When profits barely exceed cost of business.

I have a small website that I drive traffic to with PPC. Every month I spend about $400-$500 in Adwords costs, but I only net out about $30 in profit each month.

I never focused on any organic search engine traffic for this site, so all traffic is via PPC. I guess what I'm wondering is it worth spending that money each month when I could possibly allocate it elsewhere and hope to earn more?

Any of you run into this situation, and what are your thoughts or methods?

 

You might try some other ways to drive traffic so you're not dependent on Adwords alone.

Take a few dollars of your PPC budget and use them to buy ten quality 350 to 500 word articles and twenty 150 to 200 word articles. Use a different keyword phrase in the title of each article, use that keyword phrase in the the body and once more in the last paragraph.

Use the 350 to 400 word articles to:

Set up a squidoo page using one article with links back to your site.

Set up a hubpage on hubpages.com with two of the articles and with two links - that's all hubpages allows - back to your site.

Set up a zimbio.com account and use one of the articles and link back to your site.

You have six articles left. Submit them to ezinearticles.com one every other day. Also submit them to other directories after you've submitted them to ezinearticles.com

Set up a blog on blogger.com with 10 of the shorter 150 to 200 word articles. Include your website's url in each article.

Set up a blog on wordpress.com with 10 of the shorter 150 to 200 word articles as well. Include your website's url in the article. Post one article a day and ping it with pingomatic.com or another ping resource.

Combine the twenty shorter articles into 10 longer articles and submit them to ezinearticles.com .

Dee

 

Try to spend $400-$500 on SEO and you will do way better in the long term.
If that's not just a landing page, SEO will drive a lot of traffic after a while.

 

GREAT GREAT INFO! - Thank you for this small write up!

 

Don't worry dude @ starting this happens with everyone.
Try out marketing methods prescribed by me -
* Article marketing
* Digital marketing
* In-text advertising
* Lead scoring
* Media transparency
* Online lead generation
* Pay per click
* Social media optimization
* Web banner

 

Could it be that your site and or ads are not strong enough?

 

That's a really, really low amount of profit to even risk that much in advertising for. I'd never try what you're doing myself, a small dip would easily ruin profits from previous months too.

If you take deepower's advice, remember to give some of those other sites some backlinks too. Squidoo/blogger/etc won't do much for ya without them.

 

I guess that's a possibility. The site is strong. Well presented product, and very good prices. I'm going to keep working on my ads and see that makes a difference. I'm confident that I can have a 200% ROI for this site, and I'd be more than satisfied with that.

 

That is some of the most direct, and best advice I have ever heard here on DP. Great Post.

 

Certainly do not rely on adwords - there is a ton of ways to advertise totally free on the net, use forums, banner exchanges, articles, press release sites, blogs, social media such as dig, twitter...then try adwords!

 

Your on the right track, all you need is some campaign optimization and you could be making more than you are spending.

 

You may also want to consider investing time or outsourcing better landing pages. Your problem could simply be one of conversion rates.

 

Uhhh, Ben, you read that very same advice here ten times a week.

The posters here are amazing.

Yeah, christian231, I would suggest having others, family, friends, coworkers, posters...critique your ads and your site.

That could very well be the problem.

Ask them if they were looking at such a product, would they buy from you.

Once you get it nailed down, the more sites you advertise in, the higher that profit margin goes up. Before you know it, you're using that money to pay your rent.

Another problem could be you are spending too much on Adwords.

Maybe???

If you can get that profit up to, say, at least $100, you'll be doing good.

We spend A LOT on advertising, but we also make A LOT.

It's common for advertisers to spend thousands of dollars a day yet get only hundreds back in profit.

That's advertising.

 

SEO is the ultimate success.I think you can optimize your campaigns and increase your profit level.

 

You can try to optimize your keywords and tweak your campaign further. Use ppc tools to find out which keywords are profitable and which are not. In this way, you can cut some cost per click.

 

I agree that it makes sense not to abandon your current site and products all at once and try to better your ROI, differentiate marketing efforts etc. Still though, if you haven't invested TOO much on this business (like if you don't have physical inventory sitting somewhere, or something) you may want to check out on other online ventures.

With this scenario, you may want to spare $100 and a few hours to your alternative track.

Again, business is really a matter of writing smaller checks and getting bigger ones... but, that your situation fits into this doesn't necessitate that you are on the most favorable path.

There are just too many opportunities out there, don't settle. You wouldn't be leaving all behind if you do. Now you have experience in Adwords campaigns, site management and else that you will transfer to your new business.

 

The good part is that you're breaking even...the bad part is that you're not making a living. If you're doing this for only a month to get the word out about your company, leave it at that...but I would scale that budget WAY down and put all of the focus on organic search...

 

If you are building repeat business it is worth it in the long run. If not, I'd focus on another form of marketing.

 

This all depends, are you selling a product? PPC really only works well if you are trying to sell something. If you are an affiliate or simply trying to get clicks, PPC may not be your best bet. I have read a interesting article about most large companies who run multimillion dollar PPC campaigns actually either loose a little or just break even. They see it as a means to get customer and brand awareness more than profit.

PPC Does work for some people. We use it and it generally cost $100 per signup due to the high cost of our search terms, But usually this is woth it if the customer stays with us for a while.

Have you tried any alternative marketing? SEO, Article, Social, etc? Even CPM?

 

I suggest you work on some alternative forms of advertising and other ways to drive traffic to your site.

Video blogging on youtube is a free option tah can allow you to tap into a large market.

Spend some time working on optimizing your site for search engines (SEO).

Build up backlinks with targeted keywords.

Maybe buy some banner space on a busy forum or blog.

If you are selling a product, check into some free classifieds. There are a lot of forums that offer free classifieds to attract new members. Go to photopost.com they have a list of sites that have their classifiieds script installed - http://www.photopost.com/forum/show-off-your-photopost-site/ Some of those sites may offer free ads to members. This can allow you to tap into a targeted nitch.