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Pay-per-click is becoming an
important tool for marketers for many reasons and Google Adwords is the one
vendor most think of for obvious reasons.
When any one service grabs better
than 70 percent of the market share on anything you MUST take a serious look at
all of their products and services.
Many beginning marketers make the
mistake of jumping into PPC before they've defined their niche, before they
know who their target audience is and before they even know what keywords
appeal to the customers they are seeking.
If you don't know whether there
is a market for your product or service and what terminology might be used to
find that product or service, how can you possibly think you will have a chance
at making a profit?
Even though Google gets more than
70 percent of the searches and any ads placed in Adwords will receive plenty of
eyeballs and clicks, you will probably be paying a premium for those clicks and
eating up a large chunk of your advertising budget before you even get a chance
to test your ad and conversion rate.
Some of the other PPC providers
receive less traffic so there are often fewer competitors which means you are
less likely to pay as much per click.
If you have a good ad and landing
page, you will have a good chance of turning a profit. Marginal ads or landing
pages can be tweaked when you aren't blowing through your advertising budget as
fast.
Once you have a landing page and
ad that have been optimized and testing shows they are winners, you can expand
your campaign to the bigger PPC providers, test additional keywords or add
other small PPC search engines.
PPC providers that are classified
as small by me are given this tag because of their search volume as compared to
Google instead of the size of the company that owns them. Some of these
providers are:
- Ask
- Yahoo Search Marketing
- MSN AdCenter
- Findology PPC Search
- Enhance PPC
- and more
It's possible to create and test
PPC advertising campaigns using Google Adwords but I highly recommend you learn
as much as you can about Adwords first. You should also get the website you
will be promoting online and indexed by Google BEFORE you even think about
doing pay-per-click.
A site that Google has indexed
and is delivering traffic to is more likely to get a higher quality score which
means your cost per click will probably be lower than it would be if you were
submitting a new site.
Some of these less used PPC
search engines offer you PPC credit in your account the first time you create
an account and fund it with the amount they specify. Search123 will place $20
in your account when you put in $50 on account creation and Yahoo will give you
$25 if you make the minimum deposit.
I can't think of a better way to
extend my advertising budget to test my offer before moving to Google where I
know everything needs to be ready to profit from the beginning and I hope you
use a similar mindset.
Grab your new accounts, make the
required deposits and start selling and testing without busting your PPC budget.
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