THE MODERN MIRACLE:
PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING
If you’ve never heard of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, hold onto your seat!
This is probably one of the greatest tools you can add to your online market-
ing arsenal to instantly see results. In the past few years, this has become the
best way to quickly drive online visitor traffic to your web site for as little as
$0.01 per visitor. Imagine, in under 10 minutes, you have laser-targeted
prospects and customers pouring into your web site (and buying).
Sound too good to be true? It’s not. If you’ve ever searched at
Yahoo.com and seen the sponsored links up top, or used Google.com and no-
ticed the classified ad–looking links on the right-hand side of the screen,
you’ve seen pay-per-click advertising in action.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the Internet has slowly been moving away
from “free” and more toward a “paid” model, right? So why should search
engine results be any different? Instead of having to hire a search engine ex-
pert to get you ranked high in the results for whatever search terms you want,
you can now buy those top rankings.
Here’s how it works: When you set up your account with a PPC search
engine, you’ll first pick the keywords you want to bid on. A keyword is the
word or phrase you want your ad to appear under when people are typing
that word or phrase into the search engine.
Notice, I said bid. The person bidding the most gets the highest ranking.
Yes, there will most likely be others online who are aiming for the same key-
words as you. But, as long as you’re not targeting broad, generic terms like
“MLM,” “home business,” or “network marketing,” and are getting very
specific with the terms you choose, you’ll be in much better shape.
You want to use the most laser-targeted, specific keywords you can find.
The broad terms will only waste your money. The key is to think of what
your ideal prospect is typing into the search engines. What is he searching
for? What is the problem she is looking to solve? Those are the keywords you
should be bidding on. I recommend http://www.KeywordMillions.com for brain-
storming your massive list of keywords. The site also has a free version you
can try out.
Now that you have your keywords chosen, you’ll then give the PPC
company the copy or text to use for your ad. Think of this as a highly tar-
geted classified advertisement—you’ve got to say a lot in a small amount of
space. Load as many benefits into your ad as you can. For a crash course in
writing sales copy, I highly recommend John Caples’ Tested Advertising
Methods(Prentice Hall, 1998). You’ll find plenty of helpful examples you can
adapt for your PPC efforts.
The 7 Best (and Most Profitable) Internet Prospecting Tools 217