Getting Started in PPC Campaigns

by Rainey Stricklin of PrideBucks.com

 

Pay-per-click traffic can be a bit of a game of hit or miss in the beginning, but can be a profitable tool once you work out the bugs. Creating a winning plan involves creating the right ad copy, selecting appropriate keywords, setting a good bid price and continually monitoring and adjusting everything until your find the money-making combination.

Creating Your Ad
Your first step will be to craft text ads that accurately capture the essence of the site you are advertising and attract the surfer to click and weeds out unqualified traffic. You want your ad to stand out from the others, especially if you’re bidding for a lower position in the top ten. Before you start writing your ad, make sure you review the guidelines of the PPC engine you are using to find out the character limits, content restrictions, etc. Here are a few tips:

Make sure that what you promise in your ad is actually delivered on the site you’re advertising. For example, if you advertise “10,000 free pictures” in your ad, but only 20 are offered in the tour, you may get a lot of costly clicks, but very few sales.

  • Incorporate your top keywords into your ad. For example, if you are promoting TrueTwinks.com on a PPC, make sure the word “twink” is in your ad. Even though your ad will come up when the surfer searches for the term, they’ll want to see exactly what they are looking for in the text.
  • Use a unique selling proposition. In other words, tell the surfer exactly why they should click on your ad over the others, in the shortest amount of space. Make sure you end your ad with a call to action, such as “Click Here for Hot Gay Twinks!”
  • Create several different ads, so as you go through the testing process, you’ll have others waiting in the wings . Try different focuses such as promoting video content, live feeds, chat programs, etc. Test out using words like “membership” to increase your conversion. Test, test, test until you find out what works best.

Picking Keywords

When picking your keywords, you want to keep three basic points in mind:

  • Relevance – You want to select keywords that are relevant to the site you are advertising. For example, if you are advertising CircleJerkBoys.com in your PPC campaign, you wouldn’t want to bid on the keyword “bear.” You may get an increase in traffic, but most likely, the surfer will hit the back button and you’ll never see them again.
  • Keyword Popularity – Once you’ve narrowed down some terms that are relevant to your site, try to get an idea of how often these terms are searched. If they are overly popular, you’ll drain your entire PPC account on this key word in a short amount of time. That is fine if you’re making a profit from it, but many PPC strategists feel that casting a wide net of a large amount of keywords purchased at a low bid price will be more effective. Dig deeper into your site to find keywords that are still relevant, but not too generic, such as “porn,” “gay,” and “sex,” for example.
  • Affordability – Depending on your budget and conversion ratio of the site you’re promoting, you’ll want to take into account how much you have to pay per click on your keywords to be in the top 10 positions. The less -popular but still relevant terms work well here, because you can usually get them at a lower bid price

TIP: Try using this keyword suggestion tool from Overture to get you started:
       http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Campaign Management

Once you’ve selected the site you’ll promote, created your ad and selected and bid on your keywords, your moment of truth has come. Set your ad free and see how she does. From here on out, your campaign will be constant testing and trial and error until you get everything working together to create a profitable result. Most PPC engines provide you with detailed statistic so make sure you take advantage of the data they offer and keep what’s working, get rid of what’s not, and keep trying new things.

Useful PPC Tools:


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