How to Make Money With PPC

Pay per click or PPC as it is so affectionately named is one of the fastest and most popular ways to make money online. Most search engines online have some form of pay per click monetization scheme to sell products. The most popular is Google. Google dominates the pay per click advertising market. The reason is because it commands practically 60-70% of online searches for information. The lion's share of search traffic goes to Google. The other search engines share the scraps.

The Google pay per click business model is a proven system. It works very well for buyers worldwide and has made many product sellers millionaires.

Over the years however, it has become more difficult to easily make a lot of money online with simply a product, a website and a few advertisements on pay per click.

The easy money has been made and the new money that is being made requires a deeper knowledge of what buyers are looking for; a greater commitment of money to test the best advertisements; and a greater commitment to tracking the results of each advertisement. In short, it's become a more serious business. The return on investment of ROI however, is very high.

Can you still make money from it? Absolutely! Can you lose money doing PPC? Yes, you can. In fact, if you don't know what you're doing before you start, you can throw thousands of dollars away very quickly.

The ppc business model is simple: Find a good product that people already know about and buy online, find out how people search for that product online(this is called keyword research), create at least 2 ads for each of the main keywords for that product using the ad parameters that Google has established, and establish a bid or a buy price for each keyword you find, turn your ads on, wait to receive at least 500 clicks on your ad or ads and weed out the ads that don't get a decent conversion. Conversion is when someone buys the product from your advertisement. Sounds pretty simple until you begin taking a deeper look into each step above.

Assuming you have an adwords account already set up with google, there are two basic ways in which you can make money with ppc:

- Your ad can contain a link that goes directly to the merchant's website sometimes called arbitrage) or

If someone clicks on your ad, your ad will send them directly to the merchant selling the product where the buyer can buy or search or read more about the product. Hopefully, they will buy and you can receive a commission for their purchase;

This is a good choice if you don't have a website and have no interest in having one and/or you don't have time to spend on one. If the product is from a known and trusted merchant, your customers will often buy. The fact is however, that 80-95% of the people who click your ad will not buy at first. Direct linking also saves time. It's quick and easy.

The bad things about it are that it costs more to link directly to the merchant site per click and your advertisements will need to be made for only the highest traffic keywords - meaning the highest-cost keywords per click.

Also, No matter which way you choose, you will still need to buy a domain name and then set the domain name to redirect to the merchant's sales page. It's only $9.99 per year for most domain names but you will need to figure out how to redirect it. That takes a little time (15 minutes).

There is also Google's "one URL" rule -- Google prohibits advertisers from using the same display URL for a keyword. For example, if someone else is bidding on the keyword “office chair” and sending that traffic to eBay, you can't use "eBay" in your display URL, and you can't send traffic to eBay for that particular keyword.

This can make it tough for affiliates to direct link, since there's bound to be more than one affiliate who wants to buy ads on Google for that keyword and product.

Then You must "deep link" -- Direct linking only works if you can send visitors to the EXACT product you are promoting, not to the merchant's generic home page. Sending visitors to a specific product page is called "deep linking," and unfortunately, not all merchants give you the ability to deep link.

Finally, there are some merchants who don't allow direct linking -- and even when merchants do permit the use of their display URL, they usually won’t allow you to use it where they already have a presence.

So you can see, there are real problems to direct linking that can cause you to pull your hair out. To avoid the above problems and others, many very successful people send those who click on their ads to a 'landing page'.

- Your ad can contain a link that goes to a landing page that will collect the visitor's first name and email address in exchange for a free report or gift related to the product you are selling. This of course requires you to have something of value - information in the form of an eBook, a report or a great information link to give away that they can easily retrieve after they give you their name and email address

So they enter their info and are taken to the merchant's sales page for the product you are advertising.

This is the preferred method for setting up your paid search business.

When visitors click on your ads, they arrive at YOUR website first. You don't send them to the home page, but a page specially created for this ad campaign. This destination page is called a "landing page."

On your landing page, you provide visitors with all kinds of information that helps them make an informed purchase. That information can include product reviews, ratings, articles, specs (color, size, weight, power requirements, etc.), side-by-side comparisons, and illustrations and diagrams.

After looking at your landing page, your visitors decide if they will click on a link that will take them to the merchant's site, where they will buy the product. This is the best way of doing it.

The goal of a landing page is to give prospective customers lots of information and shopping help, warming them up to click your affiliate link and buy the product.

Here, you can pre-sell your visitors with product comparisons, product reviews, coupons, and discounts -- to entice your visitors to buy the product.

In tests that have been conducted many times over many years by many different people for different products, landing pages will convert three times better than a direct linking campaign with the same keywords and search engine (Google).

One of the biggest benefits for you is that when someone goes to your landing page, you have an easy chance to build your email marketing list - an essential part of every serious online business. A list of names and email addresses is the currency of successful marketing. Having a list of your own allows you to send follow-up messages if the customer doesn’t make an initial purchase, and send cross-promotions for other offers, multiplying your earnings many times over the years.

Direct linking is often said to be “one and done.” Once someone clicks on your pay per click ad, they are sent directly to the merchant and you lose them forever. If however, you send visitors to your own website first, and your website offers additional content they like, you may find them returning to your website for reference. This is what bookmarking is all about. I like a site so I bookmark it for future reference.

Having a newsletter, or a member's forum also builds the value of your website and can create a loyal audience.

Landing pages are easy to test too -- Once you have one landing page, you can make different versions with a different headline or color to see which one works best for your offer. Google’s Website Optimizer (free) will test the different landing pages to see which one results in more sales. This is valuable information to you so you won't waste money on landing pages that don't convert well.

Yahoo Search Marketing requires you to have your own website in order to promote affiliate offers and products.

The upshot of all this: Use landing pages and your own websites to sell on Google Adwords ppc.

The bad thing about landing pages is that it takes more time and money to build and maintain your business. What started as a great and simple idea may have you up at all hours of the night trying to tweak landing pages and rewrite ads and do keyword research. There's not a free way to get around this right now. There are some great tools that will help you do all the tasks required but they will cost a little money.

To make money with ppc selling, you will need to spend nearly 500 dollars per month to make a good solid effort at it that will allow you to make it. Those who spend less than $300/month often quit - assuming it just doesn't work for them or it's too hard or it requires too much work.

After all, you will need a domain name - perhaps more than one, you will need to build at least one website, and many different landing pages. You will also need to subscribe to a a good autoresponder like get response or aweber.

The good news is building a website today is ten times easier than it was ten years ago. You can outsource it to someone on eLance, ScriptLance, Guru.com, or GetaFreelancer.com. Budget freelancers can create a simple but complete website for a few hundred dollars. You can also buy website templates for $50 or less, and have a freelancer modify it for under $100.

You also need quality content -- writing good content isn’t hard, but it does take a little thought and some time.

In any case, your website must meet Google's Quality Score guidelines. If it does, your cost per click will fall and you can save a lot of money. Google expects affiliate landing pages to be part of a larger website.

Yes, you can make money with ppc. I've given you the knowhow to get started above. You now know how to make money with ppc. Is it easy? No. Does it work? Yes.

copyright 2008 money.package411.com
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