Paid advertising - should you use it?

Hello again,

Is paid traffic worth it? Here are a few things to consider before you start shelling out the bucks to promote your website - whether you are promoting your affiliate site or your own product site.

First of all, how fast do you want to start making money? Most people say "are you crazy? Right now!" but hold off for a second. The majority of people do want fast cash, but believe me it's not that easy. The fastest way to make money online is to: 1) Pick a real "winner" right out of the gate 2) Use PPC (pay per click) or other paid advertising

Now I'm not saying that's hard, because there are lots of great products you can start making money from almost instantly. However you must do your research if you really want to make money using PPC! Many will tell you just find a few good keywords, create your ad(s), and start raking in the dough! Yeah, right.

The problem is, if it is a really good product chances are there is lots of competition! And you know what that means - the cost per click is going to be steep. Here's an example of what I mean: I use a website called www.keywordspy.com to check keyword prices for comparison. If you type in the search term "diet pill" you find that there are 14,900,000 results for the term and it costs about $2.33 per click on average! That's a very competitive market for sure. On the other hand if you type in the term "stamp collecting" you will find about 2,260,000 results and an average cost of .81 cents per click! The point is, you can really see a difference in costs depending on the relative popularity of a topic. So if you want to start promoting a really hot item, be prepared to pay the price up front. Of course, don't forget you can limit the daily amount you pay for you PPC campaign, using either Google or Yahoo. That way you don't break the bank before you start figuring out how to get sales.

So does that mean you can't or shouldn't do it? Of course not, it just means be very careful of the products you promote, and make sure if you do promote a hot product you do your keyword research very diligently before starting. That means finding the "long-tail" phrases that people are using to buy your product, not the 1 or 2 words they type into Google to research something, or lookup a school assignment project! This article is too brief to go into great detail, but there are plenty of tutorials for finding targeted keywords in your niche product. I suggest reading a bunch before shelling out the cash to PPC engines.

One of the other ways to do paid advertising is through banner ads, which has been making a bit of a come back of sorts lately. For awhile the "annoyance" factor, as well as the cost, of these ads drove people away. However you will find some pretty cost-effective sites that allow you to get quick traffic without spending a fortune. Some are a pay per view, so you would pay a dollar amount for every thousand impressions of your ad are shown. Most sites charge per click, just like the PPC model of Google, so if nobody clicks your ad you aren't charged. Again you have to weigh for yourself after some testing to decide whether your ROI is worth it - are you making a profit above what your ads are costing? If not, either you adjust your ad, show it on a different site with more appropriate content to your product, or move on.

No matter what type of paid advertising you use, you have to do testing to gauge the results. Create several ads, using different text, to which words cause people to click the most. This is crucial in any PPC campaign! Luckily this type of testing is made pretty easy in both Google and Yahoo, and you can create many ads to find out exactly which words work the best. In the mean time, don't forget to use "bum marketing" techniques that get traffic, too! It's the combination of free traffic and paid traffic that will eventually help you keep your costs down, and thus make more money.