So many people (myself included) spend so much time trying to generate free/SEO (search-engine optimized) traffic to their websites, when they could very easily have traffic coming in literally within the next few minutes…if they’re willing to spend just a little bit of money.
I’ve personally spent HOURS and HOURS of time writing articles, social bookmarking Squidoo lenses and Hubpages, linking this web 2.0 property to that one, all trying to get that somewhat elusive Google Top 10 ranking in the search results. Sometimes I’ve been successful, sometimes I haven’t.
But where I’ve been most successful lately with my own product sales (in a non-internet marketing niche) is simply by buying traffic.
Yes, it takes a LITTLE time to setup, and it really needs to be tracked and tested, but wouldn’t you rather spend an hour or two a week (usually less, if it’s working) generating traffic than an hour or two each NIGHT? I know I would!
Look, do yourself a favor and try Google AdWords. Yes, you will have to learn a little something, because I’m not going to go into a complete course on AdWords here.
And DON’T buy another course on the subject! Google has some great free tutorials available here:
http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/
Besides the basics, I’ll add some of my own tips from my several years of experience with AdWords:
- Do NOT set your daily budget to something more than you can afford! Kind of makes sense, but believe me, it’s easy to think of this like gambling and start spending too much.
- Try both the Search Network (ads on Google search results pages) and Content Network (AdSense ads on websites), but do so separately. Set your bids for the Content Network to aboud 1/3 or 1/2 of your Search Network bids, because it is definitely cheaper to get traffic there.
- Try attention-getting words like “scam” and “truth” and “you” in your ads.
- Capitalize the first letter of EVERY word in your ad – it just works.
- Make sure your landing page is a good quality page – with content relevant to your ad and your product. Google will figure out if it is or not anyway – I don’t totally know how, just know they will.
- If you are breaking even or even losing a little money on your campaign, you may have a winner in hiding – it’s time to start tweaking and testing to make it even better.
- Always have two ads running, to see which one performs better. To test the statistical significance of your results, use this great tool at http://splittester.com
- Once you find a winning ad, disable the loser and try to beat the winner. Do this forever.
- Once your campaign is “minimally efficient” (making SOME money), scale it up and keep tweaking, since you probably will not lose money now!
- Use the awesome bidding tutorial at http://www.google.com/adwords/biddingtutorial
- Learn, test, track, and improve!
Don’t be afraid of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising!
Is it possible to lose a lot of money fast with PPC? YES!
Is it one of the most powerful ways to generate targeted traffic fast? YES!
Use it wisely and you will be rewarded.
If you have had experience with PPC advertising – good or bad – or just have questions or comments, please share them by leaving a comment below. If you liked this post, please ReTweet it through your Twitter account with the ReTweet link at the top of this page.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Great advice for PPC. I recently had my first real successful day in PPC yesterday. I had $60 in profit and it was all from testing and tweaking my landing page and adsense ads. It really is amazing how the slightest changes can make such a huge effect on a campaign.
One more suggestion that I would make is to make several adgroups. Pick a set of keywords and create two ads for split testing around that group of keywords. For example, if you bid on the keywords “Learn Spanish fast”, make sure your ads say something about learning Spanish fast. If you are also bidding on the keywords “Spanish E-Book Scam”, make sure you create a separate adgroup for those keywords and your ads have something referring to a Spanish E-Book Scam. It’s all about making sure your ad is as relevant to the keywords being searched as possible if you want to boost that CTR…
Once I feel like I’m consistently profitable with this stuff, I’ll make a blog post about adgroups and split testing. Great post. Definitely some good advice.
Matt Wolfe´s last blog ..I Have a New Mentor
That’s excellent, Matt! It is a fine balance, too. For example, sometimes if I watch things TOO closely, I start to freak out that I only got 3 sales today instead of the 8 I had yesterday. However, when I look at the 1-week or 1-month view, it all averages out, and I can be more methodical and less knee-jerk about my testing/tweaking.
I now have enough experience in AdWords to start using the new Conversion Optimizer, which I’m doing, so I should have some data on that in a week or so also.
Great work on the +$ day!
Hey Bill, another great post!
I also rely heavily on ppc traffic for one of my non-internet marking niches and I can turn that traffic on and off just like flipping a switch.
I would most definitely echo your warning about setting a realistic daily budget because if you don’t you can get burned really quickly before you even realize what happened. Justin Brooke tells a story of one of his friends that lost quite a large some of money in literally minutes.
The one thing that I do really like about ppc marketing is how fast you can see results but you do need to keep a close eye on things.
-Red
Red Dayton´s last blog ..By: Red
Thanks, Red! And sorry you got Akismet’ed there, buddy – hopefully you’re out of the spam cesspool for now, at least on my blog!
Glad you liked the post.
This is an excellent point and covered almost not at all in the blogesphere. I did some ppc purchasing for my bricks and morter business about two years ago. It was an excellent investment and I think it can be adapted to work will with our other online promotions. Thanks for the post.
Waye
Wayne´s last blog ..Persistence
Thanks for the comment, Wayne. Yup, I had to learn this one the hard way!
Hey Bill thanks for your comment…. I just re-visited your site and noticed the little heart by my name and loved it. What is it called? I would like to include it on my site for my readers.
Thanks
Wayne
Wayne´s last blog ..“I Need More Time!!”
It’s the CommentLuv plugin, Wayne. Justin Brooke introduced me to it, and it is pretty cool!