Keyword PPC

Pay-per-click advertising (also known as PPC) is something you want to seriously look into for the following reasons:

- Tons of traffic. PPC is a great way to get lots of traffic to your site.

- It’s super fast. You can literally have visitors within 5 minutes of setting up your PPC campaign.

- Targeted traffic. Because you pick the keyword PPC terms that you want your ad to appear for, you only get visitors to your site that are looking for what you are offering.

- Budget control. You can specify exactly how much you want to spend per day and how much you are willing to pay per ad click.

PPC is very powerful. To make sure you use it the right way and don’t lose your shirt, here are my top 7 PPC tips:

1. Start off with a small budget. Don’t jump in head first. Start off your first campaign with a budget of around $5 per day. Only increase your budget once you know if it is profitable.

2. Track each keyword. This may sound a bit daunting but it’s very simple. Most PPC networks (e.g. Google and Microsoft adCenter) have code that you can place on your site so that you can easily see which keywords in your campaign are converting best.

You may be surprised which keywords are profitable and unprofitable. You don’t want to guess this. Track each keyword’s performance and remove those that are not working out.

3. Don’t use broad match. When setting up your PPC campaigns in Google and Microsoft adCenter, you have the opportunity to specify if you want your keywords to be broad, phrase or exact match (you can use one, two or all three types). Broad match keywords don’t convert well at all. Only use phrase and exact match keywords.

4. Group your keywords. If you have a large list of keywords in your campaign, group them into categories and create a separate ad for each group. This will improve your ad click-through rates, which, in turn, will give you more visitors and lower PPC costs.

5. Target locations. What’s great about PPC is that you can specify which countries you want your ads to appear in. Only target countries whose national language is the same as your ad’s. E.g. if you are writing an English ad for an English website, only target countries like U.S.A., Canada, Australia, U.K., etc.

6. Keyword PPC bids. You want to very particular about where you target your ad positioning. The higher you bid, the higher your ad appears on the page. You want to make sure your ad appears at least on the first page of search results (i.e. in the top 8) but at the same time you don’t want it to be in the first few positions because these ads are ‘over-clicked’.

7. Ad Copy. When writing your ads make sure your ad copy is compelling. Your ad headline is the most important. It needs to eye-catching, sensational and/or controversial.

Alternative PPC Networks

Besides Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter, there are a lot of other PPC networks. Some of them don’t get a lot of traffic but others still do, and they are a lot less restrictive in what you can and can’t do.

For a list of these alternative PPC networks and how to use them for massive profits, I highly recommend Philip Mansour’s Confidential Conversions.