Pay Per Click
There are people who would have you believe that using Pay Per Click is as simple as paying your money, writing your ad, picking out a few keywords and then sitting back to watch your income explode. T'aint so... The reality is far more complex than that! Pay Per Click marketing is a skill. Doing it right takes time, analysis, research, and then continuing monitoring, reanalysis, and adjustment.
AdWords gets the most attention in this type of advertising. And it is the hardest system to use. It does offer more flexibility than other systems for making different kinds of adjustments and for tracking results, managing multiple campaigns, etc, but there is a definite learning curve, and to ignore it is certain disaster. AdWords, without understanding, can open a great sucking hole in your marketing budget that fails to return anything at all!
Don't gamble with Pay Per Click. Start out with a simpler system, and learn to use it well. Once you know how to make money with it, then try AdWords and be willing to study and learn how to make it do what you want it to do.
Test with Kanoodle or some other simpler system. Set a budget of $1 per day, and see if your income increases. If it does not, then tweak. Keep tweaking every few days. By the end of the month, you should have some idea of whether you can make it work or not.
You should watch two statistics for each ad: The length of time the average visitor stays (or the number of pages they visit - but usually length of time is adequate), and whether or not you make any additional ad money or sales compared to the amount you are spending.
Never use Pay Per Click with a business that cannot support the cost of clicks. Remember, with PPC, you pay for every site visitor, regardless of whether they buy or not. So you might have to pay quite a bit to get site visitors. If you have a low per order profit margin, then PPC is not going to work for you. If you have an ad supported informational site, the chances are extremely low that you'd be able to get PPC ads at a low enough cost to offset the even lower returns from PPC income on your site (you pay more for incoming clicks, and you pay for EVERY incoming click... outgoing clicks pay you LESS, and only 1 in 100 or fewer people coming in, will click an ad to go out... do the math!). Paid Inclusion may be a better option for ad supported sites.
The great thing about PPC is that if you can find a winning combination, good keywords and a well written ad, and a site that converts browsers to buyers well enough to profit, then increasing profits further is a matter of simply increasing your daily budget. It can be very difficult to find that combination, and for some businesses, they may never succeed. But for those that do, Pay Per Click is a pure winner.
Gambling means that there are more losers than winners, and when you go into PPC without caution or understanding, you are gambling. Education is important with Pay Per Click, otherwise you are playing in a game that is rigged against you.
Written by Laura Wheeler
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