A Modern Day Fairytale: Pay Per Click Search Engine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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