Dec 12

A Great Way To Get Pay-Per-Click Ads For Free

Pay Per Cick (PPC) No Comments »

A gentleman from New York discovered what he calls an “oversight” on the part of 99.9% of all marketers that allows him to get otherwise paid-for advertising at Google as well as all other search engines that allow sponsored ads.


And no, nothing about his “secret” is illegal – nor does it require that you know someone on the “inside” at Google, Yahoo, MSN, Overture and others.


Instead, the New Yorker boasts proudly “…this is something that I caught onto just before 2000 when there was so much search engine craze running around, and started doing small just to test things at first … but which I later expanded on after getting the hang of it.”


This same fellow went on to start and operate sixteen separate online companies selling everything from pet food, DVDs, children’s toys & games, books, software, and sold not only his own manufactured products but became an affiliate for other web businesses – all the while applying his mastermind secret.


Over the course of nearly eight years the New Englander confesses “I’ve actually gotten over $87 million in advertising that using my secret I never had to pay for … and the largest share of which was more recently in Google pay-per-clicks as well as other forms of pad advertising at search engines … all of which I got for free …”


I must say it really is a new twist on an age-old concept. You may have seen what are called “Ad Sheets” in business opportunity newspapers over the past few years. The designer of the Ad Sheet buys full-page print ad space in bulk so as to receive a sizable discount in the publication. Next, advertisers who could not afford to place ads at regular rates in the publication, instead send their ads to the Ad Sheet organizer who then arranges the ads onto a blank template the size of a full page in the publication and inserts the full-page ad into the magazine or newspaper at his discounted rate.


The net result is, advertisers get the same exposure for a fraction of the cost, while the Ad Sheet organizer makes a healthy profit. It truly is a win-win-win situation for the Ad Sheet organizer, the publication, and the advertisers.


This same concept can be applied to a web page where ad space is sold in the form of banners and text links in order to cover the cost of pay-per-click advertising. The resulting PPC traffic is monetized by offering them ad space on the web page, in addition to presenting offers of interest initially described in the PPC ads.


It’s a most ingenious concept to generate free advertising, and surprising that it had not surfaced on a widespread basis much sooner.

A Top-Earning Internet Marketer and Author in New York City, Scott Michael shows you how to earn an incredible income at home (working just 2 hours a week). Plus, he’ll show you how to get all your Google PPC Ads absolutely free. Money Formula

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Sep 25

PPC Marketing – A Great Method of Advertising!

Pay Per Cick (PPC) No Comments »

PPC marketing or pay per click marketing is the most popular method of advertisement employed by various websites on the Internet. PPC marketing may often be referred to as pay for position, cost per click or pay for performance. But regardless of the term used, PPC marketing is the online advertiser’s medium of choice for promoting products and services to online consumers.

PPC marketing is beneficial to both the advertiser and the consumer. Advertisers using PPC marketing only need to pay for the actual click throughs linked to their sites from search engines. At the same time as consumers are relieved of having to get annoying emails or pop-up ads for products and services.

When an online consumer searches for a specific product or service on the Internet, corresponding PPC marketing ads are also displayed alongside the results generated by the search engine. This forms a highly targeted consumer group that is more likely to purchase a specific product or service. In addition, websites get to limit their advertisement costs with the use of PPC marketing. PPC marketing is truly a winning solution for both parties.

Possible drawbacks of PPC marketing

Despite the obvious advantages of PPC marketing, there are possible drawbacks that can cancel out its benefits. One of the most common problems associated with PPC marketing is the inexperience of many people attempting to use this profitable advertisement method. Simply submitting PPC marketing ads to a search engine such as google, does not make up the entire campaign.

PPC marketing requires a calculated and systematic approach to setting up ads. PPC marketing involves the use of keywords and biddings in order to get top placement on a search engine. Getting top search engine placement helps boost traffic to a website that can easily translate into profit.

Without the necessary experience and knowledge to carry out a typical PPC marketing ad, may turn into an expensive campaign that does not convert into profit. PPC marketing ads also require continuous funding, as discontinued payments will also result in discontinued ads. This can be unfavorable for a website that has already built high rankings with their PPC marketing ads.

Bidding on keywords can also be quite costly, as the growing number of websites on the web struggle against each other to bid on the most popular keyword for their PPC marketing ad. Obviously small business websites are at a disadvantage here since big business websites are able to pay more for popular keywords related to their site. This is because most small businesses only set aside a small portion of their capital for advertisement, putting them at a disadvantage.

Running an effective PPC marketing campaign

There are a number of things that a website should consider when running an effective PPC marketing campaign. It is important to develop a marketing plan in order to get the most return on investment from PPC marketing. Selecting the most appropriate keywords that relate to the site’s business is essential in PPC marketing.

However, simply choosing the most popular keywords does not necessarily translate into profit. Selecting more specific keywords that will put a site within the first ten results of a search also gets greater awareness from online consumers. In addition, it doesn’t cost as much as getting the top spot for PPC marketing.

It is also important that a website constantly monitors the performance of their PPC marketing campaign. This will help the site modify any existing PPC marketing ad to make it more productive. At the same time any PPC marketing ad that has not proven effective can be immediately discontinued. Altering PPC marketing ads is a continuous process that many websites do in order to increase their return on investment.

Getting professional help with PPC marketing

The popularity of PPC marketing has given rise to professionals offering PPC marketing services for small and big businesses. Hiring a professional PPC marketing company is advisable for a small business without experience in PPC marketing. Most PPC marketing companies offer reasonable rates for their services and at the same time produce acceptable results.

A PPC marketing professional can attend to all the details commonly involved in a PPC marketing campaign. Handling a PPC marketing campaign is a time consuming process that can be overwhelming for a small business. A PPC marketing professional can help set up a PPC marketing campaign and later on train someone from within the business to handle it to ensure its continued success.

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Sep 24

Google Bid Simulator

Google Adwords No Comments »

Google have announced a new Adwords feature called Bid Simulator.

From the Google Adwords blog:

Bid Simulator takes some of the guess work out of cost per click (CPC) bidding by estimating the number of clicks or impressions you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid.

Google have also provided a tutorial video showing you how to work out your value per click, and how to use this value to maximize your profits.

This video provides a great overview of the economics of PPC bidding, then goes onto show you how to use the Bid Simulator tool to arrive at the most profitable bid.

In summary:

  • Determine your max profitable CPA
  • Determine your conversion rate
  • Calculate your value per click
  • Adjust your bids so value per click = ICC (Inceremental Cost Per Click)

This tool, whilst useful in terms of taking a lot of trial and error out of bid setting, will provide marginal benefit in areas where the keyword auction is fierce. If the auction is busy above you, then you’re still going to need to raise you bid a lot for minor increases in volume.

Indeed, some of the recommended bid prices seem very high. The danger is that some people may see this as a helpful autopilot, when really it’s just another “suggestion” tool. Be wary.

The tool is possibly most useful when there is moderate activity in the bid range. Andrew Goodman suggests that Bid Simulator might help a lot in terms of saving cash on the low side:

Case by case, it gets interesting. Take, for example, an account where you figure you’ve done a great job whittling average CPC’s down to 23 cents. Now on a lot of the keywords that you’re getting for 15 cents, you’re not doing great ROI-wise, but you’re reasonably content since the price is low by historic and industry standards, you don’t feel like risking the effort to go down to 11 cents. I think the bid simulator may be helpful in helping advertisers decide when to take risks like that. Shaving those few pennies on lukewarm keywords, across several hundred keywords and a thousand clicks a day, can add up to a lot of saved cash you can then turn around and devote to better performing keywords or channels (or simply, profitability).

Also, as it is a simulator, your actual mileage out on the real Google may vary.

Here’s a presentation on how to use the bid simulator within your Adwords account.

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Sep 24

PPC vs SEO

Pay Per Cick (PPC) No Comments »

Search marketing consists of two channels: PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO (search engine optimization). Both channels have advantages and disadavatages you need to consider before committing resources to either approach.

Advantages Of Google AdWords Over SEO

Minimal Impact – Most sites won’t need to make design or layout changes in order to use PPC. SEO often requires site design changes, and these changes can be significant.

Instant – Traffic can start flowing in a matter of minutes once a campaign has been launched. With SEO, traffic can take some time to build, and there is no guarantee it will arrive at all.

Pay On Performance- You only pay when you receive traffic. If you do not receive traffic, you owe nothing. SEO requires a large upfront investment with no guarantees of campaign performance. Traffic and visibility isn’t directly controlled by the SEO.

Precise Keyword Targeting - You chose the keyword terms under which you appear. This allows you to run tightly focused campaigns. With SEO, pages can appear under a wide range of keyword terms, and sometimes these terms are unrelated to your campaign. This can make campaigns difficult to measure.

Precise Tracking And Adjustment – You get instant, precise figures, and you can adjust your campaigns in real time. SEO campaigns can be adjusted, but it is time consuming, and the results of which might not be seen for months.

Landing Page Control – You decide which page search visitors see. With SEO, visitors can arrive on any page the search engine has in its index.

Region Control – You control the regions and countries in which people see the ads. With SEO, you have no control over regions or countries.

Buy Position – want to rank #1? You can pretty much buy it with PPC. SEO is hit and miss affair when it comes to ranking, and ranking for highly competitive keywords can be virtually impossible for new sites.

Control Your Budget – You can specify how much you want to pay for any given period, and you can stop and re-start campaigns when it suits you. SEO is largely an upfront cost, and the campaign can’t easliy be switched off.

Time Control - You can control when your ads are seen. SEO has no such control.

Advantages Of SEO

Given the features and flexibility of PPC, why would people use SEO?

It comes down to two things:

cost per click and trust

SEO has zero cost per click. Of course, this doesn’t mean SEO is free. SEO is time intensive, and time costs money. It can also involve third party costs, such as link buying. However, the on-going cost of a well executed SEO campaign can come in well under that of PPC, especially if good rankings are maintained.

People tend to trust the main listings more so than they trust the paid listings. The main listings receive the lionshare of attention and clicks.

In the study “An Empirical Study Of Paid Listings In Product Search And Purchase” (PDF) the researchers found users to be suspicious of paid results:

For paid listings to yield the financial results that are
anticipated by the business community, it is critical that
consumers perceive paid listings and their descriptions
as relevant to their transactional tasks. The results of this
study support previous findings that this may not be the
case, but also provide some guidance for the
development of paid listings. Participants in the study
showed a bias against paid listings in several ways. They
reported an explicit suspicion about paid listings in their
verbal protocols. They rated the relevance of the paid
listings as lower than the organic listings despite the
content of the descriptions being controlled across listing
type

However, it should be noted that eye pattern studies show both high positioned PPC and organic listings achieve significantly more attention than lower ranking listings, organic or otherwise.

The key location on Google for visibility as determined by the eye activity in the study is a triangle that extends from the top of the results over to the top of the first result, then down to a point on the left side at the bottom of the “above the fold” visible results. This key area was looked at by 100 percent of the participants. In the study, this was referred to as the “Golden Triangle”. Generally, this area appears to include top sponsored, top organic results and Google’s alternative results, including shopping, news or local suggestions.

The Advantages Of Feeding PPC Into SEO, And Vice Versa

Some of the most powerful SEO strategies blend PPC and SEO, taking advanatge of both systems.

PPC is an ideal testing ground for SEO. Typically, the SEO guesses if a keyword term is worth the time and effort of attempting to rank for that term. Perhaps the keyword term doesn’t receive as much traffic as the estimated numbers suggest. By running a PPC campaign on the keyword terms prior to implementing an SEO campaign, the SEO can get more accurate estimate of search volumes. The SEO can also test out the wording of language on landing pages to see how altering the copy to favor search spiders makes a difference to conversions.

Similarly, SEO can feed back into PPC campaigns. Because SEO casts a wide net, traffic logs can sometiems reveal lucrative keyword combinations that the research tools do not.

An SEO strategy, built up over time, should reduce the cost-per-click price of a combined strategy. If a site ranks well for expensive terms, then you may be able to switch PPC bidding away from these terms and use the funds on covering other terms.

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Sep 24

Why You Must Test & Change Your PPC Bid Strategy

Pay Per Cick (PPC) No Comments »

Years ago some noted PPC experts like Perry Marshall recommended bottom fishing AdWords for deals in some competitive markets, claiming that as searchers moved down the listings they were more pre-qualified to make a purchase.

Google’s ad quality score algorithms, bid prices, editorial standards, and the competitive landscape of paid search have changed to where it is much harder to find deals with nickel and dime clicks. Google favors smaller tight lists of keywords over broad mix and match ad groups. And, in an attempt to kill off many forms of ad arbitrage, they made a decision to recycle leading ads against the long tail vs letting longtail advertisers get those clicks for cheap.

27 minutes into this video Dan Thies claims that their sales per click dropped off as their ads moved down the page.

Today George Michie published a blog entry on Search Engine Land about why position bidding wastes money, claiming that the value of traffic doesn’t vary by position (though stating it does vary by time of day and day of week).

The next time someone tries to engage you in a discussion about “finding the right position” for a particular term, remind them that the value of the traffic is measurable; but the cost of a position is unknown, and unknowable, changing based on the whims of your competition. Bottom line: don’t let your competitors run your search program.

Mr. Michie linked to a PDF titled An Empirical Study of Search Engine Advertising Effectiveness – though that statistical study focused on one advertiser in the automotive group. None of these citations should give you a clear optimal bid position strategy, but all should give you encouragement to test your market and find out what works best for you.

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Sep 24

Google Adwords Trickery – Be Relevant

Google Adwords No Comments »

On the face of it, Adwords is a pretty simple system. You bid for keywords, visitors pay per click, and the aim is to get the most visitors for the least money.

However, as anyone who has used Adwords will know, there are a number of tangles and traps, mostly designed to maximize revenue for Google.

The Google business model for Adwords must simultaneously achieve two – seemingly contradictory – goals. It must keep the bid prices high, whilst also keeping the relevance of the advertisements high. Google will not relegate relevance for higher bid prices.

Because Google Adwords works this way, this provides the bidder with opportunities to maximize value from the system, without bidding excessive amounts. One of the best approaches to Adwords is to simply “be more relevant”.

Here are five tips to help you, keeping relevance in mind.

1. How To Increase The CTR Of Individual Keywords

If you’ve got a keyword that matches the following criteria:

  • High number of searches
  • The Ad text is too general

You can quickly raise the CTR of the keyword by simply moving it into it’s own new group and writing an ad specifically for it. This makes the ad more relevant for the keyword, as opposed to getting lost in more general group. Experiment with the Ad copy until you hit the sweet spot.

2. Play To The Known, Not The Unknown

You’ve got to get your message across very quickly, and you only have a few words to do so. To make matters worse, many others links are competing for visitor attention, and the SERP results display more words than you advertisement is permitted.

So go with the familiar. Be hyper-relevant to the visitor by talking about concepts they already know and understand.

If you need to introduce a brand new concept with a test ad, you’re going to find it tough going. Instead, repeat the keyword term in your ad title, and then use ideas and concepts that the searcher is already familiar with. If your concept takes a lot of explaining, then the place to do it is on the landing page.

Focus your efforts on getting the click first.

3. Significantly Reduce Your Bid

Not getting much, if any, response from campaigns with high bids?

Drop ‘em.

This will refocus your attention on the campaigns and ads that actually do work – the terms that are most relevant to your bottom line. If you put most of your effort into what is working, rather than what isn’t, you stand to benefit more. It’s the old 80/20 principle at work. Focus on the productive, not the non-productive.

Secondly, your poorly performing words might not be worthwhile, in terms of ROI, at $2.00 per click, but might do just fine a 0.20 cents per click. Traffic numbers might drop, but so too does the cost of acquisition. If you can make that equation work for you, then it can often pay to get out of the bidding war.

4. Watch the Time

Do you monitor the time of your conversions? You should, mostly because many other advertisers won’t bother.

Use Ad scheduling to display your ads at times of the day when you’re converting the most. This technique works because chances are you’re addressing slightly different needs at different times of the day.

For example, people might not feel comfortable pulling out their credit card in the office to pay for a personal online purchase, but they will do so at home. The relevance of an ad might differ for the same visitor, depending on the context – in this case, at what time of day – they see your ad.

5. Hang Out Where Your Customers Do

A lot of advertisers have problems making the content channel work for them. But this is mostly because the content market requires more effort. The advantage are that the click prices are substantially lower.

Search on the keywords you target, and look at the top sites in the main search results. You want to make a list of all those sites that run Adsense.

Next, you need to isolate those sites where the visitor is likely to have commercial intent.

For example, if site A is about buying electric guitars, as opposed to, say, the history of electric guitars, site A is more likely to deliver real buyers. The advertisements are appearing in a more relevant context for purchasing.

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Sep 24

The Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing Flowchart

Pay Per Cick (PPC) No Comments »

Aaron recently showed me his cool flowchart software and I made a flow chart for PPC.

Let me know what you think. :)

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Sep 23

Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing is a Great Way to Make Money Online

Uncategorized No Comments »

Do you want to work from home? Do you want to turn your computer into an office and business venture? If so, then you need to invest some time and a bit of hard work. In order to make money online, you need a website, and then you have to get traffic to that site, which usually doesn’t happen overnight. However, with pay per click affiliate marketing, you can have a product to promote and get get visitors to your site fast.

If your website isn’t getting any visitors, then you obviously need to promote it more. Not only should you try to generate more visitors, you should also keep your website filled with informative info and original content. In other words, don’t just copy and paste from other sites, you need to make your own as original as possible. Only then will you be able to make money with pay per click affiliate marketing.

Spend some time developing your own marketing strategy. You can find many great ideas all over the internet about how to successfully bring visitors to your site. Some methods cost money while others are free. Once again, making money online doesn’t just happen overnight, so don’t expect to find any shortcuts. Take your time and figure out what tactics work best for you and your pay per click affiliate marketing strategy.

One of the best places to start is Google. A program such as Google AdSense can make you a very wealthy individual, just as long as you’re getting visitors to your website. With this particular type of pay per click affiliate marketing, you can host sponsor ads on your site. This means that other websites that are similar to yours will have a placed banner or link on your website.

So why should you allow competitors to advertise on your own site? Because they’ll pay you for it. Actually, they’ll pay Google for doing it on their behalf. Google AdSense will give you your share of the money every time one of your visitors clicks on your sponsor ads. Some people are so determined to have the best advertising campaign possible, that they are willing to pay a lot of money. In fact, some will even pay upwards to $10 for every single click! If you get thousands of visitors a day to your site, and many of them click on your pay per click affiliate marketing ads, you have the opportunity to earn a significant amount of money.

How will Google know what type of ads to place on your site? It’s simple: whenever you sign up for AdSense and place the ad code on your site, Google will then analyze your site. Their system then places ads that are relevant to the content that your sites page is about. That’s all there really is to it. The hardest part with type of pay per click affiliate marketing is getting your website popular enough for it to be effective in the first place! Once you’ve found a marketing tactic that works, however, you need to stick with it.

Another type of pay per click affiliate marketing is where you promote someone else’s product as an affiliate and then sign up for an account at places such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN Adcenter. You can then create an ad for your product and promote it on these search engines where you pay a certain amount when someone clicks on your ad, which by the way will take them to your site or product. This is a great way to get immediate traffic and visitors.

Matt Henderson, owner of MyOnlineSuccess.com, is an affiliate internet marketing coach. Learn affiliate marketing and how to make money with affiliate programs when you visit http://www.myonlinesuccess.com
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