New PPC Marketers Must Overcome These Challenges… October 21, 2007
Posted by Andrew Wee in : PayPerClick - PPC , trackbackAs I’m working with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta on our Super Affiliate Accelerator project, I’ve stumbled on a number of challenges that new PPC marketers are going to face, and have developed some workarounds for them. Plus new PPC marketers can get free AdWords traffic too.
Which PPC Ebook Should I Buy?
The first challenge, PPC marketers will face is the plethora of PPC ebooks (primarily focused on AdWords) out there. There’s a large number of PPC-focused forums and affiliate marketing forums with large PPC sub-sections.
So which do you choose?
Before buying anything, I’d suggest time checking out the AdWords Help Center and reading the Inside AdWords blog. (They’re both FREE).
As you know, I buy just about every Internet marketing product out there and a number of AdWords “Insider” ebooks merely rehash the content contained with the Help Center.
So save your $47 (use it for your PPC costs instead) and check out the resources, the Google AdWords team has provided for free…
Can I Test Google AdWords For Free?
If you’re new to using paid traffic, you might have a slight phobia as I did (as I’ve been using free social traffic generation methods to bring traffic to my sites). But here’s a way to get free adwords traffic.
There’s a number of free AdWords coupons out there (so you can have a free PPC trial if you choose to).
You can google for “$25 AdWords Coupon”, “$35 AdWords coupon”, “$50 AdWords coupon” and “$100 AdWords coupon” (which seems to be the denomination that these coupons come in).
They aren’t always available though, but your web hosting account normally comes with some credits.
Ok, The Traffic Has Come In. But Not The Profits!
Now here’s the challenge for new PPC marketers:
- Not bidding on enough keywords: It’s great to have a precision, sniper-like approach to PPC, trying to aim for the 5-10 successful sales-converting keyphrases when you’re starting out. But you’re unlikely to know what they are unless you test sufficiently.
- Bidding on too many keywords: I applied a number of Amit’s techniques and generated a keyword list containing 2,000 keyphrases. As I sorted them out, I realized that I put in a number of terms which might not convert, so I had to go back and remove them. But then I’d created other problems for myself…
One key realization that PPC Super Affiliates are using (and that I’m starting to get a handle on) is to have a detailed game plan in mind. Among the points, your “PPC business plan” needs to contain:
- What type of traffic you’re planning to attract
- What specific keywords and keyphrases will attract that traffic profile
- The ads which will get them to click
- What action they’re supposed to take once they’ve clicked to your site
- What will motivate them to take the action
- How to create an incentive or motivate them to come back again (so your lead generation cost for the 2nd and subsequent visit is marginal or cost nothing)
As you can see, the strategy is more important than the action in any PPC Campaign.
The problem is that most new PPC marketers will logon to AdWords and “figure things out”, typing whatever comes to mind, rather than have a set plan.
That’s just like going to war without a game plan and shooting at anything that moves…Good luck…
If you engage in pointless actions, like submitting a 50,000 keyword list which is irrelevant and untargeted to your traffic, it WILL NOT convert, even if you’re paying $0.01 per click.
Having a game plan is very essential or having someone show you their game plan is critical to your success.
Having worked with Amit on a marketing campaign recently, which generated more than 700% ROI on our PPC spend, it’s very clear that our Super Affiliate Accelerator project is going to yield some interesting results.
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Hi Andrew,
Great Post! As a veteran at ppc I often forget the hurdles and the pitfalls I faced when I started out. Just launching a ppc campaign is a complex process and need proper planning.
After launching 100s of campaigns you forget how intimidating this process can be for a newbie! Over the years my brain has become wired to do this stuff, through trial and error, and repetition.
Sincerely,
Amit
Hey guys I just signed up for SSA. I listened to the first 3 Mp3s. I thought they were great. The part about the Mindset was awesome! Definitely enlightening. I appreciate you going through it throughly and step by step.
It would be awesome if you guys made the other stuff available faster.
I would definitely recommend this program to all the beginner affiliate marketer
One overlooked resource with tons of useful (albeit biased) info is the AdWords Learning Center - both text and multimedia lessons. New advertisers should also start out with content network turned off. Google doesn’t make it obvious, though, that this campaign-level setting is on, by default. Anyway, Learning Center is here:
http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/
Yep, it’s linked from the Help Center.
Google’s resources are geared towards helping you with the technical issues.
For improving your marketing smarts, you’d need to look elsewhere.
There are another challenges that most of us have to overcome - The Cost of PPC is getting higher and higher. So eventually more and more newbies will have to bid on expensive keywords and also it will be getting harder and harder to select your own targeted keywords
For Google adwords voucher, I made a list of where you can get not just only Adwords vouchers but also others well-known PPC engines:
http://www.googlelady.com/431/free-advertising-vouchers-credits/
Hi,
Great tips on internet marketing.
You Know…Making money on the internet isn’t really that hard, you just have to find a niche and find a way to work everything.