How Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing works

Sunday Dec 27, 2009

Before we go into the way Pay Per Click (PPC) works in the web advertisement world, let us understand what PPC is.

PPC is a model which is used for Internet marketing. It is a web advertising tool in which the payment is made to the host by the advertisers when their advertisement on the web receives a click. In the other case, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine and other Internet publishers when his advertisement receives one or more clicks which bring traffic to his website. This advertisement model is called Cost Per Click (CPC). As far as the search engines are concerned, keyword phrases become very important for advertisers to bid on, and these keyword phrases are more connected with the market that the PPC advertisers are targeting, which bring the visitors to the page displaying the advertisement.

PPC is a model which is called an affiliate model. This differs from the usual model of advertisements, where the intention of the advertisement is to drive traffic to the concerned website. PPC is an advertisement model which is placed on websites of several hosts, and this provides purchase opportunities for the surfers where-ever they may be surfing. PPC offers financial incentives to the advertiser’s affiliate partners in form of a percentage of the revenue earned. PPC is an accepted and popular model in affiliate programs. There are other programs other than PPC, and these include, banner exchange, revenue sharing programs, and others.

Surfers use keyword phrases in search engines to look for products or services they want to avail. When one of these keyword phrases matches the keyword list of an advertiser, the website having a relevant PPC advertisement is displayed to the visitor. These types of advertisements are termed as ’sponsored links’ or ’sponsored ads’, and are mostly found near or above the adjacent results produced by search engines. These advertisements may also appear in other places on the content page depending upon where the developer wishes to place them.

The Internet is browsed by millions of people looking for one thing or the other and this has set the growth in Internet marketing. Advertisement models are constantly evolving and PPC is one such model which has become very popular. There are several others using different kinds of models. However Pay Per Click Campaign (PPC) has become one of the best and effective way to market your products or services on the Internet.

PPC is a way in which you advertise your business on the web with your advertisement appearing on the top and side of search engine results. They also appear on the web pages of the network of advertisers, where the advertisements are displayed at appropriate places on the pages. When keyword phrases match that of the advertiser’s list of keywords, the visitors are brought to the page displaying the advertisement.

The three other largest network operators are, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCente, and they co-exist along with several PPC providers. All of the network operators work on the basis of a bid based advertisement model. There has been known click fraud in case of PPC advertisement models. However, Google and others have devised automated systems to prevent such frauds. The abuse of PPC advertisement model mostly comes from clicks by competitors or corrupt web developers.


An introduction to email marketing

Friday Dec 18, 2009

Marketing your products or services by email is one of the easiest ways you can let people know about your company. It is an affordable and effective way of making your products known and sold. Email marketing is one of the most common online marketing tactics producing the intended result. It lets you build a relationship with your customers, members, and your prospects through personalised and relevant email communication.

Well drafted personalised emails, which are relevant to your products or services, increase your sales. You can improve on your investment much more when you grow your opt-in email list. Email marketing is affordable, and it is the best way to attract the attention of the people, build desire, which helps to generate sales to a great extent.

The technology today provides you to combine the best industry practices in email marketing, allowing you to personalise your emails and include relevant information on the body of the email or as an attachment and send the right type of message to the right person, at the right time. Email marketing develops business between real people encouraged by relationships based on value, trust and faith.

You can start to market your products or services by sending off emails anytime you want. All you need to know is that, your email has to convey the right type of message to the right person, and should be able to convey the right intention which would help in building loyalty and trust with your prospective customers. This way you can have a database with the names of your customers and your prospects, create and automate email campaigns and send them to the relevant persons, there-by improving on email delivery timings, boosting your response ratio and drive your sales.

As your customer database grows, you would be looking to broadcast your email to hundreds and thousands of your customers. Emails for broadcasting should be written with the thought that the email is from one person to the other. It should not be of the type of an advertisement, and rather be like a letter from one individual to another. Email broadcasts need to be different from the ones usually sent out individually for marketing campaigns. Ideally your email should -

  • Get your customers to open the email.
  • Introduce the email well enough to make the recipient take interest in what you are offering.
  • There should be motivation in what you present.
  • The contents of your email should be able to drive your customer to click on your link.
  • The subject line should be effective so that the recipient takes interest to open your email.

Email is used at all times in present days. It is also a very powerful marketing tool which is especially used as a form of online direct marketing, promotion of your products and services, e-Newsletters, online surveys, and many more. Email marketing is affordable and effective, and it is one of the very few marketing tool that has wide market reach, being cost-effective and not to mention the speed at which it reaches your customers.


Why Search Engine Optimisation is so important?

Thursday Dec 10, 2009

search-engine-optimisationWhen-ever you venture into Internet marketing or think about putting up your business on the web, it is not worth if your WebPages are not ranked within the first three or four of the first page of Google or any other search engine search results. When I started with my website, I had to know about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and just knowing did not help. To get my site exposed to that level of being noticed, I had to learn the SEO techniques and as I gathered the experience from the results I achieved, I found my website having an excellent ranking by Google.

The Internet marketers use all kinds of marketing techniques to get a formidable ranking which gives them the advantage of having created for themselves a leading edge over other similar Internet marketers. There are various marketing techniques used. However, the most important is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which forms the basic foundation in driving more and more traffic to your website. You need to have your business known to people, and SEO, if done correctly, provides you the automated way in getting traffic to your website. The important thing about doing SEO correctly is to research for correct keywords that you need to use. This needs your effort in spending time to find the keyword phrases and use them with the other known marketing techniques.

You need to learn SEO techniques only once, and as you gather the experience and get to understand the technique better, you should be able to apply the knowledge to all your future website designs. The main thing is selecting the proper keywords and keyword phrases for each of the websites you design which affects greatly the traffic driven to your sites. In order to succeed as an Internet marketer you would need to learn the other techniques involved, but SEO remains as the most important technique which can have your website exposed to the people looking for whatever you are trying to sell.

The intention in marketing your products, services, and anything else is to earn money, and more correctly you apply the concepts of SEO techniques and have traffic driven to your website, you stand a better chance to promote your business. There are tools like Google Adwords Tool which helps immensely to search for the right key phrases. There are several free stuffs available for SEO experts for proper handling of your advertising techniques, and when you combine these with the techniques for advanced marketing methods you get the results that you want.

SEO is vital to your Internet business since the traffic driven to your website is mainly through search engines. In order to gain the leading edge over your competitors, SEO plays a vital part in designing your website, and it is virtually the only way you could get a decent ranking in search results obtained through Google or like search engines. Search Engine optimisation techniques applied correctly to your website makes all the difference between high traffic frequency and being lost amidst the numerous other businesses.