I think huge startups under the right conditions are necessary for PPC. For example, let's say I'm selling a guitar course for 20 dollars. I put in 2000 dollars so that gets me 4000 visitors a .50 cents a click (that's a conservative estimate assuming PPC is very high). 1 in 50 people buy so 4000 divided by 50 is 80. 80 buys * 20 dollar product = 1600 dollars a month. However, 2000 - 1600 = 400 dollar LOSS. Of course, at 30 cents a click you get around 6000 visitors. Therefore 120 buys * 20 dollar product = 2400 a month. 2400 - 2000 = 400 dollar GAIN. Not much but a gain. Now let's look at somebody who puts in 300 dollars a month. 300 dollars at .50 a click is 600 visitors. 600 divided by 50 = 12. 12 buys * 20 dollar product = 240 dollars a month. 300 - 240 = 60 dollar GAIN. Of course at .30 cents a click (with PPC and 300 dollar startup) you would probably get around 500 dollars a month. 500 - 300 = 200 dollar GAIN. What do you all think? I think though that .30 a click is hard to come by these days. Now if you use natural traffic and get .05 of 5400 visitors (270 visitors) then you will get 4 sales = 80 dollars a month. If you could get .10 percent then you could get 160 dollars. However, if you could triple the .10 organic traffic to 16200 a month (540 a day) then you would get = 480 dollars which would pay the rent. So 540 organic search engine visitors a day and a .10 percent group going to the affiliate link would be the goal. Do you all agree? Plan 2 would involve using PPC and putting in a 2000 dollar startup at .30 cents a click. So I conclude a huge startup for PPC is necessary but will only work if the PPC is around .30 a click. Of course a 300 dollar startup and .30 a click will get 200 dollars a month but 2000 startup at .30 cents a click will get 400 dollars. Not much of a difference really but actually a huge difference. 400 dollars might pay the rent while 200 won't. Let's see what 1000 dollars a month will do. 1000 people at .30 a click will get around 3000 visitors. That will give 60 buys. That will get us 60 buys * 20 product = 1,200 dollars. 1,200 - 1000 = 200 dollars a month. The gain is the same as with the 300 dollar startup. But putting in 2000 dollars got us 200 dollars more. Why is this so? Mathematical proportion?
well if you are going to setup a website and use anything like adwords you want more income possibilities than adsense. amazon, clickbank, affiliate, if not all of these. maximize your chance of earning. Oh and it would be more worth it to set yourself up to get organic traffic than always paying for traffic. Do or pay for some backlinks, seo, all that jazz. The reason for this is that once you're set, you'll continue to get traffic. I have a friend that has a site which gets 6000-7000 uniques a month from search engines alone. He's never paid for traffic and earns around $200~ a month from adsense.
I'm not going for adsense just affiliate commissions. It's very difficult to get guitar traffic. Why? Because there is only so much guitar traffic. For example, more people are searching for jobs then guitar stuff. So mathematically you can only expect (a good case scenario) to make around 500 dollars a month (That is assuming your getting around 500 people a day and .10 of those people go to the affiliate link). Of course, the guitar site says otherwise but looking at the figures from wordtracker.com is much different. Yeah, I'm going for natural traffic and get around 180 visitors a day now. I'm not sure wether or not to dive into Adsense unless I got a huge startup and can keep costs at around .30 a click. I would prefer to not use adsense at all. But it's difficult to drive the traffic away from the free stuff I have provided and toward the pay stuff.
2000 dollars is enough to get a successful campaign. It's normal to lose a few bucks on the first day. Which is why you have to track your keywords. Remove the ones that don't convert and focus on the ones that do.
Actually there was a mistake. 300 dollar startup = 60 dollar GAIN at .30 a click 1000 dollar startup = 200 dollar GAIN at .30 a click. 2000 dollar startup = 400 dollar GAIN at .30 a click. So again I conclude even stronger that under certain conditions a larger startup is necessary to make a profit. 2000 dollars is hard to come by for poor folks. In addition, it SURE better work. But I guess if you save or can get a small bank loan it would be worth it. I'll stick with SEO right now and try to double my traffic. That should get around 400 or 500 dollars a month. But as I said before it's hard to get people to reach the affiliate page. It's also difficult to double the natural traffic because only so many people are searching for guitar stuff.
you don't need a lot, of money to start up! as long as you got a hungry niche market filled with buys you wont feel the effect of the money your using to create advertising!
If I could just connect my free traffic with the affiliate page then something might happen. In addition I won't have to pay a dime.
Oh right, it's because you used $2000 in your example. You could probably still do it with around $500. Hell, get a few Adwords vouchers or something too.
If it is that high to stay on top, that is one of the reasons why you don't do advertising in search engines, especially Google. I'm afraid it is more like, rough estimate, 1 in 100 to 150 people. Sorry. Are you on page one or two? If not, what makes you think that you will land there? Optimizing your site does not guarantee that you will land high. SEO doesn't work that way. It's mostly the luck of the draw. Maybe you don't have a good sales page? I'm just saying. That's one of the reasons why you shouldn't focus on seo and search engines. That is, if you are. Throughout the world, I'd be willing to bet that the are millions looking for more info, products on that subject. Advertise where potential customers may go.
Exactly, where are they? How much will it cost to reach them? I get 180 people a day thru SEO. It's a lot but not enough to sell guitar courses. The sales page provided by the 3rd party is good. Perhaps my pages aren't designed flashy enough despite the educational content. My new affiliate partner (19.95 a month course) should be more honest. Hopefully they are honest. My other affiliate partner said between 80 and 120 (rough estimate) visitors would buy. Of course the other affiliate partner was more expensive (39.95 guitar course but only one time payment). So if you can't break even with search engines then I guess you'd have to try guitar magazines, social networking or newspapers. I'll experiment for a couple of days and see if I can get 20 visitors a day to go to the affiliate site. I could manage 500 dollars a month but if only 1 in 150 will buy then it's tough. Perhaps 500 dollars would buy 1,500 visitors at .30 a click. So now I will have 30 buys (at 1 in 50) or 15 buys (at 1 in 100) or 10 buys (at 1 in 150). So my most conservative scenario is getting 10 buys for 200 dollars (1 in 150 buys). If I paid 500 dollars then that would be a 300 dollar LOSS (500 - 200). The best scenario (1 in 50 buys) would be getting 30 buys for 600 dollars for a 100 dollar GAIN (600 - 500 adwords cost). But still it's only 100 dollars. 400 or 500 dollars a month is my goal. However, I do have a new job site. I think PPC would work for it. PPC could be used to generate leads. However, PPC doesn't work for a guitar site very well unless somehow you could get the visitors to sign up for a newsletter. Right now I'm trying to get my SEO traffic to sign up for a blog or at least visit the blog every week (without signing up for it). However, the blogger Yaro said that email combined with blogs was the best way. Of course (going back to the subject of PPC) I think PPC isn't the only way to get traffic for a job site. For example, I know sites where I can get tons of traffic for a reasonable advertising cost. So I could use PPC and it would be effective but it's not the only way. Natural SEO for a job site would be great too but natural SEO isn't necessary because job sites convert unlike guitar sites. So right now my job recruitment site is on page 3 for a competitive search term (The search term gets around 2,700 searches each day). It's easy to get to the front page for that term but it's difficult for me because my site doesn't have any PR now so it's difficult to get link exchanges. I posted some one way blog posts but I don't like spamming so I don't use the unethical ways to increase power. But I'm telling you that if I just breathe (with the job recruitment site) then I get leads. If I just post to free job feeds then I get a couple of leads a week. But these leads are worth 300 dollars a person.
Does PPC require a huge startup to be profitable? Heck no. Not if you know what you are doing and how to do it. Let's get back to the basics. What is PPC all about? Keywords. What is keywords all about? Things people are searching for. What do people search for? Things they want or need. So now you do your keyword research on guitar course. Your estimated cpc is $1.66. But, since we know what we are doing, we won't bid on that. We don't want to spend that much. So then we find "free guitar course". That is only $1.21 cpc. But that isn't any good cause we are trying to sell something. Then we find "kid's guitar course" for $.05 cpc. That's right down our alley. The next step is to figure out how many people are looking for "kid's guitar course". Google says 880 per month, SEO Book and Wordtracker didn't show anything at all. So you decide to take a chance and see what happens. You can set up your PPC and start your bid at $.35 to test the waters. You won't need to pay that much, but you always want to start higher and then gradually lower the price. That's how you can get the lowest cpc and good position The 1 sale for 100 clicks figure has been thrown around for years. What you will find is that it depends on many things. The product, the ad, the landing page etc. That is why you need to research, research, and research for your keywords and test, test, and test your campaigns. In the above dumb example, the starting cpc was low, due to the lack of demand/popularity. If you started with "insurance" the cpc would be $14.77. And if you were targeting "auto insurance quotes" your starting cpc is $34.58. Now, in that case, you would need a bigger bankroll to start with My whole point is that for a regular affiliate marketer, you don't need a lot of money to start with ppc. You just need to do your homework and find those goldmine keywords that will cost less and make you a good profit.
If your merchant's sales page converts 1 in 150 I'd say get out of it and find a better affiliate program. Guitar market is pretty hot and there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to find an affiliate program that converts in at least 1 in 40 or better. Of course like copper said you should have a decent landing page to get as many merchant clickthroughs as you can for your PPC investment. IMO, PPC doesn't have to drain your wallet if you properly optimize your landing page and test test and test some more. Make sure you have good tracking software so you know where your results are at all times.
Yes, in addition to your guitar services you want to have other ways to make income like Adsense and Clickbank.
1 in 50 people to buy your product is not realistic. The conversion rate is way lower than that! maybe 1:100
They're everywhere. They are on this site. They are over at Yahoo. They are over at Askmen.com. They are....well, everywhere. The trick is to make up some good ads, and find webmasters who have reasonable rates. Try doing keyword searches to narrow your target more (guitar sites), and then send an advertising proposal to the sites you like. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but, that's advertising. If you want to make money, you are going to have to do it. You sure as hell aren't going to do it through this shit Twitter, and, signatures, social sites, and whatnot. *shrugs shoulders* It's according to how much they will charge you. But spending that much per click is crazy, man. In the field you are in you can't make money that way. See if you can do 10 cents at these search engines, and figure on making 1 sale out of every 100 to 150 visitors. Besides, why in the hell would you advertise in places where competitors' ads are above and below you? That's even crazier.
One of the things PPC is really good for is to "test the waters". In other words, you can find out really quick wether or not you are promoting a product that sells...If I start a campaign and it goes off like a rocket within a few hours, or maybe a day or two, I can stop it, pay someone to write & submit articles to a site that you can set up within a day or two. Then, that runs on auto pilot. Then I move on.. Start all over. My point being, don't be afraid of ppc. Learn it and use it to your advantage!!