One of the biggest problems for new internet marketers is learning how to advertise their products, affiliate products, or websites without spending a small fortune in PPC ads. Luckily, there are several fantastic ways to go about this, some of which can help you to lower the costs of your PPC campaigns while others require no investment at all. Let’s take a look at some of these methods for lowering the amount of investment you need to make when marketing products or services.
First, there are a few great methods for reducing the costs of your PPC ad campaigns. Poorly constructed campaigns can drain your money faster than almost any other form of online marketing, and if you are a beginner, chances are you are making some crucial mistakes that are costing you big time!
Keyword-targeted campaigns are the most commonly used campaigns, so keywords are either your best friends or your worst enemies. Many sources of internet marketing “knowledge” seem to state that giant lists of general keywords are the best route for pulling traffic. While this does pull lots of traffic, short, general keywords are more often than not the downfall of an otherwise good campaign. Lots of traffic equates into lots of per-click costs. General keywords, however, do not generally bring converting traffic. The thing to remember about traffic is this – one highly-targeted potential buyer is worth thousands of non-targeted non-buyers.
Trim your keywords and remove general, slightly-related terms that are only meant to pull more people in. These keywords, in almost every case, will not convert. They will also cost you quite a bit more per click. Go for the long-tail keywords and the highly-targeted keywords. Allow me to explain.
Long tail keywords are keywords that consist of four or more words. Let’s say you’re selling a product to teach people to make money online. “Make money online”, “make money”, “earn money”, and similar search terms are some of the most awful keywords you could possibly use, as these are some of the most over-used and therefore over-priced keywords possible! Use some keyword programs and sites to get some long-tail keywords however, and you may end up with a list with keywords such as “earn more money online today”, “make money as an internet marketer”, “how do I make more money online”, etc. These terms are going to pull less traffic, but if you put together a good number of long-tails, you will still pull a substantial number of hits. The great part is that long-tail keywords are going to cost you substantially less than the general keywords, and therefore you get twice the traffic for half the price.
Highly-Targeted keywords are keywords such as “Buy product”, “Purchase product”, and “Order product”. These terms are very specific, and will bring in those searchers who are ready to purchase a product right now. This is some of the best traffic your site will see!
Site-Targeted campaigns in Google are an often overlooked but highly profitable way of running a campaign. Find the sites at the top of an organic search for your keywords, put them into your site-targeted campaign, and watch those sites’ traffic filter into yours for a fraction of the cost of PPC.
Finally, one of the most effective marketing methods is also free! Article marketing has proven to be one of the best ways to drive quality traffic to your site. The best part about article marketing, aside from being free, is that your articles can bring traffic for months or even years! This is a cumulative effort – the more articles you write and put out there, the more traffic will continue coming to your site. It’s brilliant, it’s easy, and it’s free – give it a shot!
You should now have a few new ideas about lowering your marketing costs and improving the quality of your traffic. Good luck!
Arbitrage, or using PPC (pay-per-click) to drive traffic to your website in an effort to get people to click on your ads, is a tricky, but potentially very profitable tactic for making money online. When using Adwords to drive traffic to Adsense pages, there are a few things to keep in mind. You must find the right balance of content, relevance, and ads to keep Google happy, or else you’ll find your Adsense account banned and your website ignored by Google’s crawler. Worse yet, you may blow loads of money in PPC to find only a fraction of your costs returned in ads. Let’s look at some important factors in finding the right balance for your arbitrage campaigns.
Probably the single most important factor in pulling off a successful arbitrage campaign is relevant content. If the page you send clicks to via Adwords (or another PPC engine) contains relevant content, you are clear. Google doesn’t have a problem with arbitrage itself. Google hates the horrible, nonsensical Adsense scrub sites that clog the internet with gibberish and deliver nothing of value to the users. And who can argue? When was the last time you searched for something important, only to find several sites full of gibberish and ads?
Give the user content, whether a few short paragraphs or something longer, but whichever way you choose to go, keep it relevant. If your page has relevant content, you will probably never hear a peep out of Google.
The next important point is that you find keywords to focus your content around such that your ads deliver the highest per-click payout possible. If you are paying 10 cents per click to bring a user to your site, and the most you get if they click on an ad is 3 cents, you can’t hope to profit. The best you can hope for is that maybe they click two ads before they go and you only lose 4 cents. What’s the point?
There are many excellent tools to assist you in finding high-priced keywords. Google’s keyword analyzer itself is one of the better ones. Setting up an ad campaign and testing keywords through the campaign-creation is another sneaky but useful trick. Aim for keywords that pay at least $4 or $5. Make sure your content page title contains that keyword, and maybe drop that exact keyword once or twice more, while using several related keywords only once each. Google has very clever algorithms, and it’s tough to get this exactly right, but it can be done! Do not oversaturate your page with that one keyword or keyword phrase. Google will ignore you!
Now once you’ve picked your high-price keyword(s) to base your page(s) around, use the same analytical tactics to locate as many keywords and long-tail keywords as possible that cost next to nothing. While less searched than the expensive ones, you can combine a large number of cheaper keywords and come out with plenty of traffic coming into your page. You pay the cheap keyword price for these people, and get paid the high-keyword price when they click on your ads. That’s the name of the arbitrage game.
Hopefully you have a few more ideas about getting some arbitrage campaigns started. Best of luck!
As the most popular PPC engine available, Adwords is a must when using PPC to pull traffic to your sites. However, as the most popular PPC engine, keywords are often expensive, and a short-run ad campaign can cost an arm and a leg. There are ways to grab more traffic while spending less using Adwords. Let’s look at three tips for doing so.
Tip One: Use Hyper-Targeted Keywords.
Hyper-Targeted keywords are the actual keywords that sell – the ones that indicate your surfer is sitting there, credit card in hand, ready to make the purchase. In general, I use the following three phrases when selling “product”:
Buy Product
Purchase Product
Order Product
And of course, use each of them with all of Google’s features – in quotations and in brackets, for each type of matching. So for instance, instead of just Buy Product, you would use: Buy Product, “Buy Product”, and [Buy Product]. Depending on how hot an item you have chosen, these three primary power words – Buy, Purchase, and Order – can bring you more targeted traffic than you know what to do with, and these are people who are ready to purchase right now!
Tip Two: Use Site-Targeting.
Another feature of Adwords that most users completely ignore is the site-targeting option. Campaigns can be keyword-targeted or site-targeted. The beauty of site targeting is that you can target sites at the top of the organic Google searches. This works better in some cases than others, obviously, but when it works, you end up paying a fraction of the cost for clicks that you would for keyword-targeted campaigns.
For best results, choose a few top keyword phrases and enter them into Google. Look at the first 5 results for each one (or more if you like) and notice whether or not those sites use Adsense. Also notice the Adsense placement – is it near the top of the screen? The top left position is best, but as long as the ads are visible without scrolling the page, that site is a great candidate. When you paste that site’s root into Adwords, it may or may not be approved. If it is an approved site-targeted ads site, you’re in business. Now edit the campaign and change the site’s root out with the direct link you got from your Google search – now only that page will show your ad! Your CPM will be much lower than if the entire site was showing your ads, and you know your traffic is coming from people who searched for the term you entered.
Tip Three: Show the item’s price in your ad.
This one may sound simple, but it can really go a long way towards weeding out expensive clicks that had no intention of converting. In my experience, showing the item’s price in the ad has weeded out approximately 80% of non-buyer clicks. It reduces the total number of clicks, of course, but those clicks are higher quality traffic. This is especially effective if your price is lower than most other prices on the same product elsewhere.
These three little tips will give you an advantage in the Adwords game. Best of luck!
