Pay-Per-Click marketing is the way to advertise online. You create an advertisement that gets posted online then pay the ad’s host every time someone clicks on it.
What makes pay-per-click (PPC) advertising so powerful is that you can use images and words to interest people to click on the ad, and when they do, they are taken to your site. That means you have real metrics to work with. (Metrics are the measuring numbers you use to determine the success of your marketing campaign). A metric like, “how many people clicked through my ad to my website?” is a useful metric to you. It can help you make smart adjustments to your ad to increase the number of people who come to your site.
The second reason why PPC marketing is so powerful is that it sends warm leads to your site. If someone is not interested in what you have to sell, they’ll simply not click your ad. If they are interested, they’ll click your ad and that will take them to your site where you can sell to them. Most people turn to the big providers, like Google and Yahoo to provide PPC services. And depending on what you sell, you may find that market is already saturated with advertisers for the same product. Here are some other ways to advertise with PPC that you may want to consider.
Miva.com, formerly FindWhat is bigger than most people realize and seems to be positioned to be up near the top of most frequently used search engines, just bumping its head on the big players in the industry. Rather than advertising on their own site, which seems to be rarely searched, they advertise on many other partner sites including eBay.
Embedded text is another option. It’s not nearly as big as the text-based ads that frequent most sites, but I’m seeing it with greater frequency. A site like www.investopedia has them, if you’re looking for an example. Here’s how they work: advertisers buy a word on the page and that word is underlined and highlighted in green. When you mouseover the highlighted word, a small text-based advertisement appears that you can click on to go to another site. Because the words are not ads themselves, but rather triggers, they may not be as effective as text ads, but they do offer a fresh and non-invasive way to advertise. I think we’ll see more of this in the future.
Double qualified PPC ads are a clever way of helping you separate the people who are “just looking” from the people who actually want to buy. Companies that sell it, like www.havetraffic.com, essentially just create their own PPC ads for your keywords and those ads send visitors to a landing page that contains relevant information. If the information is what the visitor is looking for, they read it and leave. If it isn’t what they’re looking for, they can then click to your site. It’s essentially Pay Per Click with an intermediate qualifier in there. Most small businesses might resist the idea because it keeps traffic from your page, however it can increase the traffic that actually buys from you by pre-qualifying them in the first place. This idea is not for everyone but if you have a site with a huge amount of traffic and only a few buyers, it might help to reduce bandwidth and maybe even cut down on many of the emailed inquiries you get from people who will never buy.
Complimentary sites. In your quest to find good site to link to, you should create PPC arrangements with complimentary sites. Don’t advertise on a site that sells competing or contradictory services to yours just because it’s an advertisement in an industry-related site. Think outside of your industry and instead think with the mind of your niche. For example, if you sell car seats to new moms, don’t advertise on sites about children. There are probably other car seat advertisers there already. Instead, advertise on sites for moms. Create partnerships with car dealerships to advertise your seats in their minivans (and while you’re at the car dealership, offer them a small bonus if they actually sell your car seats). The key is to think about where your niche goes and go there; don’t just go where all the other advertisers are going.
There are so many advertising ideas, but many fall short of being effective. Use these ideas and mix them into your marketing plan to find the best advertising for your business.
