iCan Marketing

I’ve dabbled here and there in pay per click (ppc) marketing over the past few years. I made a little money on selling Senseo coffee pots through amazon a couple of years ago, but I didn’t have the cash flow to offset my costs for three months while waiting for amazon to pay me.

Recently however I’ve dove head first into ppc marketing using ringtones now that I have the cash flow from my adsense earnings to support such an endeavor. Here are a few tips and some of the things I’ve learned about the nature of ppc marketing.

1) You must know exactly what you are doing to have a snow balls chance in hell of being successful. Knowing the ins and outs of Adwords is pre requisite before placing your first add. The easiest and most comprehensive way to get up to speed is to read Perry Marshall’s ebook. I can’t recommend it enough and it’s worth every penny plus some.

2) Expect to loose money during the first 2-4 weeks of testing. PPC marketing is a competitive industry and in order to find profitable keywords you will have to test many. Out of the keywords tested, you will find a subset of those that are profitable. It takes anywhere from 30-100 clicks to determine if a keyword is profitable (depending on the industry).

Not only do you have to get enough clicks, but you have to adjust bid prices to try and find a sweet spot (more on that in a sec) and that takes time and money. Once you’ve come to the conclusion that a keyword isn’t going to be profitable at any price, you remove it. Eventually you’ll have nothing but winners running.

3) A PPC campaign needs to age. What do I mean by this? Well, basically you aren’t going to be able to see the big picture in just one week. I’ve had keywords that started out looking great, then fizzle out and others that started slow but picked up steam. Your trying to discover trends over long periods of time. In some cases I’ve seen keywords do better the longer they’ve run.

4) Find your profitable keywords using adwords, then take those other networks like YPN and MSN.

5) Sometimes lowering a bid price will bring you more clicks and better conversions. I generally start a little high on my bids to get a decent CTR going then start adjusting the bid downwards if I’m not finding a good return on investment. To my surprise I found that by lowering my bid, I was getting more traffic and better conversions. I had read that spot 8 on adwords was a good, but never realized just how effective it could be.

The crux to any ppc campaign is testing. Test every variable possible. It’s hard work and the tendency is to take shortcuts or follow your instincts. That’s a mistake, you have to be diligent and disciplined.