PPC is one of the fastest and targeted traffic generator the web has known, so if you are a new business owner your chances of making profit for your service or product is very vital online. BUT sometimes it might not be the case for some products or services that you are promoting.

What Happened???

Earlier this year, I found a very interesting local business where the competition was  not that strong terms of SEO and PPC. I decided to give it a try. As it’s a No Capital Down project – that means I have to pay for the PPC traffic for this new business. I decided to put a daily budget of $25. So my PPC costs should be around $750 total over 30 days.

Little did I know that the PPC bids on keywords for this local business was around $2 to $4. If I were to take $3 per keyword bid, I will only have 8 clicks for this business per day. Thank God that the keywords that I used are converting with average of 15% for click through rate. But it was not enough.

I was able to make some profits on the 1st month after cutting my costs, which me and my partners did not get any salary out of it. This goes on for a good 3 months.

Although every month, we could see that our profits are increasing, due to the SEO part for the website was done correctly and that the competition was not that strong either.

So on the 4th month, I decided to lower our PPC budget to $20 per day to test out. Our business did not drop, instead it became better and we had more profits. Then finally on the 5th month – our website finally received good SEO rankings for converting keywords. That was the turning point and I decided to stop the PPC all together (as well as our sponsored advertising on Yahoo and MSN).

That’s when we saw the real money coming in in terms of thousands of dollars – although we still have cost – but the major cost which was PPC was FINALLY stopped. This  meant we finally had much higher realized profits.

What went right for us?

The thing that went right for us was that we positioned our business targeting PPC and SEO together at the same time. We needed customers to start the cashflow running so PPC was used first. Also at the same time we finally continued working on the SEO aspects of the website.

During the 4 month period – it also became a good time for us to find out what are the keywords that people are targeting.

Without using Pay Per Click Marketing and Google Adwords, I would have missed out a on a very important keyword that was totally different from our primary keyword – and yet it has the almost the same meaning. We wouldn’t have discovered the important converting keyword without PPC.

We also created new content with new web pages based on the keywords that were converting from the Google AdWords reports. Creating more new relevant content for our targeted customers became very fruitful in our SEO efforts.

Summary

I must say that this business has made me realised that the beginning of new businesses will be tough and may not even make any money on the first month. I was lucky to have make at least a hundred dollars in profits. It was our consistency and our persistence in this new business that gave us the reward that can be seen now.

I will not stop using PPC as the main tool to find out the real demand of the market, and using SEO to get to that market free of charge.

This should be your goal too. If you have a different way to market your new business, do share below in general. I will be happy to hear from you.

Cost Per Click (CPC) in Adwords is the cost of each click when someone searches and found your PPC ads relevant, this is the price that you pay for the traffic from Google. So if you have a high cost per click, it just means that you have a very competitive keyword and that a lot of your competitors wants a position in the first page of the search result as well.

In my previous post, on High Cost Pay Click, Competitive Market, What To Do!, I shared on how to rectify when you have this situation.

Today, I will go further on why the cost per click will continue to increase in cost, and how you can further solve this ever increasing cost per click problem by just changing a very simple yet not known to a lot of PPC users.

Why Cost Per Click Will Continue to Increase in Cost?

As more and more people realised the power of the Internet, where they can track results on their business, whether their advertising is working, how many people saw the ad, how many click on the ad, how many become leads from the ad, and how many was converted to sales from the ad. All this can be track, whereas the newspaper you can’t track a lot of things like how many saw your ads, this is a very important element that we as marketers want to know. This can be shown only in the online marketing.

The supply (number of ad positions) in the Google search results is only 11, and there can be as many as 100 competing to be on the page one of the search result, thus making the cost per click increase more than ever before. This is just like in stock market where there are a lot of buyers, but little sellers, making the price of the stock increase in value. We as PPC users are the main cause of making the cost per click increase.

So how do we find solution to this problem?

I shared a smart solution on the post of High Cost Per Click, Competitive Market, What To Do! You can read more about it. Today I will share with you on a more advance strategy where most PPC marketers do not use and that you can take advantage in.

One of the most important reason why some keywords are so expensive are they are very general and usually make up of 2 or 3 words. This is where the most expensive keywords are usually landed. In order to get a better keyword to target, you need to target on the long tail keywords of the market you are in.

You need to find out at first what is most general keyword of your market, preferable two words or less, then from there buy this keyword in the PPC position where most will see and click on your PPC ad. I would use phrase and exact match only for this strategy.

What this will do is help you in two things, one is to find out the long tail keywords people are using to search online, second is to find out the negative keywords that are not in your negative keywords list in your Adwords campaign. Thus making your campaign very tight and focus.

I will share next on how to even tighten and focus on your Adwords Campaign on the coming post. Do you have anything that you want to know, or not sure? Please use the comment and I will reply to you.

What do you do when you have a high cost per click (CPC), like $4 and above and in a competitive market or niche that is full of Adwords PPC ads (more than 11 PPC ads). Do you quit or continue?

Quitting is a very easy choice to do. You may not have enough budget to carry on or the sales or conversion is very low using PPC, thus not making profit and the cost did not go down as well. It may seem that quitting is the way out now, but do you know that you can rectify the situation by doing some correction on your PPC campaign?

First, you need to realise that you need to correct three things that will turn your situation around instantly.

1) Writing compelling PPC ads that will attract clicks, and to position your ads on the above the fold area (preferable from position 1 to 5 at least). Spit test the PPC ads as well in a ad group. The keywords are to be place on the headline of the PPC ad, so that you can get good quality score.

2) Targeting conversion only keywords. This way you can ignore those that do not bring in the profit. If you have been using Adwords PPC for at least 2 to 3months, you can find out which keywords convert sales. You will need to have the Adwords conversion code in your thank you page, will you find out the conversion keywords. Read how to set up Adwords conversion code tracking.

3) One Landing Page To One Ad Group. Having a landing page that only targets a specific keywords in a Ad group, can also increase quality score, thus lowering the CPC of a particular keyword.

The above way can only work if you only have budget to continue with, but what happens when you do not have enough budget? One very simple tip is to place your Ad on the first position of the second page. Yes you hear me, second page of the search result.

Most of the PPC ads are competing for the first page of the keyword there are targeting, because there are the most 11 places on the search result, if there are more than 11 ads, then the 12th person will have to pay CPC that is at least higher than the 11th ad, presumably all are new ads. This is where the the demand (more than 11 ads on a particular keyword) is more than the supply (11 ad positions).

There is a saying that those who really want to find what they are looking for will go for the extra mile of searching the second and even the third page of the search result. They are really looking for the product or services you are providing. This has a huge advantage compare to the been on the first page.

a) Lesser Impressions; I mean much lesser impressions than on page one. This will greatly increase your CTR of your keyword because the impressions have greatly decrease.

b) More Targeted Audience; These people are the ones that will go the extra mile, and they mostly are buyers.

c) Cost Per Click Decreases; Because it is in the second page, the cost is so much lower than the first page, it can go as low as 90% less than in the first page itself.

I have shared with you on amending your PPC ads, keywords and landing page for those who can continue to target on the first page. For those who do not have enough budget to carry on, the second page will be a great idea to go into instead of the first. This is not just theory, it is very practical and what you always need to do is to test it first. Sometimes it does not suit the niche you are in for the second page, you got to test!

Can using PPC marketing to increase SEO ranking? I must say that it can’t be done, as PPC does not affect any SEO ranking on your website. But PPC can help to find out the profitable keywords and you in turn focus on these keywords to rank better in terms of SEO.

Finding out from the keywords that converts in PPC and using it on your website as SEO is a smart way to get free traffic. This will help you focus on driving conversion traffic instead of those that does not convert is a much better and faster way to making money online.

This can be done when you have collected your data from your Adwords PPC campaign, once you find out from your campaign which are the highest conversion keywords, you should do your best to rank on the page one on the search engine result for the keywords you are targeting.

Here are some of the blog post I written on SEO that will help you:

1) Basic On-Page Optimization For Your Web Page

2) Page Rank: Is It That Important?

3) 3 Ways To Increase Your Page Rank

4) SEO and Backlinks: The Importance of Building Backlinks

PPC and SEO are two separate strategies that uses the search engine results, but they are in a way great for complementing each other in the search engine. PPC and SEO are a match made in heaven.

As we know that SEO is a free organic search result for the search term you want to optimize in. The major problem is that it is not instant result like PPC. And as for PPC the main problem is that it is not free (pay per click), but instant result within minutes. Because each has a disadvantage that can only be complimented by each other, that is why when you use PPC, you should optimize in SEO as well.

Besides the reason above, as PPC will give you the raw data of a particular keyword, telling you if its profitable to optimize the particular keyword in SEO. A lot of PPC users do not realized how important this raw data can be to your online business. What this raw data that I am talking about is the impressions. It tells you whether are there people searching online for that search term. If the impressions in a month is more than 100 impressions, then all the more you should optimize in SEO.

Knowing that most of the search users do not trust PPC ads, as its just like the advertisement you see on the T.V or when you are shopping in a mall. You can ask yourself this question too, “Do you trust or even take note of the ads you see everywhere?” I can say that most of the time is yes, maybe like 95% of the time.

With the above two points, all the more you should optimize your website in SEO.

Another important point is that, sometime you are not able to optimize your web page to at least page one of the desired keyword. With your compitetitors having thousands of pages, having great page rank and good link back to that particular web page, you will almost not able to make it to page one of the search engine result. How can you be able to position yourself in page one then?

The answer is through PPC ads. With strong competitors in page one or even page two of search engine result, only through using PPC will you be able to reach your target audiences in the first page.

With so much advantages in using both PPC and SEO strategies, there seem no reason not to use both of them for your online business. What say you about this post. Do you use them for driving traffic?

Here are some of the reason why and when you should create a new Google Adwords account:

Reason 1: Too many Campaigns that you needed a new account for new project using PPC to drive traffic to your website.You have a lot of affiliate products to promote and earning you profit. So once you hit 25 campaigns, you will have to create a new account for the new affiliate products, when you reach this level, it means you are doing very well in online marketing.

NOTE; Do not get into too many affiliate products to promote at first, instead go slow one by one, staring with one that you are familiar with. Then promote related product or services, this way you are able to optimized from the lists you have build from the previous projects.

Reason 2: Target different countries also known as GEO Targeting. Due to the different natural of people’s search term. You would want to separate them up, so that you can get the most targeted audience to your landing page.

Something that most PPC marketers do not know is that if you target to a specific country or state, you will find that most of the competition are not there, you can easily dominate from there onwards. And this will also give you a cutting edge information about the people in that area. For example, if there is a festival event which is related to your products or services, you can write ads to that group, thus having high CTR and sales too.

GEO targeting can help influence quality score, because you are only looking into that particular group of people only.

Reason 3: You are a PPC marketing consultant, so it’s best if you can set up different account for different clients, so you will not mix up or worst let your other clients see your other client’s PPC campaign.

This is one of the PPC mistakes you would not want to make if you are a professional PPC consultant, your client might think that “If you can let me see your other client’s PPC account, then I would be the same when this happens too.” So be careful.

Reason 4: Bad result, bad quality score history. This is a very good reason to start a new account all over, as Google Adwords stored the history you done in that particular account.

It’s like not having great result when you are schooling, and it follows you till you are adult. One good thing is that Google Adwords only remember the history of one account, as long as the new account has good to great quality score history, your new campaign will get good treatment as long as you can generate good CTR.

Reason 5: Different currency for Adwords for your PPC clients. As PPC is not just on a targeted area, but it can be done globally even if your client is in Australia, and you are in United States.

This is more for PPC consultants. As they may want to GEO target their country only, that is why you have to set up new account for different clients especially if they are in different countries, as they would prefer to pay using their own currency. By the way, once you have set the currency for that new Adwords account, it cannot be change anymore.

I have listed the above 5 reasons that you will need to create a new Adwords account.There may be other reasons that you might want to create a new Adwords account. Remember that a new account will mean that you have not history with Google, so your quality score history is not build yet. Next post I will share on how to build great quality score history with Google Adwords.

Do you have any other reason or you have questions you like to ask, feel free to use the comment below and I will answer your question soon.

Taken From www.uncyclopedia.wikia.com

Have you ever been in a new untapped niche which you think is going to be profitable, but after you have fully enter into the niche, using all sorts of skills like SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, lead capture, article marketing, video marketing, etc… You found that its not making you money, what went wrong?

It is because you did not test the market before going in full force. In marketing, it is wise to always test the market first.

Since the start of PPC on the internet, it has change how marketers market to their customers. Besides driving traffic to your web pages, you can also use PPC to test if the market is profitable before you go in full force. Here is how you can test the market:

First, do your keyword research on the niche you want to be in. I would suggest that you have 10 ad groups that have phrase and exact match keywords, total keywords in one ad group is 10.

Second, is to choose a product to promote. For beginners its better that you have some knowledge of the product which you are promoting, so that you can write your ads and landing page with better conviction.

Third, place your PPC ads blow the fold, place it between 7 to 9 position. This way you will not lightly incur any clicks, but at the same time find out if there are real impressions of people searching for your product online.

BUT WAIT A MINUTE! This way I am not going to get any traffic from the PPC then?

Yes, most likely! This exercise is to test the raw data impression in terms of keywords used in the search engine. Google can always give you the estimate traffic using the Free Adwords Keyword Tool, but they are not in raw data, its an estimation only.

So that is why its so important to use Adwords to test the market you want to go into. You can also choose to go in above the fold positions if you want, for example in the third position. Remember this exercise is to test the market within a time flame, you choose the time flame you want to test this market. I would recommend to use the one week time flame to test it out for optimum results.

Always remember if you do not want to make a loss in you online business, you have to test it first. And Adwords PPC (other PPC like Yahoo and MSN is fine) is the best tool to test it, this will help you understand more on the niche. Do you have any other way to test the market that involves very little cost and precise in the data result? If you have any I like to hear from you. Or if you have any questions regarding testing untapped niches using Adwords, do use the comment below, I will reply to you shortly.

In previous post on to use content or search network for your Adwords, the very next time you should be focusing is to plan your marketing strategies. Without a detailed plan or focus, you can be sure that your PPC will not be put into the best use for marketing.

Here are some of the well known PPC marketing strategies that you might want to consider using:

Pay Per Sale Strategy Using PPC

This is by far the oldest form of affiliate marketing using PPC. Using a direct linking from your PPC ads, to the sales copy of the product or service. Do note that direct linking is not a very good way to generate sale as Adwords do not like web pages that has pop in, or pop out, things that will suddenly pop out when viewing the web page.

Why Google do not like pop out?

This is because pop out does not give good search engine users good experience. It is a nuisance and hard to get rid of it when you reach the web page. Thus most Internet marketers will use email marketing instead of direct linking. OR you have to make sure that the affiliate product that you are promoting do not have a pop out, then direct linking will be good choice for PPC.

Pay Per Lead Strategy Using PPC

Pay per lead or pay per action has been in rising popularity these days, as PPC has been rising in price, so it does not make sense for the companies to get the leads, so companies will get online marketers to get them quality leads for them. You can see that a lot of the Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs now.

Wait!!!! Didn’t you say that using PPC for pay per lead is going to be expensive!

Yes, you are right. And it still can be done by choosing the pay per lead affiliate that pays you a lot (of course this is going to be very competitive also, and SEO is a better strategy).

Second is to find the company that needs that pay per lead, this way you will get to be pay more than the ones in the affiliate program. This is best done for local services. Getting leads from the search engines are by far having the highest conversion than from newspaper ads, and its even cheaper as well.

Lead Capture Strategy Using PPC

If you are not really comfortable using the direct linking strategy, then I would suggest that you build a list of targeted names and emails who are interested in a certain market. You can use PPC to lead capture their names and emails, email them news and offers of new products.

There is a saying, “The money is in the list”. Yes it is in the list, using PPC to pay for it. You will need to build a squeeze page for lead capture, and a auto-responder to store the names and emails, and to send them email to upsell them again and again and again.

If you want to know how to set up this lead capture system, go to Learn Build Squeeze Page here.

Drive Traffic to Website, While SEO builds ranking

You have a new website, and no traffic coming from the search engines. The fastest way to drive traffic is to use PPC. While driving traffic to the new website, you have to concurrently do your website SEO. Because in the long run, you will to have free traffic coming to your website, and cutting down on your PPC.

Second season is that not all web pages will be able to target all the related keywords to your website, that is why you will still need to use PPC to target those unreachable keywords. Making your website all rounder in the area of search marketing.

Whatever strategy you use above, in the end you need to find out which suits your result most. You may have to test all four of them to find out which suits best for you. Remember that marketing is all above testing.

By the way, I like to hear from you what kind of PPC strategy you use to get your outcome. Use the comment below, hear from you soon.

PPC or Pay Per Click marketing is where you pay for each click on the ad you place on the search engines, be it Google, Yahoo, MSN or other smaller search engines. You have to understand that traffic coming to your web page does not mean you will be making money or profit.

That is why I have these 3 fundamental tips for using PPC as a form for sale or lead capture:

Find Out Terms or Words People are Using to Search for your Product or Services. Many of the people who first started do not really care about finding out what do people search online, especially the terms. That is why a great way is to use a keyword research tool to do that for you.

Another way is to ask friends how they search online. If they are looking for such products or services, get them to show you how they search online, by typing the specific words.

The last way is to think of how you yourself will search online for the product. This way, you would have cover a mass area of keywords and phrases to target your market.

Compelling PPC that will Grab the Attention of the Searchers. Next on the line is to have a ad that will draw your targeted audience to click on your PPC ad. I will be sharing with you more on writing great compelling ads and some review in some PPC ads that really draw my attention.

A Call to Action Web Page. Lastly a web page or landing page to entreat your traffic to take action, be it to click on another link or to give you their details, it must be voluntarily on the searcher’s part. We must always present relevancy to what the searchers are looking for online, will there be a higher chances of them taking action.

As a PPC marketer, these three are the most basic fundamental skills we MUST have in order to succeed online. Nothing beats more when we give irrelevant content or services to the searchers, which would not give the searcher a good online experience, and will kill our PPC marketing as well. It is best to keep on learning and changing during the process, so that you can maximize the learning curve and profit online using PPC.