Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.

Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.

As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.

Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier – and more effective – the process will be.

The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position – which can obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.

In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.

The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.

Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit.

The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good news is there isn’t a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because additional keywords do not add additional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords.

Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than others are, but they will not cost you anything except time to set-up your account in your pay-per-click bid. Of the popular search engines that offer pay-per-click, one called Overture provides an online tool that will give you the data on how often particular keywords are entered into their search engine. They also offer suggestions for keywords after you enter a description of your site.

In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. You must understand that the object of your description is not to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to your site. You must use expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.

Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in mind that the results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are Overture and Adwords Select, usually appear on other popular search engines. Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit.

If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing the bidding war.

Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis.

Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success.

John Hayward is editor at the Add-Articles.com Article Directory. They currently have over 28,000 FREE Articles on hundreds of different subjects. You can find many more articles like this at our Article Directory. To learn more about Search Engine Optimization SEO Advice.

Affiliate Marketing Essential Tips

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing in which a business rewards its affiliates for the sales and marketing efforts that they undertake on its behalf. This is similar to multi level marketing and is a rage among users of the internet. There are many people who use the internet to make money or the self-employed using the World Wide Web as their source of income. There are lots of ways in which you can use affiliate marketing to earn that extra bit of income or even make it a full time occupation.

There are some simple things that you can follow when pursuing affiliate marketing. The first and foremost of this is to write on topics that you are familiar with. For instance, if you like pets then you can try writing on topics related to keeping pets and their rearing. Since affiliate marketing involves building a website and promoting your product, the best way to start off would be to build a site around the topics that you consider are your expert areas and then continue on the same vein. Initially, this may not bring in the commissions that you hope for but trust me, over a period of time; this would result in increase to your income.

The next tip would relate to putting less number of banners on your site. It is tempting to stuff your site with banners and more banners, but doing so would make your site look un-attractive and even ugly to potential visitors thus making you lose business. You should use the optimum amount of space for banners and make sure that people actually click on the banners provided by using catchy slogans and titles.

One of the other things that you have to remember is that there are no “best merchant” programs that are available and it is up to you to make the decision on which merchant program you want to join. You should prefer a merchant who is liberal with the commissions and someone in your line of interest. As outlined above, someone who is related to the area in which you have built the site would be a potential merchant for you to link your site with.

Remember that starting off in building a site is the first step and the most difficult as well. Once you have the site up and running, you have taken the initial steps to making your site viable for making money.

en you are first deciding on online marketing in order to promote your business online, the main online marketing methods that you will encounter are Organic search engine optimisation and Pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords.

 

Organic search engine optimisation and Pay pr click advertising are the two main methods of online marketing. Both these forms of online marketing are aimed at getting highly targeted visitors to your website by making your website rank on search engine results for the keywords that you are targeting.

 

Ideally a business needs to utilise both, organic Search engine optimisation as well as Pay per click advertising on order to get the maximum exposure for their business online. However cost and budget considerations often result in a business having to make a choice between using organic search engine optimisation or Pay per click advertising for their business.

 

Before discussing which form of online marketing is better for your business, it is important to understand the difference between organic search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising. Organic search engine optimisation refers to the search results that appear in the main centre section of the search results. Ranking within organic search engine results cannot be bought and ranking is a result of organic non-biased steps taken over a period of time. It is dependent on the overall popularity of your website on the internet in general among other on site factors. Organic listings are the results that appear in the main section of a search engine such as Google when we search for something. Pay per click advertising on the other hand refers to the paid listing or sponsored results that appear on the right of the search results page and not in main middle section of the page.

 

Pay per click result is paid for and results are almost immediate to achieve. However there are many drawbacks to pay per click advertising as compared with Organic search engine optimisation. The recent years have seen an exponential rise in competition and a steep rise in pay per click costs. Click fraud is another rising concern in pay per click advertising where an advertiser may be charged for clicks that are not by genuine customers.

 

1) Many surveys and search engine marketing studies have pointed than users are more likely to click on organic search results that appear on the main section of the page rather than the paid listings that appear as ads on the right.

 

2) Organic listings are non-biased and cannot be bought. As such users trust the results more than the paid listings which are a result of paid advertising. The conversion rate for organic listings is much higher than for paid listings.

 

3) Rising cost of pay per click. Pay per click campaigns are becoming more and expensive day by day as competition is increasing. It is common now a days to be pay as much as £1 or £2 per click for a op 5 position in pay per click campaigns like Google ad words.

 

4) The results of organic search engine optimisation campaign are more permanent that pay per click. In pay per click the results stop almost immediately at the end of the campaign whereas in organic listings the rank remains.

 

Although the main advantages of organic search engine optimisation over Pay per click advertising are discussed above, Pay per click advertising has its advantages. Pay per click advertising is a much quicker way to get results. This is useful to advertise events and other marketing campaigns that cannot be planned months in advance. Organic search engine optimisation is a time consuming task and organic listings often take months to achieve.

 

 

 

In the long run investing an organic search engine optimisation is beneficial. Organic search engine optimisation has lower costs and offers a high return on investment. Once a favourable ranking has been achieved in organic search engine optimisation, it is more permanent. In pay per click the results will atop immediately when the payment has stopped and the campaign comes to an end. Organic search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign also has a wider coverage and generates maximum exposure for your business.

 

Any organic campaign in order to achieve first page rank in Google will focus on a variety of techniques not only submission to search engines, e.g. directory submissions, press releases, article marketing and social media marketing. All this is important in order to generate quality back links to your website and will most certainly be covered in any organic search engine campaign that is run on behalf of your website.

 

Organic search engine optimisation is hence a better rounded approach to online marketing and has a much wider coverage. Although you may not see the result within the first few months it will be an extremely useful marketing investment for any business. The benefits of an organic search engine optimisation far outweigh any risks involved with investing in a one year organic search engine optimisation campaign.

 

More practical website marketing tips and discussion can be found on the Search engine marketing and E-Commerce advice for business blog

 

Small Business E-Comemrce

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Author K.Singh is a Technology consultant for web design company, Kronik Media. The author also offers online marketing advise to Estate Agents in UK and is a guest author for Ecommerce Blog.

Kronik Media, London

Company Websites:
http://www.kronikmedia.co.uk
http://www.estateagentwebsite.com

Making Money Online with Pay Per Click Search Engines


It is not surprising if online entrepreneurs ask if its true that sales conversion from Pay per click Search engine traffic is as good as what everyone is talking about. Well, as true as it seems, it is now a fact that Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engines is one of the most powerful advertising methods available online which provides very targeted traffic. Pay-Per-Click is a fast growing industry accounting for 30% online advertising in the year 2003. This industry is predicted to be worth 7 billion dollars by 2007. Pay-Per-Click search engines are growing in popularity due to the following reasons:


Very Targeted Traffic.

First and foremost, it’s a ready targeted traffic source for advertisers. Advertisers only pay for a targeted audience that is ready to buy your products. Like Spidering search engines, the traffic represents people or prospects who are searching using specific keywords. Therefore, it can’t be argued that the traffic from Pay-Per-Click search engines are very targeted depending on how niche the keywords you choose to advertise in.


You pay for guaranteed traffic only.

In Pay-Per-Click search engines, as the name implies, advertisers pay only for the traffic sent to their site. For each click that the advertiser’s listings have received, the advertiser pays a bid amount. For example, if you as an advertiser bids $0.10 for a listing position in a Pay-Per-Click search engine, every hit that your listing gets and the visitor is sent to your registered site, you will be charged $0.10. For a period of time, if a thousand visitors click on your listings and are sent to your site, you would be debited $100 for $0.10 per visitor.


Control of ranking position

In most Pay-Per-click search engines, the position of your listings in any particular keyword results page is predetermined by the amount you bid for. The higher you bid, the higher listing position your listing will get. As you are able to bid for the position in a PPC, to a high extent, you have the control to where or which position you want your advertisement link to be placed in the Search Results Page. To advertisers, they would want to bid for the highest positions they can afford. This is because like Spidering search engines and directories, the higher postioned listings will receive more traffic.


Rapid setup

Another great advantage of using Pay-Per-Click search engines is that the setup can be fast. Setup and account approval can vary from a few days to even a few hours. Imagine your website having the potential to receive very targeted traffic in just a matter of hours or days.


Cheap niche targeted traffic

You may think that such traffic from Pay-Per-Click search engines can be very expensive especially with very general, popular and high volume keywords. This may be true but for niche or more specific keywords, where the traffic is even more targeted, the top bidding prices may be very low. In some cases, the prices are as low as a penny. Compare this low cost and very targeted traffic to the cost of sending expensive offline advertisement paper fliers.


For all these reasons, it is small wonder that the Pay-Per-Click search engines are considered by many as the “Untapped market”! Let’s take a look at some tips and strategies when you use Pay-Per-Click search engines.


Tip 1. Relevant keywords.

The most fundamental concept in keyword bidding in any type of Pay-Per-Click search engines is to choose keywords that are relevant. If you choose the wrong keywords to bid for, all your time and advertising money will be wasted. Your targeted prospects are searching for your website through the keywords that best reflect or describe your products and services. If you have chosen irrelevant keywords, you may only pay for the visitors that are not looking for your type of products or services; hence, a waste of your advertising money. Visitors from relevant keywords bring higher conversion rates. Higher conversion rates mean more sales made over the specified amount of traffic sent to your website.


Tip 2. Avoid expensive general keywords.

Try to avoid expensive general keywords. True enough, these popular general keywords may generate high volume traffic but the traffic has a lower percentage of targeted prospects. Furthermore, the top bids for these general keywords will be very expensive. On the other hand, specific and targeted niche keywords will be cheaper for the top positions. After all, specific targeted keywords will bring you higher conversion rates as the niche keywords better describe the products and services the listed advertisers offer. Hence the targeted keywords filter off uninterested visitors that may waste your advertising money.


Tip 3. Attain volume from variety.

By choosing more niche targeted keywords that are cheaper, we can easily gain top positions in these niche keywords. However, these niche targeted keywords may not carry as much traffic as achievable by general or popular keywords . Therefore, to solve this, you advertise in as many relevant niche targeted keywords as possible. Variations of the niche targeted keywords that may all have the same meaning can also be used. This will also help to bring in more traffic. You need not just advertise in one Pay-Per-Click search engine, but also duplicate the advertising campaigns in as many Pay-Per-Click search engines as possible. Maintaining these efforts, you ultimately preserve the goal of having low cost yet targeted traffic and achieve a respectable volume of good quality visitors.


Tip 4. Use relevant description and keywords in your advert listings.

You would want the description of your advert listings posted in Pay-Per-Click search engines to be as accurate as possible in describing what you offer. Your advert listings are placed in the Results pages with other competitor adverts, so your Advert listing description has to be more attractive to the searchers. Thus, you need to layout your precise benefits to the searchers using convincing and relevant words and terms. It will also be a good idea to use the exact relevant keywords within your description as these tend to capture the attention of the searchers who are interested in your products and services. Try to avoid using superlatives. Why? Words like “Best” and “Greatest” are statistically proven to reduce quality visitors rather than attract them to click on your listings. Most Pay-Per-Click search engines disallow advertisers from using superlatives anyway.


There are hundreds of Pay-Per-Click search engines on the Web today. How do

you go around choosing those that you need? The following factors can be used

in your evaluation process.


Low Initial Set Up Cost.

Make sure that the Pay-Per-Click does not ask for too high an initial set up cost, which is non-refundable. You do not want to advertise in too few advertising sources. Remember the saying,”Don’t put all your eggs in just one basket”? It applies to this as well. Diversify your advertising money to many advertising sources including several Pay-Per-Click search engines.


Traffic Volume.

Find out what the search traffic going through your needed keywords in the concerned Pay-Per-Click search engine is. There should be enough traffic for you to even consider using it. In general, there is no fixed standard on exactly how much traffic is sufficient. Comparatively, it should be at the volume that meets your budget.


Customer Service.

Does the Pay-Per-Click search engine respond fast to your questions?


Time Taken for your Adverts to be reviewed and posted.

Time is money. You wouldn’t want to wait for more than a few days before your Advert listings get posted.


Provided Tools.

There should be simple bidding tools for you to utilize so that your bidding with the Pay-Per-Click system is made easy and automated.


Partnership Deals.

Some Pay-Per-Click search engines have partnership deals that tie themselves up with other search engines. Therefore, if you advertise on top spots of these Pay-Per-Click search engines, your advert would also show up in other major search engines. Look out for these partnership deals. Embarking in them can prove to be rewarding in your advertising campaigns.


If you need to know more of other Internet Advertising mediums, you can check out http://www.Netbizsolutions.com

Eugene Yeng is the Managing Director of Netbizsolutions.com .

An Internet Advertising Guru leading An Internet Advertising Consultancy.

He is also the author of the paperback book Killer Internet Cashflow Strategies.

The holiday shopping season has a beginning, middle, and end. You can argue it begins in September and ends in January. No matter what timeframe you have it’s still a finite period of time during which a very large percentage of yearly retail sales are made. You have to strike while the iron is hot. It is unrealistic to expect users to locate your online presence by directly entering your website address. More than 75 percent of Internet consumers use search engines and directories to look for products, services and information.

The problem is it takes time to optimize your website and for spiders to magically index your site in relation to the billions and billions and billions of other websites. Well maybe not that many. The question is how do you get people to your website for that brief three or four month selling season. Answer: you buy your way in.

Pay per click (PPC) search engines, also known as pay-for-performance, are engines which allow website owners to determine their sites ranking in that particular search engines results by bidding on keywords. Usually the first three to five search results are used by a network of partner search sites. The result for the site owner or webmaster is a lot more highly targeted traffic and a lot more sales.

PPC has a small setup fee, and higher recurring costs than Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, while SEO can take months or longer to build traffic, PPC will immediately send targeted traffic to your website. You may pay more for the convenience of instantly turning your traffic on and off, but to many it is worthwhile.

Pay Per Click search allows you to effectively connect with customers searching online for your products and services. You select words that relate to your business and your website appears in search results on selected sites when search users enter those words. You pay for each sales lead, not each impression, leading to a high return on your advertising investment. You also control your costs by determining the price you are willing to pay per lead – the more you pay, the higher your listings appear within the search results and the greater the number of potential customers that see your listing. The underlying idea to pay per click search engines is that you find keywords related to your website and then you bid on these keywords and buy high positions on your chosen engine. Your bid amount is the amount you’re willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results.

The more times a word or phrase has been searched for the higher you’ll have to bid to get high rankings. The only limitation is that your site must be at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on (if you bid for terms that weren’t really directly related to your website, people would come to your site, not buy anything, and you’d still pay for the visit. It’s like giving the PPC search engines free money, therefore it’s vital to always stay relevant). These engines allow you to skip all the search engine optimization stuff and simply pay for visitors.

PPC is perfect for a finite period of time because you can start and stop it when necessary. Benefits of PPC are:

* You only pay for visitors. Unlike banner advertising where you pay each time someone sees your ad, pay-per-click engines only charge you when someone actually clicks on your listing. This means you’re getting guaranteed visits.

* Pay-per-click engines provide highly targeted cheap visitors. Often you can buy a good ranking on a decent keyword for as little as 1 cent or 2 cents per click. Overture has of late installed $.05 as the minimum bid however. Popular search terms can cost much more on the big pay per click search engines most notably Google Adwords, Overture.com and Findwhat.com. Even still PPC engines are one of the most cost effective way of driving targeted people to your site. Google Adwords, Overture.com and Findwhat.com are the pay-per-click engines most often recommended.

BizAtomic Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management allows your site to be advertised on various keywords optimized for your business. Using a bidding mechanism, you purchase the right to have your business listed in a set position for your keywords. This process provides instant gratification as your site can be listed at the top of searches instantly.
The BizAtomic PPC campaign is aimed at delivering the maximum ROI for your PPC budget with an eye on high conversions, higher CTR and lower cost of customer acquisition.

The Advantages of PPC (Pay-Per-Click):

* Control: you always know who you are reaching, what keywords you want to run your PPC campaign on, what countries or even what city you want your PPC ads to appear for and what language should they be displayed in. You also control how much you bid for each advertisement and how much you want to spend in total.

* Targeted Traffic: You get to target the right audience without worrying about irrelevant traffic. If you sell blue shoes, you can select your ad to appear only when a search engine user types “Buy Blue Shoes”. Of course people need to be searching for the particular keyword.

* Instant: Another big advantage of PPC is that it is instant. The PPC ads appear almost instantly and respond to the changes or modification made instantly.

* Branding: You can choose the words in which you want to describe your business and also have the freedom of having the visitor visit the exact page you want them to see.

* Site Architecture Independent: No architectural changes need to be made to sites to rank on PPC keywords. For example, flash websites can run PPC campaigns without having to worry about search engine crawlers.

If your objective is to increase traffic to your website or increase brand awareness, PPC is one of the most important and safest bets on the search engines.

Internet Marketing Product Launches

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