Maximise Your Profits from Pay Per Click Search Engines

By: Mal Keenan

Search engine optimization is the least costly way to drive traffic to your home based business. The problem is - it is usually time consuming to optimize your site for Google and the other top indexes.

One solution I use to drive traffic to my sites is Pay Per Click search engines. PPCSEs allow me to pay for targeted traffic and only pay if the visitors actually click through to my website. This is different from banner advertising where you pay for the amount of times your banner is shown whether the visitor clicks through or not.

Pay per click companies are a great way to send instant traffic to your website. You can literally have visitors clicking onto your site in less than an hour.

The idea is to add as many targeted keyword phrases to your pay per click account as possible. If you target 100s or even 1000s of longer keyword phrases, 4-5 words, rather than short 1-2 word terms then generally you will pay less for your traffic.

Many internet marketers use pay per click traffic to send visitors to sales pages to test the visitor to sale ratio before releasing their product to their customers and more established email lists.

Google adwords is one of the most popular and effective pay per click programs. The general rule is that the more visitors a search engine gets the more useful it is going to be for you to get visitors from. Another established PPC company is Yahoo Search Marketing. Personally, I have found the traffic from this engine is of much lower quality than Google traffic.

Pay per click search engines can also be used to send targeted traffic to your affiliate programs. Although, with Google you will need to set up a seperate landing page as this search engine will not allow you to link directly to affiliate links.

In order to profit from affiliate programs with PPCSEs you need to work out your visitor to sale ratio for each particular affiliate program.

For instance, if it take around 100 visitors at 10 cents per click to make one sale of a $37 product, the profit will be $27. If the affiliate program pays you 50% of each sale then you stand to make a profit of $13.50 for each $10 spent. This does not seem like a lot but if you repeat this across many different affiliate programs you can generate a full-time income from this internet marketing strategy alone.

The most inportant thing to remember when entering the Pay per click market is to keep a careful eye on your spending and tweak your keywords, costs per click and ppc ads accordingly.