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Find Your PPC Niche

Written by: Paul Flintoft

Article Overview: How to get the best from internet marketing using the pay-per-click (ppc) method

Find Your PPC Niche

Pay per click (ppc) advertising can be costly. If you take the standard approach i.e. bidding for popular and competitive keywords, then you're open to high costs and potential click fraud. I know this from experience.

When done correctly, ppc advertising can be a great way of driving targeted traffic to your site, therefore creating more qualified leads. This is especially beneficial if you're selling high end or high margin products or services. It can also work well if you're promoting a business opportunity.

Google and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) are two popular ppc search engines that I use and several years of experience have taught me the following points for success:

1) Have a nice, well written website. It's great generating traffic, but if your site is poor quality / has poor copy, the traffic is wasted.

2) Brainstorm a list of keywords. Think 'what type of people do I want to attract and what kind of things might they type into the search engines?’

3) Think of variations on those keywords that are not so obvious. Examples could be, instead of 'local property' try 'cheap property in mytown' or instead of 'web design' try 'good value web design'. The list could be virtually unlimited.

4) Group your keywords into related groups.

5) Decide on your daily / weekly budget and start small.

6) If you’re going to bid for popular keywords, just switch them on for a certain part of the day, or a certain day of the week – don’t leave them running all the time otherwise your account will deplete very quickly and you’re more subject to click fraud. I call this strategy 'spiking'.

7) Add a conversion tracker to your site so you know which keywords are actually turning into sales / conversions.

8) Monitor your campaign and tweak as necessary.

Here are some pitfalls to avoid:

1) Don't bid for the most popular keywords - my rule of thumb is not to pay for than 50p (approx. $0.80) per click, certainly no more than 10% of your daily budget on one keyword/phrase.

2) Don't be tempted to spend more than you can afford.

3) Work out your ROI (return on investment). Does the change in sales / business justify the cost on ppc advertising?

4) Give it time and monitor your stats every month.

As more people start to use ppc search engines to promote their business, then it will become more important to find niche keywords. Play it smart and it will be an important and successful part of your marketing campaign.

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