Proven SE Advertising

Pay Per Click marketing is also known as PPC. With PPC marketing, you pay the search engine each time someone clicks the link in your ad and goes to your site.

Face the facts, it will probably take between 6 and 12 months to avoid being intentionally filtered out of the search engine results by Google. And after that, you'll still have to wait until your website begins to rank high enough in the SERPS to start getting mouse clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the SE pages by using pay per click marketing

Like lots of other areas of Internet advertising, keyword investigation is a critical part of PPC marketing. You have to know which keywords and keyword phrases the majority of searchers are most likely to use to seek out what it is that you are offering.

When you start a PPC marketing campaign, you are actually involving yourself in an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are most popular, with the highest listings going to the highest bidders. The more that a person is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher that site will be listed in the paid listings, which are usually at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

PPC marketing has become highly aggressive for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

PPC marketing is often filled with falsified clicks. Your competitors will click on your ads to drive up your PPC marketing bill in order to try to get you to stop competing. There have also been some allegations and lawsuits regarding fraud that is perpetrated by the search engine companies themselves. And the Plaintiffs won at least one of these lawsuits that I read about.

I could write a lot about this area of advertising. But I think that your interests would be better served if I just "cut to the chase." Conversion rates vary widely by industry on the Internet. But the average conversion rate is similar to what is found in the mail-order business, between one half of one percent, and two percent. And in the real world, projecting a one percent conversion rate would be fairly safe, though there are thousands of variables that can make the one percent estimate much too high.

What that means is that out of every 100 clicks on your links, you might get one actual sale. So if the markup (Gross Profit) on your average sale is $50.00, and your clicks cost fifty cents each, you cannot afford PPC marketing because 100 clicks X fifty cents per click = $50.00 and you only broke even.

Remember, "Gross Profit" does not include your overhead. It is only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the above example money was actually lost. You have got to know what your costs are, and that includes how much it costs to own your equipment, pay your rent, ISP, etc., plus the value of your time.

The bottom line is that most PPC advertising has been bid up too high by the larger businesses and can be difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using pay per click marketing.

Watch out for of the companies who will offer to administer your pay per click marketing for a fee because they cannot change the laws of math or physics. They will claim to have the expertise to help you, and they may very well. But they still cannot change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that pay per click marketing can work, but you have got to carefully do the math. Can you make a profit based on the above if you pay the current bid price for the keywords and get only about a 1/10th of 1% or 2/10ths of 1% conversion rate (sales rate)? If you can, then pay per click marketing may very well work for you.

I urge you to stick with niche terms that have not been bid up to high. Personally, in my industry I'm only willing to pay between 15 cents and 40 cents maximum per click, and my products sell for between $40.00 and $150.00.

Pay per click advertising? Do the math first, and then make a decision. But you must be willing to lose money while you find out how to make it work!

Personally, I've found several SEO techniques that are much more effective than PPC marketing. These other techniques have helped me to advance my website to the first page on all of the major search engines for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. A reason that these other techniques are much more effective is they cost little or no money. And most people searching the Internet attribute a lot more trustworthiness to websites that rank high in the organic listings vs the paid listings.

By using these techniques, in well under one year, I've been able to make my site rank better than other websites in my industry that have been at it for ten years or even more!

In the longer term, you will want to optimize your site and work on getting backlinks to raise your ranking in the organic listings. Many people use link trading to promote ecommerce sites.

However, one-way backlinks are much more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I've been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented the steps that were taken to get tons of free traffic to my ecommerce site to make it successful by relying on article spooling.

Albert Weiss, the author, has written up how he gets a lot of free traffic to his site by relying on article spinning, as well as other effective SEO methods that you can employ yourself. Visit his Free SEO Information site to find out who the real SEO Experts are.

- Albert Weiss