How to save money on the Adwords network
Over the years I have had many accounts with Adwords, spending a small fortune with the Adwords service. So naturally I have picked up many cost saving tricks. I am aware that most people feel Adwords costs too much and delivers little results, this is completely untrue. Adwords is a service that is here to help us, so I have written this article to help web developers make the most out of the service.
1) Set your currency,
First and foremost, select the currency of which you locally trade in. You may think its wise to start your Adwords account in USD, but if you do not live in the USA you may get a shock when you find how much you have been charged.
2) Use negative keywords,
You are using the Adwords service to generate website traffic, so obviously you want the right traffic to generate revenue. Start by using negative keywords for people whom you do not want to click on your advert, the best place to start is the keyword “free”. As I doubt you want to waste money on traffic that will not generate revenue.
3) Make a strict daily budget
Make sure you have set out a daily budget, Adwords generally advise a way out of proportion budget. After all most new Adwords customers have no idea how effective the advertising will be. Do not start off with a bang, your pocket will feel it.
Just as important as the budget, be careful with the CPC rate. I advise you to start with a low number, each click soon adds up very quickly. I actually found that by lowering my CPC rate by 50% I doubled my visitor count…
4) Check those clicks!
One of the most talked about problem with Adwords is, click fraud. There are two main types of click fraud: the first is when any one starts clicking away at your advertisements trying to waste your money. It is very hard to stop this kind of fraud, if you are a victim stop your ads and file a report to Google ASAP.
The second main issue is now that google allows Web Developers to earn money off their websites by placing ads (Adsense) .some Web Developers try to cheat the system by clicking on their ads as much as possible. The best way to stop this kind of fraud is check your page log, Adwords allow you to block out websites that you do
not want your advert to be placed on.
Adwords does not have many protections against Click fraud, although they do disable Adsense accounts who cheat. Google are very hesitant to refund the victims, if at all. Reports tell many organisations are actually suing Google to get their money back, so be careful.
In this article I have illustrated some of the most beneficial ways to save money when advertising with Adwords. My main advice to you is, do not go crazy with your spending. You may not see the results you are after, it does take a while to get to know Adwords. I have had many successful ad campaigns using the Adwords network. However I do advise to look around, with the ever growing popularity of MSN search you may actually find it much more affordable.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
5 Free Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic
I don't know about you, but when I first entered the world of internet marketing I thought I could just submit my newly finished website to a few search engines, then sit back as the visitors flocked to my site.
I imagined that people would arrive on my website, as if by magic, purchase goods, and perhaps come back again for more.
A week or so later I came down to earth with a big bump.
I realised that it would take a bit of time and effort to see the results that I was dreaming about!
Since my reality check, I have learned all about the weird and wonderful ways of internet marketing.
In this article I will tell you about my top 5 free ways of increasing website traffic.
All these methods are completely free and if you spend some time on them you will find that they work consistently.
(1)Writing Articles
Writing an article on a subject related to your website and getting that article published has two major benefits:
- People who are interested in your article will read it and often click on the URL in your resource box find out more. This gets you another free targeted visitor. Targeted, because that reader wants to find out more on the subject of your article, which is hopefully related to the subject of your website.
- Every publisher of your article must also publish your "resource box". Adding a resource box with your URL to all of your articles will increase the number of links leading back to your website, which in turn helps to increase your search engine position
(2)Forum Networking
There are many discussion forums on the internet, on every topic you could possibly imagine.
Most discussion boards allow posters to attach a "Signature" with their post containing additional information about themselves, such as their name, URL and sometimes even an advertisement.
By visiting a few forums regularly and participating in the discussions, asking and answering questions, you can build up trust with other forum members, whilst at the same time getting free exposure for your website.
Just try to make a useful contribution to the forum - be sure to read the forum rules and don't spam!
(3)Reciprocal Linking
Reciprocal linking has two main benefits for you.
Firstly, the more links that you exchange, the more chance there is that someone will follow a link from another site and land on your website.
Secondly, your website will be perceived more importantly by search engines.
The more links you have from other sites, the greater your chance of getter ranked more highly by all the search engines.
Here are some Dos and Don'ts to help you get more out of your link exchanges.
- Do link with sites that will be of interest to your visitors.
- Don't link with pages that have unorganised link directories with hundreds of links on each page. This won't benefit you with increased traffic or search engine rankings.
- Do link with sites that have a clearly labelled "Link Directory" from their main page. You aren't likely to get much traffic from a hidden or hard to find link directory.
- Don't use link farms or FFA pages. You are unlikely to get extra traffic using these methods and the search engines may penalise you.
- Do use link directories to help you find link partners.
- Do stay organised. Use link exchange software, or a spreadsheet to keep track of the link exchanges you have requested and the contact details of the webmasters.
(4) Email Signatures
This is a very simple, but often forgotten way of increasing your website visitors.
Most of us are sending lots of emails a day, but many of us just sign them with just our name, or perhaps nothing at all.
Instead, why not end your emails with a short signature containing your name, a bit about your website along with the URL?
Keep the signature short (4 lines), to the point and avoid hype or SHOUTING.
You may be surprised at the extra visitors you receive through doing this. It's amazing how curiosity will lead the recipients of your email to click on your link!
(5)Using Traffic Exchanges
Finally, this is one easy way to guarantee instant hits to your website. You can build up credits for free by surfing or building up a downline to surf for you.
The downside of this method is that the visitors you receive from traffic exchanges are not as targeted as the visitors that you will receive via the other methods that I have described.
The reason for this is that people surf traffic exchanges for one reason - to earn as many credits as possible in as short a space of time as possible!
This gives you a challenge - how do you attract the attention of someone who is looking at your web page for 20 seconds or less?
Here are two tips -
- Know your market - spend some time surfing on the exchange that you are advertising on and pay attention to the types of web pages being advertised. Make sure that the pages you advertise are going to interest your target market.
- Use a short, simple attention grabbing page that can be read in a few seconds - there is no point advertising a huge page of text that takes 5 minutes to read. The chances are, your visitor will get bored and click on the "next" button without giving your page a fair chance.
Regularly invest some time in each of these 5 traffic generating methods and you will see your web statistics moving in the upwards direction before you know it.
I imagined that people would arrive on my website, as if by magic, purchase goods, and perhaps come back again for more.
A week or so later I came down to earth with a big bump.
I realised that it would take a bit of time and effort to see the results that I was dreaming about!
Since my reality check, I have learned all about the weird and wonderful ways of internet marketing.
In this article I will tell you about my top 5 free ways of increasing website traffic.
All these methods are completely free and if you spend some time on them you will find that they work consistently.
(1)Writing Articles
Writing an article on a subject related to your website and getting that article published has two major benefits:
- People who are interested in your article will read it and often click on the URL in your resource box find out more. This gets you another free targeted visitor. Targeted, because that reader wants to find out more on the subject of your article, which is hopefully related to the subject of your website.
- Every publisher of your article must also publish your "resource box". Adding a resource box with your URL to all of your articles will increase the number of links leading back to your website, which in turn helps to increase your search engine position
(2)Forum Networking
There are many discussion forums on the internet, on every topic you could possibly imagine.
Most discussion boards allow posters to attach a "Signature" with their post containing additional information about themselves, such as their name, URL and sometimes even an advertisement.
By visiting a few forums regularly and participating in the discussions, asking and answering questions, you can build up trust with other forum members, whilst at the same time getting free exposure for your website.
Just try to make a useful contribution to the forum - be sure to read the forum rules and don't spam!
(3)Reciprocal Linking
Reciprocal linking has two main benefits for you.
Firstly, the more links that you exchange, the more chance there is that someone will follow a link from another site and land on your website.
Secondly, your website will be perceived more importantly by search engines.
The more links you have from other sites, the greater your chance of getter ranked more highly by all the search engines.
Here are some Dos and Don'ts to help you get more out of your link exchanges.
- Do link with sites that will be of interest to your visitors.
- Don't link with pages that have unorganised link directories with hundreds of links on each page. This won't benefit you with increased traffic or search engine rankings.
- Do link with sites that have a clearly labelled "Link Directory" from their main page. You aren't likely to get much traffic from a hidden or hard to find link directory.
- Don't use link farms or FFA pages. You are unlikely to get extra traffic using these methods and the search engines may penalise you.
- Do use link directories to help you find link partners.
- Do stay organised. Use link exchange software, or a spreadsheet to keep track of the link exchanges you have requested and the contact details of the webmasters.
(4) Email Signatures
This is a very simple, but often forgotten way of increasing your website visitors.
Most of us are sending lots of emails a day, but many of us just sign them with just our name, or perhaps nothing at all.
Instead, why not end your emails with a short signature containing your name, a bit about your website along with the URL?
Keep the signature short (4 lines), to the point and avoid hype or SHOUTING.
You may be surprised at the extra visitors you receive through doing this. It's amazing how curiosity will lead the recipients of your email to click on your link!
(5)Using Traffic Exchanges
Finally, this is one easy way to guarantee instant hits to your website. You can build up credits for free by surfing or building up a downline to surf for you.
The downside of this method is that the visitors you receive from traffic exchanges are not as targeted as the visitors that you will receive via the other methods that I have described.
The reason for this is that people surf traffic exchanges for one reason - to earn as many credits as possible in as short a space of time as possible!
This gives you a challenge - how do you attract the attention of someone who is looking at your web page for 20 seconds or less?
Here are two tips -
- Know your market - spend some time surfing on the exchange that you are advertising on and pay attention to the types of web pages being advertised. Make sure that the pages you advertise are going to interest your target market.
- Use a short, simple attention grabbing page that can be read in a few seconds - there is no point advertising a huge page of text that takes 5 minutes to read. The chances are, your visitor will get bored and click on the "next" button without giving your page a fair chance.
Regularly invest some time in each of these 5 traffic generating methods and you will see your web statistics moving in the upwards direction before you know it.
Pay per click & Adwords : expensive without expert help
Despite being online using email since 1995, at the start of the summer of 2004 I had no idea what pay per click was.
During that summer, I had taken some time off work and was researching online opportunities. This led me to Ebay, various get rich quick type scams, and then an email referral to marketing using pay per click.
What was pay per click, I remember asking.
Days of research later, I learned that pay per click (also called ppc) was a type of search marketing where advertisers pay a set amount every time their ad was clicked by a prospect. This is known as a click thru, click through rate or ctr.
The opportunity to place your ad directly in front of a prospect at the exact moment they are searching for your product or service is tremendous.
Performance based advertising is not only cost efficient and effective, but it is track-able and user-friendly. The advertiser, you, in this scenario has control over the keywords that best represent your product.
The PPC model allows you to decide how much you are willing to pay per customer. Unlike banner ads that demand payment on a cost per thousand basis, the only viewers you pay for are those that are actively seeking your product or service.
In a Google search, I learned the small sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page were a type of pay per click called Google Adwords.
I discovered that the pay per click world was huge, with millions of clicks delivered by hundreds of search engines such as Overture, Find What, ePilot, Enhance and GoClick.
The great benefit is the cost-effective, highly targeted website traffic that this type of search generates.
However, the massive popularity and growth of pay per click had also made it very expensive.
For example, Google Adwords allowed me to set up campaigns and see them live within 15 minutes. This was very, very exciting and very addicting.
Within days of learning about pay per click, I was generating 1,000 clicks per day to my various campaigns. I thought I was seeing success in pay per click.
In the early days of ppc, that may have been true because your bids on popular keywords were just pennies a click.
By the time I was hitting it, popular keywords were around $1 dollar per click and I was actually losing hundreds of dollars per day.
Worse yet, my keywords were being disabled and my ads were getting disapproved.
Then I started watching for sales. I kept watching, and watching, and watching and by the end of that first week, my 6,800 adwords clicks had produced only 3 SALES for $55.
I was crushed. My brand new online business had already lost $500. This is when I realized just how steep the learning curve was.
I signed up for free-5 part email courses on Adwords and pay per click. I learned about converting traffic into sales, avoiding the curse of disabled ads, return on investment, finding niche keywords and lowering my cost per click.
Today, no one is quite sure where the pay per click industry is going.
The bottom line is pay per click campaigns can bring large numbers of highly targeted visitors to your website. The industry is growing rapidly, it is hugely competitive and campaigns can become prohibitively expensive.
Success of any pay per click campaign comes down to paying pay a reasonable price for each visitor, that each visitor is highly targeted, and that you continuously monitor and track your positions.
During that summer, I had taken some time off work and was researching online opportunities. This led me to Ebay, various get rich quick type scams, and then an email referral to marketing using pay per click.
What was pay per click, I remember asking.
Days of research later, I learned that pay per click (also called ppc) was a type of search marketing where advertisers pay a set amount every time their ad was clicked by a prospect. This is known as a click thru, click through rate or ctr.
The opportunity to place your ad directly in front of a prospect at the exact moment they are searching for your product or service is tremendous.
Performance based advertising is not only cost efficient and effective, but it is track-able and user-friendly. The advertiser, you, in this scenario has control over the keywords that best represent your product.
The PPC model allows you to decide how much you are willing to pay per customer. Unlike banner ads that demand payment on a cost per thousand basis, the only viewers you pay for are those that are actively seeking your product or service.
In a Google search, I learned the small sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page were a type of pay per click called Google Adwords.
I discovered that the pay per click world was huge, with millions of clicks delivered by hundreds of search engines such as Overture, Find What, ePilot, Enhance and GoClick.
The great benefit is the cost-effective, highly targeted website traffic that this type of search generates.
However, the massive popularity and growth of pay per click had also made it very expensive.
For example, Google Adwords allowed me to set up campaigns and see them live within 15 minutes. This was very, very exciting and very addicting.
Within days of learning about pay per click, I was generating 1,000 clicks per day to my various campaigns. I thought I was seeing success in pay per click.
In the early days of ppc, that may have been true because your bids on popular keywords were just pennies a click.
By the time I was hitting it, popular keywords were around $1 dollar per click and I was actually losing hundreds of dollars per day.
Worse yet, my keywords were being disabled and my ads were getting disapproved.
Then I started watching for sales. I kept watching, and watching, and watching and by the end of that first week, my 6,800 adwords clicks had produced only 3 SALES for $55.
I was crushed. My brand new online business had already lost $500. This is when I realized just how steep the learning curve was.
I signed up for free-5 part email courses on Adwords and pay per click. I learned about converting traffic into sales, avoiding the curse of disabled ads, return on investment, finding niche keywords and lowering my cost per click.
Today, no one is quite sure where the pay per click industry is going.
The bottom line is pay per click campaigns can bring large numbers of highly targeted visitors to your website. The industry is growing rapidly, it is hugely competitive and campaigns can become prohibitively expensive.
Success of any pay per click campaign comes down to paying pay a reasonable price for each visitor, that each visitor is highly targeted, and that you continuously monitor and track your positions.
Market Your Dream Online: Internet Advertising Advice
You need to be advertising and marketing your home-based business, but what does it all mean? You need customers. You need sales! But where do you start?
These are just some of the ways for your home-based business to be advertising and marketing online (meaning on the Internet). But, what do they mean?
FFA Pages -- You submit your site to a FFA page (or network of pages) and agree to get one E-mail from every other website that is listed there. Definitely not a good idea (see our Advertising/Marketing page for more details).
Banners - These are ads shown at the top (usually) of many webpages and they sometimes rotate to show a different ad each time the page is loaded.
Traffic Exchange Programs - You submit your ad to be shown to other members of the program when they load the program start page.
Reciprocal Linking - You place a link to someone's website on your site and they place a link to your website on theirs.
Other Internet Marketing Suggestions
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Keywords are placed throughout your website's pages to tell the search engines what your page is about. Keywords are simply words (or combinations of words) that describe your business.
Content is king. Provide good content (basically, articles about your area of expertise) about your subject and sprinkle the keywords (and combos) through the page. This basic strategy will get you a higher ranking with the search engines and many more customers because you're giving them something that they need -- information!
PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising - Instead of submitting your pages for inclusion in the search engine's database, you bid on the keyword(s) that relate to your website. You can find out in advance what other sites have bid for a particular keyword and then decide if you want to outbid the number one spot or maybe bid a little less and get the number two, three, or four spot (or lower if the keyword is expensive).
Ezines/Newsletters - These are delivered through E-mail and can be either plain text or HTML with full graphics. Although they can sometimes be expensive, you can get free ads by writing articles about your subject area and contribute them to the ezines. Why would you want to give them away? Because you can put in a "Resource Box" at the end of each article. At the very least this box will contain your name, website address, and a brief one or two line "bio" about you (some ezines allow more room). See, free online advertising for your home-based business!
- FFA Pages
- Banners
- Traffic Exchange Programs
- Reciprocal Linking
These are just some of the ways for your home-based business to be advertising and marketing online (meaning on the Internet). But, what do they mean?
FFA Pages -- You submit your site to a FFA page (or network of pages) and agree to get one E-mail from every other website that is listed there. Definitely not a good idea (see our Advertising/Marketing page for more details).
Banners - These are ads shown at the top (usually) of many webpages and they sometimes rotate to show a different ad each time the page is loaded.
Traffic Exchange Programs - You submit your ad to be shown to other members of the program when they load the program start page.
Reciprocal Linking - You place a link to someone's website on your site and they place a link to your website on theirs.
Other Internet Marketing Suggestions
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Keywords are placed throughout your website's pages to tell the search engines what your page is about. Keywords are simply words (or combinations of words) that describe your business.
Content is king. Provide good content (basically, articles about your area of expertise) about your subject and sprinkle the keywords (and combos) through the page. This basic strategy will get you a higher ranking with the search engines and many more customers because you're giving them something that they need -- information!
PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising - Instead of submitting your pages for inclusion in the search engine's database, you bid on the keyword(s) that relate to your website. You can find out in advance what other sites have bid for a particular keyword and then decide if you want to outbid the number one spot or maybe bid a little less and get the number two, three, or four spot (or lower if the keyword is expensive).
Ezines/Newsletters - These are delivered through E-mail and can be either plain text or HTML with full graphics. Although they can sometimes be expensive, you can get free ads by writing articles about your subject area and contribute them to the ezines. Why would you want to give them away? Because you can put in a "Resource Box" at the end of each article. At the very least this box will contain your name, website address, and a brief one or two line "bio" about you (some ezines allow more room). See, free online advertising for your home-based business!
How to Win the Advertising and Promotion Game
I am certain that, as a business owner, you have often entertained the question as to how much to spend and where to spend your advertising dollars. For most small business owners, these questions can add to the headaches suffered in the course of normal everyday operations of their business.
THERE ARE NO SIMPLE ANSWERS
The how much to spend and where to spend it questions have no easy answers.
Depending on your type of business, many people suggest that the *how much* should be equal to anywhere from 4% to 10% of your gross receipts.
The quandary is that a business cannot survive without a fresh flow of incoming customers. But, a business can seldom generate a fresh stream of customers without spending money to get the word out about their business.
THE CHALLENGE OF DEVELOPING EFFECTIVE ADVERTISING
Have you ever paid for advertising and sat back to await the fresh flow of customers, only to find yourself sitting and sitting and then sitting some more?
Don't feel bad about that. It has happened to many of us before.
See, knowing where to spend the advertising money is not enough to get the job done.
Where to spend the money only begins to highlight the other issues connected with advertising:
· Marketing Plan
· Advertising Strategy
· Headlines, Ad Copy and Visual Presentation · Tracking the Success of Your Advertising Campaigns
Local Business Advertising & Google Adwords
Local Business Advertising
"I don't need the Internet to advertise - I'm a local business!"
Okay...
If you could spend £0.04 (or $0.05 in the US) and have a new customer - what would you do with your local business advertising budget?
I hope you would spend that money again and again!
Granted this is the ideal example and you are likely to pay much more then £0.04 per customer you acquire, BUT - herein lies the rub for local businesses:
An internet presence announces your business to the world.
When you are online, you have little control about where traffic is coming to you from (if you are not actively driving traffic that is), but what if you could make sure that people who lived in your area, who buy your goods and would make ideal customers could be targeted!
Google Adwords can help you target local people, not people from New Zealand if you live in the UK - but people close to you.
Pinpoint geographic targeting of prospects is an optimum use of your local business advertising budget.
Is it 100% foolproof?
Alas no, but it's a good start.
How do I do it?
Well the easiest way to do this is as follows:
Create a national campaign with your search terms and your location terms - eg: If you're a plumber in Poole then "plumber poole" would be a good keyword.
Create a geo-targeted campaign (this can be done in a couple of ways - I'll leave the nitty gritty details out for now) which means your ads are served to local people when they search for your keywords.
So in the plumber example if a local person types in "plumber" and doesn't mention anything else, your advert will be shown.
So goes the theory anyway.
Does it work all the time?
Like I said - Not always very well.
This is because Google uses IP addresses to determine location and this method is somewhat of a cleaver when a scalpel is required.
It all depends how diligent ISP's are when allocating IP addresses to their customers, the only way you can know is through empirical means.
What if the regional targeting is producing no results?
If this is the case then a national campaign with location terms included (as mentioned above) is your best bet.
If you were to run a national campaign on the same keywords without the location terms, you will be competing with other players who have a national presence for your particular product/service which could prove very expensive.
Your local business advertising budget spend should at the very least give Adwords and PPC advertising in general a tryout. Remember there are an infinite number of keywords in any target market.
Just because the big boys may have a stranglehold on the 'obvious' terms does not mean your market is saturated.
"I don't need the Internet to advertise - I'm a local business!"
Okay...
If you could spend £0.04 (or $0.05 in the US) and have a new customer - what would you do with your local business advertising budget?
I hope you would spend that money again and again!
Granted this is the ideal example and you are likely to pay much more then £0.04 per customer you acquire, BUT - herein lies the rub for local businesses:
An internet presence announces your business to the world.
When you are online, you have little control about where traffic is coming to you from (if you are not actively driving traffic that is), but what if you could make sure that people who lived in your area, who buy your goods and would make ideal customers could be targeted!
Google Adwords can help you target local people, not people from New Zealand if you live in the UK - but people close to you.
Pinpoint geographic targeting of prospects is an optimum use of your local business advertising budget.
Is it 100% foolproof?
Alas no, but it's a good start.
How do I do it?
Well the easiest way to do this is as follows:
Create a national campaign with your search terms and your location terms - eg: If you're a plumber in Poole then "plumber poole" would be a good keyword.
Create a geo-targeted campaign (this can be done in a couple of ways - I'll leave the nitty gritty details out for now) which means your ads are served to local people when they search for your keywords.
So in the plumber example if a local person types in "plumber" and doesn't mention anything else, your advert will be shown.
So goes the theory anyway.
Does it work all the time?
Like I said - Not always very well.
This is because Google uses IP addresses to determine location and this method is somewhat of a cleaver when a scalpel is required.
It all depends how diligent ISP's are when allocating IP addresses to their customers, the only way you can know is through empirical means.
What if the regional targeting is producing no results?
If this is the case then a national campaign with location terms included (as mentioned above) is your best bet.
If you were to run a national campaign on the same keywords without the location terms, you will be competing with other players who have a national presence for your particular product/service which could prove very expensive.
Your local business advertising budget spend should at the very least give Adwords and PPC advertising in general a tryout. Remember there are an infinite number of keywords in any target market.
Just because the big boys may have a stranglehold on the 'obvious' terms does not mean your market is saturated.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising & Search Engine Optimization
There are pro's & con's to both Pay-Per-Click advertising and optimizing for natural search engine traffic.
PPC advertising has many great benefits. First of all, you get your traffic going quickly. I have used this advantage many times. I test new products and even new websites through PPC advertising before making a decision to promote or scrap my new website or product idea.
I am a firm believer in testing new products before throwing large amounts of money into advertising. PPC advertising is a great way to do this. For example, with Google's Adwords program, you can post your ad, pay a $5 sign-up fee and have highly targeted traffic to your website within an hour. How is that for efficiency?
Also, you can moniter your click charges and stop them before they get too expensive. By the time you have spent your budget on clicks, you should have a pretty good idea of how successful your product is going to be.
I think of PPC advertising as being the most useful when starting a new business or product. WIth PPC advertising, you can quickly and efficiently find out which keywords you need to target and which products are the most popular.
Once that testing period is over, however, it's time to look into Search Engine Optimization. PPC advertising can be very expensive, costing hundreds, even thousands a month in advertising costs. Once you know what keywords to target, it's time to put together a plan on how you are going to optimize your website. The drawbacks to search engine optimization is that it requires a lengthy amount of time to get your site to rank high with your keywords. That is why I suggest using this method after the testing period is over, when you already know your business will be profitable.
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