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1st Singapore Web
Hosting > Web Site Promotion
How To Drive Targeted Traffic In 10 Minutes
Time
The answer is, Pay Per Click
Search Engines.
Pay per click (PPC) search engines are search
engines that allow advertisers to bid on listing positions for chosen keywords. The advertisers pay the amount they bid only
when someone clicks the link and visits their sites.
This is great for many of us. Anyone, either a fortune 500
company or a one-man operation, can have the top positions if they choose to.
Pay per click search engines are an incredible way to get
instant, targeted traffic to any site you need to advertise.
Some of them allow you to bid as low as $0.01 and get you up to 10,000 targeted visitors for as little as $100!
Most of the promotion techniques you learn
at this web site, or anywhere
else, will take time to build up. PPC search engines, on the other hand, can bring in traffic
10 minutes after you sign up.
At traditional search engines, the title and description of a
given page seen by visitors in the search result is retrieved from the html file itself. You have no control of it once the
page has been indexed. Pay per click search engines allow you to tweak the title and description for each keyword you bid until it
grabs visitors' attention.
(BUT, it doesn't make any sense to bid on "sex" for your
web hosting service! If you did that, you would end up with lots of clicks, a big credit card bill from
PPC search engines, and zero sales. What would you do if you click on "Working At Home Business" and discover it's a site
all about "video editing"? Click away in no time, I believe.)
Another key advantage is that, listings at pay per click search engines
often show up in some of the most heavily trafficked traditional search engines and directories such as
Yahoo, AOL
search, Altavista,
MSN, metacrawler, just to name a few.
Obviously, the only drawback is that it's not free. It could
easily become unnecessarily expensive if you don't apply the right strategy.
The key to a successful PPC campaign is Knowing
Exactly How Much Each Visitor Is Worth To You so that you will figure out
the maximum amount you can bid to ensure you always make a profit.
Let's say 1 visitor out of 100 to your site actually make a
purchase, you have a 1% conversion rate which is good enough. If you make $20 per sale and are willing to spend $10 in
advertising, then your maximum bid amount is $0.1 so that $10 will bring you at least 100 visitors among them one will make a
purchase.
If you are more aggressive in getting customers
considering the life-time value of customers, you can bid
for as high as $0.2. Anything more than that, you are taking
the risk of losing money - if you don't have backend sales.
Many people are doing just that - losing
money to get customers - for a good reason. If you have
a solid backend sales plan, you can afford losing money
to get first-time customers and still make good profit in
the long run.
You may be wondering, what about those advertisers who pay $3
or more for the top positions? At 1% conversion rate, that equals to $300 cost per customer! Well, there are four possible
reasons:
-
They have an extremely high conversion rate, say 5%
-
They have a really high ticket item to sell, $300 plus
(Insurance, real estate...)
-
They have very powerful backends
-
They don't know what they are doing
In fact, it's not always a good idea to bid for #1
position. How many times did you make a quick decision to buy at the very
first site you stopped by? Not many times I guess. Average people typically click around first, read, compare, and then
make a decision if at all.
So being listed at #1 position is not necessarily better than
at #5. The major advantage of being #1 is having more chances to show up at other search engines and directories. At
Overture, for example, the top 3 listings will also show up in
AOL search, MSN, Altavista and other places.
The price of top positions is another reason not to be involved
in a bidding war. The cost of top listing for competitive keywords could be as high as
15 or 20 dollars!
The best strategy for small businesses is to get a large quantity
of keywords at low price other than bidding $3 for a few words. While top positions for popular keywords get more search and
higher click through rate, a large number of less popular, slightly-lower-positioned keywords will bring you the same, if
not more, amount of traffic - at much lower cost!
If you can't find enough keywords, try WordTracker.
It helps you come out with hundreds of keywords relating to your topic.
Some PPC search engines, Overture for instance, also provide
handy keyword suggestion tools.
Although you don't have to bid for the top position in most
cases, but make sure your site is listed at least in top 20. Otherwise, very few people will find you.
Here are the most popular pay per click search engines:
Overture (formerly known as
GoTo)
FindWhat
SearchTimes
7Search
Kanoodle
You can learn more detailed PPC search engine techniques
here.
Feel free to use this article in your
publication or web site.
It's pre-licensed to you.
The only requirement is to include this resource box:
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Article by Zac Hewlett at
1stSingaporeWebHosting
Visit http://www.1stSingaporeWebHosting.com
for more
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