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For a small business competing in a niche market it is
becoming ever harder to achieve high rankings in the free
search engines. Pay-per-click (”PPC”) advertising can be
a great alternative

Study the workings of the PPC search engines and you’ll bo
on a fast-track to success. Conversely, poor knowledge can
put your business on the slippery slope to ruin. Listen to
me carefully now! Learn how to operate PPC search engines
and you will have a great advantage over your competition.

Advertising on the PPC search engines can be a bit like
attending an auction where you can bid for the top ranked
positions on the keywords of your choosing. Every time a
visitor reaches your website by clicking on your advert at
that search engine you pay the value of your bid. Bid
values typically start at five cents but can be several
dollars for certain highly-competitive keywords.

Let’s talk about the pros and cons of PPC advertising.
First the pros :

1. You are only required to pay when someone clicks through
to you site.

2. This can be an inexpensive way to generate targeted
traffic for your website.

3. Outbid the competition and that top advertising spot can
be yours, no matter how small your business.

4. Some PPC search engines enable a campaign to be up and
away in minutes. Not very long after you could be taking
orders.

5. If the results aren’t all you expected then you can
simply cancel the campaign with immediate effect.

6. Campaigns can be tested and refined very quickly and
very easily.

Unfortunately there are some disadvantages we have to
discuss too -

1. People may click on your advert just because they can.
You will, of course, have to pay for these junk clicks.

2. The cost per click can escalate if you and and your
competition become involved in a bidding war over that top
spot.

3. Your advert may be subject to a strict review prior to
approval. This can delay the start of the campaign
considerably, and you may not like the final advert they
approve.

4. Poor or misleading ad copy may attract visitors but not
generate sales. Without a cap on your advertising budget,
your business could be on the slippery slope to ruin.

So how do you start with PPC advertising? First you need to
establish which keywords your potential customers are
searching on. No point in bidding for traffic on an
inappropriate keyword. There are many ways of doing this
research, unfortunately it is way beyond the scope of this
article. But this is an important step that shouldn’t be
missed and I’ll be covering it more fully in a future
article.

Before you can contemplate making a bid on the keywords
you’ve established it is vital that you know the monetary
value of a visitor to your site. That is you must be able
to calculate on average how much revenue each visitor
generates. Simple math will then tell you how far you can
go in the bidding process.

Admittedly in cases where a site is new and you have no
visitor experience you may want to use PPC advertising to
test your sales copy - but be careful to monitor costs and
sales closely. Also set yourself an initial daily budget
that you can afford to lose if the worst happens and no
sales are made. You can always increase this if your copy
is converting like crazy.

You’re just about ready to dip your toe in the water. I’ve
simply given you an outline here and this is only my
interpretation of PPC advertising, which I suggest you use
as a stepping stone to finding out more for yourself.

Here’s to your online success with PPC advertising.

Mark Vandorone is a great advocate of pay per click
advertising. At his site, Five
Marketing, Mark
offers a very affordable, highly effective pay per click
service.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 at 2:14 am and is filed under Pay-Per-Click Ads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.