Pay Per Click StrategiesBetter Search Engine Marketing / Pay-Per-Click Results Start Here – We Guarantee It!

The continued growth of search and social media marketing is creating new opportunities, but Marketers are challenged on how to effectively integrate social media into their search marketing efforts. To address this challenge, PPC Summit presents an all new conference this year “Search & Social Media Success” which will be held at the Omni Los Angeles Hotel on Sept. 21-22, 2010. 

The new sessions will teach expert, trusted strategies, and provide the tools and resources to Marketers searching to improve their campaign results. Registration is open and parties can register now before the full agenda is live to get the $400.00 early bird rate.

The ALL NEW 3 Tracks and 27 ‘How-To’ Sessions cover step-by-step instructions for creating and managing successful search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing (SMM) campaigns.

Over the last five years, PPC Summit has trained thousands of internet marketers how to be smarter and increase their ROI using search engine marketing. Results from a recent attendee survey sent to 3500 Search Marketers, revealed the growing need for further advanced training in these areas: Google AdWords, Quality Score, Keyword Targeting, Pay Per Click, Blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, SEO tips and tools, Landing Pages and more.

What Marketers Will Learn:

• Leading-edge SMM (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube), SEO and SEM (Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing) instruction, content and actionable strategies that can be implemented right away to boost ROI.
• Which SMM, SEO and SEM tools, solutions and resources to utilize to achieve higher profits, and take-away comprehensive reference guides to build an effective search and social marketing plan.
• How to get on the fast-track of successful search and social media marketing–gain answers direct from the SEM/SEO/SMM experts and build lasting relationships with peers

 Register today for the two-day pass, only $995–includes three tracks and 27 in-depth sessions, networking, breakfast, lunches, breaks, 2 comprehensive training manuals and more. For more information, visit the
PPC Summit website or call 800-507-2958.

By Kevin Newcomb, Editor, Internet Marketing Institute

Many companies spend tens of thousands of dollars to acquire customers, but ignore what happens next. Paying attention to your landing pages — whether it’s for pay-per-click (PPC) ads, email campaigns, or banner ads — is one of the most-neglected online marketing tactics. But creating custom landing pages, then testing and optimizing them, holds a lot of potential for increasing conversions, and therefore revenue.

“People don’t fundamentally believe that conversion optimization will work. If they did, they’d jump all over it,” said Lance Loveday, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing and co-author of Web Design for ROI. “The truth is, it can have a game-changing impact on revenue and profitability.”

Most marketers have heard the buzz around landing page optimization (LPO), a part of the larger discipline of conversion optimization. Many marketers have also heard hyped-up claims of two- or three-fold jumps in conversions, and are not convinced that small changes can have a big impact on their conversion rates.

While those kinds of returns are possible, in extreme circumstances, such drastic increases are not necessary to make conversion optimization worthwhile, Loveday said.

“You don’t need to hit a home run, and double or triple your conversion rate, to have a measurable effect on the bottom line,” he said. “I’ve seen cases where increasing conversion rate from 2.0 to 2.1 percent has had a big impact on revenue.”

Others have dipped their toes in the water and tried it out. Unfortunately, many of those that did so went in without a real plan, and ended up with lackluster results.

First, a marketer needs to determine where to focus his or her efforts. In many cases, people think starting with the home page is best, since that seems like it would have a big impact. But Loveday advises keeping away from the home page, and focusing instead on a single product page or a custom landing page for a specific PPC campaign.

“More and more users are arriving at a site on a page other than the home page, but that’s still where many companies spend most of their design resources,” Loveday said. Besides that, the home page is burdened by politics, with turf wars over who gets what real estate, and is more scrutinized by executives, he said.

So not only will it be more effective to choose a lower-level page, such as a PPC landing page, to begin testing, it will be easier to do without interference from other departments or from higher-ups. Once you’ve demonstrated that you can have success, it will be easier to get buy-in to apply the same landing page optimization techniques to a page higher up in the site architecture, such as a category page, he said.

With the availability of free or low-cost landing page testing applications, marketers can also limit IT involvement, while maintaining more control over their tests and pages. But knowing which elements of a page to test can be tricky, Loveday said.

“It’s not just about throwing things against the wall and seeing what will stick,” he said. “You need to take a more structured approach, and test among good options.”

That means knowing which elements are most likely to create a change in conversion rate, and then testing out elements that are different enough to have a measurable difference between them. Using minor variations of a headline or image may not be enough to cause a change in user behavior.

To learn more about conversion optimization and other online marketing strategies, check out the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search Marketing and Social Media Success, coming to Los Angeles in September 2010.

It’s not hard to make money with Google AdWords, but many fail to do so because they make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Keep it simple by doing the following:

Decide On Your Offer: Putting together a successful AdWords campaign starts NOT with keywords, but with your offer. Why? Because you have to be very clear about this before you move on to selecting your keywords.

For example, if you operated an online bookstore, do you want to send readers to the romance section, the science fiction section or the history section? “But,” you may be thinking, “I don’t care what they buy, as long as they buy something.”

We counter with, in order to get browsers to “buy something,” you have to first get them interested in “buying what interests them.” And, this is where you get specific.

Think of it like a local bookstore they may wander into. A reader may pop in to buy a specific book, but once there, they start to browse and come out with two, three or four things.

The bottom line here is – web surfers don’t care about making a purchase from you. What they do care about is getting that book that their friend, mother, aunt, etc. recommended.

If your specific pay per click ad landed them in your online store, you have a chance of making that sale.
Use Keywords Effectively: Once you have tightly focused your offer, now you can move on to doing effective keyword research. Here again, be specific. When choosing keywords remember, it’s not about how much traffic a keyword will bring, but how much “qualified” traffic it will bring.

Rock the Landing Page! Round out your campaign by having a clear, concise, professional landing page that gets prospects where they want to be. Don’t make them surf to find what your ad promised. Land them there directly.

If you do these three things, you will be well on your way to Google AdWords campaign success.

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About the Author
Want to out perform your Google AdWords competitors? Attend the AdWords Advantage Online Summit (Dec. 1-17) and learn how to fast-track your pay per click marketing profits. Register now and save 40% at http://www.AdWordsAdvantage.com.

When most people think of pay per click marketing, they think of tiny little “word” ads that you click on. Video doesn’t usually enter the picture. However, “PPC video marketing,” so to speak, has been around for a couple of years.

In 2006, Google bought YouTube (for an astounding $1.65 billion, no less). This allows it to offer a very valuable service to internet marketers via an already established outlet – loyal “YouTubers” who like receiving content via video.

The Beginning of Video in Pay Per Click Advertising
It took Google about a year and a half to capitalize on their acquisition of YouTube. In February 2008, they started testing the use of video ads in their pay per click advertising model. Now, video ads appear as display ads on MySpace and other social media networks.

How Video Ads Appear in Pay Per Click Ads
Experts generally agree that it is very easy rich medium platform to master. Video ads show up as a single link under a normal pay per click ad.  This link is next to a plus-sign icon, indicating that there is a video (or more information to be found if the surfer clicks).

When a web surfer does click, a small window (about 160×140 in size) appears in which the video will show.  A timer shows how long the video is. Most are very short – less than 30 seconds. At the end of the video, a URL of the advertiser’s site appears.

Ready to Set Up Your Own Video Pay Per Click Marketing Campaign?
Learn more about how to set up and run a PPC video campaign (via Google). If pay per click marketing confuses you altogether, it’s a good idea to invest in some training (Pay Per Click Summit is coming up soon in Chicago on Nov. 4-5) to make sure you’re doing it right – from the beginning.

Last week at PPC Summit in Los Angeles, the Search Marketing expert trainers shared a wealth of Pay Per Click knowledge with the 100+ marketers attending the event. Keyword targeting is always a hot topic and the use of long tail keywords was one of the tips discussed.  

In our last post, Long-Tail Keywords In Pay Per Click Advertising Works, we covered the value of using long-tail keywords. Today, we want to continue this discussion, highlighting how to get more value out of the long-tail keywords your visitors may already be using to find you.

How to Get More Value Out of the Long-Tail Keywords Visitors Are Already Using to Find You
Many pay per click marketers don’t realize that a lot of their traffic may already be coming from some long-tail keywords. This presents a golden opportunity to get even more traffic and sales. How?

Quite simply, your web presence already has good search engine juice (ie, good organic rankings) for this term. However, it may not be ranked as high as it could be, since you have spent any time specifically optimizing it for that/those specific long-tail keywords.

Once you do this, you can exponentially build on traffic you are already getting. Following are two ways to do this.

Write More Content: Writing and distributing articles is one way to optimize a site quickly for popular long-tail keywords. This will give your site higher visibility quickly, especially if you distribute the content far and wide (eg, article directories).

Put Together More Offers: If a popular long-tail keyword is bringing you more traffic, look to see if you have any special deals, discounts, or other offers that can convert this traffic into sales. If not, put together one (some).

These are just two ways to make your pay per click campaign pay off with traffic you may already be receiving. 

In the post, Pay Per Click: How to Use Google Trends to Capitalize on the Slow Summer Months, we alluded to how and why things slow down during the summer months. So right now, sales may be a little sluggish.

But, the busy season is right around the corner. As many pay per click marketers set their pay per click campaigns and forget them, now’s the time to give your site a pre-season tune up. Following are three areas to assess to.

1. Does my site load quickly enough? When was the last time you checked this? It would suck to spend money on a fantastic PPC campaign, only to have visitors clicking away because your site loads too slowly.

2. Can browsers easily find what they want on my site? Prospects should have to click no more than two or three times to find the product/service they’re interested in. If it’s more, you need to simplify your site.

Beyond this, a rule of thumb to live by in pay per click marketing is to direct prospects to what you promised them in the ad.

For example, let’s say you owned an online clothing boutique. You carry apparel for every member of the family. If a surfer clicks on a “cheap children’s shoes” ad, then that’s the page they should land on, not a generic home page with your.

3. Keyword Research: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is mercurial; not static. When was the last time you evaluated your keyword choices. Are they still the best keywords for pay per click campaign? Do you need to add more local keywords to the mix to gain more of this traffic?

By paying attention to areas like these, you can significantly increase your pay per click results with little or no further investment. 

Pay Per Click marketing is known for its effectiveness in generating quick sales. And, this is a good thing. Quick sales, however, should not be the foundational goal of any online marketer. The ultimate goal is to create long-term relationships with customers. For, over time, these are the customers who will bring you the most profit.

So, how do you use Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing to cultivate lifelong customers?
Quite simply, you take the time to educate them. Sometimes, this means foregoing the quick sale and employing more multi-step marketing strategies.

The Best Way is to Educate PPC Prospects and Get Them to Buy More from You

In order to accomplish this, you must become a go-to source. You must be thought of as an authority. On your landing page, for example, you might ask prospects to sign up for an informational brochure that addresses a certain problem they have – in detail.

For example, if your client sold organic baby food, a free e-report entitled “How to Sell Organic Baby Foods to New Moms” would be a good informational brochure to distribute. In it you would address the problems inherent in selling to new moms and how to overcome them.

Of course, the solutions you offer would be ones that your company provides. Then, when it’s time for prospects to purchase the type of product/service you offer, your firm will be top of mind – all because you’ve used a pay per click strategy that “educates” instead of “sells.”

Learn more pay per click marketing strategies like this by attending the next PPC Summit.

The reason Pay Per Click advertising is so popular is that everyone can do it – with a budget as little as $50 or $100 (or less). But, not all clicks are created equal. Some can cost mere pennies, while others can go for tens or hundreds of dollars each.

So, how do you determine how much you want to spend per click? Well, it’s an art.

Pay Per Click Marketing: 2 Tips on How to Spend Little and Gain Big

Budget: Start with the amount in your budget to determine how many clicks you can get. For example, if you have a $100 per month budget and you bid on a keyword that is 25 cents per click, then you can afford 400 clicks per month.

If you bid on a keyword that is $5, then you can only get 20 clicks. So obviously, the larger your budget the more clicks you can afford. And, this is why you’ll always see the big boys at the top. You won’t be able to outbid them.

Now comes the cool part though that does allow you to spend a little, and still gain a lot.

Position Smartly: As in, don’t even shoot for being number one. As we discussed in the post, Pay Per Click Marketing: 3 Tips for Quicker Results, “research has proven that being number one isn’t necessarily the best spot to be in . . .because you get a lot of curiosity seekers who’ll click on ads in this spot. . . . [but won’t buy].”

This wastes money.

The best strategy is to position yourself high enough to bypass the tire kickers, while keeping your cost per click as low as possible. In order to do this, you have to know which keywords to use to get you in this “sweet spot.” It’s an art, and takes time and testing, but well worth learning. 

At PPC Summit, we teach you this and a whole lot more about how to be successful as a pay per click marketer.

It’s belt-tightening time for all businesses–from mom and pop shops on Main Street to skyscraping halls of Fortune 500 companies. The one area small businesses can compete with large corporations is online with pay per click marketing. But, you have to be careful not to break the budget doing it.

No matter how large or small your business is, following is one handy thing you can do to keep a tight rein on how much you’re spending – ie, recession-proof your PPC marketing efforts.

Pay Per Click Marketing: How & Why to Avoid Bidding Wars on the Information Superhighway
You know how sometimes you’re driving down the road and a car passes you. And, you speed up just a little, trying to keep pace. It happens to the best of us, even if we’re not speed demons. Well, this can happen with pay per click marketing too. After all, it is the information superhighway, and we want to keep pace with the high rollers. Sometimes, the urge to be number one or two can be so strong that we spend too much.

As discussed in the post, Pay Per Click Marketing: 3 Tips for Quicker Results, “. . . research has proven that being number one isn’t necessarily the best spot to be in. . . . Because you get a lot of curiosity seekers who’ll click on ads in this spot. An ad in the third, fourth or even the fifth spot can convert [even] better.”