Pay Per Click Advertising

One of the biggest impacts on Internet Business Marketing today is clearly Pay Per Click advertising.

Using PPC campaigns can drive instant traffic to your website without having a "list". It can be worthwhile to use as a way to test changes to your website (ad copy, titles, keywords, etc.) and make comparisons for your ROI before you get "natural" traffic. More on ROI and testing is in SEO Marketing and Derek Gehl and IMC.

The most popular search engine today is, of course, Google.com. There are others, but advertising at Google is the surest way to test your ads and get results fast. Their PPC tool is called AdWords. They show their ads on Google's search results pages on the right-hand column. Their ads are also displayed on content sites when webmasters use AdSense scripts on webpages. Other Internet services are trying to catch up.

MSN launched AdCenter recently and they also bought Kanoodle which displays its ads on targetted high-traffic websites. You can select your niche, or type of website where your ads will be displayed, like Sports, News, etc.

Overture is Yahoo's PPC tool, and there are many others. For each, you will need a separate account and a credit card for them to charge you. Some require deposits of $50 or more into that account before you can "turn on your ads".

Ads are created by you in what I refer to as "3 liners". The first line is a headline which is linked to the URL or landing page on your website where you want them to be directed. There are usually 2 more lines that follow and a displayed URL. You might want the displayed URL to include capital letters to distinguish your domain name, like PlanBreview.com, for instance.

Then you load or enter a set of keyword phrases you have selected for driving targetted traffic to your website. I am referring to the keyword research I explained in Traffic and SEO.

Using PPC to Get Traffic for Testing "Everything"

Benefits are obtained quickly by working with two sets of anything you want to test. For instance, you can change your 3-liner ads or something on your website. You keep the best version of the two tests, making the better one a "control".

By changing only ONE thing at a time, you can improve your ROI continually until you are satisfied that you are achieving the results you need to be profitable.

Usually people are satisfied with anything greater than 2 percent, or 0.02. I have heard that 5 percent is outstanding and almost never achieved even by the best Internet Marketers.

Be sure to test your website and ads before you feel satisfied that it is stable to run "virtually by itself" for years while you move onto creating another successful website.

Using PPC Right

Anyone can easily create an account and load up a 3-liner and a few keywords. The hard part is to make those ads pay for themselves. For that you need to consider the cost of the keywords and the pay off you get at the landing page people will see when they click on your ads.

I tried some basic AdWords ads and got some decent results for "playing free PC games". I loaded up over 200 keywords and some were too expensive to run, so I let them be "inactive". I knew I needed more advice to make PPC ads profitable.

AdWords is SO HOT there are several new authors trying to capitalize on teaching people How to Profit from Google AdWords, and other PPC Campaigns.

Perry Marshall is the expert that I recommend on this subject. I downloaded the ebook as soon as I heard about it.

"The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords"

This is the new ebook by Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd.

I have to tell you that I am very greatful for the way he explained it all so my non-technical VP of Sales and Marketing (my hubby, a scientist with no background in marketing) became very literate on the subject right away.

If you want to really understand how to use PPC campaigns for your promotions, "The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords" is the best information to have in your arsenal.

THE BIGGEST BENEFIT OF PPC ADS

Imagine this. The long lasting benefit is that when your run your PPC campaigns, you instantly get the "attention" of the big search engines you are using. Both Google and MSN found my game site right after I started my first AdWord campaign and my Alexa ranking began jumping each week. This might not last forever, but it helps to realize how advertising somewhere can help your search ranking.