Online advertising is an extremely effective way of getting your products to the masses but it is also both expensive and very competitive. There are several ways to get traffic to your website; Pay per click programs as well as developing a SEO, or search engine optimization campaign are among the most common. Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted towards getting your website as close as possible to the top of search engine results. One of the main differences between the two is that while it takes just minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign, it might take several months for a good SEO campaign. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) in simple terms is a type of paid advertising now done by most search engines, including some of the largest ones. You are charged for each click you get. This means that you pay the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. One advantage in using this kind of advertising is that when a PPC site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other search engines. Just like in most online marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. Pay per click campaigns can be very effective if closely and frequently monitored. Another big advantage is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your search engine results position, as is the case with a typical SEO campaign. All what you need to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee. Another strong point in pay per click campaigns is the simplicity of the whole process. Just bidding for your choice of keywords and you’re up and running in a couple of minutes. No specific technical knowledge required, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier - and more profitable your campaigns will be. One big drawback is that pay-per-click is essentially a war of bidding. A higher bid than yours will automatically lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position - which can clearly become quite expensive, most especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword. In order to determine if pay-per-click advertising is a cost effective form of marketing for you, you must do some calculations to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. This can be achieved by dividing the profit you make on your site over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that time period. An example; if your site made $2,500 in profits and there were 1,250 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 25 cents. The basic formula is just profits divided by number of visitors. The figure of 25 cents per visitor is the breaks even point of your business. The idea is to make a profit, not merely to cover your costs. Therefore, you should be aiming at a figure less than 25 cents per click. Beware however that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than just 25 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying a bit too much for each individual hit. The key to success here, is to learn and know everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good news is that there is no limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because additional keywords do not necessarily add cost. This means a lot less hassle for you because you do not need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords. Some keywords are obviously more effective than others, but 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 advertisements, one called Overture provides an online tool that will give you data on how often a particular keyword is entered into their search engine. They also will offer suggestions for keywords after you enter a description of your site. In pay-per-click, written descriptions are crucial for your campaign. One thing to understand is that the objective of your description is not just to 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 strategy to guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is clearly your most powerful tool to insure that your bid yields profits. There are several tools that can greatly ease your efforts in keyword research. Pay per click software Tools which not only look for potential and profitable keywords, but also can also be set to give a close estimate of the competition. This can be a valuable resource to the marketer. The most popular of such tools is the Keywore Elite Because of the high competition in this kind of advertisement for top ranking, you may very often find that the bidding price skyrocket for pay-per-click to yield a profit. In this case, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that particular keyword and try another one. For this reason, it is essential to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis or better still to have a system in place that monitors your keywords Not only is careful monitoring important, but also the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer trends, motivation and habits. Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will not only insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a successful but will also take your business to another profit level. For a great keyword tool, check out the Keywore Elite
great article. i have a question... so i am using google adwords, and i have a huge long list of keywords but probably only 6 of the keywords get the most impressions. so if i am trying to only rank for a few keywords in the search engine, would it help to make my list smaller? Does my ad keywords list even affect(improve) my keyword search result?
great work on this article in explaining the various options available for marketing a website. thanks for taking the time to share this.