Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing

Plan and launch your PPC campaign and keep track of its progress

If you want potential customers to form a traffic jam at your Web site, Pay Per Click just might do the trick. This book will help you decide It tells you all about Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search, targeting your customers, watching out for fraud, assessing the pros and cons of Pay Per Click, and making Pay Per Click work for you.

Discover how to Use the right keywords to trigger your ads Figure your breakeven point Write ads that reach your customers Calculate return on investment Use geo targeting Track your ad results

Top 20 Tips for Beginner Blogger

1. Choose a topic that you know, like, and are passionate about. This way you will never get bored and will keep your audience always interested and asking for more.
    
2. Pick a topic where there is not a lot of competition. If your topic is too common, try addressing it from a particular angle or focus on a specific niche. For example, there are many sites that talk about cars, but few that specialize in only one brand, and even fewer that focus on only one model. The key to be successful is to find a specific enough topic with a large enough audience.
    
3. Open a Blogger account. It is free and easy to use. That way, you won’t have to invest in costlier platforms like MovableType or TypePad before you have the chance of finding out if blogging is for you.
    
   
   
4. Use a minimalist template, preferably one with a white background. This format is easier to read and pleasant to the eye when you combine it with color pictures.
    
5. Use pictures to dress up your blog entries and give your blog a more professional appearance. You can find excellent pictures at a very low cost in istockphoto.com, or even free in Flickr (don’t forget to ask the owner of the picture for permission before you use it).
    
6. In one of your blog’s side columns, list six or seven links to authoritative sites related to your topic. When the search engine robots visit your blog, they will find these links and your blog will benefit by association.
    
7. Write in simple language, short paragraphs and using bullet points. These are essential guidelines for writing on the web, and will make your posts easier to read and understand.
    
8. Always link out to the sources you use to document your posts. This is not only good etiquette but also a way to promote your blog and get links: when the people you link to find out that they’ve been linked to, they will most likely link to your post from their site or blog.
    
9. Check your posts for spelling and grammatical errors. This will make your blog look more professional and will increase the probability of other people linking to it.
    
10. Use labels to categorize your posts and keep your blog neatly organized. Blogger recently modified its software to allow the use of labels.
     
11. Participate actively in forums and discussion groups related to your topic. Find what are the most common questions and provide the answers in your blog. Then, direct forum readers to your blog. Try to also direct forum readers to other resources, or  answer without necessarily linking to your blog, sometimes. If not, you may be perceived as self serving and only interested in promoting your blog.
     
12. Use HitTail to research topics to write about. HitTail gives you a list of the search terms used by those who came to your blog through a search engine. This search term list will give you ideas for future blog posts.
     
13. Allow your blog readers to email your posts to other people. Also, give them the option to bookmark your posts using del.icio.us, furl, or any other social bookmarking service. You can go to AddThis to download a smart button that makes it easy to bookmark your posts. You can find instructions on how to add the button to Blogger here. The easier you make it to share your blog posts, the more relevant traffic your blog will get.
     
14. Use Technorati tags at the end of your blog posts. Technorati tags are a way of classifying your blog posts by topic and have them added to Technorati’s index (Technorati is the most important search engine for blogs). Use this automatic Technorati tag generatorto avoid having to create the HTML code manually.
     
15. Syndicate your blog allowing your visitors to subscribe to your feeds through their favorite aggregator. This way, they will be automatically notified every time you update your blog. You can use this tool to generate attractive syndication buttons, which you can then place in a side column of your blog.
     
16. Post frequently. It is the only way to keep your audience interested and coming back. Two or three times a week is ideal. Once a week is the borderline minimum that I recommend to keep your audience engaged and maintain adequate visibility in the search engines.
     
17. Keep a large number of posts in the main page of your blog. Search engine robots usually won’t crawl and index all your blog pages, however they will visit your main page frequently. The more content you keep in your main page, the bigger the chance of it popping up in the search engine results pages.
     
18. Use Google Adsense to monetize your blog. Blogger lets you add Google Adsense easily and seamlessly in several locations within a page. The best locations are within the content, and on top of the page simulating a navigation bar.
    
    
    
    
     
19. Don’t use Google Adsense excessively, at least at the beginning. Your initial focus should be not to monetize your blog, but to build your audience and establishing your blog's reputation as an authority within your topical community. A blog that is deep on content and lean on ads is more likely to attract the kind of links needed to become relevant to users and search engines.
     
20. Once your blog is established and generates abundant, relevant traffic, you can monetize more aggressively, not only with Adsense but also with affiliate links and, why not, maybe even by selling your own products.

You can see a real example of all these tips at work in my blog: http://www.shoestringbranding.com  

You can freely reprint this article provided that you include the following resource box:

Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing collection of Internet marketing articles, tips and resources, and Shoestring Branding ( http://www.shoestringbranding.com ), an online resource for entrepreneurs who want to build strong small business brands.

Pay Per Click Search Engine Basics

Pay per click search engines let you set up an account with an initial deposit, and then bid for the top positions in the search results pages for keywords or key phrases that you are interested in. Your bid will typically be set in cents or dollars per click. When a prospect clicks on your link, you are charged the amount of that bid.

Naturally, the keyphrases that people search for the most will command the highest bids.
Some pay per click search engines operate their own brand of search engine. However, the bulk of the traffic to bidding web sites doesn't come directly from them but from partner sites, usually large portal sites like Yahoo!, MSN or AOL. Links to bidding web sites will appear at the top or at the side of the search results page, clearly marked as "sponsor results" or "sponsor links".
For example, Overture (formerly GoTo), by far the most popular pay per click search engine, provides sponsored listings to numerous partner sites, among them: America Online, Altavista, Direct Hit, Excite, HotBot, iWon, Lycos, Netscape, and Yahoo! The highest bidders will achieve the top position for their selected keywords.
With Lookssmart, you pay a flat fee per click ($0.15 at the time of this writing) and the pages with higher relevance rise to the top.  Looksmart provides sponsored search results to a high quality core of sites like MSN, Altavista, About.com, Netscape and CNN.
Another important Pay Per Click search engine is Kanoodle.   Kanoodle goes beyond offering traditional sponsored results in search engines, by offering their ContextTarget™ service.  ContextTarget™ puts your ads alongside editorial content instead of within search results. This allows you to reach potential consumers at the exact time they are engaged and reading relevant content on their favorite sites.   At the time of this writing, Kanoodle was offering new customers it's attractive $5 Kanoodle Free Trial.
Google, the king of search engines, has recently launched its own pay per click service, called Google Adwords. At the time of this writing, Google Adwords provided sponsored search results to America Online, AskJeeves, Earthlink, and to Google itself. Google operates a little differently than Overture and Looksmart, in the sense that the top positions are determined by a combination of high bids and high click through rates, so nobody can lock the top positions solely by bidding high.

  

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that usually only the top two or three bidders for a selected key phrase will be displayed in the search results page of the partner sites. This means that if your page is in fourth position or lower, your link will most likely not be displayed on the top partner sites, and your traffic will be significantly less. That explains the large difference in price between a top position and a lesser one.

Since bidding for the top positions is so expensive, you want to make your link text as specific as possible, to attract only the most qualified, targeted traffic. If you make your link text too generic and bid for a top position, you may end up receiving lots of clicks from people who are not really interested in your product, and who click on your link only out of curiosity. That is also the reason why you have to select very specific keywords.
To know how much to bid for a top position, you have to have an idea of your expected conversion rate and the gross profit margin of your product. Let say that you sell computer books at a gross profit of $4 per book, and your conversion rate is 3% (meaning that 3 out of 100 people who click on your link actually buy a book). Under this assumption, if 100 people clicked on your link, you would sell three books, making a total gross profit of $12. This means that, to break even, each click must be worth $0.12. If you bid less than $0.12 per click, you make money. If you bid more, you lose money.
Pay per click search engines provide you with real time reports that tell you how much are people bidding for specific keywords. They also provide you with Keyword Suggestion Tools to assist you in selecting the right keywords or keyphrases (to see an example, check Overture's Keyword Suggestion Tool). One of the most important functions of this tool is to show you alternative keyphrases, which may be cheaper to bid for than the ones you had originally selected.
In summary, using pay per click search engines is the quickest and easiest way to gain the top search positions in the major search engines. It can also be very costly, so it is important that it be handled properly.