Preparing Your First Pay-Per-Click Campaign
One of the best possibilities to drive targeted traffic to your
web site is the use of Pay-Per-Click search engines . They are
not like the regular search engines where you have to deal with
meta-tags, alt-tags, robots.txt etc. for your web pages.
With this kind of web site promotion, the rankings are solely
based on the amount of money you want to spend on your
advertising campaign. The advertisers are bidding on certain
keywords to achieve a particular position at the results page.
If someone searches for that keyword and clicks on the link, the
advertiser has to pay the determined amount of money. I've seen
actual bids which go as high as $6 to $7 e.g. for the keyword
"web hosting" on Overture.com .
Could Your Competitors Click On Your Link ?
But to avoid that your competitors click on your link a thousand
times to make you bankrupt, there is a mecha- nism (I think it's
done with cookies) which blocks this process .
This also is of interest to the PPCs' operators to serve their
customers in this way because many customers would complain and
could ask for their money back.
You should not bid for the most competitive keywords as this
could easily cost you hundreds of dollars to rank at the top.
Try to find keywords which are relevant to your site as well but
which are less competitive.
Try To Avoid Highly Competitive Keywords
In a nutshell : If your web site has the topic Internet mar-
keting, which is highly competetive, try to avoid this key- word
by choosing a more specific expression like e.g. copywriting or
e-book creation . Then you are rather in a field where
competitors pay less for a click.
Make a list of 20-50 keywords which are relevant to your site.
Look how many times your keywords have been searched for at the
most important pay-per-click search engine Overture.com (former
Goto.com) :
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Then
bid for the most promising ones (those with the highest numbers)
at Overture.com and some other PPCs .
Don't Bid Too Much For A Keyword
Don't make the mistake to bid too much for a keyword. If you
want to reach a number one spot and the highest bid is $0.30 ,
don't bid $0.50 or higher. Then you are just wasting money, you
could have the same top spot if you just paid $0.31 !