How to Harness the POWER of Pay-per-Click Search Engines

How to Harness the POWER of Pay-per-Click Search Engines
Copyright 2002 lessworkmoremoney.com
By Armand Melanson

Unfortunately, I get email every day from people who have
setup their websites to sell but they can't get any traffic to
their site - they are going out of business fast.

So let me emphasize an important element of online success:

Find markets that you can quickly penetrate via pay-per-click
advertising at Overture.

What is a pay-per-click(PPC) Search Engine(SE) you ask? PPCs are
changing the face of Internet advertising. Let me explain how.

With regular SEs, you have to write your marketing copy
to create the proper keyword density, then submit & wait
for the SE to spider your site. It can take anywhere from
2 to 12 weeks before you actually get listed. Then you have
to start tweaking your site to try & move up the ranks. It's
a slow & labor intensive process.

With Overture - the biggest PPC out there - you can
join, bid on particular keywords & get listed within 5 days!
Your bid will determine where you rank. For example, if
you are selling cigars, you can bid $0.20 for the keyword
"cigar" and that bid will determine where you rank when
someone searches for "cigar". You pay $0.20 every time
someone clicks on your listing for the keyword "cigar".

Everytime a search is done at Overture or its partner sites,
the keywords which have been bid on appear above the non-bid
keywords. So even if your competition has created a highly
keyword focused site but hasn't bid on the words you have bid
on, you will be above them in the search results.

This means that even if you find a product which is in great
demand, you should 1st determine if you can get a top 5
position at Overture for the most relevant keywords before
building your website. This is very important because if you
can't get a top 5 at Overture, then you will not get sufficient
traffic to your site to make money from the start.

Of course, you can go the long route of using search engine
submission tools, link trading, banner ads, ezine ads & what
not. But this will take some time before it pays off in
sufficient traffic to make you some real money. If you want
immediate results, you have to be able to get a top 5 spot at
Overture - top 5 is key because Yahoo, one of Overture's partners,
picks up the top 5 Overture results.

If you can get top 1 or 2, then even better because Overture's
other partners (MSN, ALTA VISTA, LYCOS, etc.) will display your
results.

But top 5 alone will produce good results because Yahoo is huge
& gets a massive number of searches.

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MATH IS FOR PINHEADS?? - NOT!!!!!
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The way to calculate how high you can bid at Overture is pretty
simple:

Let's assume a very conservative 1% conversion rate at your site
- that means 1 out of 100 visitors buys.

Determine your profit on 1 sale of your main product - if you
are selling widgets at $30 a piece (expensive widgets I know)
& your cost is $10, then your gross profit is $20/sale (haven't
factored in other expenses yet).

If rough profit per sale is $20 & you make one sale/100
visitors, then you can't afford to spend more than $20 to
attract 100 visitors (in fact, you should spend less if you want
to make any money).

So that means that you can't bid more than $0.20 per keyword at
Overture & still make money. At $0.20, you will not break even.

With this information, you can now assess whether or not it is
feasible for you to test market your widgets via Overture. If you
could get a top 5 bid at Overture for $0.10, let's see how things
would work out:

- at 0.10$ per click, it will cost you $10/100 visitors. This
means that each 100 visitors will produce:
$30(customer price)
- $10(your cost)
- $10(click costs)
-----------------------
= $10 profit

$10 per 100 visitors is not alot of money unless your able to
produce thousands of visitors/day - not likely.

Based on this assessment, you should pick another product or
another market & start all over again.

This is a general approach which can be modified according to
the circumstances. Certain product have higher conversion rates
than others. Your site marketing copy will have an effect on
conversion as well. I use 1% conversion to be on the safe side.
As well, some products might sell better in hard copy ads or
trade magazines, so online testing might not be the best
assessment.

But if you are going to sell online, doing this basic kind of
number crunching is what will help you to establish what types
of products/services you should consider selling. Otherwise, you
are really not looking out for your best interests - the success
of your business venture.

1) Is there a demand for this?
2) Can I quickly & affordably advertise to the target market?

That's what the number crunching tries to answer for you.

The best products will be the ones which:
- have some demand, but not too much (a niche market)
- have relatively low competition at Overture - the bigger the
difference between what it costs you for 100 visitors & how
much profit you make per 100 visitors, the better

So let's review the process again:
- identify some in demand markets
- pick several products which target those markets
- do some informal surveys to identify the top products
- use the Overture search suggestion tool to verify how many
searches are being made on the most relevant keywords for your
prospective products
- determine whether you can bid high enough to get a top 5 spot
at Overture for the most relevant keywords
- build a simple prototype site & submit your listings to Overture
- monitor your traffic to determine whether you have sufficient
visitors to make a go of it
- build a full fledged site which is fully optimized to sell

Signup with Overture here:
http://www.overture.com/d/advertisers/p/bjump/?o=RR-55270&b=10

Here is a good site which lists several other payperclicks:
http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Armand Melanson is an emarketing
consultant & author. For free marketing tips & articles you
can re-use, visit him at http://lessworkmoremoney.com
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