With pay per click search engines, you pay for your listing location, or ranking, on a particular keyword phrase. The more you pay, the higher up on the list they will rank you. The benefit to the pay-per-click search engines is that you do not pay a penny unless someone actually clicks on your website, so it’s guaranteed advertising. There are not many marketing strategies out there that will guarantee results.
The most popular pay-per-click search engine is Overture.com (formerly GoTo.com). When you go to www.overture.com and type in a keyword phrase, it will tell you next to each listing what the Cost to advertiser is. This is how much the website is charged every time someone clicks on their listing. On popular keyword phrases, it might cost $3-$4 to get a top ranking. You will not want to pay any more than $.10 per click up front. If you bid too high, you will go through money rather quickly.
The overall concept
Establish an initial deposit by paying an up-front fee to the search engines that you’re listing with ($50 is the minimum initial deposit at Overture).
Research the keyword phrases that you’d like to bid on – using Overture’s Search Suggestion Tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion.
Bid on as many keyword phrases that you can by entering your pay-per-click amount. This is what you pay each time a visitor comes to your websites. The pay-per-click amount at Overture starts at $.05 per click and you must spend at least $20 a month or the difference is taken out of your account.
Each time an Internet surfer goes to the search engines (www.overture.com) and enters the keyword phrase that you’ve listed under in the search box, and clicks on you site from the search, then the amount that you paid for is taken out of your initial deposit. So with $50 at Overture bidding $.05 a click, you can get 1,000 visitors to your website.
Registering at Overture & other details
To register at Overture, go to www.overture.com and click on Advertise your site and then proceed to the Self serve sign up method. This way it doesn’t cost you any more money up front. Then start typing in your search terms with the title, description, URL, and maximum bid amount. They will review your listings within a couple business days so you’ll start receiving traffic very soon.
The main benefit of Overture is their Premium listings. The premium listings are websites that are listed in the top 3 listings with Overture under a specific keyword phrase. If you are listed in the top 3, then you get listed at the top of searches done on other major search engines, like Yahoo, MSN, InfoSpace, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, and Netscape. This list is always changing, but the main players here are Yahoo and MSN.
You will receive far more traffic from these partnership listings than you ever will from Overture directly. Therefore, getting into the top 3 search result are very important. However, don’t get sucked into the trap of bidding high just to be in the top 3 or you’ll spend hundreds of dollars a day. Follow our keys to success listed below and you should be just fine.
Google’s pay-per-click program
Another search engine that offers a pay-per-click program is Google.com. Google is one of the most popular search engines out there, and they’ve learned from Overture how to make money in the search engine game, so they’ve incorporated their AdWords Select program along with their regular search results. So by registering to this program, you can get listed on the right hand side of the Google.com searches and only pay for that listing when someone clicks on your website.
Google is a very popular search engine, and with their AdWords Select program, you have the opportunity to gain valuable visibility with the search engines for your website. Another benefit is that Google has a partnership with Aol.com, so if you are listed with Google, your search results are also shown on www.aol.com when someone does a search there for your keyword phrase. So between Overture and Google, your website can be found with the main web portals on the Internet and gain incredible visibility.
To register with Google, go to www.google.com and click on Advertise with us, then click on AdWords Select, and you can read about the program there and sign up.
Keys to success
Key #1 – Know what your per/click profit is.
The per/click profit is the average profit that you make for each click/visit to your website. This is important because with knowing your per click profit, you can then know what your marketing budget would be for each marketing strategy out there, especially the pay-per-click search engines.
For example, we’ll assume that you get 1,000 unique visitors to your site on an average day. Out of those visitors, 30 people buy and spend $1,000. After you take out your expense, lets assume that your profit is $500 from those orders. Therefore, your per/click profit is $.50, or $500/1000 visitors.
If you find that you make $.50 for each visitor to your website, then you know that if you spend more than that, you will lost money on average. You will not know this information if you are just starting out with your website; therefore, you will want to keep your bids low (at the most $.10 per click) or you will go through too much money too fast. Once you know your per/click profit, then you can increase your bids.
In order to calculate the per/click profit, you will need to know how many unique visitor are coming to your website, as well as what your revenue and expenses are. The Accounting Software from MyBusinessKit.com will help you with your bookkeeping in keeping track of your revenue and expenses, and you can get tracking software for free at www.sitemeter.com. If you’d like a more advanced tracking software package, check out www.webtrends.com and www.mycomputer.com.
Key #2 – Bid on as many specific keyword phrases that you can as low as possible.
The more keyword phrase that you bid on, the more visitors you’ll get to your website. Make sure these keyword phrases are as specific as possible because this will increase the quality of your visitors and also give you a better chance of being listed in the premium listings area with Overture.
The best way to come up with many keyword phrases is to use Overture’s search suggestion tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion. Go there and type is general keywords that deal with your website and then print off the listings that it provides. Then take that list and highlight the keyword phrases that relate to your website. Then type in each one into a Microsoft Word document. Separate them by clicking return on your keyboard so you have a long list of keyword phrases. By doing this, you won’t have to retype each keyword phrase when you submit your site to other pay-per-click search engines like Google.
You’ll want to come up with hundreds of keyword phrases to bid on. Even if the phrase was searched for only 10 times at on the search suggestion tool, still bid on it.
Key #3 – Register to many of the pay-per-click search engines.
There are hundreds of pay-per-click search engines out there now. You don’t need to try to register to all of them because many are very small, but the main ones are important. At least register to Overture and Google, then you can go to www.payperclicksearchengines.com to get a list of the top other search engines to register with.
A great tool to use in getting listed with many of these types of search engines at a low cost is through PPCNow.com. PPCNow has partnerships with over 100 pay-per-click search engines. How it works is you go to www.ppcnow.com and pay them an up front fee of about $200, and then they’ll give you over $3,500 worth of combined credit with there partnership search engines. This is a great way to utilize the other pay-per-click search engines and get a ton of credit for a low price.
Online websites and resources
www.overture.com
www.google.com
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion
www.payperclicksearchengines.com
www.ppcnow.com
www.sitemeter.com
www.webtrends.com
www.mycomputer.com
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