Post written by Dana Prince

Those who want to be successful online in e-business quickly learn that traffic is a vital ingredient for profit and success. They also learn that there are many ways to capture traffic; although the methods aren’t always easy and they’re not always free. A PPC (pay per click) campaign offers several ways to get traffic to your website. Do it well and that traffic could translate to profit. Do it wrong and it could be an expensive lesson.

 In a nutshell, traffic received via PPC advertising can arrive to your sales landing page and you can then work on converting that traffic into a paying customer. Your ad could be placed in search engines, on websites and blogs, and even in someone’s email. PPC via Google Adwords could be a very profitable proposition.

 What is a PPC Campaign?

 A pay per click campaign involves paying a fee for visits to your website from people. You can arrange this with various search engines and marketing companies. You could pay a fee per click and you could also pay fees per page impression as well.

 Learning how to use pay per click to your advantage could be very lucrative and some websites and entrepreneurs use pay per click quite successfully as part of their search engine marketing strategy.

But how can you Make Money with PPC ads that cost money?

Here are some examples:

• Open an online store. Set up the website and start a pay per click campaign to drive interested traffic to your store. If the cost per click is low and the profit margin is high, you’ve got great potential.
• Do affiliate marketing. By being a facilitator that drives traffic to someone else’s site, you can make a commission for every sale. Bid on keywords that relate to an affiliate product and write great ads to drive qualified traffic to the landing page.
• Create a website and sign up for a Google Adsense account which will put contextual advertising on your website. Once your site displays ads, you can earn money when your site’s visitors click on the ads.

Let’s look at each of the above scenarios a bit more closely:

E-Commerce:

If you sell something in an online store, pay per click ads could be created to drive interested individuals to your store. If you sold shoes, for instance, you could arrange to have your shoe ads shown when people key in specific words related to shoes. Those people may be shopping for a new pair of shoes and land on your online store.

Affiliate Marketing:

Campaigns can be created so that you can direct traffic to a landing page that has your special affiliate code.  When that traffic results in a sale, you earn commission. The concept is used by many online entrepreneurs and by being an affiliate internet marketer, you don’t even have to touch product in order to earn from its sale. By getting traffic for the wholesaler or product creator, you could make commission fees.

Content Sites:

Many blogs and other topical websites are filled with ads. The website owner displays ads on their site and if people click those ads and / or buy something from the resulting page, the content site owner makes a percentage of a fee shared by a company such as Google.

More about Pay Per Click

PPC enables targeted advertising based on keywords and phrases.  Because people may be on a web page due to an interest in a particular topic on the page, relevant ads may also appear. If you’re the owner of a website selling vitamins, for instance, your ad could appear on a search engine results page related to particular phrases as well as in banners on health blogs, health forums, and in someone’s e-mail because of words in their messages related to health, vitamins, or illnesses.  

A PPC advertisement for vitamins might look like this:

Need vitamin C?

Check out our specials on vitamin C. Free Shipping!

URL

The advertiser pays for the click or the showing of the ad (depending on their campaign) and if you, the web surfer, buy something from that site, they’ve benefited from their PPC investment.

A Word of Caution:

A lot of different companies use paid search engine marketing campaigns to gain an edge but not everyone is able to do so successfully. Most use a combination of search engine marketing and organic search engine optimization (SEO) to drive as much traffic to their website as possible. Not all traffic is equal, not all pay per click ads will result in a sale, and not everyone will master PPC and make money at it.

Pay per click can be expensive and just because someone clicks, that doesn’t mean their click will result in a sale. It’s important to learn strategies of successful internet marketing techniques before creating a paid campaign.  Learning ‘as you go’ could be an expensive lesson.

Post written by Dana Prince

If you want to make money online, PPC (pay per click) advertising is one way to do it.  Most people who surf the web are very familiar with advertisements that turn up on search engine results pages, on blogs, and even in their free e-mail inbox. When you click those ads, someone is paying money for your clicks so that they can have an opportunity to market to you. If you sign up for a pay per click advertising campaign, you could bring interested traffic to your monetized website.

Just like companies pay to advertise on the TV, on the radio, and in newspapers and magazines, companies and entrepreneurs can also pay to advertise on websites. Google, for instance, offers the Google Adwords program, which gives website owners the opportunity to get the attention of people who may be interested in what they have to sell.

Google Pay Per Click Ads

A Google sponsored advertisement can appear on websites and in search engines.  If you have a Gmail account, for instance, you’ll probably notice that advertisements are regularly displayed horizontally across the top of your screen. Those ads typically relate to your email subject matter. Google software eavesdrops on your conversations in order to present topically relevant advertisement that may interest you. 

The same thing happens when you’re surfing the search engines for something. Google presents organic listings of what it believes you are looking for and you’ll notice that both horizontally as well as vertically on search engine results pages page you’ll also see sponsored advertisements that relate to your search engine phrases as well. Website owners subscribe to particular words and phrases and if you click those ads, the advertiser pays a fee for getting your attention.

Contextual Advertising

Web publishers who have websites and blogs can also display contextual sponsored advertisements so if you participate in a PPC campaign, your ad could be displayed on a site that gets a lot of traffic on a daily basis. Google’s software reads the page and then based on the words and phrases in the page, it determines which relevant ads to display.  Website owners that participate in pay per click campaigns have a lot of opportunities to get the attention of interested prospective customers.

How do you Create a Profitable PPC campaign?

PPC ads can be very profitable but they can also be very expensive and it can be a bit like taking a gamble. But you can get educated so that you’re taking a more calculated risk, rather than playing a game of roulette.  

It’s important that you recognize that it may cost you money in order to get a sale. If you’re selling a product on your website that’s $30.00, it may cost you only $0.25 to get that sale. But it could also cost you more than $30 to get a sale so learning PPC strategies and preparing for your campaign is important.

Here are some tips for maximizing the potential of your pay per click campaign:

• Look for information that helps you learn PPC strategies before you get started. Taking time to get acquainted with this type of advertising will help you earn a better return on your advertising dollar.
• Carefully set your budget. Analyze the cost of the click against the profit for the product you’re selling. An average conversion rate from visitors to customers is often about 2% if a website has a product people want and good sales copy so factor in the cost of 100 clicks equating to about two sales. (The numbers aren’t guaranteed but this can be an average to keep in mind). In this case, for example, twenty-five cents per click is probably too high of a fee for a thirty-dollar commission.
• Do keyword research. Choosing the right keywords in PPC advertising is vital. Because you’re paying per click, you want to pay for words that can have a good chance of converting to a sale so that you attract people who are ready to buy.  The goal is to look for highly searched terms that aren’t highly competitive (whenever possible).
• Work at achieving as high a Google quality score as possible. Your quality score is assigned based on several factors including: how relevant your landing page is to your advertisement, whether or not your domain name uses keywords in it, and several other factors. By learning about these factors you can get better page placement for your ad as well as pay less for each click.
• Search engine optimization is also important for pay per click campaigns. Work on organically optimizing your site. Paid traffic is nice but optimization for natural site indexing is a good idea as well. Not only will it bring you free traffic but this, too, will up your Google quality score.
• Learn to write compelling ads. In order to get people to click your ad, the text in the ad has to be attention-grabbing. You have just two small lines of text to do so, so it’s a good idea to analyze other pay per click ads to help you come up with ideas.
• Analyze your reports faithfully. By regularly looking at your pay per click reports and website analytics you’ll be able to see what’s working, what’s not, and adjust your campaign(s) accordingly. This information can help you tweak your sales copy, adjust your keywords, and replicate campaigns that are successful.

The more qualified traffic you get to your site, the better. There are a lot of ways to do that in internet marketing and pay per click campaigns can be very profitable if you learn how to maximize their potential.