A Pay Per Click or PPC campaign can revolutionize your business. It can turn a business with slow or erratic sales into a busy bustling one, but only if you are prepared to spend some time and money setting up and managing your campaign.

Trade is vital for any business and in order to get trade, customers have to know that you exist. A fast way of getting your company name out there and noticed is by using PPC on the search engines. Basically the process is that you bid for keywords and key phrases associated with your products or services, so that when your ad is clicked, you will pay a fee to the search engine. It is vital therefore, that you choose your keywords and key phrases carefully, so do some research before hand otherwise you could be throwing good money away for no return. And that is what it is all about, getting a good return on what you are spending on advertising.

Setting up your PPC campaign begins with finding keywords and key phrases associated with your products or services. This important research will tell you what people are typing in and looking for on the engines. Do not choose very vague keywords or choose keywords and phrases which don’t really describe what you sell. For example, if you sell luxury hand made socks, it would be inappropriate to use keywords and phrases including things like cheap socks as the potential customers who are looking for cheap socks are very unlikely to purchase luxury socks and you will have spent money on clicks for nothing.

Make sure you have good copy for your adverts and that your website is kept up to date and that the copy on it is keyword rich. Your website must be easy to navigate and if you are selling online, easy to order from. Make things as easy for potential customers as possible, it is well known that if ordering is difficult or awkward people will just leave and go else where.

Set a sensible advertising budget and stick to it. You can usually set how much you wish to spend per day with the search engines and your adverts will be displayed until that sum has been spent. Avoid a ‘bidding war’ for keyword phrases, as this can deplete your budget very quickly. There are always others to go for. Watch how much you are spending and compare this amount with the sales made. This will also give you an idea of the return on investment or ROI, which is vital data for your budget management.

Make sure that your website works on all the popular browsers and that it is kept updated with news, blogs and articles. Know your products or services so that you can push these towards potential customers. Do not be afraid to terminate a campaign and set up another if it is not working for you. Also, change the copy in your adverts regularly so you can find which approach works the best. Spending time doing proper research and being flexible in your attitude to PPC will pay dividends and can really transform your business.

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Graham Baylis works for a SEM business called Serendipity Online Marketing, whose sole aim is to help businesses use the Internet to increase their sales. He spends a lot of time explaining to people just how to do it, sometimes not even charging for the wealth of information he provides. This article is one of his many offerings, see more at http://www.serendipity-online-marketing.co.uk

Many people wonder what all the fuss about Pay Per Click advertising is. Isn’t PPC a means of throwing good money after bad just to get a search engine ranking on the wrong side of the page? Doesn’t it leave you vulnerable to click fraud and big bills? Isn’t the Adwords interface a nightmare to understand making it too difficult to manage? Or… is PPC the new miracle of advertising?

Well, there’s and awful lot more to pay per click advertising and most of it is GOOD!

There’s really no point in setting up a new website and then sitting there hoping someone might stop by, it’ll be some time before anyone in the World Wide Web will even know you exist. This is where Adwords excels – the results can be immediate.

There’s no doubt about it, if you go head-first into Google’s Adwords with very little knowledge of how to set up and run a campaign, you can easily end up with very burnt fingers. Having said that, there are many extremely appealing reasons why you should consider including PPC as part of your advertising portfolio:

- Once you open your Google account and set up your campaign the search engine results are almost instant (unlike organic, free search engine rankings)

- Only pay a fee when a potential buyer/client makes a click

- Laser targeted ads focusing on just the right customer for your business

- Incredible tracking facilities to continually improve results

- Advanced and free keyword research tools provided by Google from within the campaign user interface

- Accurate daily budgeting

- Great testing possibilities for new products including geographical catchment areas and even product names

- Click fraud protection

- Great brand awareness

- Can be great a great complement to a successful SEO campaign

Many of the solid and worthy principles that apply to organic search engine optimization can now be applied to your PPC campaign with great effect. Google has definitely blurred the lines in an attempt to tidy things up and rid the PPC search results of junk websites, and in doing so they now expect the following:

- Relevant landing pages (where people land after clicking)

- Good, valuable, honest website content

- Well written relevant ads

- Proper multi-page websites

If these quality guidelines are not adhered to Google will quickly lower your quality score and up your click price. This can mean things get very difficult and expensive so it goes without saying that it makes obvious sense to do what Google says!

So to summarize,

Google’s Adwords pay per click advertising

really has masses to offer if run in the correct way. If it’s not run in the right way, things can get very costly indeed. If you have no idea what a ’split tested ad’ or a ‘negative broadmatch keyword’ is, you may need to do some serious studying on the subject first or employ the assistance of a professional PPC firm. Many work by the hour and can be very reasonable.

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The author is based in London, England and works in the website design industry. He successfully uses the services of SearchWatch, a UK PPC and SEO company for all his search engine marketing needs. SearchWatch can be found at: http://www.searchwatch.co.uk

I have written really complicated documents describing the difference between market research and keyword research. But it never fails to “blow my mind” that the following four Market Research questions seem to be the most helpful and the most controversial guidelines that I keep coming back to with my students.

These are the four questions you must ask if you are to determine well a niche market or niche product within your vertical market will succeed. If you can say “yes” four times than you might as well consider yourself rich. If you can only say yes two times or less, then you will be doing a lot of branding and indirect marketing as you climb you vertical market competition.

Your product or service is either a painkiller or a vitamin. If something is a vitamin, it is merely “nice to have.” When it is a painkiller, it is more like “I gotta have it now.A “painkiller” is more direct and will result in more direct (now!) sales while vitamins can be discussed and talked about and researched for weeks before a buying decision is made.

This is a great question given to me by my mentor Even Pagan who is one of the best lifestyle psychology marketers in the world. The purpose of this question is to get you to discover if there are existing “fanatics” and “addicts” in your market. These “niche enthusiasts” need to be obsessed with socializing and gossiping about your topic, product, service or theme. If you get a “yes” on this question you are in an excellent niche. An example of an irrational passion can be connected to collector’s items like Beanie Babies or Cabbage Patch dolls, but it is not limited to trends or fads. It may also be a group of “raving fans” such as the Apple computer user or Mother’s against drunk drivers. If there is a “cult” or a group of people who spend any part of their spare time discussing a topic, niche, or product, there is likely some sort of irrational passion driving the market.

This question drove me to create a software application that would provide an answer based on knowledge of the other three questions. We created Theme Zoom in order to reveal the number of searches around a topic, theme or keyword. More importantly I did not want the same old basic information provided by any old keyword tool- such as the number of queries and adwords clicks around a keyword. I also wanted the application to reveal the relevance of dozens of long tail keyword related to the larger market segment around a niche or keyword. This requires the use of “natural language processing” and inspired me to design a completely unique keyword tool. In order to adequately answer question number three, you need to look as several factors and keywords around a given topic in order to understand how popular and profitable a niche is.

You know you have hit an opportunistic niche when you see a huge demand or passionate cult-like interest around a topic, but very few products and purchasing options are available. This may seem obvious, but many entrepreneurs forget to look for competing products and services around a given niche, topic or theme.

This is done by simply typing the keyword (or keyword clusters) into the search engines or into applications such as Theme Zoom Krakken in order to look at the competing websites. It is a good idea to look at the products sold by these competing websites in order to make a better product.

If too many companies are offering products and services similar to the ones you are planning, then you need to take measures to improve and distinguish your unique selling proposition. If you are in the affiliate market, you may want to choose another niche or a unique angle. This will be especially true if you do not have superior SEO skills or online affiliate marketing skills than the bulk of the competition.

Asking these 4 million dollar marketing questions can save you hundreds of hours of wasted time and energy that come from barking up the wrong tree, or diving into a low-demand overpopulated niche market segment.

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Russell Wright is the co-creator of http://www.themezoom.com which is a natural language processing keyword research application.