Affiliate Classroom Blog

Pay Per Click - But Don’t Pay Too Much

Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 11:19 am by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

Pay Per Click advertising has been touted as the fastest way to get visitors to your site. And it is fast, but it can also be expensive if you do it wrong. 

The first thing you need to do after you open a Google or Yahoo! Search Marketing account is to set up your tracking codes.  These codes will help you determine how much of the traffic coming to your site is actually buying.  You can usually find these scripts in the Account Set-Up areas - they’re all ready to copy/paste into your transaction completion page. 

The second thing I do is to see which keywords are performing the best.  If there are some that are not performing, I do some keyword research.

Now, I know that there are programs like HitsLink and Indextools that will do this research for a small fee.  But, I also know that in the control panel of my web site there is a place that lists the keywords that were used to find my site. 

Don’t be afraid to go into your web site’s control panel! You need to get familiar with it because it is an easy way to track who is coming and going - and how they are finding you. 

Anyway, I go into my stats section of the control panel and use the AWStats reports and find the “Search Keywords” section.  Then I take a look at what words people used to get to my site. I almost always find keywords that I am not bidding on, and some I never thought of before. 

Now, here’s the most important part.  Because I never thought about those words before, I don’t know what other words might be related to them will bring traffic to my site.  And, here’s where Wordtracker comes in handy. 

Have you heard the saying “the money’s in the tail?”  It means that these little words have more words behind them that are just as important (and maybe more profitable), but will not cost me an arm and a leg to bid on. 

I’ll go into Wordtracker, look up my newly found keywords, and find more words that are related to them (I have found that Wordtracker will give me more results than any other program).  Then I go back to Yahoo! or Google Search, and add minimum bids on words that no one else is bidding on yet.

Even if you don’t want to examine your web stats, Wordtracker is a helpful tool to find words related to those that you are already bidding on too.

So, that’s how I get more traffic, for less cost – and you can too!

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