Step 6. Pay Per Click Engines

OK lets get the snowball rolling!

Right, so we’ve got the site all nice and sticky, its been optimized for search engines and its been submitted to the major engines and automatically sent to FFA pages, now to give the little guy another push to get him going - But this time its going to cost a little!

We need to get the snowball on its way and kick start the journey down the hill.

So lets get going.

Regular search engines take months to get positions in and start bringing the traffic. The way to get traffic immediately from the search engines is to start dealing with the pay-per-click search engines such as Overture.com. (Other sites that are currently famous is Google Adwords, Google Adsense and www.miva.com)

Overture.com allows you to set up an account and then you only pay a set fee (almost in an auction model) for each visitor to your site. If you bid one penny per visitor, then you only have to pay a single penny for every visitor to your site. If you bid ten cents, you pay ten cents. If you have tested and can bid a dollar per visitor, then that is what you will pay - How much you pay for traffic is up to you.

There are now several hundred search engines following this model. Most of them don’t produce nearly as much traffic as Overture.com, but some of them can be used once you have proven the effectiveness of your keywords at Overture.com first.

The first step is deciding on which keywords to bid on and then how much to bid. Its a good idea to set aside a monthly amount for Overture.com and decide to budget for that amount. Its possible to set-up an account by making a deposit and then having automatic deductions up to a pre-determined monthly limit. When the account is exhausted of funds then the listing is removed from the engine until the next month.

Pay per click search engines are perfect vehicles for providing highly targeted traffic. You are paying only for a visitor who has an interest in your website which will be determined by the link headline and link description.

There is an optimum price which you should pay for every click through or visitor. This price will be determined by the average value of the visitor. This is why you need access to detailed website statistics as you will need to know the average number of daily visitors. Once you have this figure divide the average daily net profit received by the website and this will give the average value of each visitor.

As a rule of thumb a bid of 50% of the average value is a guideline for how much to bid for each keyword. Then it doesn’t matter how much you are spending - you are making profit. So just keep topping the account up as and when required.

There are lots of pay per click engines around at the moment

You can find them at: www.payperclicksearchengines.com

Google Adsense

With the knowledge from the previous article, now you know more about Google Adsense and Google Adwords. Let me tell you a strategy that could earn you unlimited profits from Google Adsense. A good web programmer can blend in Adsense nicely into the webpage that readers do not even feel that it is an advertisement. However, without traffic, that would render it completely useless. Now, where would the traffic come from? Blogging? SEO? Just by counting on SEO would not take you anywhere.

The trick is to be a traffic middleman. You have to combine Google Adwords to do this. Get quick, cheap and quality traffic to your website by purchasing keyword advertisements with Google Adwords or Yahoo. Bid on only the minimum of $0.05 to $0.10 or buying one of the top 3 positions on the small PPC search engine. When readers from the world wide web clicks on your advertisements, they will be taken to your web site that shows exactly the relevant information that they are searching about. Google will do a good job in analyzing to show the relevant advertisements in your page, so optimize your page content that you want readers that clicked on your advertisements to click onto your Adsense advertisements.

You will be paying pennies to obtain a visitor, a very small price to pay for traffic. By paying this small price, you can gain dollars with the Adsense advertisements on your page. Later in this article, I will show you a list of keywords that Google advertisers currently pay the most, per click.

You can bid $0.05 for a keyword and gain $0.50 for that back in your page. This is superb. There are hundreds of thousand of keywords that could literally be bidded cheaply on the smaller PPC programs as stated above this page. These keywords may be VERY expensive if you bidded on Google Adwords. The key is to survey the price of various keywords from the smaller sites and choose the larger programs (Adsense) as publisher.

EXAMPLE

I did a search on the price of keywords of “Search Engine Optimization” on Miva.com and found out that it costs $0.21 to bid for the first placing. I did a similar search in Google Adwords for the same keyword and found out that i costs a WHOPPING $7.00 for it. The same keyword, one at the price of $0.21 and the other, $7.00 per click. Now, tell me, is that a huge difference? The fact is larger programs have a higher bidding price if compared to the smaller ones.

The only program that tells you how much an advertiser is bidding on a keyword is Overture (Yahoo). However through experience and research, I found out that Google has quite the similar maximums. The have a look at the list of most paying keywords, click here. You might be surprised that some advertisers even bid more than $100 for a single click on a particular keyword. Do you see the potential now? A few pennies to exchange with at least 50% of $100?

WARNING : Google has very strict policies. Any wrong-doings will lead to a bad for life. Please do not overlook these policies. You can view the Terms And Conditions and the Program Policies here. A few quick pointers if you are too lazy to read all the small caps in the policies :

1) Never click on your own Adsense advertisements
2) Never put Adsense in a page with little or no contents
3) Never point and guide the reader to click the Adsense advertisements (eg. Click here)
4) You can only put “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements” above the Adsense snippets
5) No adult contents allowed

Pointers for your ads to blend into the page and to trigger relevant Google advertisements

1) Do not use borders around the Adsense advertisements. Make it look more like a part of your content
2) Use the same background colour for Adsense and your site page.
3) Put Advertisements within your content, thus to look like a link
4) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the page title
5) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the meta tags
6) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the the description tags
7) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the content several times, with at least 1 rendering it with “bold”
8) You should have a H1 and H2 heading tag on the page for the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” as well
9) Make a link back to the homepage with an anchor text of keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization”

NOTE : Sometimes getting contents are quite a hassle. You just can’t seem to find enough content to put into your website or you are too lazy to write, think and type contents into the website. Do not worry. This is not the end of the world. There are tons of sites that provides thousands of free articles and you are free to use it on your site. Here are some of those sites that you might be interested in:

Article City
GoArticles
Ezine Articles

Alternatively, you can use an automated tool to generate contents about the keywords that you input. Below are the sites that you can use:

The Article System
Article Bot
Traffic Equalizer

The most important factor is to find and create a page with Good Paying Keywords. The ones that is in the Excel sheet above. (I hope that you have successfully downloaded it). Another important thing to do is to bid variations of those keywords such as “biggest”, “cheapest”, “most affordable” and “cheapest”. Create lots of variations, again, be creative! The next thing is to send click-throughs to the page that you have just created and you would most probably get the advertisers that bidded $1-$100 for the top spots. You will also obtain a 20%-50% click through rate if you have followed my instructions earlier. Keep doing this for more and more keywords. Impressions and click through rates may be low, but you can do this with thousands of keywords. Let us imagine, if you get $1 out of each keyword, multiply with 1000 keywords per day. you would get an average of $30,000 per month! Now, how’s that. Keep increasing your max bid penny a bit at a time, until you reach your definition of “peak” profit rate.

NOTE : There is a danger of choosing high paying keywords to advertise to your site. Let us take for example of a $50 advertisement. It is an average that Google Adsense will pay around 50% of the revenue to you. In this case, you SHOULD be paid somewhere around $25. However, to protect the advertisers, if you own a fairly new site or your article does not really match what the advertiser is advertising, you could get lesser than the amount of what you should get. I would approximately guess that it would be somewhere arounf $15-$20. DO NOT PANIC. You could easily tweak your page content back to the original advertisement that was put on your page. For instance, if the advertisement is regarding to “Computer Software” and you are showing “Computer Repairs” on your site, you can easily tweak and add contents about computer software to match bank the advertisements. You would need to test alot of different keywords to choose which one is the most profitable to you.

For me, I would always prefer to stick to those of $1 to $2 advertisements and bid a less amount ($0.05-$0.10) in Miva.com and get a click through rate of 20% or so. For $1 i get 20 visitors. 20% of click through rates would give me somewhere around 4 clickers per $1. Now, 4 clickers would be doubling or tripling off what i invested. While I playing around with cheap and low-bidded keywords I have a few advantages:

1) I can play with thousands of those keywords
2) I can keep on testing and retesting as those keywords are CHEAP!
3) I can avoid the possibility of not getting full percentage if compared to high bidded keywords
4) I always get favourable percentages as these are the keywords that is not usually played with

Another way to attract clicks is to place pictures around the Adsense snippets. (Be careful not to put graphics such as “Click this” or something that resembles that). Here is an example:

sample Adsense

It’s also important to create a “channel” in your AdSense account for each of your domains. You can also create
sub-channels for different pages within each URL. This will enable you to track exactly which pages are earning you the most money.

Advanced Middleman Traffic Trick

Here is a simple trick that can be an alternative too for gaining profits from Adsense. This trick uses the technology of the search engine. Create a search engine for your site that returns a pre-populated searches for the smaller PPC search engines and make the first few results SPONSORED results from Google or SearchFeed.

The following is an illustration of what i was talking about:
http://www.uncoverthenet.com/search/?q=pay+per+clic

Now if UncovertheNet were to purchase the keyphrase “pay per click” on Miva or another small PPC search engine for say 10 cents, they would make sure their paid ad led people to the URL above. Now when visitors reach that page, they will see results for the same keyword they originally typed in, so they won’t likely understand what happened when they were shipped to UncovertheNet’s results. Now if they click on the sponsored ads at the top of UncovertheNet’s pre-populated page (which are from searchfeed), or the sponsored ads on the right (which are from Google), UncovertheNet will make 20 cents, 40 cents, or whatever the current rate is on Searchfeed and Google.

Basically you will be paying Miva or another PPC search engine to send people to your search engine that shows relevant results. And hopefully the visitors will click on your sponsored ads because:

1) What they are looking for are relevant
2) The advertisements are on the top-right. This place is the best placement for click throughs
3) They look like real results. Readers do not like advertisements. This serves a very good way to blend in

Now that you have harnessed the power of Google Adsense, i believe you can start a crusade on gaining profits from it. Our next stop, Google Adwords! Enjoy!

About Pay Per Click Programs

Here is how pay per click programs work. As a advertiser, you bid the price of the keywords you are willing to pay for visitors to come in. As a publisher, you receive the amount of bidded price less the charges by the program owner that supplies you with this facility. In short:

Advertisers : Bid on a specific keyword that he is willing to pay when a visitor clicks on to be directed to a specific site
Publishers : Receive profit less the amount charged by program owner when someone clicks on an advertisement from advertiser. The advertisement would be located at the publisher’s site

Here are a few giant sites for PPC:

THE BIG ONES
Google Adwords and Adsense
Yahoo (Formerly Overture)
Miva (Formerly Findwhat & Espotting)
Adbrite

THE SMALLER ONES
Search123
enHance
SearchFeed
GoClick
7Search
Findit-Quick
Looksmart
Kanoodle

For Google, Adwords is for advertisers and Adsense is for publishers. Google will split the earnings with the publishers which a specific advertisement is clicked. However, Google never reveals the percentage of the sharing with his publishers.

For example, let’s say you are the publisher and you site is about dogs. You would have to put a code snippet into your site as a publisher. Once you have done that, Google will place all the advertisement form the advertisers about dogs (dog care, types of dogs, dogs for sale etc). Let’s say a particular advertiser is paying $1.00 per click and Google shares 50% of the commission with you. You would be receiving $0.50 for that particular click. If you want to know more about Adsense, you can click here