Profitable Pay Per Click Marketing

When I start each post, it is tough to know where to begin sometimes because each person that reads my posts and visits my site are on a different level and already know different information on the internet marketing business. So usually I like to start at the complete beginning for those who have absolutely no idea what the topic is about  and have absolutely no experience in the area that I am posting about.

So with that said I want to first start by thanking Wealthy Affiliate for teaching me what I need to know about internet marketing, and specifically for teaching me Pay Per Click which enabled me to make this post and increase my income by successfully running many profitable PPC ads. It has also helped me work more closely with the drop shipping sites that Worldwide Brands helped me with to increase my income in that area also.

I always like giving credit where it is do because the people who are reading this can get the full picture, and they will then know how I came to learn this information and how I came to be not only a profitable Pay Per Click Marketer, but a profitable internet marketer in general.

And if you would like related posts that will help you with your pay per click (PPC) marketing I recommend you also check out the following posts: What Is Pay Per Click Marketing, How to Succeed With Pay Per Click, Top 10 Pay Per Click Secrets, and The Most Common PPC Mistakes.

So now on to profitable pay per click (PPC) marketing. As I always said I really like to start at the beginning for those of you who know absolutely nothing about the subject at hand, in this case PPC marketing.

PPC marketing is when you use a search engines ad service to create ads, where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad; hence the term pay per click.  There are 3 major search engines that people use PPC marketing with:

1) Google – Google AdWords: This is the largest by far and most people use Google AdWords mainly for their PPC marketing efforts.  A lot of people also use JUST Google AdWords as their PPC marketing platform.

2) Yahoo! – Yahoo! Search Marketing: This is the second largest PPC platform and a lot of the best PPC marketers use this PPC platform with Google AdWords. You can also get a good amount of traffic from Yahoo! Search Marketing, although Google AdWords will get you a lot more traffic.

3) MSN – MSN Adcenter: This is Microsoft’s ad service (also known as Microsoft Adcenter). This is the third largest PPC platform and the best of the best PPC marketers also use this platform and do very well. The best PPC marketers think you should take advantage of every major PPC platform you can and they will use their campaigns for each of the 3 major Pay Per Click platforms.

Now some of you may have experience with Google AdWords, some of you may have experience with Yahoo! Search Marketing, some of you may have experience with MSN Adcenter and some of you may have experience with all 3 of them. I have personally had successful ads in each of these Pay Per Click platforms and the weird thing is that the same ads act differently in each of these services.

Just because an ad you have is super successful in Google AdWords does not mean that it will be successful in Yahoo! Search Marketing. I am not quite sure why this is as you would think if an ad is very successful on one service it would at least be somewhat successful elsewhere, but this is not the case. So don’t think because you have a profitable ad with AdWords that you can just copy and paste to both Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter and also have a profitable ad with these 2 also, but that is not the case, that’s not the way it works.

So one thing that you have to be aware of is that you have to possibly create different landing pages, ads, and prices for different PPC Ad services (Getting Back Links from Relevant Websites).

There are some people that suggest you start with either MSN Adcenter or Yahoo! Search Marketing when you are first starting out in PPC marketing and this is because these two ad services get less traffic and you will lose less money in the learning process. This is actually not a totally bad idea, but it’s not something that I totally agree with.

I believe you should just jump right in with the big dog Google AdWords as you can set a daily budget for your campaigns and ads, so you can closely monitor your spending with your ads.

Because Google AdWords is the largest of the 3 PPC marketing platforms I want to focus this post pretty much solely on Google AdWords because they have the largest amount of traffic, which means that they have the largest earning potential and the most opportunities. If you can make it with Google then you can make it anywhere, so jump right in with the big dog and take off your floaties because PPC marketing can really be a cut throat way of marketing – there is always competition looking to steal your ads, outbid you, and out place you in the ad placement.

First I want to describe the two different kinds of networks that you can advertise on with Google (and most other PPC platforms). There is the search network and the content network. I highly suggest that you only deal with the search network as the content network is a lot more confusing and can be a lot more advanced. Lets explain what each is (5 Ways To Get Your Blog Comments Approved).

First of all the search network is when your ads will show in the actual search results. So if someone types in “Wealthy Affiliate” in the search engine and you have an ad that shows in the search network when “Wealthy Affiliate” is typed in, then your ad will show in the sponsored ads section of the listings. I have included an example below:

PPC Search Marketing Example

As you can see the ads will show to the right, but they will also show above the natural listings sometimes where I have another red circle and I have written the text of where the ads will show.  All of the ads that are shown in this section are known as the “search network” – and this is the way that most PPC marketers make their income and this is where you want to focus.

On the other hand is the content network and this is a much larger “network” where your ads will usually get a ton more impressions (but not always a ton more clicks). The ads shown here usually have a very low CTR (Click Through Rate) and do not convert nearly as well as the search network does.

The content network is when your ads show on other people’s actual websites. So they do not show when you actually do a search in a search engine, but when you click on a search result and visit a website, they will show on that website if the website has ads (which is called Google Adsense for Google). I have included an example below of ads that show on the content network and what they can look like:

Pay Per Click Content Network Example

As you can see above, I have circled the ads that are shown on this site, and these are ads that are considered the content network. Again these are the ads that are shown on other people’s websites.

So we want to focus on the search network for now. You want to go into your campaign options and make sure that only the search network is turned on. If the content network is turned on without your knowledge it can cause you to get messed up data concerning CTR, Profit, Ad Spend, and all the other data that is important to keep an eye on (Using Brand Names To Make Sales).

So that is the first thing, you want to make sure that you focus on the search network, and do not even deal with the content network, especially when you are first starting.

Now many people do not know this, but how much you are spending per click is not the only thing that goes into your ad placement. Most people think that if you simply outbid your competitor that your ad will show higher than your competitors, but this is totally untrue. If we are bidding on the same keyword and you are bidding $4.00 per click and I am bidding $3.00 per click – I can still outplace you for the #1 position, and I can do so by having a higher CTR (Click Through Rate) which is super important for profitable PPC marketing.

So how exactly does this work?

Well the higher your CTR the lower your ad cost is going to be. Let me give you an example here. If I am getting a click through rate of 10% and you are getting a click through rate of 3%, I am going to get MUCH better prices on my ads, and I am going to be paying more than 3 times less then you for my ads.

By the way, before I continue, quickly I am going to tell you what Click Through Rate (CTR) is. If my ad shows 10 times and gets clicked 1 time, that is a click through rate of 10% (which is 1 out of 10). So CTR can be defined as the amount of times your ad gets clicked divided by the amount of times your ad was shown times 100. So now that you know exactly what CTR is and how it is determined lets continue.

Let me actually use an easier example to explain this. Lets say I was getting a CTR of 10% and you were getting a CTR of 5%. In this case, you would have to spend twice as much to get the same ad placement as me. So if I was bidding $1.01 and you were bidding $2.00 (assuming we are the two highest bidding competitors of course) I would still have my ad ahead of your because my CTR is twice as high as yours, and twice the amount of $1.01 is $2.02 and you are only bidding $2.00. So in order to get ahead of my ad you would have to bid more than twice as much as my $1.01 which would be $2.03 or higher (Finding The Right Niche For Yourself).

The reason for this is because my CTR is twice as high as yours – and from this you can see just how important CTR it. If I have a CTR that is twice yours, you are going to have to pay twice as much for each click in order to get the same positioning for me. Google gives a very high priority to Click Through Rate (CTR) because there search engine is all about relevancy. And if you are getting a good CTR, that means that you have a highly relevant ad and they will highly reward you for this.

So it is VERY important to get a high CTR – this is something that you definitely need to highly focus on. I mean think about it – if you are getting the top spot for $1.01 and your competitor is getting it for $2.03 – he’s spending twice as much PER CLICK.

So he has a MUCH less chance of creating a profitable ad than you do, because you are only paying about a $1 a click when he is paying about $2 a click. If you are selling a product that gives you $50 commission, he needs to make a sale every 24 clicks to make a profit, and you need to make a sale every 49 clicks to make a profit – you have twice as much chance as him to make a profitable ad out of this.

So lets go over some ways that you can get a high CTR:

1) Seperate your ad groups into very specific keywords – you want to do this so that you can make very highly relevant ads for each those keywords. When you have a very closely grouped keyword list in your ad then it’s easy to get a highly relevant ad for each of those keywords. Although this takes time it is highly worth it, because a high CTR is the difference between a profitable ad and a ad that loses you money (Aged Domains Vs Keyword Rich Domains).

2) Put your keywords in your ads – when you put your keywords in your ads the keywords are bolded. When words are bolded the ad is much more noticable and it is much more likely to be clicked. Remember, the more times your ad is clicked the higher CTR you are getting and the more of a chance you have at having a profitable ad.

3) Test different ads against each other – Google AdWords allows you to test up to 3 ads at a time against each other. The reason for this is so that you can see which ad performs the best. If you put up 3 different variations of an ad, one does a CTR of 5%, one does a CTR of 6% and one does a CTR of 7%, you want to keep the one that is 7%. Once you keep that ad repeat the process with 2 more ads tested against the winner of the previous group and keep doing this until you have the best ad that will get you the highest profits.

Like I said the CTR is a super important piece of not only profiting but actually surviving in the PPC marketing game. If you are one that does not do the things listed above then you are at a severe disadvantage. Because when your competitor is getting a CTR of twice that of yours, good luck beating them out in the search engines. You may do so temporarily, but you will seen see a loss of profits and be forced to quit that specific keyword group because you were paying twice as much for your clicks.

The next thing I want to talk about is a landing page (Different Internet Marketing Techniques).

Just like I mentioned that you need to group together very specific keywords together (keywords that are very similar) – you want to create a separate landing page for each of those ad groups. The reason for this is because the relevancy of your landing page is super important to your ad and the cost of your ad spend, just like the CTR is. Make sure you also take the time to create a highly relevant landing page for each of your ad groups.

Although this is very time consuming again, it is definitely worth it and it can again be the difference between a profitable ad and an ad that loses money. And this in turn can be the difference between a profitable PPC marketer and a person who totally quits PPC marketing.

One last point that I want to cover with PPC marketing is something that most people don’t only not want to hear, but they definitely don’t want to do. I’m not sure why so many people are scarred away by this topic but they are – and that’s the opt-in list. Having an opt-in list on your landing page will make you SO much more money in the end.

I mean think about it. You are paying money for each time someone clicks your ad, why would you not make the most out of that click. Lets say you are spending a $1 per click – do you want to spend that $1 to have 1 opportunity to make a sale from that visitor? Or do you want to spend that dollar to have multiple chances to not only make A SINGLE sale from that customer, but to possibly make multiple sales and make a repeat customer.

I can’t explain how important it is for you to setup an opt-in list so that you can have the chance to sell to the person who clicks on your ad multiple times instead of the one single time that they click on your ad and go to your landing page. It’s a very easy decision for me (Using Articles With Affiliate Marketing).

Of course it takes more work on your part, but again this can be the difference between a profitable PPC marketer and a PPC marketer that quits, loses money, or never makes it.

An important thing that you must know is that the PPC marketing game is not usually something that people succeed in right away with. It is going to take both time and money in order for you to be turned into a profitable PPC marketer in most cases, so be prepared to lose some money at first. There is a learning process. There are very few people who jump right in and start making money with their first few pay per click marketing campaigns. Of course it is possible, but it’s very rare.

You just have to understand how powerful PPC marketing can be before you ever get into this form of marketing. It is the quickest and most targeted form of traffic that you can get.

YOU get to actually pick the EXACT words that you want your ads to appear for, YOU get to make that ad say whatever you want to entice the searcher, AND the traffic is immediate. You can setup an ad and have traffic within minutes. This is not a possibility with really any other form of online marketing, so PPC marketing is definitely a unique beast (Difference Between Landing Page And Squeeze Page).

I hope that you take the information in this post seriously if you are considering getting into the PPC marketing business because you need to take advantage of every single edge that you can get. You can’t take the shortcuts when it comes to PPC.

You have to test your ads and then retest your ads. You have to create multiple ad groups for keywords even if they are similar – only group together keywords that are VERY similar in order to improve your CTR and in turn drop your ad spend and the cost of your clicks. You must create an opt-in form and setup your e-mails in order to possible make a sale that you couldn’t have made with one single try. With the opt-in list you get multiple tries at making a sale and you get the chance to make a repeat customer.

I want to wish you the best of luck – and if you want to continue your PPC marketing education I highly recommend checking out Wealthy Affiliate as they are the internet marketing learning center that taught me almost every aspect of PPC. If you are looking for a place that focuses JUST on PPC, then you may want to checkout PPC Coach as they focus solely on PPC. I recommend them is you JUST want to do PPC. If you want to do PPC along with every other aspect of internet marketing then go with Wealthy Affiliate – but again if you JUST want to learn PPC you may want to go with PPC Coach as they are an awesome teacher of PPC marketing and this is their specialty that they solely focus on so you don’t have to worry about other topics of internet marketing getting in the way of your learning process of PPC.

Again every one best of luck and I hope you find your way to becoming a profitable PPC marketer! Remember that these tactics can also be used with Worldwide Brands (in conjunction with drop shipping)!