How,Harness,the,POWER,Pay-per- marketing How to Harness the POWER of Pay-per-Click Search Engines

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How to Harness the POWER of Pay-per-Click Search EnginesCopyright 2002 lessworkmoremoney.com By Armand Melanson Unfortunately, I get email every day from people who have setup their websites to sell but they can't get any traffic to their site - they are going out of business fast. So let me emphasize an important element of online success: Find markets that you can quickly penetrate via pay-per-click advertising at Overture. What is a pay-per-click(PPC) Search Engine(SE) you ask? PPCs are changing the face of Internet advertising. Let me explain how. With regular SEs, you have to write your marketing copyto create the proper keyword density, then submit & waitfor the SE to spider your site. It can take anywhere from2 to 12 weeks before you actually get listed. Then you haveto start tweaking your site to try & move up the ranks. It'sa slow & labor intensive process. With Overture - the biggest PPC out there - you canjoin, bid on particular keywords & get listed within 5 days!Your bid will determine where you rank. For example, if you are selling cigars, you can bid $0.20 for the keyword "cigar" and that bid will determine where you rank when someone searches for "cigar". You pay $0.20 every timesomeone clicks on your listing for the keyword "cigar". Everytime a search is done at Overture or its partner sites, the keywords which have been bid on appear above the non-bid keywords. So even if your competition has created a highly keyword focused site but hasn't bid on the words you have bid on, you will be above them in the search results. This means that even if you find a product which is in great demand, you should 1st determine if you can get a top 5 position at Overture for the most relevant keywords beforebuilding your website. This is very important because if you can't get a top 5 at Overture, then you will not get sufficient traffic to your site to make money from the start. Of course, you can go the long route of using search engine submission tools, link trading, banner ads, ezine ads & whatnot. But this will take some time before it pays off insufficient traffic to make you some real money. If you want immediate results, you have to be able to get a top 5 spot at Overture - top 5 is key because Yahoo, one of Overture's partners, picks up the top 5 Overture results. If you can get top 1 or 2, then even better because Overture'sother partners (MSN, ALTA VISTA, LYCOS, etc.) will display yourresults. But top 5 alone will produce good results because Yahoo is huge & gets a massive number of searches. -----------------------------------MATH IS FOR PINHEADS?? - NOT!!!!!----------------------------------- The way to calculate how high you can bid at Overture is prettysimple: Let's assume a very conservative 1% conversion rate at your site - that means 1 out of 100 visitors buys. Determine your profit on 1 sale of your main product - if youare selling widgets at $30 a piece (expensive widgets I know)& your cost is $10, then your gross profit is $20/sale (haven'tfactored in other expenses yet). If rough profit per sale is $20 & you make one sale/100visitors, then you can't afford to spend more than $20 toattract 100 visitors (in fact, you should spend less if you wantto make any money). So that means that you can't bid more than $0.20 per keyword atOverture & still make money. At $0.20, you will not break even. With this information, you can now assess whether or not it is feasible for you to test market your widgets via Overture. If youcould get a top 5 bid at Overture for $0.10, let's see how thingswould work out: - at 0.10$ per click, it will cost you $10/100 visitors. Thismeans that each 100 visitors will produce: $30(customer price) - $10(your cost) - $10(click costs)-----------------------= $10 profit $10 per 100 visitors is not alot of money unless your able toproduce thousands of visitors/day - not likely. Based on this assessment, you should pick another product oranother market & start all over again. This is a general approach which can be modified according tothe circumstances. Certain product have higher conversion ratesthan others. Your site marketing copy will have an effect onconversion as well. I use 1% conversion to be on the safe side.As well, some products might sell better in hard copy ads ortrade magazines, so online testing might not be the bestassessment. But if you are going to sell online, doing this basic kind ofnumber crunching is what will help you to establish what typesof products/services you should consider selling. Otherwise, youare really not looking out for your best interests - the successof your business venture. 1) Is there a demand for this?2) Can I quickly & affordably advertise to the target market? That's what the number crunching tries to answer for you. The best products will be the ones which:- have some demand, but not too much (a niche market)- have relatively low competition at Overture - the bigger thedifference between what it costs you for 100 visitors & howmuch profit you make per 100 visitors, the better So let's review the process again:- identify some in demand markets- pick several products which target those markets- do some informal surveys to identify the top products- use the Overture search suggestion tool to verify how many searches are being made on the most relevant keywords for yourprospective products- determine whether you can bid high enough to get a top 5 spotat Overture for the most relevant keywords- build a simple prototype site & submit your listings to Overture - monitor your traffic to determine whether you have sufficient visitors to make a go of it- build a full fledged site which is fully optimized to sell Signup with Overture here:http://www.overture.com/d/advertisers/p/bjump/?o=RR-55270&b=10 Here is a good site which lists several other payperclicks:http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/ ----------------------------------------------------ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Armand Melanson is an emarketingconsultant & author. For free marketing tips & articles youcan re-use, visit him at http://lessworkmoremoney.com---------------------------------------------------- Article Tags: Most Relevant Keywords, Pay-per-click Search, Most Relevant, Relevant Keywords