Pay-per-click tips (first in a series)

Pay-per-click tips (first in a series)

If you follow my posts for the upcoming weeks, 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 blog or web page visitors uniquely targeted to your ad offer and visitors whose clicks don't cost you more money than you have in your bank account :-)

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 busines seppuku .

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.

PPC Tips:

1. If your product or service is something that can be related to a locale, like a city, state or region you may be able to find some ripe tomatoes in phrases like: 'retirement homes in Florida', 'Mississippi flat rate phone service', 'herbal sunscreen for southwestern sun', 'indoor air filters for Los Angeles'.
2. Discover more keywords by narrowing down to extreme specifics. People can be VERY specific when they search. Use names of months and years like '2004 tax savings', 'May flowers', 'Christmas of 2005' or 'September back to school supplies'.
   
   Let's say you are marketing a broad line of herbal products... why not get a list of all herbs (there may be thousands) and use that list as a keyword list. Maybe your product doesn't contain every herb on the list, but people searching for any ONE herb specifically may be interested in others. Try specific model numbers, makes and designs if your products are sometimes referred to this way: 'Epson stylus CX6400', 'Apple G5', etc.
3. Add adjectives to your keywords like: big, purple, new, cheap, affordable, soft, aromatic, healthy, etc.

In the final analysis, you must understand what your goals are and pay close attention to all aspects of your campaign. It can be safely said that if you run any PPC search engine ad campaign over a few weeks and you get zero or very low sales or sign-up results, the challenge 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 visitor hits. The first thing I'd look at (if results are low ) 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.

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

Best of Luck with Fifth Avenue Collection !