Preparing Your First Pay-Per-Click Campaign

One of the best possibilities to drive targeted traffic to your
web site is the use of Pay-Per-Click search engines . They
are not like the regular search engines where you have to
deal with meta-tags, alt-tags, robots.txt etc. for your web
pages.

With this kind of web site promotion, the rankings are
solely based on the amount of money you want to spend
on your advertising campaign. The advertisers are bidding
on certain keywords to achieve a particular position at the
results page.

If someone searches for that keyword and clicks on the
link, the advertiser has to pay the determined amount of
money. I've seen actual bids which go as high as $6 to $7
e.g. for the keyword "web hosting" on Overture.com .

Could Your Competitors Click On Your Link ?

But to avoid that your competitors click on your link a
thousand times to make you bankrupt, there is a mecha-
nism (I think it's done with cookies) which blocks this
process .

This also is of interest to the PPCs' operators to serve their
customers in this way because many customers would
complain and could ask for their money back.

You should not bid for the most competitive keywords
as this could easily cost you hundreds of dollars to rank at
the top. Try to find keywords which are relevant to your
site as well but which are less competitive.

Try To Avoid Highly Competitive Keywords

In a nutshell : If your web site has the topic Internet mar-
keting, which is highly competetive, try to avoid this key-
word by choosing a more specific expression like e.g.
copywriting or e-book creation . Then you are rather in a
field where competitors pay less for a click.

Make a list of 20-50 keywords which are relevant to your
site. Look how many times your keywords have been
searched for at the most important pay-per-click search
engine Overture.com (former Goto.com) :
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Then bid for the most promising ones (those with the highest
numbers) at Overture.com and some other PPCs .

Don't Bid Too Much For A Keyword

Don't make the mistake to bid too much for a keyword.
If you want to reach a number one spot and the highest
bid is $0.30 , don't bid $0.50 or higher. Then you are just
wasting money, you could have the same top spot if you
just paid $0.31 !