How to Use Pay-Per-Click to Define Your Target Market

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the best way to send immediate, targeted traffic to your website. Ahhhh, but do you know who your target is? Without a defined market you are doomed to failure. How can you define your market? How do you figure out what questions they are asking and what their problems are? There are actually several ways of beginning research into a niche market. Today I'm going to discuss just one - using PPC advertising and a flycatcher page. We will assume two things. One - you have a topic but not a product. Two - you have an advertising budget between $50.00 and $100.00. You have decided on a topic. First head over to Clickbank (a digital affiliate program). You can search through over 10,000 different products there and become an affiliate for any of them. Check out a product that is similar to one you'd like to produce. Clickbank has only digital products, which are immediately downloadable. They have a tutorial program that will walk you through their site so you can use it to your advantage. Second, if you can purchase the product for which you will become an affiliate, do it! It gives you the distinct advantage of knowing your competitor and knowing the product you are promoting. Let me pause here to say that if there are no products in the market you target, there very well may not be a profitable market. You may have a great idea but the majority of people in that market may be looking for freebies. Stay away! Find another niche and move on. If there is no competition there isn't a market. Third, set up accounts with Google and Yahoo!/Overture for their PPC programs. Google and Overture/Yahoo have tutorials to help you with the process. You can begin using Google Adwords immediately but have a waiting period to be approved with Overture. With Google you pay as you go and with Overture there is a significant upfront cost depending upon your monthly budget. Fourth, set up a landing page for a Google Adwords and Overture PPC campaign. You'll need a landing page because of some new rules Google wrote this past year. Basically, each advertiser must have a unique website so that the customer doesn't end up at the same page after clicking on three different ads. Your objective is to figure out if selling this product to this market is profitable. If it is then you can move on to the next step, which is a flycatcher page. Fifth, using the same domain and hosting as your landing page you can develop a flycatcher page to figure out what questions this target market has and how you can answer them. A flycatcher page is nothing more than a questionnaire or a way of asking people their most burning questions about a topic. You can do this using PPC and using forums and groups. The concept is the same although the quality of the traffic will be different. Using the PPC, and writing an ad that leads people to believe there is a product on the other end, you have people who are ready to purchase. Going through forums and groups will get you questions from people who may be interested in the topic but may not be ready to purchase. Use both techniques to get a balanced list of questions on which to build your product. Sixth, set up the flycatcher page and PPC campaign. As I implied in the paragraphs above you should write your PPC ad as if the people will be sent to a page where they can purchase something. You are getting traffic who is interested in buying. On the webpage ask for a name, e-mail and their most burning question about your target. For instance, you might be interested in producing an e-book about scrap booking for profit. The flycatcher page would tell people you are developing a book about this topic. You want their most burning question about how to make a profit from scrap booking. You will also give the people who leave their name, address and question a fr.ee copy of the e-book. Seventh, stop the PPC campaign when you have gotten the number and quality of questions you want. Use that information to write your e-book and answer their questions. You have now used a PPC campaign to define your target market and start your client list!