PPC Methods

ConfusedbyIRS asked:


Does anyone know the correct IRS business activity code to use for a small business that makes money by marketing online (all pay per click search) for internet retailers and gets paid a commission for each referral that leads to a sale? (no inventory - just advertising and commissions based on sales referrals. All done online.)
Thanks!

Kendall

Jerry Work asked:


Pay per click marketing has five major advantages that set it apart from other forms of advertising. These are immediacy, flexibility, transparency, portability, and scalability. Each of these advantages is discussed in more detail below.

Immediacy. With paid search, once you identify keywords for which you would like your site to be listed in a search engine results page, or a relevant non-search site for which you would like your ad to appear, you can have your ad appearing in a matter of hours, if not minutes. To get your site listed as a natural result on a search results page will likely require months of time and a considerable amount of work. Most other forms of advertising also require considerable production time.

Flexibility. Imagine that your company has just spent a large sum of money producing a TV ad. One night, you see your TV ad and decide that you just don’t like it and want to change it immediately. That would be a very expensive nightmare. By contrast, a pay per click ad can be changed at any time, with the new ad running in place of the old with no delay. Pay per click gives you incredible flexibility to make real-time changes to your campaign based on data or personal preference.

Transparency. With paid search, you have complete clarity regarding the performance of your advertising. Unlike traditional advertising, such as print, radio, or TV ads, with paid search you will know exactly how many leads or sales resulted from your promotions. Not only will you know in a broad sense, you will know down to the level of exactly what keyword and what ads generated the most clicks or conversions. This makes it much easier to tweak your ad campaign for maximum profitability.

Portability. You will learn much from your pay per click campaign that can be ported to other advertising media. For example, if you discover a particular keyword that converts at a very high rate, then you might be well-served to engage in a search engine optimization campaign so that your site appears in the natural search listings for that same keyword. Or you might discover that one of your ads with a particular headline does very well, indicating that it might be a headline or slogan that would work well for your off-line marketing.

Scalability. If you want to advertise on TV, you have to have the budget to produce the TV commercial. If you want to run a print ad, you may find the expense prohibitive. By contrast, with a pay per click campaign, you can begin advertising immediately regardless of how small your budget is. If you are running standard search engine results page text link ads, there is no production cost other than the time it takes you to write your ads. And even if your budget is only $10 per day, you can still get in the game (unless you are in one of the extremely expensive categories such as mortgage loans or accident attorneys). Once you have a larger budget, it is very easy to scale your campaign up.

The above list represents the five major advantages of pay per click compared to other forms of advertising. It is a medium available to even the smallest advertiser that offers great flexibility and affordability. If you are currently spending money on traditional advertising, I highly recommend that you give paid search a try.





Guido Nussbaum asked:


Without the proper method of using Pay Per Click Advertising, you can spend a fortune and have nothing to show for it. Clickthroughs cost you, but you get nothing in return if your website visitors only click through and don’t buy anything.

How does it work? The major search engines offer bidding for the placement of your ad based on keywords. You bid on keywords that you want to place your ads on, related to your product. If you bid the highest, your ad goes first. When someone does a search for that keyword, your ad is available to them to click on. If they do, you are charged whatever you bid. For example, if you bid $.30 for a keyword to get top spot, and 100 people click on your ad in a day, you pay $30.00. Multiply that times 30 days and you can see how quickly your advertising budget gets expended. If it is a keyword that is very popular, and thousands of people click on your ad, it really costs you big.

But, you might ask, isn’t a lot of click throughs what you are looking for? Isn’t that a good thing? It depends. If those clickthroughs result in sales, yes, it is great. But, if sales don’t result for a good percentage of those clickthroughs, then it is not a good thing at all.

One of the disadvantages to pay per click marketing is that your cost per click remains the same, regardless of traffic. Your overall costs go up in proportion to your clicks. But, in the normal search engine optimization, as your traffic increases, your costs go down. You spend a particular amount of time and money to optimize your site, and increased traffic doesn’t raise your overall expenditure.

Is pay per click all bad? Not at all. It can profitably increase your search engine traffic, which increases your website traffic, if it is managed well. With some programs, such as Google Adwords, it can immediately increase your website traffic. If you are at the top of a popular keyword, you will get instant clickthroughs, and potentially, customers. Also, you can adjust your ad campaigns to match marketing trends a lot easier than you can rework your web content to draw search engine traffic.

What are some management tips? The most basic is to focus your efforts and to be well aware of what you are spending, your conversion rate, and your number of clickthroughs. Like any advertising method, you have to stay on top of what is going on or you can spend many wasted dollars in ineffective advertising.

When is pay per click a good idea? There are three major areas where pay per click advertising is beneficial.

Campaign and advertising testing issues. If you are introducing a new product, or if you want to test drive an advertising campaign, you can expect immediate traffic and can test ads by changing in mid-campaign and watching results.

Direct response sales - if you sell something that the customer can buy immediately, pay per click advertising may be beneficial. You know that each click through may be a sale.

When using a niche phrase - when a certain keyword might be expensive, a keyword phrase with that word combined with another one might be a real bargain and generate a lot of traffic.

Pay per click advertising is not the solution for everyone or every situation. But, managed well and used effectively, it can very efficiently drive website traffic and resulting sales.



Colby

Ryan asked:


Also…why?

Angel

Guido Nussbaum asked:


The Internet is constantly evolving and changing, especially for those of us that are involved in the marketing end of the net. For some people, they have seen the changes come and go and trends that burn like fire for a while and then simply die out. One method of marketing, however, that is sure to stick around for the long term is pay per click marketing. This is one of the best methods of getting targeted traffic to your website in a short period of time. If done correctly, you can take a brand-new website and start getting sales on the very same day that it is uploaded.

Pay per click marketing actually got its start very early in the century with a company that was called Goto. This company eventually became Overture and then was bought out by Yahoo. In the early days, it was very easy to purchase some targeted traffic to your website at around one cent for every click. People that got in on the game early were able to make a killing in a relatively short period of time if they did it correctly.

Since that time, competition has come in from all different directions and more pay per click marketing companies have opened their doors to advertisers. As a matter of fact, Yahoo takes a distant second to the king of all pay per click advertisers, Google. The Google system has revolutionized pay per click marketing in a number of different ways and it is the single best way to drive quick traffic to your website, if you are willing to pay for it.

There are several different aspects of pay per click marketing that are very important for you to understand fully before you decide to get involved with this form of advertising. First of all, you need to learn how to use the system properly so that you don’t end up exhausting your entire advertising budget in a short period of time on traffic that has no way of generating any income at all. This is a very common mistake that many who are new to pay per click advertising tend to make. Once you learn the system, however, of how to bid and how to set up your various ads, it becomes an easy thing for you to build on and to maintain.

As you continue to learn more about this form of marketing, you will understand some of the intricacies that govern where your ad will be placed and how well the traffic that follows through to your website will be targeted. Things such as keyword targeting and writing proper ads will all come into play along with making sure that your landing page is relevant to the ad itself. There’s no doubt about it, using pay per click marketing is the single best way to generate an income online in a relatively short period of time. If you do it properly, it will take care of you for a long time to come.



Jaeda

seybona asked:


i wish to totally rule out pay per click. i seek conversion rates of 20% and above.

Rashad

vinay.bashir asked:


For research, we need an updated list of keywords used by people for search and for online marketing (and pay-per-click). I’m sure this list is big, so it’s probably a database; and if possible, it should also include additional information, like ranking or popularity. Thanks!

Angie

NEETU VIJ asked:


One mistake that most people tend to make at some point in their Internet marketing career is lumping all forms of advertising into one particular mold. This is often done in the case of pay per click marketing. People are aware that absolute fortunes are being made through the Google Adwords system, so they naturally think that any pay per click marketing system will work wonders for their business. Is this the case? Let’s take a look at a few of the pay per click marketing systems that are available online and see which ones will do the most for your business.

Of course, the king of all pay per click marketing systems is run by Google. It is their Adwords system that drives the entire process. Once you choose your relevant keywords and ads that go into the system, they will almost immediately be displayed alongside the search engine result pages. Not only that, you also have the choice of whether to display them on millions of websites around the world through the Google Adsense system. This can get your website a lot of exposure and traffic in a short period of time. If used correctly, it can make your business an almost immediate success.

The second on the list of pay per click marketing systems is Yahoo search marketing or YSM for short. This is also advertising that is available through a very reputable source and you can receive a decent amount of traffic by using this system as well. YSM tends to be a little bit more difficult to understand than the AdWords system but once you get the hang of it, it is easy to add keywords or change your ads and manage your entire campaign online. Even though they don’t send as much traffic as Google, you still get some very qualified clicks by using this program.

A newcomer on to the pay per click marketing scene is MSN. Their system still has, in my opinion, some bugs that need to be worked out in order for it to be truly user-friendly. It still is not a system, however, that should be overlooked if you are serious about your pay per click marketing efforts. Although MSN receives a small share of searchers in comparison with Google and Yahoo, they do tend to be those that purchase more readily. If you have the time to learn it, the system can send you some qualified traffic on a consistent basis.

Finally, we have all of the other pay per click marketing systems that are available. Many of the systems will not send you much traffic, if any at all and many of them are riddled with click fraud problems. There are a few in there, however, that can send you the traffic that you need but these take a distant backseat to the big three. If you have the time for it and the budget, they are worth doing some experimenting.



Keegan

Tracey F asked:


I am interested in making money from home on the internet and would like to learn pay per click, affiliate marketing, internet marketing etc. I’ve come across Wealthy Affiliate but it feels like a bit of a scam. Can anyone help?

Kamron