Pay Per Click

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to drive Internet traffic to your website. There’s article marketing, video-marketing, offline marketing, banner-ads... you name pretty much any technique or technology on the Internet, and I bet there’s a way you can drive traffic with it, somehow.

But of all of them, I reckon pay-per-click advertising is the most effective of them all. Not only do you not pay a single penny until someone actually clicks on your ad, but you can put an ad up and have it “live” in front of literally hundreds of millions of people and bringing in money within just minutes. Tests that tool traditional classified- advertisers weeks and thousands of pounds to perform in the past you can do from the comfort of your desk in just minutes and for pennies.

No surprise, then, when I say I passionately believe pay per click advertising is the single most important shift in the entrepreneurial marketing world this century.

And this is not fluff or make-believe: I use pay per click advertising in my own business, and I’ve spent over £1 million on pay per click alone over the last few of years.

So you might just want to pay attention to what I have to say here. There’s absolutely no point whatsoever in you trying to figure all this out for yourself when I’ve already done it for you. I’ve made all the mistakes, fallen into the traps and pitfalls and turned down more blind-alleys than you’d believe.

Hard work and frustration for me... but it does means you don’t have to start at the beginning.

And here's the best news of all: I’ve discovered PPC success is really much easier than you perhaps think, because it all really boils down to some very simple fundamentals – fundamentals I had to learn the hard way.

So now, I'd like to share 7 of the main PPC strategies with you here, the 7 guiding principles for making sure you are using effective PPC ads in your business – the very same ones I use in my own:

1.

Make your ads relevant to the topics people are searching for. Include your main keyword in your headline and then follow up with a benefit and an offer in the second and third lines of your ad. Using your company name as the headline and then saying “we give great service” is not a good idea. It will bomb.

2.

Work hard to find those “sweet spots”. If you’re trying to sell “work from home” information, you’re looking at some 1/3 of a billion competing pages and a huge number of competing Adwords ads. So look for the long-tail, like, “work from home Aberdeen”, and similar. Put in the time and you will find those often searched-for but relatively unserviced keyword phrases.

3.

Users clicking on your ad should NOT be surprised by what they find when they get to your site. Not only is it bad manners, but it’s really bad for your business. Make the page you send them to immediately relevant: don’t send them to your home page and expect them to hunt around for the onward links to what you’ve already promised them. They won’t. They’ll leave your site with a click of disgust and the money you paid to Google for the click is wasted.

4.

Instead of trying to sell them something the instant they hit the page you’ve directed them to, begin a relationship with them by giving: offer them some free but valuable information in return for their email addresses and names. You can then email them at and make the sale happen at a more leisurely pace.

5.

Use specific keywords accurately describing your products and services. Remember, you’re paying for clicks and the more “niched” your keywords are, the more targeted your traffic will be and the cheaper the clicks will be.

6.

Use the power of “negative keywords”. If you’re using the keyword “builder” in your ads, then you don’t want to be picked up by searches for “Bob the Builder”. You can set your ads up to exclude these spurious hits on your keywords.

7.

Test. Google’s free tools allow to test and measure your advertising like never before: within just 10 minutes your ad can be in front of 100 million people and you can have real test-data not long after that.

So there you have it: seven very powerful pay per click strategies you can get working for you right now and have them making money for you immediately!

To your Pay per click Success!

Chris Cardell