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You can have the best looking web site in the world promoting a fantastic product, but if your potential customers don’t know about it, you won’t get any traffic or sales. This is the single biggest problem facing all internet marketers. This is especially so for newbies who frequently get discouraged and give up their attempts to make money online.

What Is Pay per Click

This is one of the more expensive methods of generating traffic, but provides an instant stream of visitors to your site. There are a number of companies offering pay per click advertising, such as Google, Yahoo and Overture, to name but a few. The most well known is the Google Adwords program, which I will use to illustrate the principles of pay per click.

You may have noticed the ads displayed on the right hand side of Google’s search page results. Each ad is associated with a “keyword phrase” (e.g ladies golf clubs) and is displayed next to the search results when someone searches for those keywords.

These ads are known as contextual ads because they are displayed on pages where the content is closely related to the keywords associated with the ad.

You will also come across these ads when you visit certain websites. The same principle applies and the theme / topic of the page matches the keywords associated with the ad. In this instance, the webmaster will receive a payment from Google for displaying their ads. This program is known as Adsense.

How Does Pay Per Click work

Place your ads with Google Adwords and pay for every click that takes a visitor to your site.
The price per click is determined by the popularity of the keyword and its position in the list. Prices generally vary between a few cents and $5 but can be very much more for some keywords.

There is no fixed price for a specific keyword or the position where it’s displayed on the page. The advertiser specifies the maximum amount they are prepared to pay and then Google uses this and other information from all the other advertisers to work out the position of each ad. Exactly how this is done is outside the scope of this article and many books have been written on the subject.

You can open a free “Adwords” account with Google Adwords. They have very good online help screens and examples to help you set up your campaigns.

If this method appeals to you, you can at a later stage spend a lot more time specializing in the numerous strategies that have been devised to make this technique successful. In common with all advertising, the secret is to continually test and improve on the performance of your ads. The bottom line is quite simply, if you make more profit than the cost of your ads, you are on a winner. If not, stop immediately and try something else!

A good idea is to get some help in the form of step by step instructions and coaching videos designed specifically for newbies.

If you are a newbie struggling to make sense of internet marketing and want to find out more about pay per click and how anyone can now make profits from selling info products, Internet Business Buddy provides you with all the help you need. For a limited promotional period you can get a free copy of his life changing system (reports and video tutorials). Click here to get yours now

Tags: affiliate, home business, Internet, money, newbies, niche, pay per click, PPC, profit, search engines, tipsaffiliate, home business, Internet, money, newbies, niche, pay per click, PPC, profit, search engines, tips

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Most pay per click ads draw amazingly low click through rates (the number of people that click on your ad divided by the number of people that see your ad).

This not only hurts sales in the form of less clicks to your site, but on search engines like Google, it can even drop your ranking like a stone.

How can you improve your click-through rate?

Here are 3 tips to improve your click through rate and pre-sell your audience so that your web sales go through the roof.

#1 Include the highest searched term (the most popular term) in your title and/or description.

For example, if you’re bidding on a cluster of keywords surrounding the theme ‘Cheap Web hosting‘, try to include the term ‘cheap web hosting’ in both your title AND your description. This will dramatically increase your click-through ratio (and thereby also increase sales).

While this is a fairly well known fact, many ppc marketers don’t do it. But think about it from your searchers’ point of view. There is an OVERLOAD of information out there. People are extremely uncomfortable with information overload. It sets up a form of cognitive dissonance or ’searcher discomfort’.

Searchers remove this discomfort by finding a website that matches what they’re searching for. When they see that your title and description has matched their search term, they think, ‘This website has exactly what I’m looking for’ and they eagerly click on your ad.

#2 Use emotionally charged words.

While many website builders are brilliant at creating websites - let’s face it, they’re not so hot at selling.

Selling is an emotional, creative process. People buy with their emotions and then justify it with reason. If you want to sell to them, you have to access their emotions (access your right-brain and use your feelings to empathize with their desires).

Building a website and promoting an online business is a very organizational, logical process. It requires mostly left-brained abilities. So you can see how some people can build a beautiful website - but find it nearly impossible to sell from that website

Here’s where you can leave your competition in the dust and rake in the sales: Use emotionally charged words and phrases in your ad copy and people will be falling all over themselves to click on your ad to see what you have to offer.

For example, instead of ‘Sweet’ why not say ‘Mouth-watering’ or ‘Sumptuous’. Instead of ‘How to start your own Internet business‘ how about ‘Travel the world while running your business from the luxury of your hotel suite.’

The options are endless and if you look at most ppc ads - you’ll easily see areas where you can tower over your competition and make your ad stand out - even if they bid higher than you.

#3 Include a sense of urgency.

Again - this is one feature that is completely ignored by most pay per click marketers.

With competition heating up every day, you need to give people a REASON to click, a little push, a feeling that they’re going to miss out on something BIG if they don’t click on your ad RIGHT NOW.

There are lots of ways you can do this. If you’re advertising something that’s on sale why not say, ‘Sale ends soon’. Or how about ‘Only while supplies last’. People absolutely hate to lose out so when you add urgency to your ad, you’ll be skyrocketing your click-through rate and putting people in a rush to buy.

While these 3 tips will dramatically increase your click through rate, here’s one last tip: make sure you deliver exactly what your ad promised when the user clicks through to your website. You’ve put them in the frame of mind to at least see what you offer - and now it’s time to deliver.

By giving them exactly what they expect to see, you’ll not only earn their trust and approval, you’ll also send your web sales through the roof!

Kathryn O’Neill is chief editor for Pay Per Click Success, a website giving you the secrets of success with pay per click advertising.

For more pay per click tips, reviews, and ppc savings, visit http://www.payperclick.homestead.com

Tags: advertising, clicks, Internet, online marketing, pay per click, payperclick, PPC, search, search engineadvertising, clicks, Internet, online marketing, pay per click, payperclick, PPC, search, search engine

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According to Andy Jones, a member of the Best Practices Search Engine Forums, fraudulent clicks are just another aspect of the business. “Any of us that use AdWords or any other PPC has to pay for a certain percentage of fraudulent clicks,” he said in a forum discussion. “I factor it in as a cost of doing business.”

Can you believe that? In other words, he’s saying, I know the pay-per-click companies are stealing my money, but it’s okay, because I’ve considered that fact ahead of time.

Unfortunately, that mentality is pervasive among pay-per-click advertisers. No wonder the pay-per-click companies aren’t making stopping pay-per-click fraud a top priority. Who can blame them? If their advertisers don’t care, why should they? Heck, with all of the money the pay-per-click companies are making, it’s actually more cost effective to issue an occasional refund, than to develop technology to eliminate click fraud.

And if you read between the lines of the following statement, Google even admitted as much:

In a recent filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google acknowledged, “We are exposed to the risk of fraudulent clicks on our ads. We have regularly paid refunds related to fraudulent clicks and expect to do so in the future. If we are unable to stop this fraudulent activity, these refunds may increase. If we find new evidence of past fraudulent clicks, we may have to issue refunds retroactively of amounts previously paid to our Google Network members.”

That statement doesn’t exactly instill any confidence, now does it?

And if Overture is asked about click fraud, they’ll just issue their standard company line:

“Our Click Protection System is sophisticated software that evaluates each of our advertisers’ clicks. This software makes decisions as to the validity of any click. Our Click Protection System uses search and click data to make both rules-based inferences and pattern recognition-based inferences about which clicks are valid clicks. We have two patents pending related to this technology, so we cannot currently disclose too many details about the methods we use.”

Do you honestly think newspaper, magazine, radio or tv advertisers would just sit back and let those media get away with blatantly stealing their money? You know they wouldn’t.

Then why do pay-per-click advertisers allow it? I don’t know the exact answer to that question, but I have my theories: First of all, you’re talking about a whole different level of sophistication with pay-per-click advertisers, compared to media advertisers. Many pay-per-click advertisers don’t even know how to access or even analyze their log files, so they have no idea how much money is actually being stolen from them.

In addition, some pay-per-click advertisers are making more money than they’ve ever made before. And rather than upset the apple cart, they’d rather keep quiet and allow the vicious cycle of click fraud to continue, so that they can keep cashing those big checks.

I also suspect many advertisers are afraid that if they complain too loudly, they may be penalized in the search engines, in regard to their free listings.

If my theories are accurate, silence is one heck of a trade off, if you ask me. Why? Because according to a report on MediaPost, an online study done by Clicklab revealed that fraudulent clicks can account for more than 50 percent of your total clicks.

So, if the goal of pay-per-click search engines is to bring lucrative, targeted traffic to your web site, what are the pay-per-click search engines doing about the click fraud epidemic, to prevent abuse that needlessly drive up your costs and reduce your ROI?

Unfortunately, since so many pay-per-click advertisers are willing to play the role of “lambs going to slaughter,” the pay-per-click companies really don’t have to do anything.

In the meantime, your ROI is going to continue to plummet, and the pay-per-click companies are going to continue to milk those cash cows (AKA) pay-per-click advertisers, for all they’re worth!

About The Author

Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions? Comments? Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net.

Visit his website at: http://www.lets-make-money.net

Tags: Internet, pay per click, PPCInternet, pay per click, PPC

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