by: Torgeir Sunnarvik
Pay Per Click Ads may seem to be a very expensive way of selling your products. But if it's done the right way, it can be a money making machine on auto-pilot.
Let's say that you have bought one of the many ebooks with reprint rights that you can find online. Then you use the tools that you receive with the ebook to set up your own web page on your own domain. It's very easy and often done in just one hour or two.
After your sales page is online and you have checked that everything is working fine, you should go to Overture and open an account. Then you start to make your keyword list. For that you can use Overture's own keyword tool. It's quite good because you can see how many times each keyword have been searched for the previous month. That gives you a clue of how popular the keyword is, and it predicts how many clicks you can get for that keyword.
When you search for keywords you should first look at your sales page, for words that are relevant for the product that you are promoting. Write all the words down or save them in a txt file. You can also put in spelling mistakes in these keywords. There are always a lot of searches with spelling mistakes. And these keywords have often no bids. This site offer a tool to find spelling mistakes.
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-typo-generator/
Now it's time to put all the words into Overture's keyword tool. If you use the tools that are available when signing up for an account, you should be able to see how high the bids are for each keyword.
The words that have the highest number of searches are most likely to have the highest bids, too. I have seen keywords that have bids for $40 and even higher for each click. What you want to find are the keywords that have high searches and low bids. If you are lucky you can find words that have no bids on them yet. Then you have the opportunity to have your ad on the first position for only $0,10 per click. This is the lowest bid on Overture. The minimum bid per click can vary among the company's that offer pay per click ads.
By the way, that amount is what you should bid on all your keywords. Try to find as many keywords as possible. It's better to have 5000 keywords that you have low bids on, than to have a few keywords with higher bids. That way, you will have a better chance to earn money.
Remember that you get 1000 visitors for $100 if you bid only $0,10 per click. So, if you are selling a product that costs $25, and you sell around one unit per 100 visitors, you will have earned $250 after getting 1000 visitors to your website. You will have earned $250 for every $100 spent on your keyword ad campaign.
You should also think about saving money when you write your ad. Don't try to lure people into click your ad by writing about free offers or any hype of that kind. You might get a lot of visitors that way, but they will leave your site when they see that they have to pay for your product. They are only using up your money without helping you to make a single sale.
Instead you should write exactly what you are offering, and what price you are asking for the product. That way you are getting targeted visitors that know they have to pay the price you set in the ad in order to get the product you are offering. To top it off, you can offer them a test drive. If it's an ebook you can put one chapter of it onto a auto responder in 5-7 emails. Then send the messages once a day to the people that sign up for the test drive.
Now you can sit back and see what results you get. Let the ad go for a month and see how many clicks it takes before anyone buys from you. If it's not bringing back enough money, you should try to figure out what's wrong. Is it the ad or is it your web page? Anyway, try to fix it and let the ad go for another month. When you have a reasonable return of investment(ROI), it's time to let the ad continue its run, without any more work on your part. Now, your ad is running on auto pilot. Just remember to check it once a month to see if the ROI is dropping. If it's not bringing in enough money, you can then find another product, and do the same thing all over again.
Copyright 2005 Torgeir Sunnarvik