Before reviewing paid methods, you must understand the different models used when paying for customers:

CPA – Cost Per Action: You pay people that drive customers to you that take a desired action. The standard model here is a purchase where you pay through an affiliate program for customers that people send you. Don’t limit this method to affiliate programs, there are many other applications. You can pay people to send you visitors that sign up for your newsletter. A typical newsletter subscriber should be worth a minimum of $1 per month. Pay out $1 and you will be earning money on that new customer by the time next month comes.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand (Impressions): This is where you pay for banner or text ad placement and no matter how many clicks you get, you pay for how many times you ad is shown. Banner advertising disappeared for awhile, but it is very much alive and well. The key with this kind of advertising is to set it up where those that view your ad or image are given a reason to click on it. Whether you offer something for free or put decent enough sales copy to entice a viewer to take the action you want them to take, you have to put in the effort to get them to do what you want.

CPC – Cost Per Click: This is the standard method of advertising through Google, Yahoo, or MSN. You pay them when one of their visitors clicks on an ad you have placed with them. See the PPC section for more details on this specific method of getting new customers.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

The concept of pay per click advertising is simple. You bid on the keywords you want to rank for and you automatically appear based on the amount of the other bids for the same keyword. It’s an easy and automatic way of generating traffic to your website immediately. The key to doing this properly is to do keyword research. You can find tons of methods of doing this, including through the pay per click search engines you choose.

My secret website for this is www.spyfu.com. It gives you:

• Average Cost Per Click
• Current Adwords Ads
• Organic Results
• Categories
• Terms Others Buy With Your Main Term
• Related Terms and Concepts

With this you get to spy on your competition and see what is working for them!

Secret website – www.crazyegg.com – Analyzes where your clicks are on any page. Tells you what links were clicked on. This gives you a clear look into what customers are doing.

Secret PPC Success Strategies

Success with PPC is guaranteed when you focus on specific elements of your ads.

Keywords: People follow a routine when looking for products:

• Search for a single keyword.
• Search for 2 words.
• Search with brand names.
• Search for long tail terms (3 to 5 words).
• Buy!

What do you think you should focus on with your pay per click strategy?

Long terms! Use longer and more focused terms. Your conversion will be much higher and you will pay less per click.

Your Ad Copy: There are two specific areas to focus on with your ad copy.

First, you must use specific ads for every term you target. Using that term in your ad will increase click through rates.

Next, The ad itself MUST be attractive to a consumer. People know where paid listings are and normally don’t even look at them. This is a simple fact based on studies of where someone looks on their computer screen while using search engines. Test your copy, if it isn’t working – change it!

The next piece is your quality score. Having the terms that you are paying for on the landing page you are sending people to will reduce your cost per click. This must be organic and look natural, once your page becomes spammy, your potential customers will lose interest in you and what you’re doing.

Secret tip – There are two specific terms that will always attract buyers: Review and Bonus. Review applies to any niche, while bonus applies mostly to internet marketing specifically.

PPC Search Engines:

• https://adwords.google.com/
• http://www.overture.com/
• http://www.espotting.com/
• http://www.findwhat.com/
• http://listings.looksmart.com/
• http://www.kanoodle.com/ Sucks – Don’t bother!

What to Watch:

• Costs – Set a budget, otherwise you’ll end up with a $400 bill in a few days and at least as angry as the image above . All pay per click programs come with a budgeting tool, where you can limit the daily expense for your program.

• Click Fraud – The engines do their best to prevent charging you for competitors clicking on your ads. Your competitors will click on your ads to eliminate your daily budget and remove your ad. Once your budget is gone, your ad is gone, too! This moves their ad up and benefits them by costing you money.
• Companies – Depending on how competitive your keywords are, you may want to think about the non-mainstream companies. Google and Yahoo are great, but Exactseek is $4 per month with no click charges! You should only use alternatives with EXTREMELY competitive terms as they get a lot less visitors than the big dogs.

Banners and Buttons

I’ve heard from numerous different marketers that someone needs to see your offer 7 times before they even consider it. Banner advertising is the perfect way to take advantage of that. You have a nice looking graphic ad created and pay to have it posted on sites that have traffic that would be interested in what you have to offer.

Your banner should be created with your customer in mind and lure them in to find out more. Curiosity will get you new visitors and customers you may not have ever found. The more they see your ad the more likely they will become curious enough to visit your site for more information.

Your banner ads should be left in place for as long as you can afford to test them. If you get zero results from a banner ad that has gotten 10,000 impressions, then it’s time to think about not paying for that anymore. A simple 100 or 1,000 impressions isn’t enough to be sure that the right people have seen your ad.

Finding places to put your banners is not hard at all. Forums are a great place to pay for this type of advertising. Blogs can work extremely well, too. With blogs, be sure that it is content heavy and not filled with promotions of other products. When searching for sites in your niche that you can dominate, look to see if they have advertising and what types they have.

Create as many different types of banners. Common sizes include:

• 88 X 31
• 468 X 60
• 120 X 60
• 125 X 125
• 250 X 250
• 600 X 160

(measured in pixels)

Blog and RSS Feed Advertising

Paying people to review you or your products on their blogs can be an extremely effective way of promoting your website. Find a blog in your niche that gets a ton of visitors and look for an icon that offers paid reviews. Be sure to choose bloggers that have a solid reputation and don’t do a lot of reviews for others. The more objective their review, the better your product looks and the more sales you will make. Check out Reviewback to do free review exchanges.

Advertising in someone else’s RSS feed can be effective with the right feed. You need to be extremely cautious with this one as it has shown in testing to be very hard to track and get pretty dismal results. When picking a feed that you want to advertise in, be sure that you can find out how many users are subscribing to that specific feed. If they don’t have numbers for you, don’t bother! Find feed advertising sources here.

Contests

Having a contest can bring you in tons of qualified visitors. The goal of your contest is to ensure that anybody that may be interested in what you’re offering sees the contest and takes part if possible. To do this, do a press release, blog about it, and submit it to these sites:

• Contest Blogger
• Blog Contest
• Site Contest
• Beat Blog Contests
• The Prize Blog
• RevieWOW
• Disregard Me
• Contest Tracker
• Enter Now!
• The Contest Winner
• My Blog Contests
• My Blog Contest
• Blog Contests
• The Link Bait
• Contest Blog
• Contester

Be sure you get the most exposure possible for your contest. You want it to pay off, right?

Where you gain your exposure is completely up to you. If you have the time to do it, comment on high traffic blogs in your niche, write articles, pay for the upgrade on PRWeb and get it in front of as many eyeballs as you can.

Web Directories

We are not talking about getting listed in directories for SEO purposes, but traffic. When analyzing directories for traffic you must:

• ?Find Niche Directories: You need to search for your main keywords and phrases on the search engines to find high traffic sites that may be willing to add your site their directory. Most of these directories will want payment to show your website. Research these sites on Alexa and Google and only pay for the ones that will be worth your money.
• The Almighty Dmoz: Dmoz is extremely important because their directory fills Google’s. The results in their index also make up the results of hundreds of other directories. The problem with Dmoz is that the editors are finicky. They do what they want, when they want. It can take anywhere from 2 months to 2 years for your sites to be accepted into their index.
• ?My simple Dmoz recommendation: Submit your websites immediately to Dmoz when you buy the domain name. They won’t be looking at it any time soon, anyways. You simply have no way of making Dmoz editors take notice of you and your website. If you pester the editors, they will ignore your site for even longer. Be patient and they will get to it when they can.
• ?Paid Directories: To gain traffic, the paid directories are the only ones you should worry about. The higher the page rank of the directory, the higher traffic it should have. These do not need to be niche specific. Any high traffic directory will work just fine. You can find a complete list of directories, their page ranks, and recommendations about which are worth the money here.
• Format your directory submissions to lure in a customer. Treat it like a PPC ad and they will click on your listing.

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