Pay Per Click Ads And Your Home Based Business

I am not going to lead you astray and say go put ads here or do articles and blogs when I am sitting here doing pay per click ads under keywords in our target market, I am not going to do that. I teach you what I do myself, because it works. Everything that I do I will show you. I have lots more, tons more to show you than what is in our members area right now. We constantly add to our program. We will add a video series to the powerhouse marketing system, but the main level that we will be adding things to is the higher level product package in our company.

That is our premium package. That is the package that people, if they want to, can take their business to the next level, they can get that. That is a package deal. You get the lower and higher level package for the higher level package price. And not only that, you will get all the future updates as a product owner that is paid to the higher level which we will be adding things to as we go along.

Now, the videos that we have in there, they will never be able to be downloaded. The only people able to get into that area are the people who are the paid members. Why are we not going to make downloadable videos, because we know that they will be passed around the internet really fast. And people will use them to train their down lines in their home based business and whatever else they will do with them really fast. And they will never pay a dime for it. We like to help people, but I believe, as a responsible business owner that you should pay for things that are worth the money.

These videos and the ebooks that are written are worth it because it enables people to make thousands and thousands of dollars, it enables people to do something that they have never been able to do before. It enables people who are making thousands and thousands of dollars every month to make more money. It enables people to be in control of their life, because me personally, I have been there, worked a job, I have worked different jobs since I was twelve years old. I have done hard work.

Now, working for somebody else, I do not believe that is secure, because they can lay you off at anytime for any reason. If the company is having problems, the first thing that they are going to do is layoffs without changing anything in their problems. They will not change their marketing, without increasing sales, if they layoff people who they are paying out, it immediately brings them back up to the line or put them over the line of profit. So that leaves you, who is working for somebody else, not secure. And that is what I found out.

Not that I ever was laid off, but I have heard and seen many people get the shock of their lives after many, many years of working for a company. All of a sudden they are laid off. Retirement down the drain, everything in the company that they had invested was just gone. Not only that, if you have a boss or a manager who is out for you for some reason, if you do anything wrong, even personally in your personal life, you might have gone out with them or talked with them outside your job, or anything on the job, or anything where they are all of a sudden offended, or do not like you, your job is in their hands. They can make your life miserable and can get you fired.

I found this out, this never happened to me, but I found this out just recently. People that are over you will control your career, they control when you advance or when you do not advance. So you cannot just say well, I am going to go out and make, you are making fifteen dollars an hour now, I am going to go out and make twenty-five dollars an hour and that is what I am going to do. Well, you cannot, not unless that boss gives you that raise and nobody gives you that raise at all. I find it sad that government jobs and teacher jobs and things of this sort, get raises every years like one or two percent, twenty cents, thirty cents, thirty-five cents, they are lucky if they get fifty cents. I really think that is sad.

What Is Pay Per Click Marketing And How Can It Benefit My Business?

I could write a lot of pages, maybe even a book explaining what pay per click marketing is and what it can do for your business, but I will keep this short and to the point. Pay per click (ppc) marketing is an advertising platform in which you bid an amount of money that you are willing to pay for a click.

When a searcher does a search at Google all of the ads on the right side of the screen are ppc ads. Google calls them sponsored listings. When a surfer types in a keyword, the advertisers who have bid on that keyword have their ads displayed. When one of the ads is clicked by the surfer they are taken to the advertiser’s website. The advertiser is charged at maximum, the amount they’ve bid. Most of the time they are charged less than what they have bid. But they are never charged more than their maximum bid.

The bids can start at 1 cent and depending on the market and the ppc search engine, go up to $50 or more per click. When starting off I suggest bidding very low. Ten to fifteen cents per click or lower is a good start. The higher you bid the higher in the rankings your ad is shown therefore increasing your ad’s visibility and your potential visitors. The downside is bidding high can cost you a lot of money and in some cases bring you way over budget. Be very careful when bidding.

Bidding low might not get you as much traffic as bidding high but it will bring you traffic for much cheaper thus increasing your return of investment (ROI). One way to increase the amount of times your ad is shown (visibility) while bidding low, is to bid on a high volume of keywords. Some marketers bid on hundreds and up to hundreds of thousands of keywords.

This method will take some time. Putting together hundreds or thousands of keywords can be time consuming, but it is an effective strategy for getting quality traffic, without paying a lot of money. The more you work with the ppcs the faster you will get at putting together lists of keywords.

In case you’re not sure how to generate that many keywords there are many tools on the net that will help. Some are free and some charge money. One of the best free tools is offered by a company formerly named Overture, which has been bought out by Yahoo! This tool can be found here. http://inventory.overture.com

What can ppc marketing do for your business? Depending on your market, ppc marketing can be a great way to get quality traffic inexpensively, increasing your ROI and profit. It is also a great method for testing products because your ad can “go live” in as little as 15 minutes and up to 5 business days. Depending on which ppc search engine you use.

Advertising your business at free search engines a.k.a organic search engines can take weeks or even months for your website to be indexed in their directory. It can take a lot longer than that to get a decent ranking on your search terms. The more competitive the keywords you are trying to get listed, the harder it is to obtain a decent ranking. This is one reason why ppc search engines have a huge advantage over organic search engines.

I, as well as thousands of other marketers think the best two ppc search engines are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Google claims your ad can “go live” in 15 minutes but it usually takes a couple of hours. This is really fast. Yahoo! Usually takes a couple of days.

There are thousands of smaller ppc search engines. Some of them are good and some are not. Some will take your money but will not have many searchers. Google and Yahoo have hundreds of millions of searchers every day. If you think about using a smaller ppc do some research and find out what experiences other marketers have had. There are thousands of forums, newsletters, ezines and info sites dedicated to educating people about ppc marketing. You can learn a lot about Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and a lot of the smaller (2nd tier) ppc search engines at these places.

The Pay per Click Business Model and How It's Changing

There are currently many discussions in the webmaster forums on contextual advertising programs and the changes they are going through. Which program currently has the most ‘publisher friendly' terms of service? Which company values it's publisher's more? Which will pay me more? Which will be better in the long term...

And the most common, simple question: "Which one is best"?

Is there a solid answer to this question? Here are some of my thoughts on the subject.

The internet is an evolving creature by nature. It is not the same creature that it was ten years ago, or even ten days ago. It's ALWAYS changing. Every single day, hour, minute, and second, something new is added to it. Someone is uploading their own personal creation at this very moment, helping to forge the web's overall shape.

So if it's always changing, then to survive in it's environment we must be VERY flexible and evolve with it.

Why is this pertinent to PPC programs like Google's Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, and the truckload of other companies launching their versions? Because they know how the online world works, and have most likely planned their options far in advance. Most of these programs have a TOS (terms of service) that reflects it.

Let's take a deeper look.

In the Google Adsense TOS it clearly states:

"Google may at any time, in its sole discretion, terminate all or part of the Program, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate the participation of any Site in all or part of the Program for any reason."

Any reason? In my eyes that also translates to ‘no reason' or explanation. Nothing will be due to you should they terminate your relationship. They hold a royal flush, you didn't even get dealt a single card.

At this point there are lots of readers that are nodding their heads and thinking, "that's why I went with Yahoo Publisher's Network"…. If you are, you're in for a surprise.

In the YPN TOS it states their version:

Section 15.b "We may suspend or terminate our provision of Matched Ads to you at any time, with or without notice, for any reason or no reason, with or without regard for how well Your Site or Your RSS Feed is performing, the quality of user traffic coming from Your Site or Your RSS Feed, or any other factor, in Overture's sole discretion."

The list goes on and on and on. If you read the TOS of MOST affiliate programs available to website publishers you'll find similar clauses. Clauses that YOU AGREE TO simply by clicking a little checkbox during the signup stage.

But it goes deeper. Those TOS agreements usually share another component. Almost every one of them gives the company the right to change, add, or delete any part of the TOS at any time, usually without notice to you. They also can sell your account off to another company. They can do ANYTHING they want with the terms. It's YOUR responsibility to keep checking back to see if it's been updated or changed.

They hold all the power. The reason they maintain these rights from the first moment of your participation is that they are aware of the web's constantly changing nature. They are not able to foresee what terms will be necessary in the future. So their high paid lawyers are adding and changing those TOS agreements seemingly on a daily basis, in an effort to protect their company by any means necessary.

So is the "Made For Adsense -PPC" website model still a good business plan?

In the beginning of the Adsense-PPC business model, many people earned a lot of money by focusing on just contextual advertising promotion and building sites oriented to content that generated high paying clicks. It was a gold rush. In internet time standards a really long lasting one. One that has resulted in MILLIONS of websites built with only one goal, getting paid. A wild west style run for the mines.

But similar to the demise that eventually followed the discovery at Sutter's Mill, those people that are now running to get in on the PPC gold rush are lucky to find a flake or two for their efforts.

The search engines are now clogged with junk websites, zero content websites, circle jerks, redirects, scripts that generate content based on a search, etc. The mass amount of low quality has made the advertisers that foot the bill react, and they are jumping ship at record rates.

Forcing the PPC companies to exercise their right to change or terminate their agreement, falling back on that trusty TOS that you electronically signed. Many times esulting in termination and nonpayment for the website owner. If it's a company that doesn't have a strong TOS, then it might result in the company's demise, also leaving you without compensation.

So back to the original question… Which should I choose?

My advice to you is to diversify your business plan as much as possible. Build different revenue streams for your overall web income. If you don't want to expend the time and effort to build and maintain a portfolio of sites, then consider additional affiliate programs for the site you do own or plan to build. Incorporate different affiliate programs into your site.

I started in this business a long time ago, about ten years now. An eternity in the electronic world. But even when I started, one of my mentors was fond of saying that he would rather get 100 checks for two dollars than one check for $200. His reasoning was simple. If you focus on one company for your income, and for ANY reason it dries up, you're left with nothing. The rent doesn't get paid.

If you focus on building a multifaceted business plan though, you might just make it.

You might just survive this ever changing animal we call the web.