POSSIBLE RETURN ON YOUR INVESTMENT
The possible return on your investment for your campaign is going to be limited by the amount of traffic generated by your PPC campaign. This is also a good thing to research before you set up a PPC campaign so that you don’t add dud keywords that can’t possibly provide you with a reasonable ROI. The tool is called the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator. It is located inside the PLANNER above. Put in your CPC and the keyword and countries you are targeting and see how much traffic Google estimates that that campaign will draw per day versus the cost of advertising.
GET ONLY TRAFFIC YOU WANT
One of the biggest problems with PPC advertising, both as an advertiser and as a publisher, is not attracting the traffic that is most likely to buy your products. If you get millions of people to visit your sites and even to click your links, but they are not in a demographic that is buying, you are wasting your money. This is one of the reasons that advertisers and publishers have a tough time making money with PPC. Their campaigns are just not targeted well enough to make the right people show up at their door. Yes, they get many new people showing up, just not the right people.
Think of it this way. Say you are trying to sell your house. Would you want the realtor to bring in tons of people who haven’t a clue why they’re there or even interested in a 2-bedroom house in the suburbs? Absolutely not! You waste time, and if each visit were to cost you money like a PPC campaign, it could get very expensive after a while. Instead, focus on bringing in only the traffic that you want and no other.
LIMIT COUNTRIES, IF NECESSARY
While the whole point of the World Wide Web is to expose your business offerings all over the world, there’s really no reason to do that for every product and service that you offer. If you are selling an English-speaking book about how to buy real estate in California for no money down, why would anyone in Japan care? You might get one or two investors who might be interested, but the majority of your demographic is going to be in the United States. You do have the option to limit your searches to specific countries, so do that, and you will get better-targeted traffic.
If you’ve decided to do PPC advertising on a forum like Facebook, you will have even more choices to limit the demographic to exactly what you want. They will let you include gender and age, as well as location, to help you
refine who actually sees your ads and who doesn’t. This makes it a very easy way to keep your CPC ROI very high.
AVOIDING SPAMMERS AND CLICK FRAUD
Targeting your traffic doesn’t just help you generate more valid clicks from potential buyers, but it can also help you weed out spammers and click fraud artists. In some cases, you can set up your campaign to block specific domains from the account. It may be limited to 500 domains that can be blocked, but at least you can remove those people who are not generating any income, any targeted traffic, and who are potentially abusing the system. Once you block these people from your ad campaign, they will not be served any of your ads, and you will have tightened the traffic to make it more authentic.
WAYS PPC PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY
PPC publishers can find many innovative ways to make money, either by PPC alone or by combining it with other types of moneymaking strategies. The conventional view is just to get a Google AdSense account and then start creating content with high-powered keywords to generate income. That’s really too limiting to make most people money. There are many reasons for that, including the biggie that you need a website with huge amounts of traffic to generate enough clicks to make all that content creation worthwhile. Another reason that this is limiting is that not everyone is a natural writer, and having to create content to attract just the right ads is very tricky, even for those with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experience. The last possibility is for someone to outsource that aspect of the money strategy, but that adds additional costs to the bottom line. You don’t really need to do strict PPC advertising on your website to get the two elements you need most to have a successful PPC campaign: targeted traffic and some way to convert that traffic into income.
SEARCH ENGINE PROMOTION
When you join the AdSense program, you also get the ability to add a Google search box to any of your sites to promote your pay-per-click program. It may seem as if Google gets all of the promotion, but this is not true. Every time someone uses your Google search box, it serves up ads that have your AdSense ID in them too. If the person searching clicks on those ads, you get some AdSense income from the PPC program based on the keywords that they used in the search engine. In this model, you’re still using the Google
AdWords campaign, but you didn’t have to place the ads or even write the content. You just promote the search engine on your sites.
BLOG WITH PLR OR FEEDS
Setting up a WordPress blog is exceptionally easy today. If you own your own domain, you can add Google AdSense to it in every post so that people will be exposed to your ads on a daily basis. However, who wants to write all of those posts? Many Internet marketers don’t have the time or the money to outsource this, so they use feeds or Private Label Rights (PLR) to help them have fresh content every day. You do have to be careful to make sure that your content isn’t too widely exposed on the Internet already, as that can lead to Google downgrading your site. Obtain good quality PLR from membership sites that limit the number of PLR licenses it sells for its content. Change it slightly too before you post it so it’s not an exact duplicate of what you bought. Using this and feeds can help generate ads without writing content.
WAYS PPC ADVERTISERS MAKE MONEY
Advertisers are assumed to make money by advertising their products and services, but just like publishers, that’s a very limited view of a way an advertiser can make money with Google PPC. There are even more opportunities to make money as an advertiser than as a publisher, even when you are having to put forth money to play the game.
PPC TO CPA
PPC has a place to put the URL where you are sending people when they click the link. Though there are now rules in place to where you can send people (must be a landing page), you can still use this to create some leverage with other types of affiliate campaigns, most notably Cost-Per-Action (CPA) campaigns.
CPA campaigns differ from PPC in that they come with different networks and they do not pay out per click. Instead, they pay out for some action performed, like filling out a survey or signing up for a newsletter. It can also be the action of selling an item. The payouts are actually higher than PPC, and it’s easier to convert visitors in a CPA format because many times they aren’t actually buying anything; they’re just providing information. That’s why some PPC advertisers leverage the PPC ads with CPA links by setting them to be the destination URL. What happens then is that they buy a CPA
campaign to deliberately generate targeted traffic and the offer they send them to is the publishing of a CPA link, which costs them nothing. However, if the person does the action required, they get a payout. Depending on the conversion rate of traffic, it can be a decent way to earn some money online by leveraging PPC with CPA ads.
OTHER PPC CAMPAIGNS
Since other PPC networks like Social Ads on Facebook offer very highly- targeted traffic by age and gender, many advertisers will buy campaigns to send them to specific affiliate offers or even to sign-up referral bonus pages. They can make money not by advertising their own products, but by advertising someone else’s products and services. In lieu of that, they can join programs that pay a sign-up bonus for people and advertise that program via a PPC campaign that is highly targeted on Yahoo, Bing, and
Facebook’s Social Ads. This works great for dating sites and other types of niches that require more understanding of demographics. In short, there are many different ways to make money with PPC as an advertiser, even if it’s not advertising your own goods and services.
PROMOTE YOUR ACTIVITIES
Don’t assume you’ll get tons of traffic from the search engine where you have your PPC campaign. Instead, opt to bring traffic in from various sources back to areas where you can generate PPC income. That means that you are going to strategically promote search engines, content, websites, and blogs as much from your own online activities as from search engine placement.
Here are a few ways to do that.
