PPC, or pay-per-click is exactly what it’s name implies. You pay for each click that goes to your site. There are pros and cons of using PPC, as there are for just about any other form of traffic generation.

How does PPC work? Basically with PPC, you bid either a specific amount or a range of amounts on specific keywords. When web surfers type in your desired keyword in a search engine, a link to your site will occur with their search results. Your placement in the list of advertisers is determined by the price you bid for the click. Generally, the highest bid goes in the highest spot; generally speaking the higher the spot, the more clicks you receive.

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PPC tip: Although the highest spot in the PPC rankings gets the most clicks, those clicks are often not the most profitable. Sometimes you are better off in 3^rd or 4^th place, paying less and getting higher quality (although fewer) clicks.

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The advantage to PPC is that you can generally generate large quantities of clicks in short periods of time, especially if you are willing to pay a little more for your clicks. This makes PPC ideal for testing campaigns. For example, you have just written a new squeeze page script, and are excited about it. You plan to use the new script with an ezine ad you have scheduled for next week in a publication that usually pulls a nice response rate. But you want to test the opt-in rate on your new squeeze page first.

In one day, given a reasonable budget, you can easily get 100 or a 1000 hits to your squeeze page, make adjustments, send traffic the next day, make final adjustments, and test it one last time. Presto! Your new squeeze page is ready for the ezine advertisement.

In some PPC campaigns, you have the option of rotating different URLs, so you can actually test as you go, testing 3 or 4 squeeze pages at one time, and then decide to use the most responsive one for your expensive ad.

The downside to PPC ads is that it is easy to get side tracked and keep adding more and more keywords that are less and less related to your topic, just because you want more clicks. Over time, your cost per click goes up, your revenue per lead goes down, and if you are not careful, you are very quickly losing money on your PPC campaign.

So the word to the wise here is, watch your PPC results very carefully. Unlike ezine advertising or article marketing or even a well-placed classified ad, PPC works every day, day in and day out. This is great, when it is profitable. But when it is not, you can spend more money faster than you realize it.

When an ezine ad breaks, you tend to get a huge spike in traffic, leads, and sales. Because it is a spike and it happens in a short, predictable period of time, you can easily and quickly assess the profitability of the ad and make a decision about running it again.

But with PPC, because it is ongoing, and there is steady traffic over a long period of time, it is easy to become complacent and simply accept that it is costing you $50 per day and not really making you that back.

So how do you manage PPC?

Just like any other form of advertising, you must have separate squeeze pages and auto responders at work. Now if you bid on 1000 words in a PPC campaign, you obviously don’t want 1000 different squeeze pages and auto responders. But I would recommend a few.

You can break them down according to types of keywords or the tightness of the targeting of the keywords.

So for example, if you have a dog supply web site, and you are building a list of people who buy do supplies, you would obviously have keywords like these:

Dog supplies

Dog food

Dog leashes

Dog training manuals

These words are relatively tightly targeted, and on topic. Perhaps you are quite successful at converting these types of keywords, and want more traffic. So you add keywords like these:

Pet supplies

Pet food

Pet leashes

Pet training manuals

These keywords, although they should include people who buy dog supplies, are less tightly targeted. Now, you will catch more dog people by adding these keywords in, simply because some people who are looking for dog supplies will not type in the dog supplies keyword, rather they will type in the pet supplies keyword. But you will also have goldfish, iguana, and cat people going to your page. Which is fine, as long as you are effectively monetizing the dog people who go to your site.

In this case, I would set up a separate squeeze page for the tightly targeted group of keywords, and a separate one for the less tightly targeted keywords. I would also set up a separate auto responder for each, so that I could track over time my income from each group.

Now, if you have a pet supplies web site, then I would do my tracking somewhat differently.

I might have a separate web squeeze page and auto responder for each of the categories of animals or products.

For example, I might have one squeeze page for dog keywords, another for cat keywords, and so on. Or you could have a squeeze page for each category or supplies, for example, one page for food, another for supplies, and another for training, manuals.

Keep in mind, your individual site, purpose, and structure is going to be different than many of the examples I provide. These examples are just that–examples. They are designed to give life to the principles and steps involved in list-building.

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