Learn PPC Marketing: best way to make a lot of money online
Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)
PPC marketing is one of the best ways to make a lot of money online in a short amount of time. However, it’s also like pretty much anything else in this world: the bigger the rewards, the larger the risks. PPC has the power of bringing loads of targeted traffic to your site or blog almost instantly, but you will have to pay for it…
What exactly is PPC marketing all about?
Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.
To cut a long story short, it’s basically targeted traffic that you are paying for. This is the big difference with SEO: you don’t have to spend hundreds of hours creating relevant backlinks to your site to bring it to the top of Google for your chosen keywords, but obviously everytime a visitor clicks on the link in your ad you will have to pay a fee to the publisher. That’s the Cost-Per-Click (CPC).
There are a lot of publishers on the web offering PPC services, but the most famous ones are:
=> Google Adwords
=> Yahoo Advertising
=> MSN Adcenter
You can refer to them as the “Big 3”, the largest network of them all being Google Adwords. You can use PPC in 2 ways:
=> Search Network: when using the search network, you need to create a targeted ad just like the ones in the picture below and choose the keywords for which you want to rank. When a user types one of those keywords in the search engine, your ad will appear. How often and at what position depends on a variety of factors that I am going to write about in a moment.
=> Content Network: the content network offers you the possibility of listing your ads on various websites relevant to your niche. Your ad does not appear in the search results but on a wide range of sites related to your targeted keywords, just like in the picture below.
Search? Content? What is the best?
It depends on the niche you’re in, the keywords you can bid on, and mostly on TESTING. I can assure you that nobody in this world (as far as I know) has the ability to start a PPC campaign knowing that it will make money right off the bat without any kind of optimization. Proper knowledge of how PPC works and serious testing are the keys to success in the PPC business.
There are super affiliates who generate $100K a month on the search networks and still fail at making any kind of money on the content networks. Others are way more profitable on the content networks and just can’t figure out how the search networks work… In other words, you won’t know which one works best for you until you try it.
There are however pros and cons to these 2 methods:
=> On the Search Networks, you have the ability to target your ads much better than you could on the content network, just because your ad appears right after the user has typed a keyword in the search bar and you can match the title and description of your ads to that specific keyword. This is why ads shown in the search networks usually have a much higher Click through rate (CTR). The CTR is the rate at which users click on your ads, so if for example everytime your ad appears 10 times on the search networks you have 1 user clicking on it, then your CTR is 1/10 = 0.1 = 10%
=> On the Content Networks, you can’t really have a very targeted ad because you’re not displaying it on the search results but on websites related to your niche. Therefore, your ads are not going to be “keywords-targeted” but “niche-targeted”. The CTR for content network ads will generally be much lower than on the search network, but here is the good part: the amount of traffic you can get to your site through the content network is way bigger than what you can get from search results, and the Cost-Per-Click also tends to be lower.
What makes a good PPC campaign?
A good campaign is one that is profitable, meaning that you earn more money from selling your products on your site than you spend to find the targeted traffic through PPC. A profitable PPC campaign is one that has what we call a positive ROI (Return On Investment).
Let’s say you are selling a $10 product on your site and you manage to sell 1 for every 20 users who click on your ads. Then 1/20 = 0.05 = 5% of your paid visitors end up buying your product. This is what we call the Conversion Rate (CR), very important in PPC. If every click costs you $0.45 on average, then for each $9 (0.45 x 20) you spend on advertising $10 go in your pockets as revenue. For every $9 you spend, you make $1 in pure profits. Your ROI is 1/8 = 0.25 = 12.5%.
Doesn’t sound like a lot of money? If you’re making $1 for every 20 visitors you pay for, you could easily scale it up and earn $1,000 for every 20,000 visitors you pay for! The “Big 3” networks are gigantic and can provide you with that many visitors each and every day for virtually any niche you’re into. Yes that’s right, making $1,000 a day with PPC is very achievable and LOTS of affiliate are earning that much and even way more.
But hold on… It’s not that easy and the learning curve can be steep. Let me list for you all the requirements for a good profitable campaign:
=> High Click through Rates: typically you are going to look for CTRs of 0.1%+ on the content network and 10%+ on the search network. The more people click on your ads, the more traffic you get, the more chances you have to make a sale. On top of that, Google and other networks reward high CTRs by lowering their Cost-Per-Click (CTR) gradually.
=> High Conversion Rates: people click on your ads, that’s awesome. However, if your landing page with the product you’re selling is not appealing and targeted enough to please even a few of your visitors, then nobody will buy from you and you will end up paying for traffic that does not make you any money.
Finally, there’s one rule you need to remember before you get into PPC: you have to accept the fact that you will most likely have to LOSE money short term to MAKE more money on the long run. Nobody knows which campaign works and which one doesn’t before testing it. And even after testing a campaign for a few days you still need to go through the optimization process to keep what’s making you money and eliminate what’s not. In the end though, it’s well worth it. I know some affiliates who went from 0 to $50K/month in 1 year running less than 6 campaigns on various networks. This is close to impossible to achieve in such a short period of time solely with SEO.
The best PPC training package you’ll find out there is PPC Coach by far…
PPC COACH
If you want to get involved into PPC, I can guarantee you that PPC-Coach.com is the best training site you’ll EVER find on the subject. Everything I know about PPC comes from this site where I am still an active member. Yes that’s right, I am a full member and you can hit me up anytime on their forum if you decide to give it a try, my username is “Julamo”.
What makes PPC-Coach.com so good? Well, understanding exactly how PPC works can be very tough at the beginning and this site run by a very successful PPC marketer is now strong with 4,277 proactive members, a number growing every day. Each and every month you will be offered hours of training videos describing various money-making techniques that the best PPC marketers have been using over the years. Not only that, but you’re also getting the tools to create solid campaigns in a heartbeat and they’re worth more all by themselves than a year’s worth of PPC-Coach membership. As if this was not enough, PPC-Coach offers the largest PPC forum in the world: at the time I’m writing this article (27th of July 2010) there are 21,157 threads and 126,583 posts! If you have ANY question on PPC, you can be 100% sure that the answer is already there.
Finally, you can get a 14 day full access to PPC-Coach for only $1. That alone is an undeniable proof of the level of quality this site provides to its members. In the forum you’ll find several members who have built real PPC empires from scratch in less than 2 years and are currently earning over $100K a month thanks to what they learnt on PPC-Coach. The best of them have been interviewed by the Coach himself and the full interviews are available in the members area. This is for real, just by searching for the posts made by these guys over the last 2 years you can see them go from the state of newbie to the state of absolute master making the big bucks. Anyone with the right mindset and motivation can follow the same path.
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PS: Don’t forget to hit me up on the forum when you subscribe, my username is “Julamo”.
