Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.

Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.

As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.

Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier – and more effective – the process will be.

The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position – which can obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.

In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.

The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.

Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit.

The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good news is there isn’t a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because additional keywords do not add additional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords.

Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than others are, but they will not cost you anything except time to set-up your account in your pay-per-click bid. Of the popular search engines that offer pay-per-click, one called Overture provides an online tool that will give you the data on how often particular keywords are entered into their search engine. They also offer suggestions for keywords after you enter a description of your site.

In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. You must understand that the object of your description is not to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to your site. You must use expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is
both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.

Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in mind that the results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are Overture and Adwords Select, usually appear on other popular search engines. Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit.

If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing the bidding war.

Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis.

Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success.

I am almost 10 years now FULL TIME working from home on the internet making money online and I have put together the following website to share all of my secrets with you at http://www.DecideYourIncome.eu

Regards Always

Mark McCulloch

http://www.CoachOfSuccess.com – mark@markmcculloch.com

Internet Marketer and Entrepreneur, Committed to creating success

(UK) 07875 647 867 (Call Me Anytime), Skype – mark.mcculloch1

When it comes to the world of Internet Marketing the key to making money online is to generate sales for your product or service on offer. Now there is only one way that you can do this which is from knowing how to drive traffic to your website. Depending on your budget you may have to choose from one of two traffic options.

The first strategy to be considered is Paid Traffic.

When it comes to using paid traffic methods you will have to be prepared to purchase traffic and in some cases you will start to recieve traffic to your website immediately. A good method of getting traffic immediately to your website is to use Pay Per Click search engines such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

With Pay Per Click advertising you will be involved in setting up advertising campaigns. A large part of this process involves bidding on keywords which can either be really in expensive or it can become very expensive. The cost of bidding on the keywords will depend massively on how well you have researched them and how competitive they are.

When it comes to researching keywords with your Pay Per Click advertising there are certain tools that can be used such as the Google Adwords external keyword tool. These tools allow you to check the level of monthly searches, competitiveness and will also offer alternative keyword suggestions.

Many people like to test out their website, products or services when they have only just launched and for this paid traffic methods are the very best way. One of the main reasons why this is the best way to test out your website is because traffic will be delivered almost immediately therefore you will not have to wait long to find out the average conversion of your product or service.

The main things to look out for with Pay Per Click advertising is first of all how much you are bidding per keyword and cost per click. Some keywords start of as little as $0.04 per click however this does depend on various factors including the quality score of your advert and website.

If the cost per click starts to rise suddenly then I suggest you look at how targetted your Pay Per Click advert is along with how targetted your website is also.

The other traffic strategy is Free Traffic.

When it comes to Free Traffic you must never place all of your hopes and dreams into just one traffic generation source. The reason for this is because you will require as many traffic generation sources as possible to ensure you get as much traffic as possible along with not getting heavily impacted by growing competition.

Search engine optimization is a great way to get Free Traffic from the search engines which starts from hiring a professional to perform your SEO services on your website. Thios will improve your rankings for various keywords within the search engines. If your SEO is performed correctly then when someone searches for the keywords your website may come on up on page 1 of the search engines.

When it comes to converting your traffic into sales and paying customers it becomes much easier with organic search engine traffic. The reason being these website visitors are highly targetted due to the fact they have searched using a particular keyword search related to your product or service which means they have an interest in what you have to sell.

However the other side or Search Engine Optimization / SEO is quitekly simply that sometimes it can take quite sometime for your website to start gaining high search engine rankings. Unless your website is ranking in the first three pages of the search engine results there will never been much organic search engine traffic to your website. This process has been known to take over 4 months on occasion.

When the search engines start to deliver long term free traffic onto your website you will always be very happy that you waited for your website to gain high search engine rankings. Obviously the more sales you recieve will be dependant on how much traffic you recieve which will then determine how much money you earn. As your website continues to gain higher search engine rankings your traffic will increase also.

The question still remains would a paid traffic generation method be best or a free traffic strategy?

I highly suggest that you use both paid and traffic in order to boost your income with your online internet based business. Where possible it is a great suggestion to use free and paid traffic strategies that way you will get as much traffic to your website as possible.

Regards Always

Mark McCulloch

http://www.OneMillionIncome.com – mark@markmcculloch.com

Internet Marketer and Entrepreneur, Committed to creating success

(UK) 07875 647 867 (Call Me Anytime), Skype – mark.mcculloch1