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Home |
Talking |
for FREE |
the Top |
Secrets |
Warnings |
a Website |
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The Ultimate: Just buy your way to the top! There's no guessing here. You don't have to learn the secrets of creating Meta Tags or the strategy of creating doorway pages. You can get the #1 position on all of the major search engines within a few days by participating in Pay Per Click advertising. Let me give you an overview of how Pay Per Click advertising works: Here's what happens: For my example, let's say you have a web site that is promoting a new revolutionary cleaning product called EasyClean:
Once you place your bid, when someone types in "shower cleaner" on Yahoo or on their other favorite search engine, you magically show up as the very first listing! When someone clicks your listing, you are charged what you bid, which was 10 cents. Let's say you receive 100 hits that day. You would pay $10 for today's traffic (100 clicks at 10 cents per click). At the end of the day, you see you have made 5 sales for $19.95 each. When you tally things up you see that for $10 you were able to generate almost $100 in sales! You decide to do the same thing tomorrow. That's pretty much how it works with Pay Per Click advertising. You have complete control. You choose the phrases you want to bid on and you choose how much you want to bid. You decide how high up in the search engines you want to appear. Here is my overview of the pros and cons of Pay Per Click advertising:    Overture.com is the undisputed leader of Pay Per Click advertising. Overture.com (formerly known as Goto.com) has partnerships with 80% of the Internet search engines and portals, including the coveted Yahoo.com. You signup with Overture by depositing $50 in your bidding account. You then create your first listings with the search phrases of your choice. Overture has a great tool that you can use to figure out what phrases you should be targeting. Type in the search phrase you thing people would use to find you and click the button. Overture will tell you exactly how many people typed in the phrase you picked last month on all of the various search engines. You can use this tool to figure out which phrases should get you more hits. You can also use this tool to figure out the size of your market. You can gather extremely valuable information for free. For example, using my "shower cleaner" example from above, I found out that only 100 people typed the phrase "shower cleaner" in a search engine last month. That's only 100 people on the entire Internet for the entire month! This might make you think that there probably isn't a very big market for shower cleaners. But what happens when you try the phrase "cleaning product"? Almost 6000 people typed in the phrase "cleaning product" last month! Maybe there really is a market for my EasyClean product. Use Overture's tool to identify the phrases you want to target. You probably will only be able to take the time to setup about 10 phrases during your signup process. Later on, it's not unusual to bid on hundreds of phrases. You can add phrases to your Overture account at any time. Tips for using Overture
Overture.com offers a number of plans. For most people I recommend their Self Serve Plan, since it's free. You just pay for your clicks, and you don't have to pay Overture for a setup fee. You deposit $50 into your bidding account and you can start making your listings on your own. Overture takes about 5 days to add new listings when you are on the self serve plan. It's up to you to create your ads and pick your phrases. If think you will have trouble picking your phrases or if you want help writing your listings, you can go for Overture's other plans that offer more assistance. Relative is the best word I have to describe how expensive it is to use Pay Per Click advertising. For those of you who expect to create a successful business with absolutely no marketing budget, I would think again. I started my own computer consulting business back in 1988. Most of my customers came from contacts I made at computer stores where I used to work and through going door-to-door passing out my brochures to area businesses. You would think that type of marketing was pretty much free. Well, it wasn't. I had to pay for creating my business cards, publishing a brochure, gas for the car, printing nice laminated "Dealer Wallet Reference Cards" for sales people to use at the computer stores, and more. If you think about it, most successful businesses have at least one sales person. How much do you think the average sales person is paid? My guess is that most successful sales people at least make $35,000 these days (I could be wrong, but it's just a guess). When you have an online business where you generate business from online customers, your sales force is the Internet search engine network or whatever other marketing vehicle you choose. I'm not saying that you have to pay $35,000 on marketing, but if you think about it, that would be very little to spend to make 100,000 presentations in a month as compared to having one sales person who may only be able to make 100 presentations in the same amount of time. The other amazing thing about Pay Per Click advertising is that you only pay for performance. You only pay when someone actually comes to your store! Just think about that for an off-line business. Do you think that newspapers would let you get away with just paying for the people who came to your store for the sale you were advertising? I can just hear you saying, "Well, we had 5 people respond to our ad. I bid 10 cents for each person who came to the sale, so I owe you 50 cents.” It doesn’t work that way does it. The newspaper people would demand their $5,000 or whatever price they were charging you for your display ad. They would make you pay the full price for running your ad whether anyone came to your sale or not. I know the feeling. I used to place small newspaper ads for my consulting business to try to generate more leads. I remember paying $150 for a tiny ad. I would receive very few calls from these ads (I couldn’t afford to spend the thousands of dollars it took for the large display ads). The frustrating part was that I would receive very few calls from prospects. When I did receive a call, it was usually from another company trying to sell me something. And you know what? I think I am very lucky I didn’t waste thousands of dollars on the larger ads. Most likely, I would have just received more phone calls from the wrong people. I learned two lessons the hard way: 1) Stop spending money on ads that may not reach my targeted audience. A general ad in the business section of the newspaper didn't necessarily reach people who were just looking for computer consulting. It mostly reached other businesses that were looking to generate more business from me! 2) Don't waste money on ads that "might" bring me prospects when I have Pay for Performance advertising options available to me. Yes, I'm a fan of Pay for Performance advertising, as you can see. At least you know that when you pay, you are paying for good prospects. Whether they buy or not, is another story, but at least people interested in my product or service come to my website. Google ADSelect and Other Pay Per Click Services  I wanted to also mention Google AdWords Select, which is a similar service to Overture that will get you on Google.com and AOL Search. In the best of all worlds, if you have the budget, you will want to participate with Google also. Google’s system is a little different in that they have minimum bids based on the phrase you pick. The popularity of your ad will also give you an advantage in ranking. This is a nice feature, but you also lose that total control that you get with Overture. If your aren’t getting many clicks on your ad, it may drop in the rankings, even though you bid as high as your competitors. Often, you may find that the phrases are more expensive, unless you can think of good alternate phrases that others may not have considered. We have had good success with Google AdWords Select, but for first timers who can’t try both, you may want to get your feet wet with Overture, since their system is a little more straightforward and you have total control over what is happening. When you see how things work, you can venture over to Google and grab the boost in traffic you will get from AOL Search and Google.com. AOL has a ton of members, so it can often be a significant boost in traffic. Here's a link for Google's AdWords Select: Google AdWords Select There are a number of other Pay Per Click services. The next most popular is FindWhat.com. At some point, I think you have to stop and not over extend your management skills by participating in too many services. My advice would be to stick to Overture and Google for most people. What do you think? Tell us in our HitsTalk.com discussion area. Mitch Cohen -- Webmaster | Return Home | Start Talking | Submit for FREE | Buy the Top | SearchEngine Secrets | Mitch's Warnings | Make a Website | |
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