A Terrific PPC Success Checklist!

It's easy to 'lose your shirt' with Pay-Per-Click, however most who do, lose it rather quickly and bail out. Much more insidious is having marginal success, when it could be turned into substantial success.

A lot of it hinges on optimizing campaigns, keywords, adgroups, etc. Unfortunately, there is a lot to consider and keep track of. Too much.

A while back, I came across a terrific "checklist" from PPC wizard Ben Hart. He put together a list of things to remember and consider. This can take your drab or lackluster Adwords campaigns and turn them into real winners.

Do yourself a favor and print this out, and keep it close by when you create new campaigns, and while looking over and optimizing what you already have!

__ Turn off most of Google’s default settings.

__ Start by having your ads show only on Google. Turn off Content Network and Search Network to start.

__ Start with Exact Match for keyword searches. Turn off Broad Match and Phrase Match to start.

__ Make sure your geographic and language settings are correctly set.

__ Pick keywords and phrases your likely buyers are typing into search engines. Put yourself in their place. What is are they looking for?

__ Start by bidding low – perhaps 10 cents a click. If traffic is too light, ramp up slowly – a nickel at a time.

__ Don’t worry about being ranked #1 on the first page for your keyword. That might require you overpaying for clicks. For competitive keyword categories, a rank around #5 has delivered the best ROI for me.

__ For super-competitive keyword categories, I don’t mind if my ad is on page two of the Google list. Searches who get to page two and deeper tend to be more qualified as leads.

__ Do not take clickers on your ad to the home page of your website. Take them to a landing page specifically designed for your ad. Your landing page should be a continuation of you ad.

__ Include your main keywords in the headline of both your ad and landing page.

__ Determine the primary goal of your ad and landing page. What is your “Most Wanted Response”? Is it to make a sale or collect a lead?

__ Do everything in your creative power to capture the names and email addresses of visitors to your site by offering something of value free ( such as an eBook or “white paper” on the subject of their keyword search).

__ Build rapport and cultivate relationships by continuing to send your opt-in subscribers a valuable ezine that’s on the subject of their keyword search that brought them to your site in the first place.

__ Are you ready to do business when your ad campaign is on? Do you have a merchant account, a shopping cart, a way to take payments?

__ Does the headline of your ad stress the main benefit to the read of clicking on your ad?

__ Don’t make your ads about you. Make your ads about what your prospective customer is looking for.

__ Don’t use technical jargon in your ads. What the heck is a “gigabyte”? Instead, follow the lead of Apple’s great ad for its iPod: “1,000 Songs In Your Pocket.” What’s the main benefit to your reader of what you are offering?

__ Don’t try to buy your way to the top of Google’s search engine for an off-the-mark ad that’s getting few clicks. Write a great ad, that gets lots of clicks – targeted clicks from people who are looking for what you are selling.

__ Specific problems require equally specific solutions. Offer specific solutions in your ad copy and on your landing pages. “Improve Your Golf Score” is not nearly as strong as “Cure Your Slice in Five Swings.”

__ Understand who your customer is and what she’s looking for. Then provide it.

__ Every search and every click represents someone with a need. Can you fill that need?


__ Have more than one product to offer that’s on the subject of the keyword searches that brought visitors to your site. Have a steady stream of follow-up products and upgrade products. It’s tough to build a business on just one product.

__ Make an extensive list of keywords and phrases that you believe your customers are typing into search engines to find the main product or service you are selling.

__ Put all your keywords and keyword combinations on a Excel spreadsheet so that you can move them around easily and group families of keywords and phrases together.

__ Take families of underperforming keywords and create separate ads and landing pages specifically tailored for those families of keywords. This can result in you having many ads and landing pages, each with its small family of keywords.

__ If your landing page is intended for “lead generation”, is the free ebook, “white paper” or other free gift you are offering of high enough value to your visitor that she will want to fill out your sign-up form to get it.

__ Is your free offer that’s designed to get leads to fill out your form exactly in line with the AdWords ad that brought them to your site? (It must not be off the mark, even a little).

__ Have an email marketing system (such as Aweber.com or iContact.com) set up before you launch your AdWords campaign so that you can capture leads and follow-up with email.

__ Use powerful keyword research tools to help you brainstorm your keywords, such as Wordtracker.com, KeywordDiscovery.com and GoodKeywords.com

__ Don’t forget to include Negative Keywords – words that disqualify your ad from being shown where certain words are typed into an engine. A good negative keyword might be “free” if you don’t want clickers who are looking just for “free” stuff.

__ Always split-test two ads at a time. “Test” is the most important principle in marketing.

__ Use Google Conversion Tracker to track conversions on your landing page.

__ Use Google Analytics to track visitor behavior on your site.

__ Test landing pages to see which ones are doing the best job of converting visitors into leads and then into buyers.

__Offer one and only one thing with your pay-per-click ad. If you sell more than one product, create different ads, one for each product . . . with each ad leading to a “landing page” also deigned to sell that one product.

__ If your ad is working well, turn on Search Network and see how that goes.

__ If your ad works on Search Network, test Content Network.

__ Start by setting bids low for Content Network. You can set separate bids of Content Network and Search Network.

__ Use the PPSeer.com tracking tool to see how individual sites on the Content Network are performing for you.

__ Tell Google not to run ads on sites that are delivering a lot of clicks, but few sales.

__ If your ads are running on the Ad Sense Content Network, understand how to use Demographic and Site Targeting.

__ Don’t use Google Budget Optimizer (unless you want Google managing your finances and making your marketing decisions).

__ If you are a local business, set up three kinds of ads – one configured for local business, one configured nationally but that uses names of local area towns and cities with keywords describing your service, and one in Google’s Local Business Center so that your local business appears with an enhanced interactive listing on Google Maps.

__ Don’t ignore the pay-per-click ad programs other search engines and many directories offer. offer. Yahoo Search Marketing is the #2 PPC program – and well worth using.

__ Use Google AdWords to conduct super cheap, quick and accurate market research for all your advertising and marketing campaigns (whether offline or online).

One Opinion About Clickbank

One Pay Per Click marketer's opinion about Clickbank:

If you were to search affiliate marketing on google you are sure to come across the name clickbank more than once. Maybe when it first started it was a good idea and I'm sure there are a few making a tidy profit from it, but if you ask me it should be banned.

You can not search google anymore without page after page of affiliates trying to sell you some sort of money making venture or a system to whiten your teeth. Clickbank is the source of a lot of annoying ads floating around the web now, and most of them are full of lies.

If you are one of the people that believe the sales stories, you no the sort of thing, "I looked for years before I found this system, but as soon as I did, I was rich." then I'm telling you now, it is all lies, any ebook that was ever published on the subject will tell you to write whatever will sell the product, taking away any real advertisers credibility to sell good products of their own.

Clickbank has made the market so difficult for any new Internet marketer to even get their foot in the door, as they have filled up the net with rubbish, giving any potential costumer for a real marketer the sense they have seen it all before and a feeling of doubt before they have even started to read the page.

All I am saying is there should be some sort of quality control or a limit on how many products a marketer can promote, this would at least give any legitimate marketer a chance to start.

All that said, there are probably more Internet marketers using Clickbank for their PPC efforts than anything else.

The chief benefits of clickbank is the huge number of products, and the speed & ease that affiliates get paid.

Clickbank may not be the best affiliate marketing network, but it's one of the largest and proven over time.

Affiliate Marketing Home-Based Business

By Melanie Ullman
Affiliate marketing, which is a frequent focus for home-based businesses is a pretty broad term that encompasses managing traffic on the internet to maximize exposure of your company or product and therefore improving sales of the same. Affiliates would be those who advertise on your website and thereby bring in traffic by those who are interested in the affiliate, the advertiser, since they are not yet familiar with you and your product.

Affiliates can also be based on HITS, the number of people who come to your website because of the advertising, feeds or links from other companies. In this case, the affiliate might get paid based on the number of hits to your website or increased number of hits from the time of affiliate participation. There are firms that specialize in setting up web pages and other internet advertising to maximize the amount of traffic to your website.

Like all advertising, increasing exposure is far different from getting sales. Translating the increased traffic into sales would probably require additional sales techniques. Unlike traditional advertising which might measure success of advertising by the end result in increase in sales, affiliate marketing often gauges "success" based on traffic, or number of hits which actually does not necessarily translate into changes in sales.

There are risks with affiliate marketing as well, as people become more expert in linking their websites to others. The risks might include that people are merely skipping through your website and are actually going directly to the affiliate. One way of keeping your niche and therefore keeping your business would be to clearly differentiate yourself from the affiliate. This will take a bit of practice as you don't want a COMPETITOR on your website but you want complementary businesses.

As in all advertising, you also want to make sure that your affiliate is legitimate. In the event of controversy regarding your affiliate, you need to leave yourself a contractual "out" in that you can drop the advertiser for such cause. Further, investigations into an affiliate might bring you into a controversy that is inconvenient. We see this with search engines and listing services that make their money such as Craigslist.

Your common interests with affiliates must be clearly distinguished from your involvement with your affiliate. Marketing affiliates also might overload your website. You don't want so many HITS that your website becomes another search engine rather than a means of selling yourself and your product. There are affiliate marketing firms that often specialize in setting up websites. The importance of feeds from other areas on the internet are also stressed.

Often, the advertisements are accepted by beginning companies for free and therefore benefit the affiliate through no cost publicity for themselves that also provides you with publicity by having this better-known company as part of your marketing strategy. In cases of big search engines, companies PAY to advertise, realizing the value of the company.

Using Google Webmaster Tools To Best Use

Written by Melanie Ullman

It's been a while since I updated this blog, but I'll try and get back to a regular routine.

When you're trying to rank your landing page, whether it's for PPC or simply to get organic search traffic to an offer page, backlinking is the key. In short, the more back links you get, the higher you will go in the SERPs. Now of course this is a relative thing. Trying to rank against strong "authority sites" that have high Pagerank and thousands of backlinks can be an exercise in futility. But generally speaking, the more links, the better your site will do.

But all back links aren't created equally. Links from strong sites, those with a high Page rank, are worth more to your site than those with lower rank. It's actually the passing of this "link juice" that gives your target site it's boost. This means you want higher value links.

Just as important however, perhaps even more pertinently is whether or not Google sees and counts your links. Though they may index nearly every page, not every link they come across counts towards your SERP ranking.

How do you know which is which? That's where Google's Webmaster Tools comes into play. Webmaster Tools was designed to show the webmaster where their links are coming from. As such, you can see which of the backlinks you are taking the time to get are being seen AND counted by Google. If it isn't in Webmaster Tools, it isn't doing your site any good, at least as far as boosting your ranking is concerned.

Another great use for Google's Webmaster Tools is for you to see which links you might be able to take more advantage of. When you see that your links are sticking for instance from your blogs, Squidoo lenses, other sites, etc., you immediately know they are more valuable links.

So why not go back and re-visit those web sites? You might just be able to post more links, or put in links to your other sites. I spend a lot of time in Webmaster Tools. I look to see where my backlinking efforts are paying off, focus further efforts where they count, and reduce the time I put into those that aren't paying me dividends.

Plus I comb through the results always looking for new and better sites to go back to with more links.

It's also worth noting that Webmaster Tools will show you the specific pages where you are linking to. You should make sure to vary your links, vary your anchor text, and don't just link to your home page, but your inner pages as well.

Make Google Webmaster Tools a routine part of your own "site intelligence". You'll find you can spend your time in a more valuable manner, and that you avoid going through the process of building, checking, waiting, checking some more, all for something that won't help you in the long fun anyway.

If you've found some interesting or little-known, little-used tricks that you want to share, make sure you come back here and post them in the comments section. I'll be very appreciative, as will the readers! Plus, you'll get a lot of good Karma points!

Keyword "Profitability"

Anyone doing PPC for more than a day knows that keyword research is one of the fundamentals of the game. Focusing on the “wrong” keywords will cost you money, lower your CTR (Click-Through Rate), and bring down the Quality Score of your whole campaign.

Knowing which keywords are profitable and which aren't mean the difference between making money, and losing money, plain and simple.

A new post on Improve Your Internet Marketing talks about an easy way to 'test' the viability of your keywords - before spending your money on 'bad' clicks!

According to the post, one of the ‘tried & true’ methods for testing keyword profitability is to ’spy’ on PPC ads. The rational is that anyone advertising on a given keyword consistently is probably making money. After all, no one is going to pay indefinitely for PPC ads on a keyword that isn’t making them money, right?

While this technique is quite effective, it is extremely time-consuming. In order for your data to be meaningful, you have to track ads over time, usually at least 2 weeks to a month.

This technique uses Spyfu (http://www.spyfu.com) to 'leapfrog' the time you would have to wait using traditional ad-spying programs.

I've used this method myself, and I can tell you it not only saves time, but it works! But don't take my word for it... :)

SpeedPPC - Astounding PPC Results, and EXCLUSIVE DISCOUNT!

I know I've mentioned this many times, but if you're serious about Pay Per Click, you simply MUST consider SpeedPPC - and with an EXCLUSIVE $100 DISCOUNT!

In it's newest version, SpeedPPC Version 3, you can now apply it's magic across more search engines, automate ad building, integrate vendor datafeeds, and so much more.

It’s actually a suite of tools, all based on ultra-smart methodologies.

Relevancy and Quality Score are the keys to SpeedPPC - they are vital for your campaigns’ success. That means tight-knit relationships between your keywords, ads and landing pages.

The application is simple to use. Simple to get results. If there was one piece of software that reduced the most amount of work and still created the best returns, SpeedPPC is it.

If you are doing Pay Per Click, your cost, return, and ultimate success is dependent on creating ads triggered by the right keywords, and paying the least possible CPC for those keywords. The primary factor determining what you will pay for clicks is your Quality Score. For PPC ads, your Quality Score is determined by the relevancy and relationship between your keyword, ad, domain, and landing page. SpeedPPC is the first and only system that creates a perfectly optimized coupling between all these elements, giving you the lowest possible CPC.

Article Marketing and Bum Marketing

Article marketing has become one of the most talked about strategies for Internet marketing lately. As one of the chief components in the bum marketing, and its newfound popularity is due to two significant characteristics: it's free, and it works.

Article marketing provides Internet marketers with two important benefits. First, it creates wider exposure for the author and their website. Secondly, it provides valuable inbound links or IBL's.

Just like the other bum marketing strategies, article marketing is all about numbers. It's effectiveness relies on consistent and ongoing effort. A single article has limited benefit, however daily submissions have an overall benefit greater than the sum of its parts.

Maximizing your article submission strategy means targeting a single keyword or phrase, one per article. It's equally important to optimize each article, similar to each page in a website. In fact, each article acts as a one-page mini site.

You optimize an article for the search engines the same way you would for a web page. Put your keyword or phrase in the article title, as the beginning of the first paragraph, the beginning of the last paragraph, and for the anchor text in your link or resource box.

By following a few simple steps, you will gain maximum return for your effort. As part of a multipronged approach, article marketing becomes an extremely effective and inexpensive technique in your arsenal.