PPC Advertising is all about taking the right steps, and avoiding the landmines. Once you know how to really hit on the PPC “sweet spots”, you’ll come to know how massive potential it has to make you a windfall of cash. However, not everyone gets it right and many end up losing their shirt – so what exactly makes a successful PPC campaign? Given below are 10 powerful tips for maximizing your profits using PPC advertising, so that you know how avoid the major pitfalls.
1 ) Choosing the Right Product
You obviously would want a product that ‘sells’ in order to make your PPC campaign successful, and there are a few things that need to be considered when choosing one. For instance, it’s always a good idea to promote a downloadable product since the buyer can instantly receive his purchase. The next important step being, choosing a reputed affiliate network that professionally manages the distribution of the product, along with refund support and of course makes sure the commissions are on time. There are many networks in the market that you could go for, but one that I would highly recommend is Clickbank, because it’s very simple to set up (takes just a few minutes) and is highly popular. Also, keep in mind that the Clickbank vendor that you choose to work with has good affiliate support and is professional. It’s good to do a background check and do your homework before you start selling. If the product is being sold by other affiliates and is popular in the market, it’s probably a good bet. This might sound a bit confusing, but trust me, it’s critical that you promote products that are popular in the market, as they’ve already proven to make money.
2 ) Selecting Your Domains
When you are going to sell an affiliate product using PPC, you always have two choices: linking directly to the vendor’s sales page or having your own domain that you use for redirecting to the product page. Direct linking makes sense when you’re testing but on the long run, it’s not really profitable unless you’ve got your own domain name. Popular search engines like Google and Bing always prefer their advertisers to have their own domain that directly links to the product’s sales page.
3 ) Choosing the Right Keywords
How do Search Engines work with advertising? They take the keywords you type in to search and map them to the PPC ads listed in the search results. These adverts are presented to you depending on the relevancy to the keywords, the quality of the web page they link to, and the keyword’s bid price. So when selecting keywords, you always have to make sure you keep them relevant to the product’s website. Since the popular and most wanted keywords turn out to be really expensive when bidding, you need to aim for long tail key phrases that are more targeted and convert better.
4 ) Getting Your Keywords List Organized
As soon as you’ve got a list of good keywords (Although the number of keywords you choose depends on your daily budget, try starting with 1,000), you need to start organizing your keywords into related “adgroups”. This is vital as it’s extremely helpful when making any kind of changes during campaign management. This is the real technique of making sure everything is optimized for more profit. Organizing is simple and you can use Microsoft Excel to put everything into order.
5 ) Creating Profit Pulling Ads
Once you’ve got the initial steps set up, you need to move to the next interesting step, creating ads. PPC adverts cannot be too long, they need to be nice and short, up to the point and direct. These ads would obviously have a headline, the ad’s descriptions (just two lines), display URL (the visible URL to your site) and the real link to your website. So how does one write good ads? A few tips that I can pass along include having the right keywords in the ad, making use of emotions in the right way, crafting out the feature that’s follow by a benefit to pack the punch and ask them to call to action. It’s also important to go through the Search Engine’s guidelines on what’s allowed and what’s not when submitting an ad. In case you mess up here, you’ll be penalized, so you have to be really careful.
6 ) Effectively Using the Adwords Editor
Now that you’ve got your list of segregated keywords and ad, all of them go into your PPC account. You need to have an account to get started, in this example, let’s just say we’re using the Google Adwords service. So go ahead and create an account, play around and explore. Here, you could work with your campaign at one keyword after another, but you might make tons of mistakes as you move along. However, you don’t really need to worry as you’ve got a better, more organized way of doing it, by using the Google Adwords editor. Download it to your computer and you’ll easily get acquainted to it. The benefits you get out of using this brilliant tool are:
* You can very easily use the tool offline to create your campaigns and then later on synchronize it with your Adwords account.
* Copying and pasting your keywords from Excel straight into the tool is not a problem.
* Making bulk changes to your active campaigns can be done by downloading the latest data, which doesn’t really have any other workaround.
7 ) Creating Profit Driven Landing Pages
As we’ve already learned that if you are looking for long term success, you need to have your domain name. When a visitor clicks through the PPC ad, they’ll reach your product’s landing page. Building an effective landing page is necessary, as when a prospect will go through it, the first 10 seconds will determine whether they will stay on the page or not. So you need to concentrate on the whole look and the feel of this page. It needs to eye catching, get their attention and keep them focused. Right from the color of the text, fonts to the headlines used along with videos and pictures, everything needs to be tested. It’s important that you have a good copy on your page, because if your words aren’t interesting enough, everything goes to waste.
8 ) Bidding Initially
Okay, so we’re all set. Now, what price do you really start bidding on your keywords? Most of the time, this is going to be difficult as it depends on various factors. You need to do your homework and research on what your competitors are bidding on the same keywords. If you think researching is not your cup of tea, then start off with a bid amount that is somewhat equal to 0.01 times the profit you will be making from every sale.
9 ) Optimizing for Maximum Returns
So your ads are up and running and you’ll be getting your feedback on their performance from Google. From time to time, your Google Adwords account will show up to date statistics related to your campaign, which can easily be synchronized to your Adwords editor to view it when offline. This is where you get to see ads that are performing well, and the best keywords and adgroups. However, before you make any changes, you need to wait for a few days; since they need the statistics have to be significant. Once you know where you’re going, start to increase and decrease the bids you place on keywords depending on how they perform. This is really important when it comes to increasing profitability and there are many different ways through which you can achieve this.
10 ) Running a Successful Campaign
PPC advertising has turned out to be a very lucrative business with marketers from all corners of the globe are making millions of dollar in profits. If you are someone who is persistent and puts in the hard work to learn from your experience, PPC is for you. The only tried and tested way to uncover a successful campaign is to test it, tweak it, optimize it and takes it to the next level. In order to achieve a high degree of success with PPC, you need to test out multiple campaigns and keep up the momentum on a regular basis.
