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Cheap Ways to Drive Site Traffic (06/30/2004)
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It's been a long time since I talked about two 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, 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 site for you. And the best part is, 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.
Using PPC Search Engines
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 site that sells woolen mittens. And you
want to rank No. 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 No. 1 spot in just minutes!
That's because all you have to do is see how much the person who has the
No. 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 No. 1 position.
There are three advantages to bidding on keywords in the pay-per-clicks:
1. You get effective advertising, because you only pay when someone actually
clicks through to your site.
2. Your listing will get posted quickly—anywhere from a few hours to a couple
of days at the most—meaning you can start profiting from increased traffic and
sales almost immediately.
3. In order to rank in the No. 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,
if you're not careful, you can lose a lot of money with your PPC advertising.
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 aren't specific enough to
attract the right audience.
Ensure that the sales process on your 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 site can't produce sales.
Make sure you calculate how much you can afford to bid on keywords to
guarantee you still turn a profit. To determine how much you can afford
to bid, you'll need to understand the value of each visitor to your site.
You can do this by determining the number of sales you'll get, the profit
you'll 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:
1. To determine your visitor conversion rate (that is, the percentage of
visitors who buy from you), calculate:
Number of unique visitors ÷ number of sales = visitor conversion rate
2. To calculate your net profit per sale, calculate:
(Gross revenue - total expenses) ÷ number of sales = net profit per sale
3. 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'll 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'll
generate profits.
The value of your visitors may also help you determine which PPC search
engines you'll use, as the minimum bid on keywords in some search engines
may be higher than in others.
Choosing the Right PPC 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 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. Google Adwords is also an excellent option,
though technically, it's not really a PPC search engine. Instead,
it's a "pay per position" ad model that's 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). So 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.
How do you go about finding the keywords 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 aren't being used by your competition. All you
have to do is enter your keyword, and WordTracker will check its 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. A free trial version of WordTracker is
available at www.marketingtips.com/wordtracker. There's also a more robust
paid version as well.
Using Affiliate Programs
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.
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 your affiliates send to your site, you pay them a commission.
Your affiliates send visitors to your site using banner ads, text links,
letters of referral, and other methods of promotion. Then you track these
visitors using special software. For every visitor who decides to buy,
you pay your affiliate a commission.
It's an extremely 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.
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 a commission for each sale made.
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, and so on 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.
How to Set Up and Manage Your Affiliate Program
In order to run a successful affiliate program, you need to be able to:
1. Create a separate account for each new affiliate.
2. Track each of their referred sales on each of your products they're promoting.
3. Calculate commissions based on referred sales.
A few years ago, there was no special software to track affiliate sales,
so the process was complicated and time-consuming. But today, you can use
software to automatically track which affiliate made which sale and exactly
how much you owe each of them. Tracking 10,000 affiliates is just as easy as
tracking one. Because there are a number of software programs available to
manage your affiliate program, you'll want to check out a few to see which
one would work best for you.
One that I really like is from AssocTRAC. It's an all-in-one affiliate
tracking program that costs a few hundred dollars and will give you an
easy and functional way to automate your affiliate program. Remember,
cheaper programs may be appealing, but they may lack the functionality
of tried and tested software.
Combining 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 this would drive up bidding costs and you'll wind up
actually competing for PPC 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 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' 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're surrounded by more links to your own site.
By using this strategy, you're 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 for your competitors' product—and
the more likely it is that a shopper is going to see your product and buy it.
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're your
business partners, working with you to market your product or service.
Competing with them for a top spot is counterproductive, especially
since your 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 PPC search engines, 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 goal should be to outbid your competition, not your affiliates,
for top placement in the PPC search engine results.
Final Thoughts
By themselves, 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, 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're 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.
-- Corey Rudl
Source: Entrepreneur.com
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