Pay Per Click - Should I Take The Plunge?

By Tim Redman

For those of you who are new to Internet marketing, PPC often seems the best option to use to promote your website. But is it? Well yes and no, it all depends on what finances you have in place to be able to run a PPC campaign successfully, and having the knowledge in place on how to effectively manage a campaign.

Many Internet marketing newbie's often go and sign-up for a new PPC account, set up and advert and flood it with lots of keywords so that they get lots of hits to their site. After about a month of running the advert and receiving their first bill for $2000, they then think, "What was I doing?"

What people don't realize is that by flooding their adverts with lots of keywords they are actually damaging their campaigns. The premise behind PPC, and to be fair the PPC companies don't really tell you this, is to use target keywords specific to your website or products.

For instance, I once had a client that was using a well known PPC program. He had a website selling classic cars, when he set up his PPC advertising campaign he didn't really know what he was doing and so used keywords in his campaign such as "silver car". Once he had spent over $2500 in PPC marketing and hadn't really sold anything, he came to me and asked, what was he doing wrong?

I took a look at his list of over 280 keywords, this was his first problem. When starting a PPC campaign you should only use a few keywords to test them out. I normally start a PPC campaign with 1 keyword and try it for a few days. If it's right I then add another, then another if that one is working ok for me. If the keyword isn't working then I just go ahead and delete it! So, going back to my client, I deleted all of his keywords and told him that we were going to start again.

At the time he was trying to sell an Aston Martin DB5, just like the car in James Bond. So, instead of using the keyword "silver car" I used the keyword "Aston Martin DB5". Over night success, this keyword really started to do the hard work for him and he sold the car within a week.

The moral of the story he is to keep your keywords list low and keep them targeted to your website, otherwise you may end up paying out lots of money that you may not have.

Some websites that you can become and affiliate for will tell you to go and place PPC adverts using a list of keywords that they say are high converting. My advice is don't use them, everybody else that is promoting their products is probably using exactly the same list, and so you will be competing against their bids for the same keywords. However, take a look at the list and see if you can use one of the keywords to come up with an alternative. Just don't use the keywords supplied!

To summarize:

* Keep your keyword list very short to begin with and only add on to it when you know your original keywords are working ok.

* Target your keywords to your website or products.

* Don't use preformed lists of keywords, they don't work.

* Never spend more than you can afford on any PPC campaign.