Until your web site recieves organic traffic, if you want visitors, you will need to pay for traffic.
The name of the game is PPC - Pay Per Click. The huge advantage of this kind of advertising is that
you pay only when someone actually visits your site.
When creating a PPC campaign, no matter in which compnay,
you can choose which keywords you target and what ads you want to display to these keywords.
Ads:
First, let's talk about the ads.
Don't create ads inviting visitors to your home page. It is a waste of time and money. When creating an ad, you have the power to take the user to the exact page you want them to see.
For example, you can create an ad saying "
Buy Aquamarine Gemstones" for users looking for aquamarine gemstones, or
"
Buy Calibrated Gemstones" for buyers looking for calibrated gemstones. Both pages are on the same website, but they target different buyers.
The
Rich Jurk has some excellent examples of how an ad should look like.
An ad should be attractive, and get the user attention above all the other ads.
An ad should attract the attension of the potential buyers, and not waste money on visitors who won't buy anything.
Adding "starting $9.95" would eliminate all the ones who look for 'free' stuff, and 'this week only' gives the ad the feling of urgency that other ads don't have.
There are lots of books and websites about this matter, look for them to do better. These are just begginer tips.
Keywords:
The challenge of a PPC campaign is selecting the right keywords and placing the right ads.
Think of the
gemstones shop we've seen before, let's build a keyword list for this site.
It's quite clear that we'll choose
gemstones,
loose gemstones,
aquamarine,
spinel and
color change garnet. that was easy.
but what about
emstones,
gemstons,
gemsones and
gmstones? these are all spelling mistakes of the word gemstones, we've just missed one letter.
and how about
femstones? look at your keyboard and see that the letter F is next to the letter G.
seochat has a
Keyword Typo Generator that can help us find common typos for a given word. use it. it's good.
Keyword Elite is an excellent software that helps you build your keywords list for your campaign. it uses sources from multiple search engines.
Overture has a great tool called
Keyword selector tool that can help you understand what variations of your keywords where searched by users. for example, see the search terms related to
metallica. This tool is not updated for quite a while, since Overture was merged into Yahoo Search Marketing.
Google, Yahoo and MSN all have keyword suggestion tools integrated into your acccount, you can use them as well but they require login.
These are the search engines we recommend for PPC campaigns.
The best:
1.
Google Adwords. It takes minutes before the world is fludding your web site.
2.
Yahoo! Search Marketing USA offers $25 for new customers. The traffic is very good and will be even better with the new Panama launch coming soon.
3.
Yahoo! Search Marketing UK is great for UK traffic. Sign up and get a £50 credit to your account
4.
MSN Adcenter has just started on 2006, and is already very big.
5.
Ask has very good traffic to offer. Their quality of their traffic is higher then the others.
6.
LookSmart offer free $50 credit in your new acccount. (limited time offer)
The rest: (give them a chance, just in case they surprise...)
-
Miva offers a minimum price of 5 cents per click. Open an account now and get a $25 sign up bonus.
-
Enhance Interactive offer paid ads for 3 cents per click. Open an account now and get a $25 sign up bonus.
-
7Search offers great PPC traffic, the minimum bid here is 1 cent.
Relevant Forums:
Keyword Discussion Forum
Pay Per Click Forum
Msn Adcenter Forum
Google Adwords Forum
Yahoo Search Marketing Forum
Relevant Blogs:
Adwords Blog
YSM Blog
MSN Adcenter Blog
PPC Discussions Blog
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