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What About Pay-Per-Click?

Description: pay per click marketing is an excellent way of getting more traffic to your website. But it's important to make sure you have a good understanding of it before you take the plunge.

If you are thinking of spending some money to increase the amount of traffic you are getting to your website, maybe it's time you explored the possibilities offered by pay per click advertising.

Pay per click is exactly what it says it is - search engine marketing which you only pay for when someone actually clicks on your advert. So in addition to appearing within the search results according to your ranking, which has been generated organically, you will also appear in the sponsored listings whenever someone looks up one of the keywords or phrases you have bid on.

But it sounds a lot easier than it actually is, and in order to get the most out of pay per click marketing you need to make sure you plan properly, do your research and set a budget. If you don't do all of these things you may find you have spent a lot of money and have very little to show for it by way of results.

Firstly it's important to know which terms are worth bidding on from your point of view. There is very little point in trying to compete for popular search terms that hundreds of thousands of people search for every day, because there will be thousands of companies out there with far bigger budgets than you, blowing you out of the water every time - unless you are willing to pay twenty or thirty dollars (or more) for every lead you get.

It's far better to target your advertising so that you get better quality traffic that ironically you don't have to pay as much to get. You will generally find that far less people will bid on longer search terms, and they will be far cheaper as a result. The great thing is that these people know exactly what they want to find information on, so you will generally find that using longer search terms will bring several benefits:

• Your advertising budget will go much further
• You will receive more targeted and more responsive traffic
• Your click to sales ratio (ie. the number of people who click through to your website and actually buy something) will be far higher than if you were to target a more broad keyword

Monitoring your results is another extremely important aspect of pay per click marketing. If you don't know which search terms and bids are getting you the best results, you're not going to be able to maximize your campaign with any kind of accuracy.

The best way to approach a pay per click campaign is to formulate a plan. What do you want to achieve? What kind of budget do you have? How far do you expect that budget to go? If you can set off with a goal in mind then you will have a target to aim for and your pay per click campaign will be much easier to manage.

One of the most important things to remember is to make sure you cap your daily spend. If you don't you may fall into the same trap other marketers have done in the past, and end up spending far more than you intend to.

It's also a good idea to experiment with how you write your adverts. Make sure they are properly targeted and will attract the right people, and are tempting enough to encourage people to click on them to find out more. Remember that you don't pay every time your ad is shown in the search results; you will only pay when someone actually clicks on it and visits your website.

Pay per click marketing is one of the fastest ways to generate fresh traffic for your website. Depending on how well you do your research and how good you are at analyzing your results, it can be extremely rewarding or - at the other end of the scale - a money pit.

So long as you tread carefully and experiment to find the keywords that work best for you, there is no reason to suppose you won't increase your sales very quickly once you start using pay per click marketing.