Note from the Editor

There are a lot of things that go into running a successful home business. Pay per click is a very popular option; the one way you can have any control at all for where you appear in search engine results. But it has its risks, and not everyone excels at it.

It’s a process I sometimes take a little more time with than others. Mastered, it’s a great income source provided you can keep up with the rules as they change.

The Secrets of Successful Pay Per Click Management

They are not telling you lies. You can have outstanding profits with low expense of effort in a short period of time with PPC marketing. As far as ad campaigns go, it can be the goose that laid the golden egg. What they aren’t telling you is that the ppc marketing campaigns that are a success, result from cunning minds and many hours of manpower.

In order for a pay per click campaign to be successful the first thing that an advertiser needs to do is select the search engine they want to associate with. Naturally, it is Google and Yahoo that do the greatest quantities of business, but they are not the only search engines in existence. A study done by Pay Per Click Universe yielded the following results for the top ten pay per click advertising programs.

1. Google

2. Yahoo!

3. ABC Search

4. Search Feed

5. 7 Search

6. MIVA

7. Enhance Interactive

8. Findology

9. Microsoft adCenter

10. Ask.com

The savvy marketer will take advantage of all of these resources, experimenting to see which will bring in the greatest volume of business.

Selecting the best keywords is the next thing to do on your pathway to ppc success. Good keywords are the ones that are general while not being too general; you don’t need to have a college diploma to think of them but you also don’t want a high percentage of non productive leads because the words are too unspecified.

Many search engines make available a database that contains the most popular keywords that are used in the latest searches. You want to think of these as the beginning of your list not the whole list. Too many of the popular keyword phrases are just too generic to get a good quantity of quality leads.

Once you have selected your keywords you need to decide how much you will bid for those keywords. Search engines display their ppc advertisements based on how much the ads maker will pay whenever someone clicks on the ad. Hey, they want to make money also.

The most honored positions at the top of the page go to the ads that have the highest bidders. Their ads will be in a prime position to be seen. This is good because people who are searching are not going to wade through a dozen pages to find what they searched for, they want it in the first 5 or so pages.

Finally, there is no such thing as too much micromanagement when it comes to managing a pay per click marketing campaign. It is essential that a marketer know at all times precisely how much business their advertisements are bringing in. This allows them to redirect the campaign if it seems that the advertisements already in place are not doing their job, make minor adjustments as necessary and avert small problems before they become full blown disasters.

By carefully managing and researching hundreds of dollars can be made from ppc marketing; but it is vital to remember that this type of advertising is in large part a matter of trial and error. Don let yourself become discouraged if you don’t have 500 dollars profit showing up in your bank account right after your campaigns are set in motion. Don’t forget, “good things come to those who wait”.

Having over ten years of experience in pay per click management , Kirt Christensen, will share his expertise in PPC management, by giving you tips he found that work (and some that don’t work). http://www.managemypayperclick.com

Note from the Editor

If you’ve been kicking back for the summer, it’s time to start working harder again. Summer is getting ready to end all too soon.

You can see the signs. Just go to Target or WalMart and see all the Back to School supplies. Same for any store that sells children’s clothing. And in my area, school starts back up in less than a month.

Start getting back into a routine now if you fell out of your old one. Get to building those good working habits back up.

11 Tips for Pay-Per-Click Success

This list details some very important points to keep in mind when creating or managing any pay-per-click campaign. Is this all there is to know about pay-per-click advertising? Absolutely not, but for those new to PPC it should serve as good place to start. Additionally, pay-per-click veterans or at least the moderately-seasoned will want to touch upon these points now and then to brush up on their fundamentals.

1) Do your keyword homework. Use Google’s free Keyword Tool or sign up for a WordTracker account to find out which keywords are the most competitive. The more competitive the keyword, the more expensive your clicks will be. While you’re finding out which keywords are too expensive you’ll come across some that aren’t being targeted heavily by advertisers. Take a good look at these – they may be your keys to a successful niche campaign.

2) Don’t bunch your ad groups. You should be striving to separate your ad groups by keyword. Whatever your target, separate your keyword lists into closely related groups containing the same target words and write ads geared specifically to those words. Your ads will show up higher in results based on their quality, and search terms show up bold in results – a click-through rate booster.

3) Drive home your selling point. What’s your offer? Why are you better than the others? Remember that your ads are going to display with your competitors. The difference between a user clicking your ad and clicking a competitor ad is about 100 pixels on the screen – or a millisecond of time. You need to convince them that you are the one they want. You are better. Grab them.

4) Don’t send users to your home page. This is perhaps one of the worst things you can do to your Pay-Per-Click campaign. Internet users are notoriously impatient. Send them to your home page when they were searching for a specific product or service and see how fast they leave. Don’t waste your advertising budget – send them to optimized landing pages.

5) Optimize your landing pages. Your landing pages need to drive something home immediately for your users: “you have landed in the right place.” They need to know that, yes, this is what they were looking for, here it is, here is why it is better than the rest and here’s the easy thing they need to do to get it. In most cases you’ll need to create multiple landing pages based on your different ad groups and keywords, but look at it this way – if your users aren’t landing at pages geared exactly to their search phrases they’ll leave and take your advertising budget with them.

6) Don’t lie in your ads. People aren’t dumb. If you promise something in your ads you had better well deliver. Otherwise you’ll not only waste advertising dollars but damage your brand. Be honest, and focus on points that make you stand out from the competition. Grandiose ad text might bring in clicks, but if it isn’t the truth it won’t bring in conversions.

7) Your domain name counts. In most cases you can display a domain name that you own as the “display domain” but point the ads to a page on a different domain. Why does this matter? If you own a domain name that contains the keyword text it will show up bold and increase conversions. Enter the optimized domain as the displayed domain, point the ads to your landing pages and you can expect higher CTRs in most cases.

Utilize negative keywords. Google has a new Negative Keyword Tool that will allow you to find negative keywords that you should specify for your ads. Negative keywords are those that you don’t want your ads to display for. For example, if you’re selling “blue widgets” you don’t want to display your ads to those users searching for “free blue widgets.” If you don’t use negative keywords you are missing out on a chance to get more targeted traffic to your landing pages, and this can really hurt your conversion rates.

9) Test, test, and test some more. The greatest thing about internet advertising is the ability it grants you to measure your success. It’s easy to create A/B split tests with Pay-Per-Click advertising. Change one word, add a comma, include a value proposition. . .just make sure you only change one thing for each split or you won’t know which variable it was that made the difference! You’ll find out right away that this is a great way to optimize your click-through rates – just don’t forget that clicks aren’t everything!

10) Don’t focus too heavily on CTRs. Getting tons of clicks isn’t always the name of the game. In fact, if you aren’t using proper techniques to ensure that you’re getting targeted traffic and sending it to well-optimized landing pages you can blow through your advertising budget in no time flat. Remember that the success of any advertisement is getting back more than you put in. It’s an investment, not a cost – so do all that you can to better your rate of return!

11) Don’t pigeonhole yourself. We all know that Google AdWords is the most popular Pay-Per-Click service out there. Your competitors know it, your users know it – even your grandma might know it. It would be foolish to ignore Google as a venue for advertising, but don’t forget that there are other search engines out there who offer similar services. Yahoo!’s new Panama search system is catching on, and Microsoft’s adCenter is nothing to sneeze at either. Both companies are currently offering sweet promo

Mike Tekula is the founder and Lead Strategist at Tek Web Solutions in New York and specializes in W3C Standards compliance, search engine optimization and generating increased web site traffic.tional deals to new Pay-Per-Click advertisers to stay competitive so take advantage and diversify!

Note from the Editor

Not really business related, but happy Valentine’s Day to all. I hope it went well for you both personally and professionally if you sell anything remotely related.

I’ve been working hard on meeting my goals. Yesterday I met my goal of posting a good number of quality comments on interesting and relevant blog posts. I think it went well enough that I will try increasing the goal next week. My feeling is that I can build up a good list of blogs for regular comments and combine that with finding new ones to balance things out.

Marketing has long been one of my weak points. It’s just more challenging to me than creating content. But I’m determined to make it work for me so that I see more money coming in for my efforts. After all, the bottom line is, err, the bottom line.

Getting Pay Per Click to Click for You

One of the fastest ways to get traffic to your website is to start a pay per click campaign. This can take you from zero visitors to as many as you can target and afford very quickly. But it can also be a disaster if you don’t manage your campaigns well, don’t do your keyword research and don’t really look at your overall profit.

The principles sound easy. Find keywords. Write an ad. Set a price per click and a budget. Watch what happens.

Oooh are you asking for trouble if you think that’s all there is to it!

Solid keyword research is vital. I do like Wordtracker personally. You can use the free trial to get started, but if you’re going to get serious about pay per click I strongly recommend you switch over to the paid version after you’ve done some brainstorming and know where you want to start off. It really does help.

Think about which search engines you want to use. Google and Yahoo are the big ones, but some people like to test their campaigns on the minor engines. Doing so may or may not be a good thing. Some people feel there may be more risk of click fraud and poor quality traffic on the minor engines. On the plus side, cost per click is typically significantly lower.

No matter which engine you use, make sure you test several different ads. You cannot assume that you will get it right with the first one you write. Even so small a difference as singular versus plural can make a difference.

You will want to use negative keywords. These are keywords which you do not want included. In many cases this will include words such as “free” or “cheap,” but can also include words that make phrases unrelated to your offer. If you’re bidding on “soap,” do you want it to go along with “opera” or “dishwasher?”

Consider including your price. Some find this works very well for their conversion rate, as those scared off by the price won’t click if they don’t like it.

Unless you are experienced and have a large budget, don’t go for the most obvious keywords. Sure, you’d love to get found by people typing in your dream keyword, right?

Actually… no, probably not. In many cases people who type in the plain keyword are researching, not shopping. If they type in more details they are often more serious about buying. Use phrases, not individual words.

You will also want to use either exact or phrase matching. These are indicated by [] or by “” around the phrase you would like to bid on. This will lower your costs and get you the most qualified visitors. Without either of these you will probably get traffic that is not as well targeted.

Be prepared for differences between the different search engines. That campaign you test on a small engine may be a flop on Google. Or it may still perform brilliantly. No matter what you think will happen, be prepared to test, test, test.

Watch your bids, your budget and your profits. You may find out that you are overpaying for clicks. You could also be underpaying. Sometimes even the position on the page can determine how well your ad performs.

Mastering pay per click is tough. Some will succeed brilliantly at it and make delightful profits with little efforts. Others will struggle. But no matter which way it goes for you, you need to keep an eye on the bottom line and know when to change things.

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