Work At Home Information

Sorry about the misleading title, but, no, this article is not about how pay-per-click advertising is easy nor is it about selling you some program for $19.95 to show you how easy it is. Sure, I can do that, but I’d be the only one making money, not you.

Now, don’t get me wrong. PPC is effective, but it is NOT easy. You can easily lose your shirt if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll give you an example from my own personal experience to illustrate how devastating it can be to make mistakes with PPC.

I hopped onto an affiliate program to sell cell phones. I mean, how could I go wrong with cell phones? Everybody has them and they’re always upgrading, right? So, I buy a premium site from the cell phone folks, do a bit of superficial research on that keywords people looking for cell phones would use, and then I started running ads on Google Adwords.

Well, guess what? I got into the top spot of Google’s paid listings for my keywords. Great, right? You’d think I’d have made a gazillion dollars from this. Well, not so much. It cost me, over a month, $1000 to retain that top spot. How many affiliate sales did I make? Maybe three, for a grand total of $150. Whoopee! 

So what went wrong? Why didn’t I make more profit for being in the top position for the keywords I had chosen? Well, there were a number of reasons, but the main one was that my keywords were targeted at real buyers who were looking to buy exactly that phone NOW. I was hitting people very early in the buying cycle when they’re just gathering information.

While it is important to rank close to the top of the paid listings, it is equally important to rank for keywords that people in the last phase of the buying cycle would use…that is keywords that are more specific and end up costing you less per click.

Another problem that beginners run into with PPC is gravitating immediately toward Google. While Google is definitely great, there are other search engines out there where you can get cheaper traffic that actually converts better.

One of the most frequently overlooked is MSN Adcenter. By rights, it should hardly be obscure, given that it is owned and operated by Microsoft, but surprisingly few marketers are taking advantage of the advertising opportunities MSN has to offer.

One of the most overlooked pay-per-click providers out there is MSN Adcenter, which is rather baffling since it is owned by that other big name on the Internet and computing, Microsoft.

While MSN does have less search volume than Google, it still gets a good amount of visitors every month, and a higher percentage of those visitors turn into buyers than do Google searchers. Google is where you go for information, MSN is where you go to shop.

In addition, MSN Adcenter has some features that can be more helpful for the beginner affiliate. A couple of these are:

• Adcenter allows direct linking whereas Google makes it particularly hard for affiliates to get their ads seen if they don’t re-direct off a different domain.
• There is no "Google slap" where mysteriously, your ads, where you were paying a quarter per click are suddenly demanding $5 to $10 per click due to Google’s sometimes insane "quality score" calculations.

Whichever pay-per-click service you choose for your advertising needs, be sure that you do the proper research and know your market. Know which keywords your target market is likely to search for when they’re ready to buy. Knowing this can make the difference between losing your shirt and laughing all the way to the bank.