Is Pay Per Click your Best Marketing Bet?

You may already have heard of this method to get people to your web site. From my point of view and experience it turns out to be expensive and you have to write the ads yourself, pay for them, and change and maintain them to be the correct ones to work and be the right price in competition with many others.

When people search for a particular topic like healing a headache or other malady, they will see in the column to the right an ad that when clicked on takes the person to their web site selling the book or service on healing headaches.

Advertisers pay a set amount for every time the ad is clicked by a prospect. This is referred to as a click through rate or ctr.

Yes, there are benefits: 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 good.

More benefits include your 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. You only pay for the click throughs, and these are your targeted audience seeking your solutions.

After using Overture and being disappointed, while doing a Google search recently, I noticed the small sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page were a type of pay per click called Google Adwords. I do know people who are successful with this company.

While this search generates targeted website traffic, the downside? You have to study what key words work best, and the best ones are much more expensive than other ones. The popularity and growth of pay per click had also made it expensive.

The Horror Stories of Pay Per Click

Story One. One submitter got hooked because it was fast, exciting and easy.

Within days of learning about pay per click, she was generating 1,000 clicks per day to her various campaigns. She thought she was seeing success in pay per click.

In the early days of ppc, that may have been true because bids on popular keywords were just pennies a click. When her popular keywords were around $1 dollar per click, she actually lost $100's of dollars per day. Along with that, her keys words got disabled and were disapproved.

Where were the sales? At the end of the first week, her adwords produced only $75 from over 5000 adwords. Count the loss!

You can shorten your learning curve if you like by taking a course in adwords, but you can just as well take a teleclass from a respected internet marketing coach who knows all of the ins and outs and do what's already tried and true-as in this book. If you want to be more successful, go to Adwords-Hints.com/pay-per-click. Find tools for keyword analyzing, lowering costs and increasing click throughs. http://tinyurl.com/5nb46

Story two. One web-savvy friend used ppc ads in Google for a set of how to video for building a motorcycle, then a race car. Her sales were affiliate ones. At first, she invested $4000 and got back $7000 one month, but when more competition entered the field, her sales were not high enough for her efforts.

Story three One health author put a short ad in Google for a diet to heal a specific disease and her solutions. She said she sold 4,000 books within months that only cost her $400 in ads. Her ad led straight to her book's sales letter.

This success story shows that if your book is narrow enough in its focus, you may want to try ads because there won't be any competition, but if you have a general personal growth or business book, you will have to pay too much per key word to make any real money.

Story four. Although I already was successful with internet promotion, I thought I should try the Overture pay per click program. My web master helped me and charged me about $350. She did take care of the changes for a while, but then I had to do it myself. Using www.goodkeywords.com helped a bit. The less expensive key words didn't work, and the more expensive cost too much. After losing around $800 I let go.

You may want to learn the lesson yourself, or you may want to invest far less money in ongoing internet promotion that is already tried and true over many years.

Judy Cullins ©2005 All Rights Reserved.

Judy Cullins, 20-year Book and Internet Marketing Coach works with small business people who want to make a difference in people's lives, build their credibility and clients, and make a consistent life-long income. Author of 10 eBooks including "Write your eBook Fast," "The Fast and Cheap Way to Explode Targeted Web Traffic," and "Create your Web Site With Marketing Pizzazz," she offers free help through her 2 monthly ezines, "The BookCoach Says..." and "Business Tip of the Month" at http://www.bookcoaching.com/opt-in.shtml and over 165 free articles. Email her at mailto:Judy@bookcoaching.com.