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January 2002
Traffic Generation Technique
Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
One of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your site is
by the use of "pay-per-click" search engines. With a
pay-per-click search engine you bid on keywords that apply to your type
of business.
For instance: In my business I sell lots of educational
materials to people interested in public speaking. Some of them want to
simply get better at speaking to get promoted at work and some want to
learn how to become a professional speaker. I have chosen two keyword
phrases to focus on although there are many that could apply.
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Public Speaking
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Presentation Skills
I bid on the keyword phrases "public speaking"
and phrase "presentation skills." Bidding means that I offer
to pay the search engine a certain amount of money when someone searches
for one of my keyword phrases and then clicks on the link that goes to
my site. Thus I pay when they click, or pay-per-click.
Bids can go as low as a penny and as high as the sky. It
depends on the popularity of the keywords. At the time of this writing,
on http://www.overture.com
(formerly GoTo.com) I pay 36 cents to be number one on the keyword
phrase "public speaking." On http://www.findwhat.com
I pay only 25 cents. On some other pay-per-clicks I only pay 3 or 4
cents.
Some more popular keyword phrases could be several
dollars per click. This is too rich for my blood. I find that I can get
lots of good traffic that's looking for my products and services for
less than 50 cents each and in many cases much less.
Testing
A really good way to use pay-per-click search engines is to test your
sales process. Too many people kill themselves and spend months getting
high rankings in the regular search engines only to find out that the
traffic they get don't buy anything because the sales process on their
website is no good. Using pay-per-clicks for a small amount of money and
a short period of time you can see if the visitors you get are buying
anything or calling you for more info. If they are, then great. You can
now roll out a program to pour lots of traffic to the site. However, if
they are not buying or calling you have just saved yourself a lot of
time and money driving lots of traffic to your site for nothing. You can
spend your efforts fixing up the sales process and then testing again.
Bid Management
One of the mistakes I make (because I'm terrible at counting beans) is
overbidding for no reason. Sometimes the persons bidding beneath you may
drop out of the bidding altogether. If you pay close attention to your
bids, you may be able to drop the amount you bid and still stay number
one.
If you really get into the pay-per-click game you might
want to consider a bid organizing tool or company that keeps track of
all your keywords and associated bids on different pay-per-click search
engines. Here are some of the companies that help you with this.
http://managebid.com/
http://search-engine-bidtool.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=antion
http://www.positionguardian.com/
Premium Listings
On some pay-per-click search engines if you bid high enough to get
into one of the top positions, you also get preferred links on other
sites that the search engine has made deals with. In the Overture
pay-per-click search engine if I keep my bid high enough to get into one
of the top three positions then I get a premium listing on America Online, Lycos, AltaVista, Netscape, Hotbot and Cnet,
Microsoft Internet Explorer, Ask Jeeves, CompuServe, EarthLink and many
more other search engines. Overture has just made a deal with Yahoo
which will really increase the value of a premium listing.
Semi Scams
There are over 150 pay-per-click search engines. Only a few are very
successful and get lots of searches. For a complete listing of these
search engines visit http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com
You might think it would be a good idea to sign up with
all of them since you only have to pay when someone clicks. It's not
quite that simple. In most you have to put up a $25.00 or $50.00
deposit. For the bulk of the small unpopular pay-per-click search
engines you would be putting up the deposit and it would most likely be
years before you would get enough clicks to use up the deposit. The
search engine might go out of business in the mean time and you would
lose your deposit. I'm not saying this is intentionally a scam, but your
money should not be used to finance some rinky dink start up search
engine that is probably going to sell your information and get you
spammed to death anyway. I would just stick with the big ones and test
carefully.
The main one I use is http://www.overture.com
(formerly goto.com). This provides me with lots of traffic.
I also use http://www.findwhat.com,
http://www.bay9.com http://www.kanoodle.com
and http://www.7search.com I don't
really pay too much attention to any of these, but they do get some
traffic.
More tips
Write your site descriptions in an effort to get people NOT to click.
Since you are paying for the traffic, you want to make sure that the
person clicking is realy, really interested in what you have to offer. Also,
send them directly to the page advertising your product or service.
Don't make them search around and get frustrated. Remember, once they
click, you pay so get them the info they want quickly. Search
Term Tools
Some of the pay-per-clicks give you a free tools to help you pick
keywords and determine their popularity. These tools are very important
and will be covered in a future article on keyword selection. Future
Topics for this section
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Trade links -- it's great for you in several ways
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Write one articles and get at least five uses and
maybe 50 uses
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Off line ways to drive traffic
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Online ways to drive traffic
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When NOT to drive traffic
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to January 2002 Index
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