PPC search engine tips (first in a series)

PPC search engine tips (first in a series)

While contemplating the deep dark inner essence of my morning coffee, it hit me like a caffeine brick that lot's of people are running pay per click ads (like: Google, Overture, Yahoo, MSN search etc) and are not having the kind of results they might have expected. After several more java jive jolts, I decided to embark on a multi-week PPC tips post. What am I talking about? I plan to share what I consider the best tips for running a successful pay-per-click search engine campaign. I consider a 'successful' campaign one that generates destination page visitors that are likely to respond to your ad offer and visitors whose clicks don't cost you more money than their results merit.

Unless you have very deep pockets, or you're completely nuts, or you have a solid money-making conversion rate, paying big bucks for clicks that don't pan out is business hara-kiri .

Is it possible to launch a pay per click campaign that produces results without causing a divorce? Maybe. What ensues here and over the upcoming weeks are my time tested strategies to put any pay per click campaign on a path toward affordable results.

Pay per click tips for this week:

1. When cooking-up your keyword phrase list, use an extended "keyword discovery" phase. Your competition, like you, will do basic keyword research. You can only beat them if you take it to the next level, and that won't happen in the first day. Having a large number of targeted keywords in your campaign is a side effect of an extended period of brainstorming, discovery, research, or whatever you want to call it.
2. Not very wood with gords? There is a hidden target market of quality visitors who type in incorrect spellings of what they are looking for. Site owners often overlook this. In a recent 30 day period on a major search engine at least 108 people where searching for a 'buisness'? Hundreds more were searching for: 'vitiamins', 'vitimans' and even 'vitamens'... You can bid on misspellings and have very little competition on the search results page.
3. Assume that at least half your keywords will be rotten eggs, that is, no one will ever look for them and end up at your site. Because there is no extra cost to add as many keyword phrases as you can think up, treat them like biscuits and bake-up as many as you can... 100 or more keyword phrases for each destination page you list in any PPC search engine.

Don't forget that if you run any PPC search engine ad campaign over a few weeks and you get no sales or sign-up results, the culprit is most likely NOT the traffic you're generating from your ad, rather it is your site, your landing page, your product, your service, your price or some factor other than your PPC generated traffic . The first thing I'd look at ( if things aren't going satisfactory) is your landing page. Your landing page must be the 'pearl' in your sea of PPC campaign tools. Anything less and you might as well be shucking oysters.

In my previous blog post I included a link for additional marketing tips. You will find lots of help for your PPC campaign there.

To make certain you don't miss this series of PPC tips, you might consider subscribing to my RSS feed.

Best of Luck with Discovery Toys !