture (www.overture.come) or for Google AdWords.

Another technique that can work is to buy additional domain names that include words that your prospects may use to search for products that you sell. You will need to set up a separate site for each of these domains, but it need not be more than a few pages and it can link to your main site or use the same data base of products developed for your main site.

Beyond search engines, you need to find other sites where your prospective customers may go and ask for links from that site to yours. This could be the best source of visitors to your web site.

Opt-In Lists: Since your business is a web based business, you might want to explore buying a list of names from an opt-in list broker. Opt-In lists provide information only about individuals or companies that have signed up to receive information on various subjects. By using this type of list, rather than a general list of addresses, you avoid being accused of sending spam. Spam (unsolicited e-mails) is a big problem now and tends to make people angry rather than attract them to your web site. You can find brokers by doing a search for "list broker" or "opt-in list." One that I believe to be reliable is Postmaster Direct (http://www.postmasterdirect.com/), but there are many out there. They will give you advise about how to write an effective e-mail solicitation and will send it for you.

Other Ideas: You might want to read the book, Guerilla Marketing Online, (available at bookstores or at http://www.gmarketing.com/) to find inexpensive ways to promote your web site. A good site for explanation and ratings of search engines is www.searchenginewatch.com.

The following article is from one of the best e-commerce sites on the net, www.wilsonweb.com. I strongly recommend signing up for Dr. Wilson’s newsletters. Most are free, but if you pay for the one that has a fee, you have full access to his very extensive data base of articles about e-commerce.

The Web Marketing Checklist:
29 Ways to Promote Your Website

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklist.htm

How can you get more visitors to your website? What can you do to stimulate traffic? Here's a checklist of 29 items you need to consider. Many of these you're probably doing already; others you meant to do and forgot about; still others you've never heard of. Of course, a great deal has been written about this. You'll find links to thousands of articles on site promotion in our Web Marketing Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket). While we're not breaking any new ground here, we've tried to summarize some of the most important techniques.

Search Engine Strategies

The most important strategy is to rank high for your preferred words on the main search engines. Search engines send robot "spiders" to index the content on your webpage, so let's begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing.

1. Write a Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title, such as "the," "and," etc. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice surfers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the tags, in this format: . Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc." use "Silver Bullets -- Acme Ammunition, Inc." Words people are most likely to search on put first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is your entire identity on the search engines. The more people see in the blue highlighted portion of the search engine that interests them, the more likely they are to click on the link.

2. Write a Description META Tag. Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title, though many don't. This sentence should describe the contents of the body text of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases used on this page. If you include keywords that aren't used on the webpage you could hurt yourself. Place those words at the top of the webpage, between the tags, in a META tag in this format:

When I prepare a webpage, I write the description first in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and phrases included in the article. Then for the keywords META tag, I strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty words and phrases. The keywords META tag is no longer used for ranking, but it is sometimes used for paid inclusion technologies. I'm leaving it in. Who knows when search engines will consider it important again?

3. Include Your Keywords in Header Tags H1, H2, H3. Search engines consider words that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrase appear in one or two header tags.

4. Make Sure Your Keywords Are in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document. You don't want to stuff keywords here, however. Google expects a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high. Other places you might consider including keywords would be in ALT tags and perhaps COMMENT tags.

5. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. Some lazy webmasters use frames, but they can cause serious problems with search engines. Even if search engines can find your content pages, they'll be missing the key navigation to help visitors get to the rest of your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation buttons look great, but search engines can't follow them. Supplement them with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that can get from the front page to every page in your site. A site map with links to all your pages can help, too. Be aware that some content management systems and e-commerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages. You can recognize these with question marks in their URLs followed by numbers. Overworked search engines usually stop at the question mark and refuse to go farther. Some solutions might be URL rewriting, paid inclusion, and targeted content pages.

6. Develop Several Pages Focused on Particular Keywords. SEO specialists don't recommend using doorway or gateway pages any more, since nearly duplicate webpages might penalize you. Rather, develop several webpages on your site, each of which is focused on a different keyword or keyphrase. For example, instead of listing all your services on a single webpage, try developing a separate webpage for each. These pages will rank higher for their keywords since they contain targeted rather than general content.

7. Submit Webpage URL to Search Engines. Next, submit your page to the important Web search engines that robotically index the Web. Look for a link on the search engine for "Add Your URL." In the US, the most important are: Google, Inktomi, Alta Vista, and Tehoma. They feed search content to the other main search engines and portal sites. For Europe and other areas you'll want to submit to regional search engines. It's a waste of money to pay someone to submit your site to hundreds of search engines. Avoid registering with FFA (Free For All pages) and other link farms. They don't work well, bring you lots of spam e-mails, and could cause you to be penalized by the search engines. We'll talk about submitting to directories under "Linking Strategies" below.

8. Fine-tune with search engine positioning. Now fine-tune your focused content pages, and perhaps your home page, by making minor adjustments to help them rank high. Software such as WebPosition Gold (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/webposition.htm) allows you to check your current ranking and compare your webpages against your top keyword competitors and WebPosition's Page Critic analysis of a search engine's preferred statistics for each part of your webpage. You can do this yourself with WebPosition Gold, but many small businesses outsource search engine positioning because of the considerable time investment it requires. You can find links to hundreds of articles on search engine strategies in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=mp_Search).

Linking Strategies

Links to your site bring additional traffic that is quite worth the effort. Since Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website ("link popularity") as an important factor in ranking, more links will help you rank higher in the search engines, too. All links, however, are not created equal. Links from popular information hubs will help your site rank higher than those from low traffic sites. You'll find links to articles on link strategies in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=mp_Linking).

9. Submit Your Site to Key Directories. Be sure to list your site in the free Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com), overseen by human editors. This hierarchical directory provides content feeds to all the major search engines. Plus it provides a link to your site from an information hub that Google deems important.

Yahoo! Directory is another important directory to be listed in, though their search results recently haven't been featuring their own directory as prominently. Real humans will read (and too often, pare down) your 200-character sentence, so be very careful and follow their instructions (http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/). Hint: Use somewhat less than the maximum number of characters allowable, so you don't have wordy text that will tempt the Yahoo! editor to begin chopping. Business sites now require a $299 annual recurring fee for Yahoo! Express to have your site considered for inclusion within seven business days (http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/busexpress.html). Other directories to consider might be About.com and Business.com.

10. Submit Your Site to Industry Sites and Specialized Directories. You may find some directories focused on particular industries, such as education or finance. Be sure to register with these. You probably belong to various trade associations that feature member sites. Ask for a link. Even if you have to pay something for a link, it may bring you the kind of targeted traffic from an info hub that you need. Beware of directories that solicit you for "upgraded listings." Unless a directory is widely used in your field, your premium ad won't help. Marginal directories come and go very quickly, making it hard to keep up. Don't spend time here trying to be exhaustive.

11. Request Reciprocal Links. Find complementary websites and request a reciprocal link to your site (especially to your free service, if you offer one). Develop an out-of-the way page where you put links to other sites -- so you don't send people out the back door as fast as you bring them in the front door. Your best results will be from sites that get a similar amount of traffic to your site. High-traffic site webmasters are too busy to answer your requests for a link, and don't have anything to gain. Look for smaller sites that may have linking pages.

Check out Ken Evoy's free SiteSell Value Exchange. It (1) registers your site as one that is willing to exchange links with other sites that have a similar theme/topic content and (2) searches for sites with similar topical content (http://sales.sitesell.com/value-exchange/). Two automated link building software programs stand out -- Zeus and Arelis. These search for complimentary sites, help you maintain a link directory, and manage reciprocal links. But use these programs to identify the complementary sites, not to send impersonal automated e-mail spam to site owners. When you locate sites, send a personal e-mail to the administrative contact found in the Whois Directory (www.allwhois.com). If e-mail doesn't get a response, try a phone call.

12. Write Articles for Others to Use in their Newsletters. You can dramatically increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise and distribute them to editors as free content for their e-mail newsletters. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. This is an effective "viral" approach that can produce hundreds of links to your site over time.

Traditional Strategies

Just because "old media" strategies aren't on the Internet doesn't mean they aren't effective. A mixed media approach can be very effective.

13. Include Your URL on Stationery, Cards, and Literature. This is a no-brainer that's sometimes overlooked. Make sure that all reprints of cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company's URL. And see that your printer gets the URL syntax correct. In print, I recommend leaving off the http:// part and including only the www.domain.com portion.

14. Promote using traditional media. Don't discontinue print advertising you've found effective. But be sure to include your URL in any display or classified ads you purchase in trade journals, newspapers, etc. View your website as an information adjunct to the ad. Use a two-step approach: (1) capture the readers' attention with the ad, (2) then refer them to a URL where they can obtain more information and perhaps place an order. Look carefully at small display or classified ads in the back of narrowly-targeted magazines or trade periodicals. Sometimes these ads are more targeted, more effective, and less expensive than online advertising. Consider other traditional media to drive people to your site, such as direct mail, classifieds, post cards, etc. Since 1999 we've seen TV used to promote sites, though it is probably too broad for all but the most general product sites.

15. Develop a Free Service. It's boring to invite people, "Come to our site and learn about our business." It's quite another to say "Use the free kitchen remodeling calculator available exclusively on our site." Make no mistake, it's expensive in time and energy to develop free resources, such as our Web Marketing Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket), but it is very rewarding in increased traffic to your site. Make sure that your free service is closely related to what you are selling so the visitors you attract will be good prospects for your business. Give visitors multiple opportunities and links to cross over to the sales part of your site.

16. Issue News Releases. Find newsworthy events (such as launching your free service), and send news releases to print and Web periodicals in your industry. However, opening or redesigning a website is seldom newsworthy these days. You may want to use a Web news release service such as XpressPress (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/xpresspress.htm) or the free PR Web (www.prweb.com). Placing your website URL in online copies of your press release may increase link popularity some. More info on PR. (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=mp_PR)

E-Mail Strategies

Don't neglect e-mail as an important way to bring people to your website. Just don't spam. That is, don't send bulk unsolicited e-mails without permission to people with whom you have no relationship. You can find lots to details and tips in The E-Mail Marketing Handbook, an e-book by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/handbook.htm).

17. Install a "Signature" in your E-Mail Program to help potential customers get in touch with you. Most e-mail programs such as AOL, Netscape, and Outlook allow you to designate a "signature" to appear at the end of each message you send. Limit it to 6 to 8 lines: Company name, address, phone number, URL, e-mail address, and a one-phrase description of your unique business offering. Look for examples on e-mail messages sent to you.

18. Publish an E-Mail Newsletter. While it's a big commitment in time, publishing a monthly or bi-monthly e-mail newsletter ("ezine") is one of the very best ways to keep in touch with your prospects, generate trust, develop brand awareness, and build future business. It also helps you collect e-mail addresses from those who visit your site but aren't yet ready to make a purchase. Ask for e-mail address and their first name so you can personalize the newsletter. You can distribute your newsletter using listservers such as Gammadyne Mailer (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/gammadyne.htm), Infacta GroupMail (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/groupmail.htm), Topica Email Publisher (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/topica.htm), or Constant Contact (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/roving.htm). If you're just getting started you can use free advertising-supported programs, such as Yahoo! Groups (www.yahoogroups.com) and Topica Exchange (www.topica.com). See articles on newsletter marketing in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=me_Newsletter).

19. Send Offers to Your Visitors and Customers. Your own list of customers and site visitors who have given you permission to contact them will be your most productive list. Send offers, coupon specials, product updates, etc. Personalizing the subject line and the message will increase the results. You'll find scores of articles on general e-mail marketing in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=me_Email-Gen).

20. Rent targeted e-mail lists. We abhor "spam," bulk untargeted, unsolicited e-mail, and you'll pay a very stiff price in a ruined reputation and cancelled services if you yield to temptation here. But the marketing industry has developed targeted e-mail lists you can rent consisting of people who have agreed to receive commercial e-mail messages. These cost $100 to $300 per thousand, 10¢ to 30¢ per name. Do a smaller test first to determine the quality of the list. Your best bet is to find an e-mail list broker to help you with this project -- you'll save money and get experienced help for no additional cost (www.wilsonweb.com/contact/listbroker.htm). You'll find many articles on opt-in e-mail marketing in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=me_Opt-in).

Miscellaneous Strategies

21. Promote Your Site in Mailing Lists and News Groups. The Internet offers thousands of very targeted e-mail based discussion lists and Usenet news groups made up of people with very specialized interests. Use Google Groups to find appropriate sources (http://groups.google.com). Don't bother with news groups consisting of pure "spam." Instead, find groups where a dialog is taking place. Don't use aggressive marketing and overtly plug your product or service. Rather, add to the discussion in a helpful way and let the "signature" at the end of your e-mail message do your marketing for you. People will gradually get to know and trust you, visit your site, and do business with you. You can learn more from articles in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=mm_Newsgroups).

22. Announce a Contest. People like getting something free. If you publicize a contest or drawing available on your site, you'll generate more traffic than normal. Make sure your sweepstakes rules are legal in all states and countries you are targeting. Prizes should be designed to attract individuals who fit a demographic profile describing your best customers. See dozens of articles on contests and incentives in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=ma_Incentives).

23. Ask Visitors to Bookmark Your Site. It seems so simple, but make sure you ask visitors to bookmark your site (www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/bookmark.htm) We use a graphic on the main entry page to our site. Hey, why don't you bookmark the article you're reading right now? You know you'll want to find it again soon.

24. Exchange Ads with Complementary Businesses. Banner exchange programs don't work well these days. But consider exchanging e-mail newsletter ads with complementary businesses to reach new audiences.

25. Devise Viral Marketing Promotion Techniques. So-called viral marketing uses the communication networks (and preferably the resources) of your site visitors or customers to spread the word about your site exponentially. Word-of-mouth, PR, creating "buzz," and network marketing are offline models. #12 above, "Write Articles for Others to Use in their Newsletters" is a viral approach. The classic example is the free e-mail service, hotmail.com, that includes a tagline about their service at the end of every message sent out, so friends tell friends, who tell friends. You can learn more in my e-book Demystifying Viral Marketing (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/viral.htm), available for no cost when you subscribe to my free, weekly Doctor Ebiz newsletter (www.doctorebiz.com). You can find articles on viral marketing in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=mm_Viral).

Paid Advertising Strategies

None of the approaches described above is "free," since each takes time and energy. But if you want to grow your business more rapidly, there comes a point when you need to pay for increased traffic. Advertising is sold in one of three ways: (1) traditional CPM (cost per thousand views), (2) pay per click (PPC), and (3) pay per action, otherwise known as an affiliate program or lead generation program. Do some small tests first to determine response, and then calculate your return on investment (ROI) before spending large amounts. Here are some methods:

26. Buy a Text Ad in an E-Mail Newsletter. Some of the best buys are small text ads in e-mail newsletters targeted at audiences likely to be interested in your products or services. Many small publishers aren't sophisticated about advertising and offer attractive rates. For example, we offer low-priced 2-Line Ads in Doctor Ebiz each week (www.wilsonweb.com/ads/2-line-ad.htm). Banner ads get such a low click-through rate (0.2%) these days that I don't recommend paying much for them. Banner ads typically cost about 50¢ to $1 per thousand page views.

27. Begin an Affiliate Program. Essentially, a retailer's affiliate program pays a commission to other sites whose links to the retailer result in an actual sale. The goal is to build a network of affiliates who have a financial stake in promoting your site. If you're a merchant you, need to (1) determine the commission you are willing to pay (consider it your advertising cost), (2) select a company to set up the technical details of your program, and (3) promote your program to get the right kind of affiliates who will link to your site. Consider affiliate management software such as My Affiliate Program (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/myaffiliateprogram.htm) or Ultimate Affiliate Program (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/groundbreak.htm). More info in the E-Commerce Research Room (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=em_Associate).

28. Purchase Pay Per Click (PPC) ads on Overture.com (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/overture.htm) and Google AdWords (https://adwords.google.com/select/). The top ads appear as featured links at the top of search engine results for your keywords in many search engines. Your ranking is determined by how much you've bid for a particular search word compared to other businesses. This can be a cost-effective way to get targeted traffic, since you only pay when someone actually clicks on the link. Lower cost PPC systems include FindWhat (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/findwhat.htm) and Kandoodle (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/kandoodle.htm). An excellent e-book on PPC strategies is Andrew Goodman's 21 Ways to Maximize Profits on Google AdWords Select (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/pagezero.htm). More information on PPC ads can be found in our Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=mp_PPC).

29. List Your Products with Shopping Comparison Bots and Auction Sites. Shopping bots compare your products and prices to others. Google's new Froogle (www.froogle.com) is currently free. Some work on a PPC basis: mySimon (www.mysimon.com), BizRate (www.bizrate.com), PriceGrabber (www.pricegrabber.com), and DealTime (www.dealtime.com). Others expect a commission on the sale and sometimes a listing fee, especially sales systems that host the merchant. These include eBay (www.ebay.com), Yahoo! Shopping Auctions (http://auctions.shopping.yahoo.com), Amazon zShops, Marketplace, and Auctions (http://zshops.amazon.com), and Yahoo! Shopping (http://shopping.yahoo.com). You pay to acquire first-time customers, but hopefully you can sell to them a second, third, and fourth time, too.

We certainly haven't exhausted ways to promote your site, but these will get you started. To effectively market your site, you need to spend some time adapting these strategies to your own market and capacity. Right now, why don't you make an appointment to go over this checklist with someone in your organization, and make it the basis for your new Web marketing strategy?

Tips For Cost Effective Pay Per Click Advertising

2008-08-07T02:17:00.000-07:00

Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest ways to targeting prospective customers to your business products or services. A website can contract with one of the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN and bid on keywords. When a person using the search engine enters one of the keywords in the search box, their ad pops up on the search results page as a sponsored ad. Here are some tips to make sure your ad is seen above your competition.

Know Your Niche
Knowing your niche when it comes to pay per click advertising involves knowing what search terms surfers are most likely to type into an internet search engine when looking for a site such as yours. Coming up with as many phrases that describe your website or your product or service is your most handy tool. With this basic list of keywords that describe your niche market you can then proceed to use the internet to help you find more words or phrases that you might not have thought of to add to your list. You can also find derivatives of the main words you thought up to give you a broader scope of keywords to bid on. To find free tools to use online to assist you simply type in "keyword too" into any search engine.

Pick Low Competition Keywords
The world of pay per click advertising is very competitive and the words you might want to bid on can be out of your budget. The key is to find the low competition variations of your main keyword that are less popular and therefore will cost less. The best tool one can have when looking for low competition keywords in their niche is a keyword analyzer software which can be purchased or found for free online. Some keywords tools are very good for doing pay per click research because they not only give you a list of alternatives for any search word you enter, they will also display the number of searches for that keyword and the number of campaigns already running for the keyword phrase you entered. This gives you a good view of what words you can bid on without going over budget, and also allows you to find keywords to bid on that are uncharted, meaning they get a good number of monthly searches but there are no campaigns running for that keyword. Without a keyword analyzer tool you can also find out how many campaigns are running for any keyword by simply typing the word into in the search engine and counting the ads.

Write Engaging Ads
Pay per click ads are typically less than 125 characters. You don't get lots of ad space to sell, so the object is to get into your customers head and ask yourself how they will benefit from your product or service. Listing a benefit in the form a question is a good way to engage those who view your ads. Some search engines such as Google allow you to score points through relevancy to search terms. Meaning the more relevant your ad is, based on how many times it is view verses how many it is clicked, the higher your ad will be on the list of ads bidding for that keyword. Using your main keyword in the title of the ad and in the ad itself will show your ad as having the exact phase that surfer searched for and thus increases the likeliness that they will click through to your web page.

Test Your Ads
Once you've written an add and included the keywords you'd like to bid on, your next step is to write a different ad and run it along side your first ad to test which one gets more click through's or sales. Once you've found this out, write another one and try and beat your previous stats. This will eventually lead to you having the best ads possible. Most pay per click companies will allow you to run two ads simultaneously, sharing the account funds to each and displaying each ad the same number of times.

Once you have a few pay per click campaigns under your belt this system for choosing the right keywords and creating relevant ads will become routine. Done the right way pay per click advertising can be a very cost effective way to promote any online venture you are involved in.

EXPOSING CLICK FRAUD

2008-08-06T05:48:00.000-07:00

Click fraud has recently emerged as a topic of discussion and debate
regarding the potential of undermining the pay-per-click revenue
model that has made Google and Yahoo the financial success that they
are today.
At its essence, click fraud is the willful act of clicking on a search
engine sponsored listing or banner ad with the intention of falsely
increasing clicks while consuming the advertiser’s pay-per-click
budgets.
While there is little consensus that click fraud will undermine the payper-
click market, most search engine marketers agree that click fraud
does occur and diminishes the success rate of many online marketing
programs. Below are the results of a recent survey conducted by the
Search Engine Marketers Professional Organization (SEMPO).*
There are numerous reasons why someone will intentionally commit
click fraud. In some cases, click fraud may be an isolated occurrence.
In other cases, click fraud may be a malicious and well thought out
systematic method of generating excessive and erroneous click
activity.
The Covert Competitor
In some cases it may be a rival competitor who jealously has clicked on
a top sponsored ad to visit your web site. In this case the click fraud
may easily go undetected if the number of clicks is not exceedingly
high. Even if identified, the time involved for seeking
remuneration from the pay-per-click network may not justify the time
involved in the research and pursuit of the credit.
However, some more sophisticated unethical marketers have
developed a variety of programs and techniques in an attempt to out
wit other advertisers by depleting their budgets, daily allocations or
reducing return on investment in an attempt to take top position for
sponsored links. In some cases, these marketers utilize cloaking
technologies to generate clicks while going undetected. In addition
they may develop “spider” technologies that automatically and
systematically click on sponsored links.
In the cloaking example, a click fraud perpetrator may be accessing the
Internet using a single IP address or block of IP addresses, while
fraudulently clicking on your ads. They may cloak or disguise their IP
address (similar in manner to a spammer using an erroneous reply to
an address) so they appear to be accessing your pay-per-click ads from
a variety of IP addresses in an attempt to avoid detection
Alternatively, the click fraud perpetrator may develop a computer
program that automatically “crawls” a search engine or their affiliates
in a spider like fashion looking for competitor pay-per-click ads and
generating erroneous clicks on sponsored links.
The Advertising Affiliate
Some search engines with pay-per-click / sponsored listings have
developed a network of affiliate sites that distribute listings based on
search term results in what is known as contextual advertising. The
ads or sponsored links are served up in the context of related Web site
copy. For example, a search request for news on the Apple iPod™
may direct the user to a news Web site that displays a sponsored link
along with an article about the new iPod Shuffle.
The advertising affiliate is compensated with a percentage of the
revenue associated with “click” resulting from the display of the
sponsored link. Some affiliates have actually generated erroneous
clicks in an attempt to boost their own revenue. In addition to using
spider technologies that generate click fraud, some of these affiliates
have resorted to a form of “outsourced” click fraud. In this case, they
enlist the help of foreign labor who click on advertiser listings with no
intention of looking at your site. These clicks increase the amount the
advertising affiliate gets from the pay-per-click network.
Recently, Wired News** reported that Auction Experts International, a
Google AdSense partner located in Houston, allegedly reaped $50,000
in commissions by hammering away on ad links until Google sued in
November 2004. Its principals never showed up in court, and Google
won by default.
In summary, there are a variety of factors that induce click fraud.
Some of these perpetrators have developed sophisticated technologies
and business processes in order to fraudulently generate clicks without
getting detected. Others are less sophisticated, but still poise a threat
and burden for accurately measuring a campaigner’s online succes

Click Fraud - What To Look For?

establishing baseline visitor behavior, unusual patterns usually become
apparent. Almost everyone can be a victim and no one is immune.
There are a variety of indicators that you can watch for to identify
possible click fraud including:
Conversion Rates
If you are spending ANY money on pay-per-click marketing programs
you should establish base line conversion rates for your campaigns.
For example, how many clicks does it take to generate a desired site
behavior (e.g., shopping cart transaction, e-mail opt-in, contact us
form completion). By comparing your campaign results to your
expected baseline, you can identify underperforming campaigns as
suspicious click activity.
Clicks By Country
Some search engine marketers and advertising affiliates have
outsourced the task of erroneously clicking on your sponsored links. If
you have an increase in activity from domains like Romania (.ro) or
India (.in) you may be a victim of click fraud.
Repeat Visitors From The Same IP Address
Repeated clicks from the same IP address may be a possible sign of
click fraud. This technique is a first line of defense in the identification
of click fraud. There may be legitimate reasons why campaign clicks
may originate from the same IP address (e.g., aol users). However, by
combining this information with a number of other variables,
suspicious clicks can easily be differentiated from genuine customer
visits.
Page Depth
When analyzing click behavior, it is important to note the average
page depth of the suspicious visitor. If a repeated site visitor
generates only one page view per visit this may be suspicious.
Compare these results to a typical visitor session on your site. Be wary
as some sophisticated bots which can generate multiple page views
from an automated fraudulent session.
Time On Site
In addition to identifying repeat visitors and page depth, also consider
the time spent on the site. An automated bot may generate many visits
and lots of page views, but do so in a period of time too short for a
human. By knowing how long a typical visitor spends on your site
you will be able to identify suspicious click activity.
Acceptance Of Cookies
Many bots use browser-less spider technology to visit your site. In
many cases these spiders do not accept cookies. Evaluate what
percentage of your site visitors accept cookies (typically more than
95%). Repeat visits though a sponsored link from the same visitor
who does not accept cookies may be a bot that is attempting to
deplete your ad budgets.
Clicks At Unusual Hours
The World-Wide-Web never sleeps, however, be wary of an unusual
increase of visitor activity at odd hours of the day or night. This may be
suspicious visitors from different time zones not typical of your usual
site visitor or automated spiders that are clicking your ads at all hours
of the day or night.
Net Applications 65 Enterprise Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 949-330-7910
netapplications.com

search engine marketer, the advertiser, the consumer, and ultimately
the search engine or pay-per-click network.
The Search Engine Marketer
Search engine marketers who are victims of click fraud see their rate of
return on marketing programs diminished by these activities. It
needlessly consumes budgets and decreases results. As a result,
search engine marketing organizations may be delivering results at a
sub-optimal level jeopardizing their client relationships. Click fraud
can become a difficult topic of discussion if it has been ongoing for a
prolonged period of time and left undetected.
The Advertiser
What business can afford to pay more for advertising dollars
needlessly? Whether an organization is large or small, return on ad
dollars is under paramount scrutiny. One of the benefits of online and
eCommerce business models is the ability to “close the loop” on
advertising dollars. By marketing through search engines and selling
online, there is an unprecedented opportunity to track and report
return on investment from search engine marketing dollars – down to
the keyword! The growing prevalence of click fraud contributes to
diminishing performance industry wide for online marketing
campaigns directly impacting all advertiser's.
In addition, if click fraud continues unchecked, there may be the
possibility of an industry shakeout where less credible companies will
be forced out of the market resulting in fewer search engine/pay-perclick
network operators allowing those remaining to be under less
scrutiny for raising minimums and increasing online ad fees.
The Customer
Because organic search engine listings can be complicated and
competitive, many companies rely on sponsored listings to ensure that
they are highly ranked in search engines. Customers have come to rely
on sponsored listings to find what they are looking for on the web.
Should click fraud undermine the pay-per-click business model,
advertisers will find its cost prohibitive to place sponsored listings. In
turn, customers will find it more difficult to find what they are looking
for on the web.
Furthermore, there is the possibility of higher cost of goods and
services. If marketing budgets are increased due to click fraud and
associated customer acquisition costs, marketers may elect to pass on
the increased costs to the consumer in higher prices for goods and
services
The Search Engine/Pay-Per-Click Network
Ultimately, if click fraud reduces results to a point where it is no longer
economically feasible to sponsor listings, advertisers will stop spending
and the search engines will suffer accordingly. While it seems that
they benefit in the short run by erroneous clicks (they get paid anyway
don’t they), these engines compete to deliver top results. Letting
click fraud run rampant on their networks is not in their best interests
and they know it.
It should be noted that many of the more respected networks have
acknowledged the click fraid problem and are actively reviewing
suspicious activity on their networks. When it has been uncovered, the
networks are beginning to automatically credit back advertisers for the
suspicious click activity. However there are many unscrupulous or just
plain lazy networks out there with no intention of taking on the
burden of policing their own networks. In cases like these, their
business practices of today will come back to haunt them as their
future livelihood and longevity depends in part with their industry
participation in detecting click fraud.

Top tips for increasing traffic to your web site

2008-08-05T02:09:00.000-07:00

You’ve got your new web site up and running. How do you
get maximum exposure for it and ensure that you get a constant flow of traffic to it? There are a number of fairly simple things you can do that will make a big difference to the amount of visitors
you will get.

Here are some great tips to help you get the most visitors possible.

1. Make your launch public

If you are launching a new web site or some significant new content for your site, write an introduction about it and submit it to share web sites such as Digg, Reddit and Now Public.

2. Make sure that the domain name you have chosen is suitable

Pick a name that will grab the interest of your target audience and enable them to instantly understand the aim of your web site.

Try and keep your domain name short – two to three words maximum. Avoid complex or hard to spell words, as people will struggle to type them correctly and remember them. Try to avoid a hyphenated domain name, as it will make the name hard to pass on verbally (e.g. on the telephone).

3. Be flexible about your choice of domain name

However, as there are approximately 120-130 million domain names registered worldwide, it may be useful to have a shortlist of alternatives in case the name you ideally want is already registered. You can check the availability of any domain names ending in .uk using the WHOIS search facility on our web site http://www.nominet.org.uk.

4. Think about sources of traffic to your web site

The type of traffic you want to attract to your web site will also have a bearing on your choice of domain name, as well as influencing how you decide to publicise the site, and the features and content you include.

Traffic to a personal web site usually comes from three main sources:

· Search engines

· Referral traffic (from other sites)

· Loyal readers

Each of these audiences will benefit from a different approach. The key to building a group of regular readers is to keep the content on the site fresh and update it regularly. Adding features such as a forum, or comments section will enable your audience to interact with you and others who share your interests, which can help keep the impetus going.

You can attract readers from search engines by using keywords. Search engines use keywords within domain names to rank web sites. If you choose a domain name that contains generic keywords (like mobile, music blog, gamer) you could achieve a high ranking. If your web site contains advertising this kind of traffic can be valuable, as visitors who come via search engines are more likely to click on ads than regular readers.

You can also attract readers who follow links from other sites. If your site is a blog you could benefit from links from one of the larger blogs such as Slashdot. This can result in large amounts of traffic and although these visitors are less likely to click on ads if they decide to post links to your site on their own blogs this can help with your search engine optimisation.

5. Marketing your web site through search engines

If you are not able to use keywords in your domain name you can still use search engines to promote your web site to a larger audience. Most of the search engines and directories allow you to register your web site for free. You can also take advantage of free banner advertising on various link exchange networks.

6. Marketing your web site through social networking sites

If you belong to a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook, or you are a member of a network such as a Yahoo Group, make sure that you post a link to your web site on your page, and post messages every time you update the web site or add a new feature. It’s free advertising that could reach a much larger audience than you think.

7. Making money from your web site

You can make money from your web site by placing adverts on your home page that generate revenue when visitors click on them. Google Adsense adverts are pay per click and can generate decent revenue. You could also sign up for an account with Text Link ads, who will sell small text ads on your site and split the revenue with you 50-50. You can also take advantage of free access to various affiliate networks such as Amazon and LinkShare. You can also make extra revenue by adding a donation button – if your site is giving people genuine value they may well be prepared to give a donation.

8. Keep developing your web site

The key to any successful personal web site is to generate traffic. In order to keep attracting visitors to your site, you must spend time developing it and updating it regularly. Add new content as often as possible, and carry out regular reviews of your layout and design. Keep your eye out for new features you can add to improve usability and if you are monetizing your web site, experiment with different revenue streams.

9. Use your domain name for your emails

In addition to your web site you can use your domain name for your email address. If you have an existing personal email account (e.g. hotmail) you can keep this, but use the domain name to forward your email.

About Nominet

We are the registry for all

Internet domain names

ending in .uk.

We operate at the heart of e-commerce in the UK,

running one of the world’s largest Internet registries

and managing over six million domain names.

We maintain the register of .uk domain names.

We also run the technology which locates a computer

on the Internet hosting the web site or email system

you’re looking for when you type in a web address or

send an email that ends in .uk.

We aim to be the leading provider of registry services,

including ENUM and other associated technologies.

AdWords Tricks - How to Turn $10 Into $200 Using Google AdWords

2008-08-04T02:57:00.000-07:00

A little-known AdWords trick to get low-cost clicks (I'm talking in the $0.01 region!) is the Placement Targeted option. Setting up a Placement Targeting campaign can be highly profitable, but you've got to do it right.

Basically, Placement Targeting allows you to target sites that have Google AdSense ads and allows to place your ad among these ads.

So here's how to turn $10 into $200 in profits with Google AdWords:

Step 1 - Find Sites That Have Google AdSense

You'd want to be targeting those sites that appear high in the search engine rankings for popular keywords. Wanted to bid on 'make money online' on AdWords but the price was too prohibitive? No worries. Search for 'make money online' on Google and look through the sites on the first page, including the Adwords ads at the side. Are there web pages that have AdSense ads on them? You can add them into your placement targeted campaign.

Step 2 - Set Up A Placement Targeted Campaign

Set up a Placement Targeted campaign. You can find a link a link called 'Placement Targeted' on your AdWords account home page. Go through the steps and then write your ad. As an example, you'd want your ad to have the words 'make money online' in the title and the body copy if we're following through from Step 1. This makes your ad highly targeted. You have the choice to choose between paying by Cost Per Click or Cost Per Thousand Impressions. Go with Cost Per Thousand Impressions to get those potential $0.01 or $0.03-esque clicks.

Step 3 - Tweak Your Campaign For Higher Profitability

Constantly tweak and split-test your ads to attain higher click-through rates to attain a higher Quality Score. This will give you better rankings on the pages that you are targeting. Remove sites that are performing poorly for you and add in new sites when you find them.

Increase Your Pay-Per-Click Traffic Immedaitely

2008-08-03T02:54:00.000-07:00

Follow These Methods To Revive Any Pay-Per-Click Campaign

Creating and launching a pay-per-click campaign is relatively easy. However, starting pay-per-click advertising is more difficult than many think. In fact, knowing some basic strategies when doing pay-per-click marketing can be the difference between your site growing or failing. Remember the following tips and your pay-per-click campaign should take off like never before.

Choose your keywords

The main aspect of pay-per-click is picking the right keywords so that your advertisement will show up when people do a search. It is crucial to your campaign that you select the right keywords or otherwise your business site may never be found. When picking keywords remember to pick ones that are special to your business. In other words, don’t pick words that are very popular with other businesses because the chances are they will be very expensive and hard to get. Instead pick a few words that set your business apart from all others. For example, if you run a local law firm in Houston instead of picking just Law Services, choose Law Services Houston.

Price

Before launching your pay-per-click campaign make sure to set aside the amount of money you wish to spend. Because you have to bid a price on the keywords that you choose make sure you know how much you can spend otherwise you may quickly exceed your limit when traffic starts to come to your site. Also remember that popular keyword phrases are going to cost much more than other less popular but just as effective keywords.

Effective Headlines

As you well know your pay-per-click campaign will only be as effective as your headline and description of your site. Make sure that your headline is attention grabbing and at the same time include your keyword or phrase. The description of your site is also vital, and makes your customer curious enough to come to your site.

While these are just a few strategies for your pay-per-click campaign, following them will help your site grow like never before. If you feel uncomfortable about running your own pay-per-click campaign there are hundreds of respectable companies that are more than willing to help you increase traffic and revenue to your online business.

Why Use Large Pay Per Click Search Engines?

2008-08-03T02:51:00.000-07:00

When you use large pay

per click search engines

you guarantee you are

getting at least some good

traffic, and that your

business model is scalable.

Smaller engines provide

slower feedback loops, and

some may not even

provide quality traffic.

• The results will be scaleable.

• The feedback will be quicker.

• They offer many great tracking and targeting features free.

• Larger pay-per-click search engines generally present higher quality traffic

and are less susceptible to fraud.

• It is less complex managing two or three accounts versus 100 accounts.

• It’s easier to track the ROI on 2 accounts than on 100 accounts.

• Many of the extremely small search engines never have real traffic. You

are wasting your time registering with them.

• Even some of the better second tier search engines may waste a big hunk

of change. In early November 2004 I tried using LookSmart. It sent me

twice the traffic as Yahoo! Search Marketing and traffic from LookSmart

had a 95% bounce rate. That means that 19 of 20 site visitors from

LookSmart immediately left and I paid for garbage traffic. The quality of

traffic from smaller engines will vary from term to term, but its best to go

with the biggest guys off the start, and then, if you have spare time, try

some of the smaller engines.

Case Study: the Ignorant Bidder

If a term does not convert well for you then it may not be worth it to rank near the

top for that term.

7 SEO BOO K

Not too long ago a person was bidding on an eBay ad for “SEO Book” at over $1 a

click. Assuming I can get a 1.5% conversion rate I can afford to pay that much, but

this person was just throwing away their money.

Just to test the waters I placed my ebook on eBay and it did not go for anywhere

near what I usually sell them for.

I find it hard to believe the person who was bidding a dollar a click was making any

money. They later lowered that bid to 21 cents. In some markets there will be

dumb companies that rotate in, lose money, and then go bankrupt. By the time they

go bankrupt others may soon take their money wasting market position.

Some terms are not worth buying at the price the keywords go for. And if they are

valuable they may have more value at a lower position.

Landing Page Tips:

Conversion is a large part of how successful a pay per click campaign is. A few tips

to improve landing pages:

• Remove navigation: unless it is necessary remove other options. Let

people do what you want them to do, and don’t give them many other

options.

• Make link text appealing: people tend to glance over copy instead of

deeply reading every word. Since links are action points people tend to pay

more attention to link text. Make sure link text is appealing since it is far

more likely to get read than most of the page copy.

• Give them a clue they have found the correct page: Place the words

they searched for in large text at the top of the page to show them they are

in the right location. If you are a large merchant with many products maybe

use something like ‘search results for: their search term’. Typically it is best to

point people at a landing page instead of the home page.

• Other ideas: some of the other concepts listed throughout this ebook

(such as using short paragraphs and concise subheaders) also apply to

landing pages. Corey Rudl constantly retested his landing pages. You can

learn a good amount by seeing how he changed his landing pages over

time, by looking through how they changed in Archive.org.

MarketingSherpa also has a landing page handbook for sale.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

How Does Yahoo! Search Marketing Work?

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a large pay-per-click search provider. You write ads for

your web site, and they appear in the search results and content sites with ads

delivered by YSM. Before the end of 2006 most keywords were editorially reviewed

prior to appearing in search results, but with the launch of their long awaited

Panama platform most keywords are automatically approved and running within a

couple minutes.

YSM Stemming

YSM also truncates search terms for ad targeting, so book and books are treated as

though they are the same keyword phrase.

YSM Advanced vs Standard Match

YSM typically places standard match listings above advanced match listings if the

advanced match listings are not as close of a match as the standard match. This

means that if you bid on the exact term that someone is searching for you, will rank

above ads that are matched via broader matching options.

If you bid ten cents for best seo book and someone else bids 25 cents for seo books

your best seo book ad will show above theirs if someone is searching for best seo book.

At the end of 2006 Yahoo! aimed to make their platform less transparent, so how

they mix matching types may change over time.

YSM Bid Prices versus Click Costs

With YSM, you pick a maximum bid price and your bid will never exceed that.

Their software has a bid discounter built in, so oftentimes your average bid cost

may be less than your bid prices.

Prior to the end of 2006 YSM bid prices were transparent, which meant you could

usually see exactly what your competitors were bidding at any given time. With the

launch of the Panama platform Yahoo! no longer shows exact bid prices but bid

ranges, estimated clicks, and estimated share of clicks.

Please note that their estimates are just estimates, and that by adjusting your ad

copy relevancy and appeal you can drastically alter your click costs and traffic

volumes.

• If you use appealing ad copy an ad at position number 2 or 3 may get

more clicks than an ad at position number 1.

• Relevant ads that get clicked often are given a higher quality score. Ads

with a higher quality score are given a discount for their relevancy,

since search engines make more when searchers click on more ads.

Bid Jamming

Once the new Panama system is live bid jamming may no longer be possible, but

this explains how the process worked.

In some niche markets, there will only be a couple people who place exceptional

value on ultra-qualified leads. For example, a Chicago DUI attorney may bid much

higher for the term Chicago DUI attorney than a general nationwide firm would. If

there are only a couple competitors in a market, it is not uncommon for the top

few bids to be $5 or $10 while the rest of them are around 25 cents or less.

For example, if they bid $10, you can bid a max bid of $9.99. If the third placed

person is only bidding 25 cents, your clicks will cost you 26 cents each while

ensuring your competitor pays a full $10 per click.

Of course you want to monitor your accounts closely if you are using aggressive

bidding techniques or bid jamming people. Some competitors will be stupid and let

you take their lunch money. Others may be smart and readjust their bids to bid jam

you. Some will go so far as click fraud, so you need to watch your account closely if

you are bidding aggressively in competitive markets.

By default, ads are widely matched and syndicated to the content network, so if you

bid high on the search network make sure you check the content network ads and

bid lower on those. It doesn’t take too many $10 content clicks to come in to make

for a bad day.

YSM Programs:

YSM offers a $10 bid bonus when you open an account, but has a $5 startup fee

(which is converted to click credit), and it has no monthly minimum spend. They

also have a FastTrack program where their account representatives will set up your

account for a one time $199 fee. I recommend taking the time to set up your own

account. You know your products better and are more interested in your own

success than some random YSM editor is, they are more interesting in ensuring you

spend as much as you are willing to.

YSM offers a local product called Local Match, which allows you to target your ads

from a .5 to 100 mile radius of your business location. The Local Match product

requires that you have a business with a physical address, but it does not require a

website. These ads give driving directions to your place of business. Local Match

ads show up in the same location where other YSM ads appear.

YSM also offers a paid inclusion program by the name of Search Submit Express

(which I generally consider a waste of money for most websites). Search Submit

Express gives your sites 48 hour refresh throughout the Yahoo! powered search

products. SSE is a one time $49 review fee and also has an incremental cost per

click. SSE is good for sites which:

• are rapidly changing

• or are having dynamic indexing problems

• or need indexed quickly

• or need the associated tracking offered by Search Submit Express

Free Yahoo! Search Marketing Tools:

Yahoo! offers a suite of tools to help their advertisers set up their accounts.

• SEO Book Keyword Research Tool: cross references the Yahoo!

Search Term Suggestion Tool, all the Google keyword research tools,

and many other keyword tools

(http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/)

• Yahoo! Search Term Suggestion Tool: shows the frequency of

searches across the YSM network for the prior month

(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)

• Yahoo! View Bid Tool: shows the highest bidders for a specific

search term. Please note this tool will be shut down in December of

2006.

(http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/?Keywords=

casino&mkt=us&lang=en_US)

• Yahoo! Advertiser Workbook: free downloadable e-book released by

Yahoo! to help you get the most out of your YSM campaign

• Yahoo! Panama Preview: Video previewing the new Panama

platform.

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/tu_htnya.php

YSM Search Term Suggestion Tool Errors:

YSM truncates their search terms. While the plural and singular versions of search

terms will greatly differ in search volume YSM just lumps them together.

Please note that the Yahoo! search term suggestion tool tends to run high on highly

commercial terms since many automated bots and bid managers scour through

their partner network. Here is an example keyword research search for S.E.O.

WordTracker tracks click data from the meta search engines by the name of

Dogpile and WebCrawler. Since WordTracker makes their money by selling data

versus clicks you can usually expect more legitimate traffic measurements using

WordTracker. Digital Point created a free keyword suggestion tool which compares

both traffic estimates.

KeywordDiscovery.com and GoodKeywords.com are two additional useful

keyword research resources.

When doing pay per click advertising deep keyword research is a fundamental part

of most successful campaigns. Many of the keyword research tools are top heavy

(only showing the most common terms), but Yahoo! and Google both have

enough traffic to give deep keyword research results. WordTracker has a few cool

features called lateral search and thesaurus which help you find similar keywords. I

tested many of the keyword research tools and WordTracker is generally the only

traditional keyword research tool I feel is worth paying an ongoing subscription for.

Another option to finding deep keyword data is to run a broad matched Google

AdWords ad (AdWords and matching options are discussed later in this chapter)

and mine keyword data from the referral strings. Make sure you watch your budget

closely and use negative terms to filter unwanted traffic if you use this technique.

Pay Per Click: Using Adwords effectively for recruitment websites

2008-08-02T00:54:00.000-07:00

Why Use PPC?

When thinking about your online marketing portfolio have you ever considered Paid Search or “Pay Per Click” (PPC)? With the ever increasing competition to get you site on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Live Search for phrases like ‘architecture jobs’, ‘sales jobs’ or ‘marketing jobs’ PPC may seem like an attractive option; you can determine which keywords you want your PPC Ad to appear on, when and where you want your Ad to show and how much you want to spend per month with instant results. By following a few key guidelines you can really maximize the potential of your PPC campaign by generating quality CV’s at a low cost and low risk. You can also add tracking code so that the ROI from your PPC campaign is easily calculated, making PPC an effective and measurable marketing tool for your recruitment website.

Save money by spending time setting up your Campaign
Setting up a PPC campaign is easy but there are pitfalls to avoid. Too many people make the mistake of just adding the keywords and leaving the campaign to run ending up with a huge credit card bill and not much else to report. Remember that Google makes a substantial part of its revenue through Adwords!

So where do you start?
Thinking about your budget is a good place to start. The more money you spend, the more keywords you can bid on and therefore the more CV’s you can get. Once you have decided on your budget set your daily budget limit accordingly otherwise you could see a huge bill at the end of the month!

Writing a good Ad
Once you have decided on your budget you can start looking at what your target jobseekers or clients might search for e.g. “architecture jobs”, “social care recruitment”, “project manager jobs in London”; this will form your list of target keywords. Now you can start writing your Ad. Here the fun starts; you have got only 95 character spaces to create a compelling Ad that is going to entice a jobseeker to click on it – and not on your competitors! There are a few key rules to remember when writing your Ad:

· Make sure the keyword appears in the Ad; the words go bold and the job seeker will see that your site is relevant.

· Be creative in your writing; “apply for 100’s constructions jobs” sounds more enticing than “construction recruitment agency”.

· But also be specific; if you’re only recruiting for graduate positions you don’t want a senior professional clicking though as they are not going to apply for a job and you’ve just used up some of your budget.

· If you’re targeting a specific geographical area e.g. “surveying jobs in London” then say it. It means you’ll save money by only generating a targeted audience to your site.

· Give a call to action e.g. Submit your CV, Apply today! – this is ultimately what the jobseeker wants.

· Create multiple Ads, i.e. create a different Ad campaign for each of your sectors; if you’re a technical recruiter create an Ad campaign for architecture, another one for construction and so on.

And once a job seeker has clicked on the Ad think about where they end up…

· If your Ad is about engineering jobs, the jobseeker is expecting to find engineering jobs, so link your Ad through to the engineering jobs page not the home page.

…and what you want them to do when they get there

· Make sure that there are clear calls to action; register for a job / contact you / submit their CV so the chance of getting that CV is high.

How to make your money go further
It is worth checking your account settings before you set your new PPC campaign live. Think about when jobseekers are most likely to be searching for jobs; it is unlikely that at 4am you’re going to get many serious applications and if Monday to Friday is prime job seeking time do you want your ads appearing on Saturday? Also think about where you want your Ad’s to be displayed. By switching off the content network you can then focus on the real traffic and significantly decrease your susceptibility to click fraud. And if you want your job to display at or near the top of the sponsored listings alter you position preference so that you’re Ad’s display in the top 5.

Tracking / Reviewing / Testing / Tweaking
So how successful was your Ad? By adding the tracking code to the goal pages on your site e.g. your registration thank you page, you can determine how many CV’s you generated from your PPC campaign and the cost of each CV. Calculating your PPC ROI from there is very easy.

Feeling creative? Have another look at your Ad results, from here you can see which ads are generating a high number of jobseekers to the site or in technical jargon a high “click through rate“ (CTR) and which Ads are being displayed a lot (have a high number of “impressions”), but are not being clicked on. You can then try different Ad campaigns under the same keywords to see which one generates a higher CTR, or remove ones which are not generating much traffic. Through a bit of trial and error and monitoring your PPC performance you can tweak your campaign to have a higher spend in areas where you have the most jobs and on the best traffic converting key phrases. Linking Adwords into Google Analytics will give you even more data to play with.

With a bit of patience and tweaking your PPC campaign can be an effective marketing tool for your recruitment website, generating instant results at a high ROI which is all completely measurable and can be tailored to any budget.

Why Pay Per Click is Important

2008-08-01T02:47:00.000-07:00

I was working to raise the rankings of one client for a few competitive phrases. It

was taking a decent investment in time and money. I then started a pay per click

campaign to test a ton of terms. As it turns out the conversion rate for the words

we thought we needed were not great. There were a couple other terms with lower

search frequency and less competition which converted exceptionally well.

Had we not done pay per click marketing we may have never properly focused our

SEO efforts. In less than a month on about $300 we increased the productivity of

the site ten fold.

The only way to be certain of anything in marketing is to test it. Pay per click

marketing allows you to test real time with the fastest feedback loop of any

marketing medium in the world.

What is Pay Per Click?

In 1998 Overture pioneered the idea of selling search ads. You could buy search

results for as low as a penny or two per click. This system has quickly evolved into

one of the worlds most competitive marketplaces.

Why Use Pay Per Click?

Sometime you can not afford to...or simply do not want to wait. Pay per click

search engines allow you to list atop search results quickly. This will allow you to:

• Prototype ideas to track demand before you invest into a new business

model or are stuck footing the bill for a new site.

• Quickly gather feedback on market conditions.

• Split test to a live audience and gather results in real time.

You can use Google AdWords to offer a free white paper about some topic from a

one page website. If nobody is interested in downloading your white paper or you

can not seem to get enough clickthroughs then odds are:

• the market is not yet ready for your product

• or you are marketing it from the wrong angle

• or you are marketing it to the wrong people

Who Should I Trust in Pay Per Click?

There are a few major players in the pay per click arena. Overture (as of writing

this) currently has network partnerships that span Yahoo!, InfoSpace, AltaVista,

6 SEO BOO K

AllTheWeb and many other partners. Google AdWords has a larger distribution

network across Google, AOL, About, Earthlink, and many others sites...even a few

of my own. Microsoft is a new player in the market, but their limited syndication

network means their traffic quality is high.

For the sake of this report I am only going to cover Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search

Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter.

Amazon.com allows you to advertise contextual ads on their site via ClickRiver.

There are also a few other pay per click search engines (Ask, Business.com, Miva,

Kanoodle, Enhance Interactive, 7Search, Findology, Search123, Epilot) that may be

well worth a look after trying Google, Yahoo! and MSN. While beginning pay-per-

click advertising, I would recommend only using Google AdWords, Yahoo!

Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter.

Sometime you can not afford to...or simply do not want to wait. Pay per click

search engines allow you to list atop search results quickly. This will allow you to:

• Prototype ideas to track demand before you invest into a new business

model or are stuck footing the bill for a new site.

• Quickly gather feedback on market conditions.

• Split test to a live audience and gather results in real time.

You can use Google AdWords to offer a free white paper about some topic from a

one page website. If nobody is interested in downloading your white paper or you

can not seem to get enough clickthroughs then odds are:

• the market is not yet ready for your product

• or you are marketing it from the wrong angle

• or you are marketing it to the wrong people

What is Pay Per Click ?

2008-07-31T02:27:00.000-07:00

Pay Per Click Advertising are affiliate program scripts either set up on a website or search engines that count the number of click thru’s YOU either send or receive.

A perfect example of a pay per click program is Google Adwords. Google Adwords are the advertisements you see on the right hand side when you search the google search engine for your specific keywords.

These are called “sponsored links”.

What happens is, a business set’s up a Google Adwords account, sets up their heading and advertisement, enters the keywords that they want their ad shown for when those keywords are entered into the Google search engine, set their bid price and a way they go!

For placing the business owners specific ad on the Google website, Google then gets a nice little profit for every web surfer that clicks thru on the business owners ad.

Some website owners also set up these type of Pay Per Click Advertising on their websites.

This can sometimes be a cheaper alternative to paying for traffic from Google Adwords. Usually these types of websites pay around 0.01 cent to 0.10 cents per click that you send them.

If you would like to run a pay per click advertisement program on your website to drive in cheap traffic you can pick up scripts that you can load to your website fairly cheaply. Just type into the Google search engine “pay per click script”.

google89839a67c440bd3a

2008-07-25T02:04:00.000-07:00

it is the test

Pay Per Click

A Modern Day Fairytale: Pay Per Click Search Engine

Pay Per Click Marketing - The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Ads Of Pay Per Click Marketing Advertisers

5 Reasons To Use Pay Per Click Internet Advertising

Affiliate Marketers Will Never Make a Dime Using Google Adwords

Secrets of Successful Affiliate Bloggers - Discover How They Make It Real Big

Affiliate Marketing- Information On Affiliate Content Sites-Blogs

Advertising An Affiliate Program Effectively And For Free

Advertising An Affiliate Program Effectively And For Free

How Much Does it Cost to Bring Visitors to a Website?

PPC Advertising - Knowing the Pits and Falls of PPC

Initial Steps to Take When Doing PPC Advertising

Earning More Profits With PPC

Pay Per Click Advertising - An Advantage Or a Waste?

Is Pay Per Click Right For You?

A Fundamental Overview Of Pay Per Click Search Engines

The Truth About Pay-Per-Click Ads

How Pay Per Click Search Engines Work

Lucrative PPC Advertising - The Realities of Pay Per Click Publishing

Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs - Still Worthwhile?

How to plan a pay-per-click ad campaign

Site Intelligence Tracking – guidance notes 1

What To Do About Click Fraud?

Tips for Successful Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

Pay Per Click Search Engines

CLICK FRAUD

Search Engine Placement & Web Site Promotion

The Web Marketing Checklist:29 Ways to Promote Your Website

Search Engine Strategies

Linking Strategies

Traditional Strategies

E-Mail Strategies

Miscellaneous Strategies

Paid Advertising Strategies

Tips For Cost Effective Pay Per Click Advertising

EXPOSING CLICK FRAUD

Top tips for increasing traffic to your web site

You’ve got your new web site up and running. How do youget maximum exposure for it and ensure that you get a constant flow of traffic to it? There are a number of fairly simple things you can do that will make a big difference to the amount of visitorsyou will get.

1. Make your launch public

2. Make sure that the domain name you have chosen is suitable

3. Be flexible about your choice of domain name

4. Think about sources of traffic to your web site

5. Marketing your web site through search engines

6. Marketing your web site through social networking sites

7. Making money from your web site

8. Keep developing your web site

9. Use your domain name for your emails

AdWords Tricks - How to Turn $10 Into $200 Using Google AdWords

Increase Your Pay-Per-Click Traffic Immedaitely

Why Use Large Pay Per Click Search Engines?

Pay Per Click: Using Adwords effectively for recruitment websites

Why Pay Per Click is Important

What is Pay Per Click ?

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The Web Marketing Checklist:
29 Ways to Promote Your Website

You’ve got your new web site up and running. How do you
get maximum exposure for it and ensure that you get a constant flow of traffic to it? There are a number of fairly simple things you can do that will make a big difference to the amount of visitors
you will get.