Getting Your Money's Worth With Pay Per Click

If you're running a web site, you're well aware that the game is all about numbers and traffic flow. However, not just any traffic will do. You want traffic from people who are interested in what your web site offers, content wise, and if you're looking to make some money, you know full well that it's not just browsers, it's buyers who are important.

Like all things related to marketing, your aim should be to maximize the number of pre-qualified, already interested readers to your web site that you can, while raising your web site's overall page ranking, boosting the awareness of the internet at large to your products and services.

Now, you could use an advertising model like print magazines which you pay X amount for exposure to Y number of potentially interested customers who see a banner ad. The problem with this is that most web surfers have gotten to the point where banner ads get mentally filtered out, and while you pay per impression, you have no idea if your costs are going to be an accurate indicator of the ad's effectiveness.

Enter AdSense and Google AdWords. These are competing services where an ad is listed in a search engine result, and you only pay for each click on the ad. Instantly, you only pay for the advertising that you actually use, and which provably directs traffic to your web site.

Key to this kind of advertising is picking the right phrase for the search engine optimization. You need a phrase that will cause people to find your ad by looking for something related and similar to it. You also need to look at common mis-spellings similar to the term you want people to find.

Buying a comprehensive set of AdWords or AdSense package can get pricey, if you aren't very careful about it. Remember the following tips from long time marketers in this field:

1) Pinpoint accuracy is better than a broad net. If you have a very specific term that you're good at (like "Lower Denton Real Estate", put that in rather than just Denton, or Denton Real Estate."
2) Most people only type two or three words into a search engine field to find things. Do a little bit of digging to find a blanket of related word combinations that will work for you.
3) Make sure that your landing page is optimized for human visitors, not Google's web crawling spiders. That means real content, that gets updated regularly and that isn't aggressively search engine optimized into utter drivel.
4) If you must use a squeeze page (a form where a user has to enter some data to get at the content) be sure to put some of the content outside the squeeze pages area, otherwise, you're going to get a serious case of sticker shock when the bill comes in and Google and AdSense both charge almost 15x as much for a naked squeeze page landing page as they do for a real web site, and real web site will get you more repeat traffic.