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Showing posts from August, 2008

Is Pay Per Click your Best Marketing Bet?

You may already have heard of this method to get people to your web site. From my point of view and experience it turns out to be expensive and you have to write the ads yourself, pay for them, and change and maintain them to be the correct ones to work and be the right price in competition with many others. When people search for a particular topic like healing a headache or other malady, they will see in the column to the right an ad that when clicked on takes the person to their web site selling the book or service on healing headaches. Advertisers pay a set amount for every time the ad is clicked by a prospect. This is referred to as a click through rate or ctr. Yes, there are benefits: The opportunity to place your ad directly in front of a prospect at the exact moment they are searching for your product or service is good. More benefits include your control over the keywords that best represent your product. The PPC model allows you to decide how much you are willing to pay per c

How to Waste Money and Annoy Potential Customers

Why do some companies bid on keywords for products they don’t even sell? Or fail to provide the basic information people need to make the decision to buy? Here’s a cautionary tale-- with a happy ending. HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU? I’m looking online for lamp shades. I go to Google and click on the top Sponsored Link in the right column: Expo.com. I’m taken to their “Lighting and Fans” page. There are 29 links in the left navigation, but no lamp shades. So I do a keyword search. Products Found = 0. All I can do is wonder why they wasted my time and their money, and move on to the next ad. CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR. Clicking on the second ad takes me to a home page with a “Shades” tab. I click on that and arrive on a page with information about sizes and a link to the lamp shade collection. I start browsing and find one I’m interested in. The text instructs me to “Click on lamp image for detail.” I guess they mean lamp shade image. I click, and to my surprise, I see the exact same thumbnail

Google Adwords Guide

You probably have already heard about the new marketing tool from Google.com on the Internet. Their advertising service is called “Adwords” and allows you use Google.com for marketing. Your ads will be displayed on Google’s website when people initiate a search. Your ads can also be displayed very targeted among many thousand websites that partner with Google in a program called “Google AdSense”. Adwords is the Google.com version of a pay-per-click advertising model. That means users click on your ad and will be redirected to your website or a specific URL that you have selected when creating your ad campaign. What do you need to know about Adwords? Adwords is a way to spend a lot of money on advertising very very fast. BUT – Adwords is also a way to spend marketing money very selective to a targeted audience. Adwords can be very expensive for the advertiser if not properly planned and tested. When you setup a Google Adwords ad campaign, you choose certain keywords for which your ad wi

We Are Right In The Middle Of A Pay Per Click Baby Boom

No, this baby boom will certainly not swamp the Social Security system (sort of a bad joke for those that live in the United States, but many other countries...most notably Japan...have an even more acute problem), but this baby boom is revolutionizing the way that pay per click advertising is being spread across the Internet. One of the early participants in this pay per click baby boom was Google, with its AdSense program. With this program, Google shares pay per click revenue with a huge number of individual partner websites that carry a few pay per click ads that are distributed by Google. In essence, this creates a whole bunch of little pay per click locations (websites) throughout the Internet and hence the term "pay per click baby boom". Conceptually, programs like AdSense are similar to what the computer hardware folks refer to a distributed processing. Instead of trying to draw everyone to a large pay per click search engine site, little groups of pay per click ads a

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

7 Great Ways to Lose Your Shirt Using Google Adwords!

Google Adwords is a great tool! Careful use can lead to legions of highly targeted visitors breaching the moat around your site, and demanding to pillage your products! On the other hand... Adwords is also a great place to drain your advertising dollars if you're not careful. Like any other automated system, it requires constant feeding and attention to keep you from wondering just why you spent hundreds of dollars and received a paltry return on your investment. Here's 7 great ways I've found to do just that, (and yes I've been guilty of several of these to one degree or another.) 1. - Not getting enough keywords, and I don't mean just numbers. Good ones. A lot of people run a search on their favorite keyword tool and pick the top ten or twenty words or phrases getting the most traffic, thinking somehow that THEY will beat all the others using these keywords. There is a reason why these keywords are so popular: everybody and their grandmother are bidding on them! A

Seven Tips To Getting The Nost From Your Google Ad Word Investment

With Google Ad Words . . . When a person searches Google for a word or phrase related to your product or something on your web site, the Google search return will display your ad. When your ad appears on the Google Ad Words page, you only have to pay for the ad if the visitor clicks on it. Even if the ad appears 10,000 times, you only pay if the ad is clicked on. The cost per click for Ad Words can be as little as five cents. Google provides extensive reporting showing which words and phrases produce the most click throughs for your ad. You can set up as many ads as you like, for as many different products and web pages as you like. There is no cost to set up an Google Ad Word campaign - and you can modify your campaigns as often as you like. Seven tips to getting the most from your Google Ad Word investment 1. Avoid highly searched single words - The biggest mistake made when purchasing Ad Words is trying to buy a single highly searched word. Doing so may seem logical, as more searche

Pay Per Click : Very Expensive Without Expert Help

Despite being online using email since 1995, at the start of the summer of 2004 I had no idea what pay per click was. During that summer, I had taken some time off work and was researching online opportunities. This led me to Ebay, various get rich quick type scams, and then an email referral to marketing using pay per click. What was pay per click, I remember asking. Days of research later, I learned that pay per click (also called ppc) was a type of search marketing where advertisers pay a set amount every time their ad was clicked by a prospect. This is known as a click thru, click through rate or ctr. The opportunity to place your ad directly in front of a prospect at the exact moment they are searching for your product or service is tremendous. Performance based advertising is not only cost efficient and effective, but it is track-able and user-friendly. The advertiser, you, in this scenario has control over the keywords that best represent your product. The PPC model allows you t

5 Tips to Pay-Per-Clicking

I’m here to give you some helpful tips with Pay-Per Click advertising which I learned over the past year. The following 5 Tips will help you target your specific audience, and help reach over 85% of internet users in a fast and effective way. 1. Bid on low cost relevant words When you do your research you need to find words that not only define you website or services but are low cost and have little competition. You will also want to build a wide base of keywords, about a 30 or so to gain the maximum click through rate. 2. Qualify your Title and description This one is simple; remember the 30 keywords you got; now you make up 6 to 7 ads with 3 to 4 keywords in them. By using the keywords in your title and description it is a fact that you can increase your click through rate by almost 40%. 3. Use unique landing pages Now if you are promoting an affiliate product or a matter of fact any product you need to us unique landing pages. You should strive to create landing pages t

Pay-Per-Click Marketing & Natural Search Engine Traffic

PPC advertising has many great benefits. First of all, you get your traffic going quickly. I have used this advantage many times. I test new products and even new websites through PPC advertising before making a decision to promote or scrap my new website or product idea. I am a firm believer in testing new products before throwing large amounts of money into advertising. PPC advertising is a great way to do this. For example, with Google's Adwords program, you can post your ad, pay a $5 sign-up fee and have highly targeted traffic to your website within an hour. How is that for efficiency? Also, you can moniter your click charges and stop them before they get too expensive. By the time you have spent your budget on clicks, you should have a pretty good idea of how successful your product is going to be. I think of PPC advertising as being the most useful when starting a new business or product. WIth PPC advertising, you can quickly and efficiently find out which keywords you need

Pay Per Click: What's It All About?

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No doubt you've heard the phrase "pay per click" before. This refers to any type of advertising where you only pay per click-through. Traditional Web advertising, such as banner ads, charged advertisers based how many people SAW your ad. But with pay-per-click deals, you only pay for how many people actually CLICK on your ad (to get to your offer page or Web site). This is great because essentially you only pay for RESULTS . THE PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH PHENOMENON One of the most popular places pay-per-click has become a phenomenon is within search engines and Web directories. For example, let's use one of my own listings. Go to http://www.yahoo.com/ right now and search for "ezine publishing." On the search results page, you'll see at the VERY top a section called "Sponsor Listings." Guess who is listed up here? Yours truly! In fact, at the time I wrote this article, my book site — http://www.ezinequeen.com/tutorial/index.htm — is list