Pay Per Click Advertising - "Must Know" Secrets For Successful PPC

By Wolf Benedict

This article presumes you know what PPC is. If not, Google it and find definitions for yourself. You can find some pretty decent explanations out there.

Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is one of the most effective ways to get the message out about your product or service. Google is the premiere platform for this, but Yahoo should not be ignored in your marketing arsenal. Using PPC, you can get extremely targeted, high converting people to your website, IF you use the right keywords and word your ad in an appealing way.

In this post (and subsequent ones), I will show you how to create a PPC campaign that not only attracts, but CONVERTS when people land on your page. I will show examples below.

First, in order to have a successful PPC campaign, and like with any advertising, you must know your audience and target. You must know what they are searching for and what keywords they are using to find it. I go over how to find out what people are looking for within other articles here on Ezine Articles.

As a basic recap, you have to get into your customers shoes. Think of what search phrases you would use if you were buying your product or service. As an example, let's say you sell barbecue grills. Some phrases you may enter in the search engine are "cheap bbq grills" or "gas powered bbq".

Narrow it down to keywords they are using to find what they want using this "in their shoes" method. Write down these keywords on a list. You are going to use them in your PPC campaign.

A Google or Yahoo PPC "how to setup a campaign" would be beyond the scope of this post, and there are plenty of tutorials on how to do this in their respective platforms. For the purposes here, I will assume you have a campaign set up already.

Here are the "secrets" to a successfully run PPC campaign:

1) Set a daily budget limit. This may be obvious, but sometimes beginners overlook this crucial element and get positively KILLED.

For example, both Yahoo and Google have "daily limits" you can set on how much you'd like to spend on your clicks, whether it's $30 a day or $3000. It's up to you.

The option that leaves lots of people in the dust when they aren't paying attention is the "no daily budget" option. You pay for however many clicks you get without a budget limit. In other words, you haven't put a cap on how much you can spend in a day.

For beginners especially, it is very important you put a cap on it until:

A) You know what you are doing with PPC (have mastered it)

B) Have enough money to spend on virtually unlimited campaigns (money to burn).

For now, put a limit on your daily spending budget. PPC can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. You will get killed if you don't know what you are doing. Set your budget according to what you deem appropriate.

2) Use keywords related to major keywords. In any market, there is the potential for saturation. This holds true for keywords, too. Unless you are involved in marketing something completely alien to most people and targeted to an extremely small niche, you are going to have vast amounts of competition for certain keywords.

For instance, "annuity buyer" is a TREMENDOUSLY competitive keyword phrase and the clicks generate up to $100.00 per click!

Not many new or veteran marketers would be willing to shell out this amount of money per click. This is why it's important to experiment and find alternative keyword phrases for your ads. For example, instead of anuity buyer, you could use:

annuity purchases

buying annuities

how to buy an annuity

annuity documents

annuity laws

best annuity lawyers

These are just a few and they're off the top of my head, and they MAY be less expensive than the $100/click phrase above. You get the idea. Experiment, be creative and most importantly, TEST.

3) Create a compelling ad that sells the click, NOT the product!

This is a huge distinction and I could write a whole post on this alone since it delves straight into the art of copywriting. For now, you should strive to create an ad that sells the click, not what you are selling. Example:

Want to Sky Better This Winter?

I Have Something For You

Coolest Techniques and Gear For

Hardcore Skiiers - Visit Now

PutYourDomainLinkHere.com

This ad above targets an audience, creates curiosity and provides a call to action ("visit now"). You haven't told anyone what you are selling, but you have effectively targeted the skiing niche. You've also mentioned techniques and gear which gives them SOME idea of what you are talking about, but not the whole picture.

By the way, if your niche is skiing, I dare you to use the above ad. Let me know how it turns out.:-) The ad itself may be too long, so it may require modification. Just make sure the ad message fits your landing page - a very important attribute we will go over in the next part of this PPC series.

Part 2 should be coming shortly!