PPC - Easy Money Or Money Pit?
If you are relatively new to the world of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and you are extremely eager to get started, it is very easy to get lured in by all of the hype and all the promises of instant wealth, riches, and “easy money” that all of the so-called Internet marketing “gurus” out there lay claim to. Unfortunately, if you dive right into PPC without really knowing what you are doing, you can get burned very easily and very badly. If you create your own website and then jump knee-deep into PPC to promote it without a clear action plan, you can lose a lot of money. You can lose your shirt and go broke.
But the truth of the matter is that if you play the game right, and learn how to make a smart PPC advertising campaign properly from the get go, then you CAN indeed become very wealthy relatively quickly. However, it is extremely important to remember that PPC is not a “get rich quick scheme” and that it is NOT easy money. On the contrary, PPC is fraught with a great deal of risk, and requires a tremendous amount of analysis, research, planning, and hard work in order to be successful.
The Importance of Website SEO for Your PPC Campaigns
When starting out with Internet marketing, you generally have two choices: PPC advertising versus organic SEO (search engine optimization) content development. The former focuses on short-term financial gains and requires money to invest. The latter is slower and costs less, while emphasizing on long term returns on investment. Many people who can afford it will jump right into PPC because it is indeed faster. Ironically, though, Google frowns upon speculators who are just “in it to win it”. Google now places greater emphasis on the quality of the webpage that you are sending your visitors to when they click on your advertisements. Many people tend to get into PPC as a way of having to avoid SEO, thinking that you can throw together any old landing page. Google has taken steps to dissuade that tendency. SEO is an important part of PPC advertising.
In other words, it is not enough to throw money at choosing the right keywords and composing clever 3-line advertising banners. Google places greater emphasis on the SEO aspects of the target website than it used to! You could have a great PPC advertisement with compelling text, targeting very high-volume keywords. But if your website is not optimized for the keywords you chose, Google will penalize you by charging more per click, thus giving you a huge disadvantage against your competition.
Some Basic PPC Tips & Techniques
Here are a few basic tips on how to create your own website and make a smart PPC advertising campaign:
- Build a campaign around many keywords that get fewer searches than only a few keywords that get lots of searches. Keywords with high search volume have more competition. The more competition a keyword has, the more you must pay per click, which eats into your profit margins. Keywords with less search volume have less competition; hence the cost per click will be lower. The key is to populate your campaign with MANY low-competition keywords. By doing so, you will gain more clicks, diversified across many keywords that you will have paid much less for.
- Design your destination landing page with SEO techniques. Treat each web page as if you were trying to get it ranked highly in Google’s natural (non PPC) search results. Google looks favorably upon this and will reward you with lower costs per click.
- Start small. Don’t set your campaign spending limits to be greater than your ability to afford. In the event that you don’t make any sales before burning out your budget, will you have enough money to pay for your PPC expenses? As you start earning a profit, you can take some of your profits and reinvest them to increase your PPC budget.
- Take the time to do thorough and proper keyword research to make sure that you are using “buyer” keywords. Avoid words such as “free” or any words or phrases that imply that the reader is just looking for information and may not be interested in actually spending money on buying the product or service you are trying to sell through your landing page.
- Make sure that your landing page offers compelling content that is both engaging for the visitor, and that is relevant to the advertisement. If the content of your web page doesn’t match what the intent of the advertisement was, then the visitor might end up clicking on the back button.
- When choosing a web hosting option, Google will look more favorably upon your web page design and optimization efforts if you use your own domain name than if your URL is a subdirectory underneath a free domain name from your free web hosting provider.
Follow these basic tips to create your own website and promote it using proper PPC techniques, and you will be well on your way to earning a handsome profit.
