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Three Cheap and Effective Ways to Drive Tons of Highly Targeted Traffic to Your
Web Site
It’s
been a long time since I talked about a couple of my favorite
Internet marketing strategies: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search
engines and Affiliate Programs. These are two of the best
tools you can use to bring hordes of people who are interested
in buying your product or service to your web site --
with little or no risk to your pocketbook.
PPC
search engines are great because once you’ve done your
homework and chosen the keywords people will use to find
you in the search engines (I’m going to show you how to
do this), it’s easy to attract visitors who are interested
in what you have to offer, often for just a few pennies.
And
Affiliate Programs are one of the best ways to get tons
of interested visitors to your site by having other people
do the legwork, promoting your web site for you. And the
best part is that there’s absolutely no risk to you because
you don’t pay a dime unless visitors referred by your
affiliates buy your product or service -- so you don’t
pay out commissions unless you already have cash in hand!
And
last but not least, after we take a closer look at these
strategies, I want to show you a really cool way to combine
these two techniques that I’d bet my left shoe you’ve
never thought of... ;-)
1. Using PPC Search Engines to Get Cheap Targeted Traffic
As
many of you may know, I’ve been a strong advocate of PPC
search engines for years. They remain one of the most
effective tools you can use to bring quick, cheap, targeted
traffic to your site.
True
to their name, with pay-per-click search engines you pay
a premium every time a visitor clicks on your link --
anything from a few cents to a few dollars.
For
example, let’s say you have a web site that sells woolen
mittens. And you want to rank #1 in the search engines
for the term "woolen mittens."
To
get a top-ten position in the free search engines, you’d
probably be looking at a few months (at least) of arduous
effort.
But
in the pay-per-clicks, you can grab the #1 spot in just
minutes! That’s because all you have to do is see how
much the person who has the #1 position is paying per
click, and simply outbid them by paying one penny more!
Then,
when your potential customer searches for the term "woolen
mittens," your link will show up as the first listing
on the search results page. And each time searchers click
on your link, you’ll pay however much you have bid for
that #1 position.
Determine your keyword bidding strategy
There
are three advantages to bidding on keywords in the pay-per-clicks:
You
get effective advertising, because you only pay when
someone actually clicks through to your web site.
Your
listing will get posted within a couple of hours to
a couple of days at the most, meaning you can start
profiting from increased traffic and sales almost
immediately.
In
order to rank in the #1 position, all you have to
do is outbid your competitors, which is usually only
a matter of a few pennies per click.
Done
right, pay-per-click advertising can be very profitable;
however, you can lose a lot of money with your PPC advertising
if you're not careful. Here are some tips to help you
ensure your campaigns are profitable:
Avoid
keywords that are too general. More general keywords
will attract a lot of traffic, driving up the cost
of your PPC campaign and converting few visitors to
sales because general search terms are not specific
enough to attract the right audience.
Ensure
that the sales process on your web site is converting
visitors to buyers before you launch a full-scale
PPC campaign. You don't want to be spending money
on getting the traffic if your web site can't produce
sales.
And
finally, make sure you calculate how much you can
afford to bid on keywords to guarantee that you still
turn a profit.
To
determine how much you can afford to bid on your keywords,
you will need to understand the value of each visitor
to your site. You can do this by determining the number of sales you will get, the profit you will earn
per sale, and the number of unique visitors your site
will receive during a set period of time. It’s generally
easiest to calculate these numbers on a monthly basis.
Here
are three easy steps that will help you determine the
value of each individual visitor to your site:
To
determine your visitor conversion rate (i.e., the
percentage of visitors who buy from you), calculate:
number of unique
visitors ÷ number of sales = visitor conversion rate
To
calculate your net profit per sale, calculate:
(gross revenue – total expenses) ÷ number of sales
= net profit per sale
To
determine the value of each of visitor to your site,
calculate:
net
profit per sale ÷ visitor conversion rate = individual
visitor value
Once
you understand the value of your visitors, you will be
able to set your maximum bid for keywords. For example,
you may determine that each individual visitor to your
site is worth 50 cents in pure profit. This means you
can afford to bid a maximum of 49 cents per click to guarantee
that you will generate profits.
The
value of your visitors may also help you determine which
PPC search engines you will use, as the minimum bid on
keywords in some search engines may be higher than in
others.
Choose
a pay-per-click search engine to use
Overture.com
is the largest and most far-reaching PPC search engine,
but its popularity has driven up the cost of advertising
with the company. The beauty of bidding on keywords in
Overture is that your web site will be listed not only
on Overture, but also at Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, CNN.com,
and InfoSpace, provided your bid is in the top three for
a particular keyword.
Other
good, cheap PPC search engines worth exploring include
Findwhat, 7Search, and Kanoodle.
Get
listed on the first page of Google
Google
Adwords is also an excellent option, though technically
it's not really a pay-per-click search engine. Instead,
it's a "pay-per-position" advertising model that is the
only way to get listed on the first page of Google without
fighting your way through the free listings.
Google
Adwords listings show up in colored boxes on the right-hand
side of Google's free search results, giving you tons
of great exposure.
With
Google Adwords, you bid on keywords for placement; however,
Google Adwords also lists ads by popularity (how many
clicks they get). You may be paying for placement, but
unless your link receives more click-throughs than your
competition's links, your listing may not appear in the
top spots of the search results.
Find
the keywords that your market is searching for
Start
by checking your web logs to see what keywords your visitors
searched for to arrive at your site (check with your web
host if you don’t have access to these statistics). These
will provide a good indication of what kinds of terms
your potential customers think of when they’re looking
for a product or service like yours.
You
may also want to consider using a service such as WordTracker,
which allows you to easily see which keywords are frequently
searched by your target market in the major search engines
-- but are not being used by your competition.
All
you have to do is enter your keyword, and WordTracker
will check its massive database to see how often people
are looking for that term, how many competing sites are
using that particular keyword, and how much they are bidding
in the PPC search engines.
A
tool like this will help you choose excellent keywords
to bid on. It will also allow you to view the bid price
of each keyword in separate PPC search engines, which
will help you decide whether the cost of bidding on the
keyword is in your ballpark or not.
For
example, WordTracker might display the following results
for the keywords "Atkins Diet" in Overture.com:
Keyword:
Atkins Diet
Bid Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Bid Price
$0.48
$0.38
$0.37
$0.35
$0.31
$0.30
$0.29
$0.28
As
you can see, if you wanted to be ranked #1 in the search
engine results for the keyword "Atkins Diet" in Overture,
you’d need to bid 49 cents. You
would also need a great sales process -- because at over
24,000 clicks in the last 30 days alone, this term would
cost you almost $12,000 a month to keep a top listing
at 49 cents a click!
A
free trial version of WordTracker is available at: www.marketingtips.com/wordtracker.
There is also a much more robust paid version as well.
Now
let’s shift our focus to an even more powerful tool that
I’ve used to grow my own business, and that I strongly
recommend as one of the key strategies you can use to
direct massive amounts of qualified traffic to your site...
without spending a dime up front!
2.
Using Affiliate Programs to Get Loads of Qualified Traffic
An
Affiliate Program (also referred to as a "Reseller" or
"Associate" Program) is a way to get other people to promote
your product or service. For every customer (not visitor)
that your "affiliates" send to your web site, you pay
them a commission.
Your
affiliates send visitors to your web site using banner
ads, text links, letters of referral, etc... and you track
these visitors using special software. For every visitor
who decides to buy, you pay your affiliate a commission
-- a percentage of the profits you make.
It’s
an extremely powerful, profitable way to grow your business
because:
It’s
a win-win partnership, so enlisting an army of affiliates
to promote your product is extremely easy. Your affiliates
get paid when they refer a paying customer to your
web site.
There
are no up-front advertising costs, because you only
pay your affiliates for advertising that gets you
sales. Whether they send 10 visitors a day to your
site or 10,000, you only pay them for the sale of
your product or service.
It’s
extremely low-risk. Setting up your own affiliate
program doesn’t cost much at all if you’re prepared
to do some work yourself.
You
can literally explode your online sales by enlisting
an army of affiliates to promote your product or service
for you.
Since
you know your product or service better than anyone else,
you’ll probably have an idea of how you want to promote
it. Providing your affiliates with banners, product images,
text links, etc. will allow them to get started promoting
your product or service faster and more effectively.
One
of the best strategies for motivating your affiliates
to promote your product or service is to pay them well
for their efforts. If the commissions you offer aren’t
attractive enough, your affiliates just won’t be motivated.
Additional
incentives, such as bonuses for a certain number of sales,
will motivate your best affiliates to actively promote
your site, putting in as much effort as possible to refer
sales on your behalf.
Set
up and manage your affiliate program
In
order to run a successful affiliate program, you need
to be able to:
Create
a separate account for each new affiliate
Track
each of their referred sales on each of your products
that they are promoting
Calculate
commissions based on referred sales
A
few years ago, there was no special software to do all
this. It was a complicated and time-consuming process
to track affiliate sales.
But
today, you can use software to automatically keep track
of which affiliate made which sale and exactly how much
you owe each affiliate. Tracking 10,000 affiliates is
just as easy as tracking one!
A
number of software programs are available to manage your
affiliate program, but you’ll want to check out a few
to see how easy they are to set up and use.
All-in-one
affiliate tracking software like AssocTRAC (www.assoctrac.com)
will cost a few hundred dollars and will give you an easy
and functional way to automate your affiliate program.
Remember that cheaper programs may be appealing at first,
but may lack the functionality of tried and tested software.
3.
How You Can Combine These Two Strategies for Even BIGGER
Profits!
Now
that you’ve had a "refresher course" on the power of PPC
search engines and affiliate programs, I want to show
you an extremely effective way to combine the two strategies
and boost the flow of targeted visitors to your site!
Here’s
all you do: Encourage your affiliates to try bidding on
your keywords to market your product or service in the
PPC search engines.
You
might think that this would drive up bidding costs, and
that you’ll wind up actually competing for pay-per-click
placement against people who are supposed to be working
for you. But the fact is, encouraging your affiliates
to bid on your keywords can help to get you a LOT more
exposure in the search results!
Think
about this: Typically, when searchers enter their search
term and your site appears in the results, your link will
be listed alongside links to other web sites... your
competitors' web sites.
Now
imagine you have a handful of affiliates using the same
keywords as you. People enter their search term and your
site appears in the results. But instead of being surrounded
by links to your competitors’ sites, you are surrounded
by more links to your OWN web site!
By
using this strategy, you are taking up valuable search
engine "real estate." Picture the search engines as a
strip mall, and the web site links as the storefronts
in the mall (also known as real estate). The more of these
storefronts you occupy with your product, the less space
there will be left for your competitors’ product -- and
the more likely it is that a shopper is going to see your
product and buy it.
You
may feel that some keywords should be yours and yours
alone -- like your company name -- and wish to include
a clause in the contract between you and your affiliate,
restricting them from using those keywords. It’s up to
you if you want to do this, but note that your affiliate
does not need your permission to bid on your company name
unless you’ve specifically asked them not to.
That
said, it really doesn't hurt to let your affiliates bid
on your company name in the pay-per-click search engines.
Whatever your affiliates are doing to get qualified traffic
to your site can only benefit you.
So
there’s no need to worry that your affiliates could outbid
you, or drive up the costs of your PPC advertising...
Because
the most important thing to remember about your affiliates
is that they are your teammates or business partners,
working with you to market your product or service. Competing
with them for the top spot is counterproductive, especially
since the goal is to occupy as much of the search engine
results page as you can with links to your site.
If
your affiliates are taking the initiative to advertise
on your behalf in the pay-per-clicks, don’t waste your
money outbidding them. Instead, check to see how much
your competitors are bidding on keywords and spend your
time and money keeping ahead of them. Your campaign should
be aimed at outbidding your competition, not your affiliates,
for top placement in the PPC search engine results.
You
may want to consider actively encouraging your affiliates
to try PPC advertising! If you decide to do this, you
might want to provide them with a few tips and strategies
on how they can use the PPCs to their advantage -- because,
in the end, this will be to your advantage, too.
4.
Final Thoughts
By
themselves, both PPC search engines and affiliate programs
are hugely effective ways to draw a paying crowd to your
site. They are two of the most powerful traffic-generation
techniques on the Internet today, and the real beauty
of them both is that they will cost you next to nothing.
Once
your affiliate program is up and running -- and automated
with software like AssocTRAC -- you won’t have to spend
any time or money at all. As your affiliates promote your
products for you, your software tracks their sales for
you, and it makes sure they are only scheduled to be paid
after a sale is made.
It’s
one of the smartest marketing strategies you can use.
And
I feel just as strongly about using pay-per-click search
engines -- particularly if you are a small business owner
going after a niche market on the ‘Net. Pay-per-clicks
are the fastest way to get your product in front of your
exact target audience so you can see immediate results.
And, by keeping a close eye on your return on investment
for each keyword you bid on, you can ensure that your
pay-per-click campaigns are always enormously profitable.
By
combining these two powerful strategies to maximize your
coverage in the pay-per-click listings, you can dominate
your market space swiftly and effectively. Having your
affiliates join you in the pay-per-clicks is really only
a natural extension of both affiliate programs and PPC
advertising, but it’s a technique that doesn’t get taken
advantage of often enough.
There
are lots of online resources to help you get started with
your affiliate program or PPC campaign. One of the best
is the "Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on
the Internet -- Version 2004" course, where you’ll find
detailed descriptions of how you can profit with these
proven strategies.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: Corey Rudl is the owner of four highly
successful online businesses that attract more than 1.8
million visitors per month and generate over $6.6 million
each year. He is also the author of the #1 best-selling
Internet Marketing course online.
To
Find Out How To Market Your Business
Online CLICK
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