Maximizing Traffic While Minimizing Costs
by Ron Thibeault

The key to operating a web site is targeted and effective traffic. Nothing could be more important than to deliver visitors to your site who are truly interested in what you are selling.

One of the best options for this is to open up a number of pay per click accounts with a number of different companies. Getting free traffic is great but through prudent use of good pay per clicks you can drive targeted traffic for relatively low amounts of money.

The trick is to use the search engines that will deliver the best results for the most affordable price. Opening an account and being positioned number 40 because you are not willing to bid high in a particular engine accomplishes nothing. On the other hand, bidding $0.01 and being number 1 without traffic is just as useless.

The key is to balance the success of an engine to the bid amounts for the keywords you are looking for. For as little as $25 per search engine you can test the system out to determine whether it is a useful place to list or not. The advantage is that your money is not lost because you are only going to pay for actual visitors. If no one is searching for the terms you enter then you haven't lost a dime!

There are some tricks to using pay per clicks that you should know before you start however.

Getting the Most of Your Pay Per Clicks
Understanding the keyword game that is played on most pay per clicks is vital to succeeding in this game. There are a number of hints and helpers that you can use to be more successful:

1. Bid on Relevant Keywords
   The key to the pay per click search engines is that you want to receive targeted traffic that is interested in your product. For this reason alone you should strive to ensure that the keywords you bid on are, in fact, relevant to your product or service.

   The idea that you are paying for non-relevant traffic should be of a serious concern unless of course you can get those words for next to nothing. This is simply a matter of trying to balance the overall costs with the overall success. Besides, if you are paying $0.01 for a fringe term it means that you cannot bid as high for terms that might be perfectly relevant but more expensive.

2. Target Your Bids More
   The first rule of pay per click bidding is that the fewer the words in your bid the more expensive it is. For example, purchasing the word "homes" will cost you more than the term "California homes" or "San Diego homes".

   Though this rule is occasionally broken you can us it as your guideline to understanding how to bid. Make large lists of potential keywords that you can use such as "homes" and then try to narrow down that term as much as possible.

   The advantages of this are numerous. First, the traffic you get will be more targeted simply by virtue of your own targeting. Second, it will also save you money as each visitor will likely come at a lower cost. Third, you will find that your conversion rate of sales to visitors will likely increase because your traffic will be more attuned to your services.

   An example of this is if you are a San Diego realtor. Bidding on "homes" will get you traffic from people looking for "homes" everywhere; bidding on "San Diego homes" will get you the traffic that is targeted for your site perfectly. This means that the number of visitors might be less but your sales could actually increase significantly.

3. Review Your Bids Weekly
   One of the greatest problems occurs when people fail to understand where their traffic is coming from, where it is going and the pages that are used. The same holds true for pay per click services.

   Often what happens is that your bids are beaten by other parties or that the bids are higher than they need to be. In the first instance, you are not receiving traffic because your bids are too low. In the second you are paying more for your clicks than you have to. Importantly, both of these situations can be resolved simply by reviewing your accounts on a weekly basis.

4. Open Multiple Accounts
   Opening a number of bid per placement accounts is a great way to maximize your traffic. If you concentrate on just 1 or 2 of these engines you will not be receiving the best traffic possible. This is because each search engine has traffic demographics that are different.

   As such, by opening multiple accounts you will find that your traffic from each will be from different terms. This is perfectly natural but means that not opening up multiple accounts leaves you underexposed to potential visitors of value.

The key to pay per click search engines is to expose your site to a wide number through a targeted but large series of relevant terms. Clearly there is a cost to this but the cost is more than manageable if that traffic is converted to sales.

Ron Thibeault