Is pay per click your best marketing bet?
You may have already heard of this method of getting people to visit your website. From my point of view and experience it is expensive and you have to write the ads yourself, pay for them, change them and maintain them so that they are the right ones to work and have the right price in competition with many others.
When people search for a particular topic, such as curing a headache or other illness, they will see an ad in the right column that, when clicked, takes the person to your website selling the book or service on the cure of headaches.
Advertisers pay a fixed amount for each time a prospect clicks on the ad. This is known as click through rate or ctr.
Yes, there are benefits: the opportunity to place your ad directly in front of a prospect at the exact moment they are looking for your product or service is a good one.
More benefits include your control over the keywords that best represent your product. The PPC model allows you to decide how much you are willing to pay per customer. You only pay for clicks, and these are your target audience looking for your solutions.
After using Overture and being disappointed, while doing a Google search recently, I noticed that the little sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page were a type of pay per click called Google Adwords. I know people who are successful with this company.
While this search drives targeted traffic to the website, the downside? You have to study which keywords work best, and the best ones are much more expensive than others.
The popularity and growth of pay per click had also made it more expensive.
pay per click horror stories
Story One. A submitter got hooked because it was fast, exciting, and easy.
Within days of learning about pay per click, he was generating 1,000 clicks a day for his various campaigns. She thought that she was seeing success in pay per click.
In the early days of ppc, that may have been true because bidding on popular keywords was just pennies per click. When your popular keywords were around $1 per click, you actually lost $100 dollars per day. Along with that, his keywords were disabled and deprecated.
Where were the sales? At the end of the first week, their AdWords produced only $75 from over 5,000 AdWords. Count the loss!
If you want, you can shorten your learning curve by taking an AdWords course, but you can also take a teleclass from a respected internet marketing coach who knows all the ins and outs and does what’s tried and true, like in this book. If you want to be more successful, go to Adwords-Hints.com/pay-per-click. Find tools to analyze keywords, reduce costs and increase clicks. http://tinyurl.com/5nb46
story two. A web savvy friend of mine used ppc ads on Google to get a set of videos on how to build a motorcycle and then a race car. His sales were from affiliates. At first, he invested $4,000 and got $7,000 a month, but when he entered more competition in the field, his sales were not high enough for his efforts.
Story Three A health author put a short ad on Google about a diet to cure a specific disease and its solutions. She said that she sold 4,000 books in months that only cost her $400 in ads. Her announcement led directly to the sales letter for her book.
This success story shows that if your book is narrow enough in its focus, you might want to try ads because there won’t be any competition, but if you have a general business or personal growth book, you’ll have to pay too much per keyword to earn real money.
I count four. Although I’ve already had success with internet promotion, I thought I’d give Overture’s pay-per-click program a try. My webmaster helped me and charged me around $350. She took care of the changes for a while, but then I had to do it myself. Using http://www.goodkeywords.com helped a bit. The less expensive keywords did not work and the more expensive ones cost too much. After losing about $800, I let him go.
You may want to learn the lesson yourself, or you may want to spend a lot less money on ongoing internet promotion that has already been tried and true for many years.
Judy Cullins ©2005 All rights reserved.