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Should you Pay Per Click?

Commonly refered to as PPC among the savy internet marketers. If you have been marketing online for any length of time you have probably seen PPC eat up your advertising dollars with little or no results.

You research and choose the hottest keywords, then burn through your daily budget in an hour with no sales. The myth that mega traffic produces mega profits is just that. A myth.

Traffic is great. Traffic improves your search engine ranking. It increases word of mouth advertising. Traffic gets you more traffic, but when you are paying a pretty penny for each and every click you want sales.

You may remember the class action law suit against Google. A group of businesses sued Google claiming the company didn’t do enough to prevent click fraud so they lost money in their PPC campaigns.

In my less than humble opinion, click fraud was not the culprit. For those who don’t know, click fraud is when someone who publishes Google Adsense ads clicks on ads on their own sight to make money with no intention of purchasing the product advertised.

As I said, in my opinion click fraud was not the culprit. It was badly chosen keyword phrases. Instructions on how to choose and bid on keyword phrases are available on the PPC sites so I won’t go into the mechanics of bidding.

The important thing is, if you chose the most popular keyword your ad will show up in hundreds maybe even thousands of searches an hour. This means you will recieve hundreds maybe even thousands of clicks a day.

Mega traffic right? For instants. If you are selling hand painted porceliain piggy banks and you bid on the keyword “bank”. Who will see your ad and possibly click on it? People looking for online banking, people looking for a rock band called “Bank”, kids writing a report for school on the bankiong industry. In other words, people who don’t want what you are selling.

They will click on your ad without reading the whole thing and go “This isn’t what I want.” and hit the back button. Remember, it cost you money for them to click. It costs them nothing, so people aren’t careful about what they click on.

Choose your phrase carefully. You want clicks from visitors who are looking to buy what you are selling. Target your phrase. Bid on “porceliain hand painted piggy banks” if that is what you are selling. People who do broad searches are just looking. People who target their searches are looking to buy.

Will you get less traffic? Yes. Will you make more sales? Maybe, depending on your product, how easy your site is to navigate, your prices, etc, etc…

If you have your own website, you can earn a good amount of money through Google Adsense. What do you have to do to earn money from your website? Nothing, really. You just have to re-post, in your site, the ads that Google has posted in its search engine pages. Here’s how it works.

How does it work?

Every time you fire a Google search, alongside the search results, you find a few links displayed under the heading ‘sponsored links.’ Well, these are links that the advertisers pay Google for displaying. They do not, however, pay a fixed amount for keeping those ads there, but a certain amount for every time a visitor clicks on the link and visits the advertiser’s site. This way, the advertiser only pays when someone actually clicks on the link, Google gets money for putting up the links, and the visitor gets to know of related links that could give him relevant and additional information and/or services. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved in the game.

Where do you come in?

Google reasoned that anyone, who visited a third party site that held content relevant to a particular search, would be interested in the sponsored links that it provided along these search results. So it decided to extend the group to include sites that have similar content, by allowing these sites to display ads and links that would be redirected to the sponsored links of Google. That opened up an easy way to increase the traffic to the advertiser’s site by increasing his exposure, while the site owner gets money for just posting the ad in her site.

What do you have to do to take advantage?

If you already have a running site that ha a good traffic, you may have to do practically nothing. All you have to do is copy and paste some HTML code into your pages. That’s all! The ads will appear on your site and every time someone clicks on those ads, you get your share

How much money can you make?

That’s not very easy to answer, because there’s no single answer to that question. It all depends on a combination of factors like keywords, the page number where the links appear, and the demand for the day. Whatever the going rate, Google passes on a part of the revenue that it gets from your site to you. You can see at any point of time and on any day, how much money you’ve made.

You can be sure of one thing, though. You’re not going to lose money by posting the ad in your site. Whatever the revenue, it’s an additional amount that you get from the site for no additional cost.

What if you don’t have a site?

You can still benefit from this scheme if you don’t already have a site. You will of course, need to put up a site in that case. You can put up a site easily and at a fairly low cost. First of all you should decide on the content of your site. If you’re thinking of duplicating someone else’s site by copying their contents, that wouldn’t work. Your site will have to be original, although its contents may be similar to that of other sites.

If you are putting up a fresh site, you’ll need to estimate the costs of putting up the site and maintaining it against the revenues that you’ll get. The secret is in getting good traffic to your site. So you should concentrate on building an attractive site and find out ways of attracting traffic to it. The rest will then follow.