Your Advertising Plan

Advertising is a huge market - and there’s a dizzying array of ways you can post adverts. So instead of discussing all of them, we’re going to outline and explain some of the best ways to advertise as a beginner.

By and large the single easiest way you’ll ever find to advertise your site is PPC.

Pay per click is a means of advertising on sites, leveraging a network, to spread your links to sites that ‘match’ the keywords that the sites are using.
This matching is done automatically by the search engines - and takes all of the hard work out of reaching niches you may have overlooked.

This works well, because they are easy to set up, and instead of paying a huge amount for possibly no return, you are charged each time someone clicks on your advertisement and visits your website, and not a cent more. Its completely targeted, as long as you’ve set up your ads correctly, and allows people to ‘pre-qualify’ themselves to your offer.

PPC search engines and networks.

The three main search engines - yahoo, MSN and Google - each have their own PPC search engine. Whilst each is separate, and reaches different groups - Google’s advertiser network is, by far, one of the largest in existence.

But before choosing Google, you might want to investigate the others - there is no harm in splitting your PPC budget and choosing a primary PPC search engine and then using another one as your secondary PPC is a very savvy way of using your budget and ensuring you’re using it in a wide array of places.

PPC search engines are almost completely hands off once you’ve set them up - you don’t need to work on them every day, and once you’ve set everything up you can basically leave it alone - its not something that NEEDS work to keep it ticking over.

The downside to this is its easy to forget to tweak it - and while you’ll probably want to leave well alone, you need to monitor what your account is doing - and make sure its worth your investment.

Choosing your PPC venue

One of the biggest PPC based decisions you’ll probably make is whether to go with Google, Yahoo, or MSN for your pay per click campaigns. Each network has its plusses and minuses, depending on who you talk to. And best of all, once you’ve explored one PPC venue, you’ll know your way around most all of them.

Ultimately, your choice won’t even be based on niche, as its pretty fair to say that every search engine will reach every niche at some point. So you should base your choice on the general costs involved - creating an account with each and seeing where your budget would be cheapest overall works well for most people.

Choosing your budget.

Budgeting for PPC is actually really easy. You set your monthly ’spend’ and then start looking at how those keywords

Pay per click - or Cost per Click budgets are simply calculated by the amount per click something costs, multiplied by the amount of clicks that you’ve had on your account. So by setting a budget you’ll be able to dictate the amount of clicks you’re going to get with ease - and estimate, roughly how much traffic you’ll get.

As for deciding on your budget - when starting out, its important to remember that you’re probably going to be investing into your budget and may not make your money back. Though there are lots of systems out there that claim you can generate traffic via low paying keywords and use the higher paying ones on your own page, its important to remember that this takes a fair amount of skill and though you should always look for ways to lower your PPC budget, whilst generating the same amount of traffic, you should always err on the side of caution.

Google is a hugely successful corporation, that doesn’t just own search engines, but for the sake of the e book, we’re going to focus on Adwords.

Choosing keywords

Remember your first worksheet? You wrote some keywords down in there (with any luck!) and these keywords are ideal for the basis of your PPC campaign. You should also brainstorm more keywords, and write them down - keywords are great for all manner of things from articles to blogs.

The primary word in your Adwords campaign SHOULD, without a doubt, be your primary keyword from your site. You can build your campaigns around one of your five primary keywords, and build several campaigns that you can activate and deactivate based on your budget and performance. Remember to generate keywords using the keyword suggestion tool - that way, you’re getting a broad canvassing around all of the subjects and secondary keywords relating to your project.

Your keyword should also appear in your headline. That way, people know exactly what you’re offering - there’s no exception to this, and it will increase your click through chances considerably. You shouldn’t ‘waste’ words either - refine your message, cut the superfluous words and ensure that you’re writing strong, solid adverts by removing anything that is considered ‘descriptive’.

Words like ‘fabulous’, ‘amazing’ and other similar adjectives will waste space, and should only be used IF you need padding.

You should probably try to focus your ads on selling - using them for squeeze pages may attract extra sign ups, but if you’ve got a very limited budget, you’ll want to focus on making money back from your click throughs.

You can design your campaign based on your competitors ads - to find them, search for your keywords and see what pops up. You’ll be able to evaluate your competition too at this point, and see what they are doing and see what you can do to duplicate their success.

PPC advertising is a cross between art and science and many companies and sites exist to make sure you’re doing the right thing, and help you to do so. They may charge, or you might be able to read up for free, but PPC campaigns are something that you should consider as learning over the same amount of time as SEO. You’ll always want to keep honing your skills.

Adsense arbitrage versus paying for it all

The actual act of Adense arbitrage is simple. Find low paying keywords in your niche - and convert that traffic to your site, which, in turn you ‘flip’ into paying traffic. In theory, its easy - you can either use a lower cost PPC network to convert the traffic to your site and then either set it up so they can click on more PPC ads - or to sell to them via affiliate links or direct from you.

In practice understanding what clicks will ‘flip’ and which will ‘flop’ is a very hard thing to do. So paying for your adsense clicks is by far the easiest way to handle your campaign.

Flipping is also causing problems for accounts, and there are many unethical marketers trying to take advantage of people looking for ways to make money from adsense. And those people teaching adsense arbitrage are slowly finding that Google will squeeze them back out of the market - but the methodology behind it is solid.

If you are buying traffic anyway, there’s no harm in also running Adwords campaigns on your site to ‘recoup’. You just have to be aware that unless you’re really lucky you’ll probably find that you’re only recouping some of the money you invest, and should NOT rely on Arbitrage to create your advertising income.

Arbitrage, of course, isn’t as simple as finding low paying click areas, and ‘flipping’ them into higher paying sites - you’ve got to know how to play the ‘weaker’ or at least, considered weaker, areas of your sites niche and make sure that it feeds into a higher paying area, without cheating.

Your site would, of course, need to cover both the lower paid end of the spectrum, and the higher paid, to ensure that you’re completely ‘white hat’ in your search engine dealings, and finally, you have to keep an eye on the rules that Google, and other sites impose – sooner or later they will probably change this loop-hole, and of course, until then, others will probably start using it too, pushing up your ‘minimum’ bid per click.

In short, though adsense arbitrage and click flipping looks good on paper, it takes a lot of work and may actually end up costing you more money than other, cheaper means of traffic generation.