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Production.
Contents
Introduction...............................................................................3
Getting started with PPC & Adwords...............................................4
Targeting is essential................................................................4
Keyword Research.......................................................................5
WordTracker free version..........................................................5
Page rank search......................................................................7
Spyfu.com...............................................................................9
Domain name & web hosting.......................................................11
Your domain name..................................................................11
Your web hosting account........................................................11
Your product's content...............................................................13
Creating Your Website................................................................14
Your landing page...................................................................14
Content is king!......................................................................15
On-page optimization tactics....................................................16
The sales page.......................................................................17
Add a blog page.....................................................................18
AdWords, PPC & Search networks................................................20
PPC & the content network is a bad match!................................20
PPC & the search network........................................................20
Targeting search pages by interest............................................21
Targeting by location...............................................................23
How much to bid per click?......................................................24
Split testing your PPC ads........................................................26
AdWords, CPM & the Content Network..........................................28
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
PPC & the content network.......................................................28
Site targeting & CPM...............................................................28
The ad campaign....................................................................29
Manual labor or SiteSniperPro?.................................................30
Setting your CPM campaign up.................................................31
Improving your search engine ranking..........................................33
Web 1.0 Linking Strategies.........................................................35
Article marketing....................................................................35
Web directories......................................................................36
Link exchanges......................................................................36
Blog/Forum commenting..........................................................37
Web 2.0 Linking Strategies.........................................................38
Social Bookmarking and Story Submission sites..........................38
Blog sites..............................................................................39
Research sites........................................................................39
Social Network sites................................................................40
Video sites.............................................................................40
Banners...................................................................................42
Conclusion...............................................................................43
In this book, you will learn:
How to correctly target your keywords.
How to spy on your competition, and learn their keyword strategies.
How to correctly target your product's content.
How to optimize your website's pages for Google.
A detailed AdWords strategy for the Search Network.
A detailed AdWords strategy for the Content Network.
How Google's ranking system really works.
The best linking strategies, for Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
How to correctly use banner advertising.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Getting started with PPC & Adwords
Targeting is essential
Without a doubt, Pay-Per-Click advertising (or PPC) is the quickest and most
effective way of driving traffic to your website. It may therefore surprise
you just how many people get it completely wrong, and how much of their
advertising budget they waste as a result.
The reason that this happens is a stunningly simple one. Targeting, or
more accurately a total lack of it, is the number one reason why people fail
when using PPC advertising. Especially when using
AdWords
, that can be a
very expensive mistake.
Using PPC (whether it is AdWords or one of the less expensive
alternatives), you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. If
therefore, the people who click are not at least interested in the
product or service that your site promotes, then you have wasted
money.
Looked at the other way around, when you draw visitors to your site, you
must have at least some chance of making money from them or you have
no chance of being a success in your online business.
The first step towards mounting a successful PPC campaign therefore lies
with targeting, and the secret of targeting is doing keyword research
correctly and thoroughly.
How to correctly choose your domain name.
Let’s imagine that you are going to create a brand new dog training
manual, that you are going to sell in ebook format from your own
website.
What you must therefore do, is draw people to your website who might be
interested in buying a product that teaches them something that they did
not know about training their dog.
Note how specific this requirement is. It is not enough that they are
interested in dogs, or even dog training. You want people who might be
interested enough in learning something new about training their dog,
that they might be interested in buying an ebook that teaches them about
it.
Using keywords is what drives traffic to any website, and so it follows that
if you are using the wrong keywords, then the traffic that you drive to your
site will not be focused or targeted.
If for example, you were to drive visitors to your site using just the word
‘dogs’, then you have a very small chance that you can convince people that
your dog training manual represents such great value that they will buy it -
but that's extremely unlikely. Indeed, some people may not even be
interested in dogs of the canine variety at all -they could be fans of Dog the
Bounty Hunter.
You need to target your traffic by choosing the most appropriate
keywords, but more than that, you should try to find those that have as
little competition as possible. Here is how you go about doing so.
WordTracker free version
Visit the free
WordTracker
keyword research tool, and type in your main
keyword phrase. In this example you would start your search using the
phrase ‘dog training’:
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
From this you can see that there are 1519 searches daily for phrases that
are based upon ‘dog training’.
The free version of WordTracker is an excellent tool, but it is not perfect. I
would suspect that the very top result is an ‘error’ result, so I would begin
the next phase of my research from the phrase shown second, ‘los angeles
dog aggression training’.
What you now need to do is establish how much competition there is for
this phrase, i.e. how many people are also using it in their keyword list. In
order to check this, you need to type the exact phrase into Google,
surrounded by quotation marks (“”).
That means that there are only 209 websites shown that match this
exact phrase, and yet there are approximately 88 searches per day,
according to WordTracker.
That is an excellent result, that tells you that this should definitely be a
keyword phase that you can use to drive visitors to your site.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
The next thing to note from the search results page, is that there is paid
advertising on the page as well. This tells you that there is money being
made by someone, as they would not be advertising if there was not.
This is another good sign, providing further evidence that this looks like
a good phrase to target.
Page rank search
Now we need to establish how difficult it is going to be to beat the
competition, into a top 10 Google natural search result. Go to SEO Chat’s
excellent
Page Rank Search
page, type in your search phrase and order
the results by ‘Page Rank’ as shown:
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
The highest ranked site for this search term (superdog.com) has a Page
Rank of 5 out of 10. After that however, the next result is a 4/10. And after
that, it drops still further to a 3/10. That would suggest that it should not be
too difficult to attain a top 10 ranking, within a few weeks.
I would recommend that you should run this search again, ordering the
results by ‘Relevance’ instead, because this will indicate what Page Rank the
sites that represent the most direct competition for this particular phrase,
have achieved:
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
No Page Rank at all, up to a 3/10. That is good news, as it reinforces the
impression that getting into the top 10 natural search engine results (and
therefore onto the first results page), should not be so difficult.
Okay, so we now know that ‘los angeles dog aggression training’ is a great
keyword phrase to use. Next, you need to find some more keyword
phrases, so go back to your WordTracker results page and test the next
phrase on the page -and keep doing it with every phrase that you believe to
be appropriate and useable, for the ebook that you plan to write.
Spyfu.com
You should also visit
Spyfu.com
, and type in the URLs of the top rated
sites, that the SEO Chat Page Rank search tool found. The top rated
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
site was ‘superdog.com’, so let’s use the Spyfu tool to ‘spy’ on the site, to
establish what keywords they are using:
This gives you yet more keywords to test for competition. Any that show
good results (i.e. plenty of searches and limited competition), you should
add to your list.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Domain name & web hosting
Your domain name
Imagine that the dog training manual that you are going to write, will be
called the ‘brilliant dog training guide’. The domain name that you want to
register should be: BrilliantDogTrainingGuide.com.
Notice how I have capitalized the URL when writing it, in order to make
each individual word stand out? This is something that you should get
into the habit of doing too.
Note also, that I am recommending a .com name. No matter how many
new domain name suffixes are introduced, the internet is still essentially
a .com world. If you do not have a dot com address, you risk losing
business from those who only remember your product name, and type it
into their browser automatically adding .com.
So you need to check on the availability of the domain name that you want.
I register all my domain names using
GoDaddy.com
(they are both quick
and efficient), so let’s type in the domain we are interested in, to see what
happens:
Hit the orange ‘GO!’ button and this is what you see:
Excellent! So just go ahead and register the name. Incidentally, if the name
that you want is not available, I would seriously recommend that you
consider changing the product’s name, until you find a domain name that is
still available.
Your web hosting account
In general however, much as I might like using GoDaddy for buying my
domain names, I would not use them for web hosting, mainly because they
do not offer a
cpanel
with which you can control the website that you build.
As a cpanel can make your life so much easier, I have only ever used web
hosting companies who offer this particular resource.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
There are many of them, but I would generally recommend
HostGator
, and
in particular their $7.95 per month ‘Baby’ account. This allows you to host
an unlimited number of domains on the same account, and with 600
Gigabytes of hosting space, plus 6000 gigabytes of bandwidth, you have
plenty of space to get started.
Incidentally, if you are unsure what a cpanel is or what it does, they have a
demo on the HostGator home page (as shown below) that you can try out:
I do not intend to go into any great detail about product creation. That is
not the purpose of this book. However, there is one very significant traffic
factor, that I do want to emphasize.
Again, let's assume that you are going to create the ‘Brilliant Dog
Training Guide’.
Your chosen keywords, tell you exactly what people need or want to know
-and the more detailed a keyword phrase is, the more precisely they are
telling you what information they are looking for.
When someone searches for ‘los angeles dog aggression training’, that
indicates a very specific need. They need to find a dog trainer in LA, who
can curb the more aggressive tendencies of their pet.
So you must make sure that your book answers the specific needs that your
keyword choices imply. In this example, you could have a list of dog
trainers in the largest cities in the USA, in an appendix of your book.
The point is, you must make sure that your product answers the specific
needs, that your keyword research tells you your customers have. And not
only will you have more customers, but you will have fewer people asking
for a refund because your book did not tell them what they needed to
know.
Your landing page
You now you have a keyword list built, that is going to enable you to
send targeted visitors to your site. You also have your domain name
secured and a hosting account where your site will have its ‘home’.
The next question to consider, is where you are actually going to send
people on your site. The logical answer might appear to be, that you are
going to send them to your sales page. It would also be the wrong answer,
for a couple of very important reasons:
• It is a well established ‘mantra’ in internet marketing circles,
that people are not going to buy anything the first time they see a particular
sales page. In fact, most people are supposed to need to see a sales page
at least seven times, before they become seriously interested in buying the
product on offer.
Therefore, if you take people directly to your sales page, they are not
likely to buy, and more importantly, they are extremely unlikely to visit
your page again. They saw what you had on offer, decided that they did not
want or need it, so why should they come back?
Another reason that you should not send people directly to your sales
page, is the way that Google structures their AdWords program.
When you decide that you want to send people to your site using an
AdWords ad created around a particular keyphrase, Google decides
how much you should pay per click by calculating what is known as
the ‘Quality Score’ of your ad.
If your ad sends visitors directly to your sales page, then Google will
almost certainly decide that this is not offering ‘quality’ to that
visitor, and will accordingly ‘hike’ the cost you are paying per click.
Now you have a situation where no-one is actually going to buy your
product and every click is expensive, all because you are trying to send
visitors directly to the sales page.
Clearly, this is a situation that is not going to work for you.
What you must do therefore, is to send visitors to your ‘landing’ page, a
place where you give away some free gift or information in exchange for the
reader’s name and email address. In this way, you add this visitor to your
mailing list, and can thereafter send them as many mails as you want
promoting your sales pages.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
The key to the success of your landing page, is that the free gift that you
give away must have a clear value to the visitor, and be directly relevant
to whatever made them click on your ad.
In this case for example, you may want to give away a ‘leaked’
chapter of the dog training manual, from which they will learn
something that they can genuinely use when training their dog.
You should also feature some content on the page in question, something
that the visitor can read and which will whet their appetite to know more.
The first page or two of the leaked chapter that you are going to give
away, ended by ‘To continue reading, simply enter your name and email
address below, and the complete ‘leaked’ chapter will be sent to you
entirely free’ -would probably do the trick.
Not only is this likely to be an effective ‘landing’ ploy, this content also
indicates to Google that there is quality content available to the reader of
that page. This should help to increase your Quality Score, as will having
links to your Contact Details, Terms of Services and Earnings Disclaimer
pages, on your landing page.
The better your Quality Score is, the lower the cost per click you will be
paying and therefore, the easier it is going to be to make a profit.
Your landing page will need a Title and a meta description. The Title should
be the same as the product-‘Brilliant Dog Training Guide’. And the meta
description should give a brief description of the single main benefit of the
product itself, again including the product title. For example, ‘Train your
dog in only one hour per week with the ‘brilliant dog training guide’.
Content is king!
Next, you need to construct the rest of your site around the landing page,
and you need to fill it with quality content that is going to offer valuable
information to your readers.
It was not that long ago that people built websites for the sole purpose of
attracting search engines, hence the ‘art’ or ‘science’ of search engine
optimization. Nowadays, the general advice is that if you build a site that
offers real value to your human visitors, then the search engines will
naturally follow, and that is what you should do.
Take each of your keyword phrases and create an article around it.
You are then going to build one page of your site for each keyword article
that you write, so you must use the phrase in the article title, and at
least a couple of times in the first and last paragraphs.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Aim for an overall on-page (or in-article) ‘keyword density’ (i.e. the
percentage of the page that is represented by the phrase in question) of 4-
8%.
On-page optimization tactics
When you are creating the webpage itself, your keyphrase must also
appear in the Title, which is in the ‘header’ (as illustrated below in yellow)
using the code from the free WordTracker page. This is important, because
this is the headline that is shown on the Google search engine results
page.
This code snippet also shows the ‘meta description’ that is highlighted (in
green), so you need to create this as well. Make sure that you mention your
keyword search term at least once in this ‘meta description’, as well.
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker</title>
<meta name="description" content="Use the free keyword
suggestion tool from Wordtracker to help your website rank higher in
the search engines." />
Here is the actual result achieved when I run a Google search for ‘free
wordtracker tool’.
Note that the Title and ‘meta description’ are exactly the same as above,
and also note that the keywords that I have used to run the search are
featured in bold. They are highlighted even though they are not in the
correct order, because I did not surround the search with the quotation
marks (“”) as I did earlier.
This font bolding makes the ad stand out significantly, and is another
reason why making sure that each page is set up correctly with a proper
Title and ‘meta description’ is so important.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Another thing to do to try to ensure that your page is as effective as
possible at drawing the search engine spiders, is to add the keyword
phrase somewhere near the top of your page in an H2 or H3 size font. H1
(which is the largest font size) used to be the most popular choice, but
there is now some evidence that H2 works better.
Okay, the final thing that you need to do with each article content page, is
to add internal links, so that visitors can find their way around your site.
Every article page should have the following links on it:
Home page
Sales Page
Similar pages (e.g. our ‘los angeles’ page might have links to other
city specific pages, for example)
Your blog
ToS, Contact & Earnings disclaimer pages
Ideally, each of these links should be ‘anchor text’ links, using the
keyword phrase that you are using for that particular page.
For example, the ebook that you are creating is going to be called the
Landing page
‘brilliant dog training guide’, so the links that point to your sales page
should use this phrase, rather than saying “sales page”.
Similarly, if you want to send someone from your ‘los angeles’ page to one
for ‘dog training in decatur il’, then that is the phrase you should use for
the link text.
This helps the search engine spiders as well as your visitors, navigate
around the site more efficiently, and should be a big help with your search
engine rankings as well.
Your home page should list some of the main articles that appear
elsewhere on your site, as well as having prominent links to your sales
page.
The articles that are highlighted on the home page should of course, use
the appropriate keywords for the link. And you should have two links to
your sales page, one being an anchor text link as demonstrated above,
and the other being an attractive banner featured near the top of the
page.
The sales page
Your sales page should have no links at all to any other pages, unless it is
to another sales page that is featured somewhere else on your site. You will
have to include the ‘standard’ internal links (ToS, Contact
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
and Disclaimer etc) -but make them as small as possible, place them at the
bottom of the page, and do nothing to highlight them.
The crucial thing to understand about your sales page, is that it is meant to
do nothing other than sell. Adding links that will take people away from it,
encourages people to leave without buying, whilst what you should really be
doing is making it as difficult as possible for them to do so.
Similarly, whilst you might try to earn a little extra revenue by adding
AdSense
ads to your article pages and even your home page, you most
definitely should not do this on your sales page.
Add a blog page
Your site must have a blog page included. This enables you to provide
constantly updated content on the site, which is exactly what the search
engines are looking for.
Having a blog allows you to add fresh new content to your site every
couple of days, and then send a ‘ping’ to all the leading blog directories
(using a free ‘pinging’ site like
Pingoat
). This helps to keep the search
engine spiders coming back to your site on a far more regular basis, which
in turn helps your search engine rankings.
Having a blog is also an excellent way of starting to acquire incoming links,
which is something that I will go into in greater depth when we look at
effective linking strategies.
The most flexible and effective blogging platform is undoubtedly WordPress,
which you can install in just a few clicks with the majority of hosting
accounts that use a cpanel. Look for the ‘Fantastico Deluxe’ or ‘Fantastico’
icon, which is generally near the bottom of the cpanel screen:
Near the top left hand side of the next screen, you should see something
looking like this:
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Simply click on WordPress, and it is a process of only three simple steps to
install the latest version of the excellent blog software on your domain. (Call
the directory ‘blog’, as shown below, so that the URL, which will be
BrilliantDogTrainingGuide.com/blog, is self-explanatory.)
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
AdWords, PPC & Search networks
PPC & the content network is a bad match!
When you are about to start using AdWords PPC ads, the first thing to
consider is where your ads are going to appear. AdWords offers three
choices:
the Google search network;
the Google partner search network;
In general, most experts suggest that you should target a PPC
advertising campaign at the first of these and possibly the second as
well, as this includes such well known and widely used search resources
as AOL and Ask.com. In general terms, I believe this to be correct,
although I will demonstrate later in this book that you can acquire some
terrific traffic from the content network as well.
The problem is that if you are advertising on the content network using PPC,
it is notoriously difficult to target exactly where these ads will appear on the
network. Whilst it is possible to exclude particular websites from any PPC
campaign you are running, it is only possible to do so at the campaign level.
In other words, whilst doing this may stop your ad appearing on sites that
you don’t want to be on, it will also stop it appearing on a lot of good ones
that you would like to feature on. It’s like throwing the baby away with the
bath water!
Having said that, as long as you manage to exclude the sites that you do
not want to appear on (because they are nothing more than relatively poor
quality AdSense sites, for example), then you might get enough traffic from
this method to justify paying $0.01 per click.
You will however, need to monitor who is sending you the traffic (using a
stats program such as
Google Analytics
), as those are obviously the sites
that should form your primary focus.
This will also allow you to identify the sites that are not performing, so that
they too can be added to your exclusion list.
PPC & the search network
However, when you advertisement appears on the Google search network
(or that of any of their partners), what happens is that your PPC ad appears
whenever a web surfer runs a search that ‘triggers’ the keyword or phrase
that you are using for your ad.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Most experts feel that money spent on PPC advertising on the content
network (that is, on apparently targeted private websites and blogs) is
content pages.
money that is wasted, and that it is therefore not worth doing, unless you
can get good clicks for $0.01 a time.
As an extension of this, it is further suggested that if you want to run your
PPC ads on the content network, then you should only do so if you
establish different pricing structures for the ads appearing on the search
network and for those on the content sites.
This is because ads that appear on the search networks (Google or not)
enjoy significantly better CTR and conversions (sales), and therefore
merit a little more investment of both money and time.
The CTR of content network sites tend to be lower, as do sales, so there
you should be buying the clicks that you do get, more cheaply.
I would agree with this theory. I will however, show you an extremely
effective way of advertising on the content network that really makes this
argument redundant later in this book. For now however, I am going to
focus on using PPC AdWords ads on the search networks.
Targeting search pages by interest
You have written (or will write) a book called the ‘brilliant dog training
guide’.
The most tightly targeted way of advertising this would be to focus on only
the title of the product itself, by using only the title as the keywords that
would cause your ad to be shown: This would ensure that practically anyone
Note that the phrase is used in three different ways:
brilliant dog training guide
"brilliant dog training guide"
[brilliant dog training guide]
The first of these will be triggered by anyone using any of your keywords in
their search. So for example, even a search for something so entirely
unrelated to your subject as ‘brilliant football’ could cause your ad to be
shown, because of the word ‘brilliant’. This is therefore, the least targeted of
these three search terms.
Using “brilliant dog training guide” however, would ensure that the
words have to appear in the right order so that is more targeted, whilst
the last example (in squared brackets) would find only exact matches,
and is therefore the most highly targeted of all.
Before getting to this keywords page of the AdWords site, you will need
to create your first ad. Now, as you have already seen, when a word that
a searcher uses matches one in your ad, that word is bolded. The title of
your page is therefore of paramount importance.
In an ideal situation you would therefore include the full product title in the
Title line of your advert as well. Unfortunately, ‘brilliant dog training guide’
has 28 characters with spaces included, and the ad Title can only be 25
characters long!
Here is how you might create the first ad:
And here is how this would look:
Note that the ‘Display URL’ is the main URL of our site, but that the real
‘Destination URL’ – that is, the place where anyone who clicks on
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
this ad is going to be taken – is the ‘landing page’ (although I would
recommend that you give it a better name than this!).
There are a couple of specific tactics that have been applied when creating
this ad, that you should take note of and perhaps use for your own ads:
Firstly, every word is capitalized. Whilst this is not a particularly new
idea, it does nevertheless ensure that every word stands out and that the
ad makes a more powerful visual impression. Note that a similar thing has
been done with the display URL too.
Secondly, at the end of ‘Description line 2’, there are three dots,
something that is technically called an ellipse.
It tells people that there is more to be said, and that what they are
currently reading in the ad is not the full story. Human nature being
what it is, the sense of this being ‘unfinished business’ will be
deeply unsatisfying for many people who see your ad, and they will
click through just to see what else there is.
This takes them to the ‘leaked chapter’ page, where they will learn
more, but not everything! If they want the whole tale, they have to
subscribe to your mailing list, and that is exactly what you want them
to do, as they will then be in your sales ‘pipeline’ or ‘funnel’.
Targeting by location
Another thing that you will need to decide is where your ad is to be
shown. Of course, one of the most powerful aspects of using the internet
to advertise your business or product, is the fact that it is a truly global
medium and if you want to, you can show your AdWords ads all over the
world as well.
The two factors to consider here are:
Firstly, there are some countries in the world where no matter how
many people click through your ads, you will simply not get many sales.
This could be because there are still many countries where it is not that
easy to make online payments, or it could be that a product that seems
very reasonably priced in Western terms will seem ridiculously expensive in
places where the standard and cost of living is very low.
The second consideration is ‘where are most of your potential
customers based?’ -and this is at least partially dictated by your primary
keywords. For example, we have already established that one very powerful
key phrase for ‘brilliant dog training’
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
focuses on Los Angeles, and that Decatur, Illinois seems to
feature pretty highly too.
Using these as main keywords phrases points our product at the US
market, so that would be the primary geographical or demographic
focus of this particular PPC campaign.
How much to bid per click?
The next thing that you need to consider is the amount that you are
going to pay Google per click on your ad.
We saw earlier from the ‘los angeles dog aggression training’ example, that
there were ads appearing on both the right hand side of the page and at the
very top left. Below the one paid ad on the left were the natural or organic
search results (where we hope to begin featuring fairly soon).
Increasing numbers of people will use the organic search results, before
they will ever use paid advertising to find what they are looking for.
That is the primary reason that a paid for ad that appears above the
natural search results is far more effective in attracting traffic, than those
shown on the upper right hand side of the page (all highlighted above in
red).
To emphasize this even further, studies by leading ‘heat map’ companies
like
Eyetools
, have already proved that this is how surfers view a search
engine results page:
This diagram shows that the primary point of focus for most searchers is
on the top left hand side of the page, and whilst the AdWords ads
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
shown on the right hand side are just about noticed, they are not
really ‘seen’.
Even if your AdWords ad appears in the number one slot of the right
hand side of the page, your Click Through Rate (CTR) is still likely to be
extremely low, and CTR is of critical importance when you are
considering using PPC advertising.
So the only position to aim for when running AdWords PPC ad campaigns, is
on the top left hand side of the page. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly),
this is also the most expensive place for your ad to appear.
Among the companies that sell PPC advertising space, Google is alone in
applying what is known as a ‘
Quality Score
’, which is essentially what
dictates how much you pay Google per click.
Whilst the exact method of calculation is a closely guarded Google
secret, including your keyword in your ad is certainly one important
factor in the calculation.
To have any chance of hitting the #1 spot on the left hand side of the
page for a popular search term, you are going to need an AdWords
account that attracts a good Quality Score.
However, to begin with, you are going to use a very specific term that is
directly linked to your product and is therefore unlikely to generate a great
deal of traffic anyway. Thus, the amount that you are going to pay per click
is going to be very low if you just use the keyword search term ‘brilliant dog
training guide’ in its three different guises.
The chances are that you will be able to bid your clicks for these phrases
low as well. I would suggest that you input a maximum daily budget of
only $5.00, and that you see what results you get if you try to price your
clicks at only $0.01. As there is unlikely to be any immediate competition
for this particular phrase, this may well work for you to begin with.
If the market gets a little more congested, then you may have to alter your
strategy at a later date.
If for example, you decide to sell your product by finding affiliates to make
sales for you through a site like
Clickbank
, then the chances are that some
of them will also start using AdWords too.
In this case, the term ‘brilliant dog training guide’ will inevitably become
more popular and well-known, and you will have increasing levels of
competition. This will have a direct effect on the number of clicks there will
be for this phrase, and thus the pricing may well need reconsidering too.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Likewise, the story will be different once you start targeting popular
keyword phrases that you already know are generating traffic, such as ‘los
angeles dog aggression training’.
You already know that there is competition for this phrase and that people
are already advertising using it. If you want to appear above other
advertisers or grab the top spot of the left hand side of the page, then you
have to be willing to pay more than anyone else is for the privilege.
Split testing your PPC ads
If you have two different ads running for the one product, then the only
thing that you can say about them with any certainty is that one ad will
create more business for you than the other.
You must therefore test every PPC ad that you ever create to see how
effective it is, because your objective must always be to maximize your
CTR. You must constantly refine and finesse your advertising, because it is
only by doing so that you can reduce your costs and improve your profits.
Look at it this way. If one ad is sending 10 people to your sign-up page
and generating 4 sign-ups by doing so, whilst another ad is only sending 1
person per 100 page views, why are you wasting money on the second
ad?
Split testing is an absolutely critical factor in running any profitable PPC
campaign.
The first thing that you should do is create two almost identical versions
of the same ad, with only one small difference between the two. Any
more changes and you cannot establish exactly why one ad is better than
the other, so it has to be one change at a time.
Yes, it will be time consuming and somewhat tedious, but it will also
gradually improve your CTR and therefore your profitability, so it is
definitely worth it in the longer term.
One additional thing that you can do before beginning your split testing, is
run your headline and ad through an excellent free tool that is offered by
the Advanced Marketing Institute which tests the ‘
Emotional Marketing
Value
’ of your copy.
I find that using this particular resource allows me to pre-test my ad
headline and copy, which is a very effective initial filter before I begin to
spend money on ads that were never very effective anyway!
People do not buy or click through on an ad because of logic – they do so
because of emotion, and the emotional effect of your words is exactly what
this resource is designed to test for.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Particularly for PPC beginners, it can be a very useful pointer, so I
would definitely recommend that you give it a try.
Now, you should allow your two ads to be viewed at least 100 times
each, before you decide whether the results that you are seeing are
statistically valid.
Switch off the automatic AdWords optimization feature, whilst you are
running your split tests. Doing so ensures that Google give the two ads
equal exposure to traffic, so that you can more easily recognize when a
winner becomes clear.
If you do not turn off this feature, Google will automatically present the
better performing ad more regularly which, whilst it is entirely logical,
will nevertheless defeat your objective.
Once you have a winner, then you need to stop the losing ad from
running, and make another change to the winner before running the
whole back-to-back testing process once again.
Do not however, simply delete the losing advert. This can be a very
expensive mistake to make, as once you have done so, you will soon forget
the exact ad that was running and it is then likely that you will try split-
testing exactly the same one again in the future. (I have done it myself, so
I know how easily this can happen!) Remove it from your ad campaign, but
keep a copy in a folder on your desktop, so that you can check back in the
future before running the same ad again and thereby wasting money by
doing so!
Finally, understand that tracking how successful your ads are (using
either Awstats or the Webalizer stats programs that can be found by
following this icon in your cpanel) is also vital:
Understand that split testing the effectiveness of the ads that send people
to your website, is a never ending ongoing process that, used correctly, will
increase your CTR and reduce your advertising costs whilst doing so.
This of course, equates to a long term increase in your profits.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
AdWords, CPM & the Content Network
PPC & the content network
I have already established that using PPC advertising on the Google
content network, is not likely to be very profitable unless you are paying
a very low sum per click.
But there is a better and far more profitable approach, that you can
adopt using the content network.
Site targeting & CPM
One way of advertising on the content network that can be very
effective, is by using ‘CPM’ advertising.
This means that you pay every time the page on which your ad is
featured is opened, irrespective of whether anyone does anything or not.
The price is quoted per 1000 ad impressions, hence the phrase CPM,
which is cost per thousand represented by the Roman numeral ‘M’.
In this case, what we are going to do is target specific web pages where we
want our ad to appear, because by doing this, we can take advantage of the
phenomenon that you saw highlighted on the heat map we looked at
earlier. That showed that most searchers focus in on the natural organic
search results pages, and not on the ads that are shown on the right hand
side of the page.
Our strategy is to try to take advantage of this, by having our ad appear
on the content pages that the visitor who uses the natural organic search
results ends up getting sent to, by the organic search results that they
click on.
As long as this can be done cheaply enough, then it should be an
extremely effective strategy, because the searcher has already shown that
they are looking for a product or service likes ours by typing in the
keyword phrase that we are targeting.
It is just that like the majority of searchers, this person decided to
ignore the paid ads on the search page, instead clicking through to find
what they could discover for free.
There is an important psychological aspect to this too. By ignoring the paid
ads on the right hand side of the page, the searcher believes that he has
somehow outwitted or outsmarted the advertiser, and scored a small
‘victory’ in the process. So when they arrive on the organic search page to
be met by your ad, their defense is already down, and the chances of this
ad being more successful than the ones being shown on the search results
page, are significantly higher.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Note that most other advertisers who appear in the AdSense ‘block’ on that
particular page, will probably do so entirely by accident. Almost without
exception, it was Google that decided that their ad was relevant to the page
in question and placed it there, not the advertiser themselves.
And whilst the Googlebot, whose task it is to decide where ads should be
placed, makes a reasonable job of it most of the time, there is no doubt
that it cannot be as accurate as doing the job yourself. It is extremely
unlikely that the ad will have the appropriate keyword phrase in the ad
title, the way that yours will. Your ad is therefore significantly more
targeted, than the vast majority of the others that will appear as your
‘competition’ on this particular page.
If you have ever used AdSense on any of your own sites, you will know that
the ads that are shown are not always as laser targeted as you might like
them to be. In fact, at times, they seem to bear little or no relationship to
the topic around which your site is based.
The key to what you are doing here, is that you only want your ad to
appear on those pages (not sites, but individual pages), where the title of
the ad that you show, contains as near to the original search term as
possible. It is this search term that drove the visitor to the site in the first
place and thus, this is what they want to read about. If they then see your
ad with almost exactly the same title, it stands to reason that they will
probably read it.
Rather than targeting your ad at a particular website, what you really want
to do is target it at several highly focused and targeted pages of several
different websites. In this way, you would guarantee that only the hottest
prospects would see your ads, and that should skyrocket your CTR, so that
even paying for ads by the 1000 impressions, becomes a very profitable
strategy.
The ad campaign
Let’s start our first campaign.
The first thing that you need to do, is to click on the green ’Campaign
Management’ Tag at the top left of the AdWords account screen.
From here, you need to give your Campaign a title and also create a
name for your first Ad group. Next, you need to decide on the language
that you are going to use in your campaign, and the geographical
locations where you want the ads to be shown.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
As we have already established that our primary target market for the
‘brilliant dog training guide’ is the USA, we should stick to that once again,
although if you have a product that is not limited geographically, then this
would not be necessary.
Next, you will need to input the text of your ad.
If you have an ad that has already been extensively split tested and
proven already, then this would be an ideal one to use for this campaign
too.
Whilst you may have no option but to test a new ad (because you do not
already have one that works, for example), remember that you pay for
every view that is shown, and costs can run away with you very quickly if
your ad is on a page that is shown several thousand times a day.
If possible, tried and tested is going to be safer and more profitable, than
new and experimental -whenever circumstances allow it.
The keyword search phrase that is being targeted by our ad group,
should then feature in the ad title, whilst the main benefit will be
contained in the main body text, exactly as it would be if you were
creating ad copy for PPC advertising purposes.
In this screen, Google is effectively offering to assist us to find sites where
they believe our ads should be shown, either by ‘categories’ or defined by
suitable matches.
We already know that we want to tell Google where our ads are to
appear. So now you need to start establishing that for yourself.
Manual labor or SiteSniperPro?
There are two ways of establishing exactly what website pages we
want our ads to appear on.
The first way is to do the job manually. Open up a Google browser
window and type in your primary search term. Click on the first organic
search result, and look for AdSense ad blocks on the page.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
If you manage to find them, then that shows that you will be able to
advertise there. Where on the page are they, however?
If they are near the top and above the ‘fold’ (visible when the browser first
opens), then they may be worth using, especially if they are the ‘hot’ areas
seen on the heat map.
If they are not visible however, then advertising on a CPM basis on a page
where no-one actually sees the ads, where you will nevertheless still pay
for them, could be financial suicide!
Does the ad block stand out, or does it blend into the page too well?
If it is the latter, you may want to give it a miss, because it is unlikely that
your ad is going to stand out enough to be noticed and clicked.
Note that when advertising on the content network, Google does not bold
the keywords in your ad, the way that they do on the search network
results pages. There is therefore less opportunity to make your ad stand
out, if the ad block is not so noticeable.
This on-page search procedure, checking every organic results page
manually, is something that you will need to do to find all of the
individual pages that you want your ads to appear on, and it can be very
time consuming work.
The alternative is to get hold of the excellent
SiteSniperPro
, that does the
whole job for you in a fraction of the time! The recently released version 2
of this program is absolutely superb, and all of the resources that were
requested by users of version 1 have been added in. Because of this,
appropriate specific site pages can be located in just a fraction of the time,
and with far less effort.
The program obviously does ‘the basics’ for you, like finding all the
specific pages featuring your relevant keyword phrase. It can then
separate those that carry AdSense ad blocks from those that do not, and
it even enables you to select only those pages that carry specific types of
AdSense ads in specific areas of the page!
It really is an excellent tool that will save your hours of work, and there
is a free 30 trial version free, and even the 30 day trial version should
allow your CPM campaign to get off to a flying start!
Setting your CPM campaign up
Once you find a site page that looks like it will work for you, go back to the
previous AdWords browser window and tick ‘List URL’.
Copy the site page URL that you just found, and paste it into the
window on the right hand side of the page.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Unfortunately the AdWords site wants you to add a whole site URL, rather
than just one page, so here you have to use a small ‘workaround’. Click on
‘Get Available Sites’ and choose one of the ones that Google recommends to
you.
Once you have added this site (it is probably best to use the URL of the
site from which you want to ‘select’ a page if possible), you continue to
where you add your budget figures. Keep them as low as possible for
now, and then save the set-up but do NOT leave the site yet!
Once it is saved, click on the name of your newly created ad group to
open it up again. Now, replace the whole website that you saved earlier,
with the URL of the single individual page, so what you will have just
entered will be something like:
www.XXXXXXX.com/greatdogthings.html
Note that there is no http:// at the beginning, and that the address
ends with .htm, .html. shtml or .php.
Save the changes that you just made, and then go back either to your
manual searching or SiteSniperPro, and find some more phrases to add to
your campaign.
Soon you should have 4-6 individual pages targeted, and should expect to
pay $1-2 per 1000 impressions. You make this alteration by changing the
Max CPM figure in the appropriate box, but note that this will have the
effect of changing the CPM for all the URLs that you have.
Using this advertising method, a CTR of 10-20% is eminently achievable,
as long as you make sure that the pages that show your ads appear high
up in the natural search results, and that your ad title and body text
contain the originally searched keyword phrases or terms.
So if you were paying even $2.00 per 1000 clicks with a 10% CTR, then
you would enjoy 100 visitors at $0.02 each -which represents extremely
cost effective paid advertising by anyone’s standards.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Improving your search engine ranking
As previously mentioned, given the competition for the specific phrase, it
should not be too hard to grab a top ten Google ranking for the phrase ‘los
angeles dog aggression training’ within a few weeks.
One of the factors that will dictate how fast this happens (or indeed, if it
happens at all), is the effectiveness of your link building strategy -as
incoming links are considered to be a big ‘positive’ by the search engines.
In general, they take the view that if other sites link to you, then you must
have something of value to say -so the more links that you have coming in,
the more quickly you will attain a good search engine ranking. Every
internet marketer knows this.
But to use this power to your greatest advantage, you must learn the
details that few internet marketers know, about two key concepts: Page
Rank and Link Power.
Google uses "Page Rank" (PR), to help it decide where to rank webpages
in its listings. The higher your PR, the higher your page will rank ("all
other things being equal").
This PR is mostly determined by how many inbound external links your page
has, and the quality of those links (meaning the PR of the page where your
inbound link sits).
However, moving your webpage from say, PR=1 to PR=2, is much easier
(and quicker), than trying to move your webpage from say, PR=4 to PR=5.
This is because the PR number is actually the exponent of the number of
links. That is:
Number of links = 10
PR
So for your webpage to achieve PR=1, it must accumulate 10 links. For
PR=2, 100 links. For PR=3, 1000 links. And so on.
But it gets more complicated than that.
As mentioned above, the actual contribution of the link, is affected by the
Page Rank of the webpage on which the link originates. So an inbound link
from a PR=5 website to yours, will count much more than an inbound link
from a PR=2 website to yours.
But it gets more complicated than that.
A website where you place your inbound link, that has PR=X and only a
few outbound links, will give you much more PR power, than a site that
has the same PR=X, but lots of outbound links. In other words,
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
outgoing PR is divided evenly between all the outbound links on a
page.
But it gets more complicated than that.
The actual benefit you get from an inbound link, also depends upon how
relevant that link is to your niche.
Example: Since we have talked about building a site around the 'dog
training' niche, an inbound link that uses "dog training" for the anchor text
of the link, will be much more valuable, than an inbound link who's text
simply says, "Click Here", or an inbound link with no anchor text at all.
WARNING: If all the inbound links to your webpage have identical
anchor text, the search engines will immediately get suspicious and
penalize your site.
This does not apply for Internal links. That is, it's ok to use the same
anchor text, in every menu link pointing to a particular page on your site.
But for External links, it is much safer to vary the anchor text of your
inbound links. So what should you do?
Use this to your advantage. Choose three different keyword phrases to use
for your inbound link anchor texts. Use your primary keyphrase for 50% of
your inbound links, and two other keyphrases for 25% each. This should
keep you safe, but also help you rank for three central phrases, instead of
just one.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Web 1.0 Linking Strategies
So how do we obtain links in the most effective manner, in order to deal
with Google's complicated PR/link evaluating system? Simple, actually.
Get as many links as you can, from webpages with the highest PR you can
find, and from as many varied sources as possible.
Here are a few of the most effective link building strategies, that you
should definitely adopt.
Article marketing
Many people write keyword rich articles and submit them to multiple article
directories, because of the visitors that doing so can bring to their site.
People visit the article directory, read your article, and then click on the link
to your site, that you are allowed to include in the 'Bio Box' at the bottom of
your article.
The Bio Box is a short blurb about the article's author, who's real purpose is
to convince the reader to click on the one (or more) links in the Box, which
will take the reader to the author's website.
So how do you convince your circulation-article's reader to click your link?
You need to offer your article reader something so compelling, that s/he
will want to visit your website to see more. Possible options are:
-Offer them something for Free if they visit, (like a free Report you will send
them if they give you their email address).
-Offer them Free information, (like a list of recommended items to help
them, additional to the central product you will recommend they buy).
-Offer them additional information, (another article posted on your site,
that is closely related to the topic of the circulation article they just
read).
If you're looking specifically to obtain traffic directly from the article, then
EzineArticles.com is the #1 directory of choice.
However, while there is no denying that this can work as a traffic generation
tactic, more importantly, writing articles creates backlinks from other
people’s sites. They visit the article directory, like what you have written
and take the article to add to their site. As long as they do it properly and
retain your Bio Box, that is a free one-way backlink from their site to yours.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
If this is the case, then several directories are recommended including:
ArticleAlley.com, ArticleDashboard.com, GoArticles.com,
IdeaMarketers.com, among others.
This is not a strategy that works overnight, but is one that gradually
builds up a great network of backlinks over time -and once the links are
in place, they tend to stay there.
Which brings us to the most painful part of article marketing: The
inordinate amount of time it will take you to submit multiple articles, to
multiple directories. The solution, is to automate the article submission
process.
There are many article auto-submission software packages, available for
purchase. I will just quickly note here, that in my opinion, the leader by
far is
Article Post Robot
. Visit their home page, to read the details of why
this tool is superior to all others.
Web directories
There are thousands of web directories where you can list your site, as a
way of creating incoming links. Indeed, there is a list of over 8000 at
Web-
Directories.ws
, some of which accept free submissions.
This is not necessarily a quick process – if it is a free submission especially,
it can take weeks to get listed – but the incoming links are generally from
sites with high Google PR, so the value of each one that you can gain is
going to be considerable.
Link exchanges
Find other webmasters in your niche with whom you are not directly
competing, and offer to exchange links with them. You place a link on
your pages to their site, and they do the same on theirs.
Whilst this is not as powerful a technique as pure incoming one-way
links, it is nevertheless a valuable tactic for generating links.
It can be made even more effective, if instead of simply having two people
working together, you can establish a linking network of a group of people
within your niche market, because in this scenario you can have several
one-way links, with no-one linking back to the same person who linked to
them.
For example, person A links to B who links to C who links to D who then
links back to A.
It's a very simple, but nevertheless an extremely effective link building
strategy.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Blog/Forum commenting
Find blogs and forums in your niche. You can easily do this, by
searching Google for: your niche + forum OR your niche + blog.
Read the postings and make sensible, constructive comments. When you
do so, you will be required to:
Blogs: add your name and your own domain name, when you compose the
comment.
Forums: create a signature file (with a link back to your webpage) that is
automatically added to the end of every one of your comments.
This will often generate a backlink from their blog/forum to your site, and
the higher their PR, the more value any incoming link that this generates
is likely to have.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Web 2.0 Linking Strategies
There has been a lot of fuss recently, about new ways to generate
traffic, under a general category referred to as 'Web 2.0'. And it is
commonly put forth as if it is some entirely new, secret and complicated
system.
This is nothing more than 'sales hype'.
A Web 2.0 visitor, is still a visitor. And a Web 2.0 backlink, is still a
backlink.
The only new part, are the link-generating sites themselves. These sites
have only appeared in recent years, and they do 'business' in a different
way, than the standard 'Web 1.0' types of sites.
So let's take a look at several types of Web 2.0 sites -and how you can
effectively obtain backlinks from them.
NOTE: In the following, AT denotes an anchor text link, while URL
means just the raw link.
Social Bookmarking and Story Submission sites
When you have a great story to tell, there is no more effective way of
getting the news out onto the internet ‘grapevine’, than by submitting it to
the leading social sites.
Send your story to the major sites, and if it gets picked up and
becomes popular, then it will have two effects:
Firstly, it can drive thousands of new visitors to your site, a tidal wave of
traffic that will last for a few days.
Secondly, it will create some terrific back links for you from the social site
itself (which is likely to have a very high Page Rank of 7-9), and also from
everyone who takes your story to adds it to their site.
Get something that is provocative, innovative or challenging onto the front
page of one of these sites, and you could see hundreds of new backlinks
appear almost overnight!
For some sites however, all you need to do is just submit your URL. For
some, you need to register. And for some, you need to download their
toolbar or install their script on your site.
Some leading examples:
Send your story and submit your URL at
Digg
Send your story to
Mixx
Submit your URL at
Reddit
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Submit your URL at
Slashdot
Send your story and submit your URL at
StumbleUpon
Finally,
Onlywire
can help you with your submission to social sites. You will
have to Register at every site in the Onlywire list and add them to your
Onlywire account. But from that point onward, you will be able to submit to
Onlywire and they will distribute it to all the other sites.
Blog sites
There are several sites, where you can create your own blog for free. Then
you can post content on your new blog, with a links that go to various
related pages on your main website. These links then boost your main
website's pages.
But in addition, if your blog ranks for its keyword, it can send traffic to your
main website. So choose your blog's keywords to be very "long-tail" (i.e.
low competition).
Some leading examples:Create a blog at
Blogger
, and post articles with
your AT.Create more than one "page" at
Hubpages
, and include your
Create a blog at
Wordpress
, and post articles with your AT.
Research sites
The primary attraction of this kind of site, is that anyone can post a
question, hoping that others will see their question and answer it. Or the
reverse: anyone can post an "answer" (an explanation of a topic), hoping
that others will come to read their "wisdom".
So if you use these sites correctly, they can once again, bring you
direct traffic plus high page rank backlinks.
Some leading examples:
Answer questions in your niche at
WikiAnswers
. Enter your URL as "To
answer with a web link, click here instead" link.
Find a page on your topic "edit" that page and include your AT at
Answer questions in your niche at
Yahoo Answers
. Put your URL in
"Source".
Answer questions in your niche at
Yedda
. Put your AT in the body of the
answer.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Social Network sites
These sites are the currently some of the "hottest" sites on the Internet.
They were originally created to facilitate online socializing, using
"personal pages" to give yourself a "human face" on the Internet, and
ways to add other people to your "Friends" list.
Used for promotion, they can help you connect with many others who
share an interest in your niche. With sufficient effort, they can even help to
establish you as a niche "expert".
However, to use these sites for promotion takes a lot of time and effort.
Worse still, they each have a different structure and capabilities. So in
most cases, you will have to restrict yourself to one site, or maybe two.
All require you to create an account with them. Then you either have to
join Groups, or send out invitations for other members to become one of
your Friends.
You can comment on the writings of others, but links in these comments are
typically useless. A better strategy, is to link to your site in your own Profile,
then build pathways to your Profile throughout the Social Network.
Some leading examples:
can add your URL to your Profile.
Upload a screenshot of your product, book cover, or something on your site,
to
Flickr
. Enter your AT in the picture description; tag your photo with
keywords; submit the image to Flickr Groups in your niche.
MySpace
is the frontrunner, but becoming "old school". Write your
"About Me" page; include your AT. Find others interested in your niche,
by researching Groups or visiting their MySpace pages; then invite them
to be your Friend.
Post updates about your site regularly, and include your URL at
Twitter
.
Video sites
If you have the capability (and the time) to create videos on your
niche, site or product; this can be very lucrative.
You don't even have to create a full-length video for the public video site.
(You can put the full-length video on your own site, instead.) Just record a
short video, that entices the viewer to visit your site to see/hear more.
Many people simply use their camcorder, digital camera, or even a camera
cellphone.
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
Use your AT link at every opportunity: in your Profile, in your video's Tag,
and in your video's Title.
You can even "host" your video on YouTube, if you cannot post it on your
own site.
Some leading examples:
Whilst not as popular as it was a few years ago, using banners to
advertise your business is still a legitimate way of promoting it.
There are a few different approaches that you can take to banner
advertising.
If you want to place banner ads on other people’s sites to advertise your
own business, then you could do so by using a banner advertising network
program such as that offered by
ValueClick
.
Alternatively, you can simply find the sites that you want to advertise on
yourself, and approach the owners or webmasters in charge of the site to
thrash out some form of direct agreement with them.
This has the advantage that you can choose the exact sites and even the
specific pages that you want your ads to appear on, and it should be
cheaper as well with no ‘middle-man’ involved.
Remember that there is no point sending people directly to your sales page,
however. The banner must send the visitor to your landing page, and the
banner itself should make it clear that there is something of value that is
being given away for free to those who click on the banner ad.
Of course, you may want to add another revenue stream to your
business, by carrying banner ads on your own articles pages.
ValueClick for example, pays 65% of received advertising revenues of
either a CPC (which is the same as PPC) or CPM basis, so this is an
alternative way of adding additional cash streams to your business.
In this book, you have been shown multiple ways to get additional
traffic to your website.
The key point to remember, is that your traffic has to be targeted, for your
sales page to be able to make sales. Thus, performing your initial keyword
research correctly, is the foundation to your sales success.
Both paid and free traffic methods have been discussed. While PPC tends
to produce the most immediate traffic to your website, a patiently-
administered link building campaign, can produce free traffic that matches
or even exceeds the volume of targeted traffic that can be obtained from
PPC.
A well-designed traffic system, either paid or free or both, can put your
sales funnel on 'automatic' -so that you can get profits coming in long-term
with little maintenance effort.
Good Luck!
by Alex Goad Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved