After approximately twelve years of trying to market products or earn money from advertising online, I have to conclude that pay per click as been the most rewarding thing I have tried so far.
In fact, pay per click has been more lucrative for me than email marketing!
And I suspect that it may be the best pathway to success for your business too.
Targeted Marketing
It is tough to get any more targeted than pay per click marketing.
Pay per click targets the people that are actually searching for specific products or services. Who better to target with your marketing efforts.
Search engine pay per click is better than FaceBook pay per click for the simple reason that Facebook users are not on Facebook to find a specific product or service.
With search engine pay per click, you don’t have to interrupt someone from what they were doing. They are specifically searching for the things that you are marketing.
Powerful Management Tools
Currently, the two biggest players in the search engine pay per click marketplace are Google and MSN advertising.
As time progresses and these companies reap huge profits from their advertising platforms, (yes a search engine is nothing more than an advertising platform for these companies), they put more and more of that cash into developing their programs.
1. Tracking – you can use fantastic tracking tools to find out which search terms are generating revenue for you and which are not. This allows you to cut back or cut out the terms that are not doing you any good. This in turn allows you to put more money into what is working. This can be fantastically efficient and effective.
2. Management – The management features for campaigns (your groupings of targeted search terms) continue to improve over time. This allows you do gather more information such as what time of the day and day of the week is producing the most sales for you. Can you imagine what a benefit that could be towards the continue development of your bottom line?
3. Elimination of ‘bad’ search terms. The ability to eliminate negative impact search terms (those that are not generating revenue for you) can be controlled at multiple levels. This would include changing the ‘type’ of the search term to the blockage of any particular search term or combination of terms from your advertising.
If all of this sounds fantastic to you, it can be. However, I must warn you in advance. Mastering pay per click marketing is not easy and there is a HUGE learning curve, which is particularly tough for a beginner.
The Down Side
If you do not know what you are doing, you can loose a lot of money very quickly with pay per click advertising. If you try it, start out very cautiously and watch your account like a hawk. It does not take long for massive charges to add up.
This can happen easily if you have even just one setting a little bit off.
You can hire someone to create and manage campaigns for you, but the downside is that this costs extra money. In this case, you have added to the expenses that you must overcome to be profitable.
This may make sense to a big company, but if you are a one man show or a small company, a lot of your profit can disappear this way.
In addition, no third party is going to have as much an interest in your success as you will. If you learn this skill yourself, you can save a lot of money and have a lower threshold towards making a campaign profitable.
Automated systems may sound great on the surface, but here again, you will have more expenses to overcome.
If you can master pay per click yourself, you can be more nimble and slip into places that are profitable that automated systems and third party people won’t be able to find. This is simply because no one cares about or knows your business better than you. No one is going to work at it harder than you either.
I might be available for consulting for the small business type of entrepreneur under the right circumstances and conditions. If interested, use my contact form to request an initial no cost conversation to see if there is a mutually beneficial opportunity for both of us.