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Here's how PPC Search Engines Work: 1) Go to Overture. 2) Enter a search term into the search box. 3) Check the results on the next page. 4) Find out how much it'll cost for the top positions. |
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How do you get the traffic? How do you get traffic when you don't have any? When you're starting from scratch? That's the million dollar question, isn't it? The answer, of course, is that you BUY IT! And how do you do that? There are many options. You can buy banner advertising. You can buy popups or exit traffic. There are many ways to do it. In this report, we're going to look at one of the best choices -- pay per click. It's interesting. The first thing most people think about when they think of getting traffic is landing a position on the top of the search engines. This is something you certainly can do. Here's a resource for Search Engine Optimization that I recommend: http://www.bruceclay.com I get sick of hearing about search engines. There are a zillion articles in ezines that cover the same thing. Most all the Internet marketing courses all cover the same basic methods. I'm not going to waste your time on common knowledge filler like that. If you're new to the Internet, just search under "search engines." You'll find more web sites with tips and tricks than you can shake a stick at. Did you know that some of the top web sites report that 20% to 90% of their traffic comes from the search engines? Don't listen to people who say search engines are dead. That's a lie. The disadvantage of search engines is that there are no guarantees you'll get listed at the top of the search engines, and they can be slow to spider your site. It can take months for you to find out if your strategy is working or not. Compare this to an associate program launch where you can make some big bucks in only a week or two if your program hits it right. Don't be fooled by the software programs that submit your site to 400+ search engines. You'll get very little traffic from this. The vast majority of your search engine traffic will come from Google, Overture and Yahoo. If you don't have the time, money and energy to spend trying to get listed at the top then you can simply "buy your way in" using Pay Per Click keywords. But this can get pretty expensive, depending which keywords you're trying to buy. The thing is, regardless of what tools you use, you still have to come up with your own strategy. See, you want to get to the top, right? But under what words? That's the question. Your strategy is the single most important thing. The tricks and techniques simply allow you to better implement your strategy. Here's how to find out: One: You need to use a web site statistics package that tells you what words people are searching on to find your site. Your host probably has a statistics program that does this for you. If not, go to http://www.webtrends.com which is the statistics tracking program I personally use and have used for the last 5+ years. For more information on Web Trends Live, tracking unique visitors and details on how I got 1 in every 102 English Speaking Internet users in the World to visit my websites, just go to www.1in102.com and check out my product located there. What you do when you get a look at your statistics is to find the keywords that people are using to find your website. Then you look at other words and try to find two-word combinations. Most people search on two words. Now, you have to narrow things down. Tons more people search on marketing than sales letters. But under sales letters I have a chance at getting to the top. I don't under marketing. The competition is too fierce. Especially if you're using the Pay Per Click Search Engines. I think the last time I looked "Internet Marketing" was over $4 per click. What you have to do is think in terms of feeder topics. What are the topics that can feed people to your site? For example, instead of marketing, I might try direct mail, direct response, copywriting, things like that. Next, I'm going to write a brief but informative article on each key word set. In the article, I'll use the key words 5 or 6 times but no more. I can use several sets of key words in each article. This is a clever strategy I got from Matt Gagnon. It's common sense but effective. A couple things that may be relevant for some search engines, but have largely fallen in the less important areas is the title of the page, meta tags and your keyword density. For advice on these and other search engine optimization techniques, I refer you to Bruce Clay (http://www.bruceclay.com) and Search Engine Watch. (http://www.searchenginewatch.com) The key is that you can't get accused of spamming the search engines because you're writing honest-to-goodness articles. If you do a good job with these articles, you can also submit them to lists of ezines for publishing. I recommend you compile as huge a list as possible of ezines related to your topic. Every two to four weeks, fire off an article to them. Just write an article in your text editor and put a hard return after every 65 characters. You only want 65 letters on a line since a lot of mail readers wrap after that number. Before you send your articles you need to format them to the specs of the ezine you're submitting to. You can now do this with the click of a button and have your articles and email perfectly formatted every time. We custom wrote the program because every other product we tried for text formatting didn't do what we needed. Check it out at: http://www.pushbuttonformat.com Few people follow the strategy I just gave. I'm NOT talking about creating the standard "doorway" pages optimized for the search engines. I'm talking about writing articles that contain honest content. See how this is different from what most people do? My friend only has 20 or 30 of these pages. And they perform like crazy for him. He works at keeping them in the top 10 position. And finds that dropping from number one to two or three reduces response by as much as 50%. So you do have to work at keeping the pages at the very top. Here's the magic of this method: 1. You use these feeder articles as search engine bait. 2. You submit these articles to ezines. 3. If you want content on your web site, you can post these articles there too. When you submit these articles to the search engines, make sure you have a great title on the page. I'll often scan search engine results looking for a title that grabs me. Follow my advice in the ad copy section for writing headlines and bullets to come up with good bait titles. By the way, just for the record, when I first wrote Amazing Formula, my friend used an inexpensive, off-the-shelf tool to do this. He later went on to write his own program. He sold it for awhile but things change so quickly I believe he just uses it in-house now. That's the problem with search engines. They're always changing. If you're a one-person business, you can only focus on one marketing method. So be careful which one you choose. Search engines can take months to work for you. But the traffic is "free" once you get it working. Free publicity and associate programs are virtually instant traffic generators as are joint ventures. You have to evaluate what is best for you. Here's another off-the-wall idea. Know how some people sell CD's with 1,000 free reports on them? The idea is that you get reprint rights to the reports and can supposedly make money selling them. I've got a better idea. Why not use those free reports as search engine bait? Just juice up the keyword density in them. The hard part about search engines is that the methods change frequently as do the software tools. I don't even know if I can count the number of doorway page builders and other types of SEO software I've bought in the past that are either not relevant or no longer work at all. That's life in the SEO game. However if you want to play the game, you've got to stay current with what tools work and what's going on and the latest secrets. Now, if you're unfamiliar with it, here's how pay-per-click traffic works.
(Overture is now Yahoo Search Marketing, so when you go there and see a reference to Yahoo, don't think you're on the wrong page.)
Go to the search box on the main page and type in: vitamins
The search results will appear on the next page and next to each of the top listings you'll see the text 'sponsored listing', like this:
You notice the red circle? That shows that each of the sites listed in the results have actually paid to be in that position. So if you want to be the first search result returned when someone searches on the word vitamins, then you pay $x.xx everytime someone searches on the word vitamins. Unless, and until someone else bids higher for that position.
If you want to see how much someone is paying for the terms you're searching on you need to request this information from Overture. On the top right hand side of the search results, you'll see a hyperlink that says:
Just click that link and the results appear in a pop up window:
Overture works on a bid basis. You bid to get to the top position. In the screen capture you see above, the person in the #1 position has told Overture they're willing to pay $2.98 PER click to maintain the top position. The #2 person has set their maximum bid at $1.70. Although it appears the person in the #1 spot is paying WAY more than they should to be at the top, the $2.98 is just the most they are willing to pay. When you set up your advertising account with overture.com, you will have an area where you can manage your bids. Here is what that looks like. If I want to bid on the term "sale letter" (without the "quotes" of course), I just type in how much I'm willing to pay for it under "new bid."
For every person who clicks on the listing I would pay .65. That means 100 visitors will cost $65.00. Let's say the product costs $50.00. To make money, I would need to sell 2 out of every 100 visitors my product. Two sales brings in $100.00. I pay out $65.00 and net $35.00. You can bid on as many words as you want. You could have 1,000 words sending you traffic as long as they were profitable. What if you can't make a profit paying .65 a click? What if you're only selling ONE person out of 100 visitors versus two? Then the absolute most you could pay would be $50.00 or .50 per click. And if you wanted to double your money, you could only afford to pay .25 a click. So you know what you do? In your bid manager, you simply type in .25 instead of .65. Now, you're only paying .25 per click. Of course, you're going to be listed at number 6 instead of number 5. The person in position 5 is paying 50 cents per click. The person in position 6 is paying 22 cents a click. Other Pay-Per-Click Search Engines Include: Google Ad Words at http://www.google.com When you're buying keywords, there are a couple things to consider. 1) How profitable are your keyword choices? Let's say to be listed as number one under the term "ecommerce" is going to cost you a whopping $6.47 per click! Now, if you're wanting an idea for a product or service, wouldn't it be interesting to go to the top 5 listings and see HOW they are making their money? Aren't you curious how the above companies can afford to pay $4.00 to $6.00 for every single click to their web site? Let's run the numbers. If you're paying $6.47 per click, that is $647.00 out of pocket for every 100 visitors. So unless you're making $647 for every 100 visitors, you're in the hole! Wow! Those are profitable numbers. You want to know how to make $647.00 for every 100 visitors to your web site? Easy. Go to a web site where they are paying that much per 100 visitors. Look at the term "bulk email marketing." See how the number one person is paying $4.20 per click? Notice that the number two person is paying only $2.01 per click! In other words, the number one person could lower their bid to $2.50 per click and still safely be in the number one position! That's a savings of $2.19 per click! Wow. Know how much money that is which can be saved in a month? 14,993 people searched on the term "bulk email marketing" in the prior month. Let's say 30% of those clicked on the number one link. (The actual figure could be higher or lower.) But if 30% of the people clicked on the link, that is 4,497 clicks. Times $2.19 wasted per click. That is $9,850.40 of WASTED MONEY! Of course, I know what you're thinking, "Marlon, I can't afford to pay $4.00 per click. What do I do" 1. You can simply bid what you CAN afford to pay. The problem with that strategy is, if you're not in the top 10 listings, you likely won't get many clicks. However, if you manage to get bids out on 500 or 1,000 key words, this could still be profitable. Let's say you had 1,000 or 2,000 key words where you only bid a dime ($0.10). You would be buying traffic dirt cheap. The only problem with this method is overture.com's specific strategy. They have decided to make it extremely difficult to bid on a large number of key words. They have very stringent relevancy rules. Unless your web page uses the exact term you're bidding on, they won't allow you to bid on that key word. You will probably have to create a special landing page for each key word you bid on that uses the term in the headline on the page and in the first paragraph of your sales letter. One thing to note is, if you have any pop up windows on your page they won't let you bid on that keyword so you'll need to create pop up free pages and drive the traffic to those. 2. The alternative is to be in the top 3 search results of your best key words. Why the top 3 words? Because the top 3 words also get traffic from Yahoo! and other search engines. This means you get much more exposure (and possible clicks) on your key words. That means more click throughs for the words you do have bids on.
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