If you have a particular interesting in making search engine company investors extremely happy by paying endless amounts of money to the search engines companies, then Pay Per Click (PPC) can be a great way to go.

Just joking guys, PPC is one of the staples in relation to web traffic on the Internet and is a very quick and easy way to get visitors to your site (though you do need to take care that you watch the amount you spend, and set daily limits, etc).

For those readers who are not familiar with PPC, essentially it’s the process whereby the search engines will present your short ad to people using the search engine (on the results page when the results of the users search are displayed).

Usually the ads are shown to the right hand side of the page, but in any event they are usually shown separate from the “normal” search engine results.

You pay for each click a user makes on your ad (no clicks means you have nothing to pay). Usually your ad when clicked would navigate to your website, but sometimes it may be to an affiliates website if you are selling other peoples products.

So in one sense, only paying per click is a good thing, because in theory people clicking your ad have some interest in your product or service, so they come to your website more qualified that a person who may just have happened to surf by.

You really need to spend time thinking about what phrases people would use to get to your website.

You don’t want to be taking chances with this. You don’t want to assume you know which keyword phrases are used by people wanting your websites (or more correctly, the keyword phrases people are using to find solutions to the particular problem they are trying to solve). We really want to know for sure that the keyword phrases we use are correct for your particular market.

In fact I am constantly surprised by some of the phrases people use when searching. Spelling mistakes are common, abbreviations are often used, punctuation can be used inappropriately, etc. The good news is that there are a number of things you can do here.

Firstly you could do some experimentation with the search engines yourself and use all the keyword phrases you think should be used to find products in your niche. Just go to the search engine and type them in and take a look at the results. Are the sites that are returned relevant to your niche?

In other words if you positioned yourself in that area would people searching in those categories find your websites content relevant (it goes without saying that you have great content, right?).

If the answer is yes and you think you would find it relevant, jot down the keyword phrase.

Also take a note of the number of sponsored links (advertisers) usually listed on the right or top of the search engine results (usually it explicitly mentions they are sponsored links). The actual number is important because too few could mean that perhaps the keyword phrase is not commonly used (but it could also mean you have found a golden nugget, that is a particular keyword phrase that is being used but not being actively targeted by Advertisers).

Too many sponsored results may mean the keyword phrase is heavily used and it may be expensive to get your sponsored links working (but again this could be a golden opportunity for you).

In general the search engines put the sponsored link that has bid the most money at the top of the list, so a quick way to ensure your up front is to pay the most (and bid more than your opposition).

However bear in mind as well, that the search engines also sort-sponsored links by the click through rate (CTR), in other words the number of times a sponsored link is clicked versus the number of times it is shown on screen in search engine results.

A sponsored link with a higher CTR indicates that more people are clicking that link, and you will find a sponsored link with a high CTR will rank higher in many cases that other sponsored links even if they have bid less money. So it is possible to have your cake and eat it to (or in this case to bid a smaller amount and have you sponsored link appear higher than your competitors who are paying more for their ad’s than you are!).

Of course to do this (get a higher CTR than other sponsored links) you need to draw attention to your ad, so your content (ad) must be more compelling than your competitors. Given the lack of space in these ads you need to be really creative to get your link clicked on more often than your competitors (even if your happy paying more than your competitors per click).

The number one sponsored link is not always going to be clicked more often than other ads, especially if it does not give the person moere of a reason to want to click it, than the ads near it.

Whatever you do, don’t just set-up a PPC campaign and leave it unchecked. Even if your having some success, make sure you go into the campaign details by logging into the search engine website for PPC marketers, and then check out the stats regularly to see how you are going because things can change very quickly as new competitors come into the marketplace.

You need to be continually checking your keywords, CTR’s of your ads, and fine tuning and tweaking to run things optimally. I am not suggesting this needs to be on a daily basis, but it just depends on your particular campaign and your market.

This is probably a good place to discuss link tracking on your website.

You can purchase software that gets installed onto your website that makes it really quite easy to see the traffic coming to your website and where it originates. It’s a good idea to do this to work out how much traffic your getting from your various sources (PPC, free Google search, press releases, etc).

The other reason why you want to be checking your ads frequently is that over time you will certainly find some ads performing better than others. You can see at a glance the CTR of your various ads, but also with link tracking it’s possible to work out the ads that are actually making you money (people are actually buying off the ad in higher proportions to other ads).

PPC is a fantastic way to get instant traffic to your website, just make sure you are doing your sums and keeping track of your expenditure and of course checking your ads regularly as well as what your competitors are doing and offering.

An area you may not have considered being a source of decent traffic is offline advertising.

By offline I am talking about newspapers, business cards, trade journal magazines, etc.

This can be an excellent niche for your website if used properly, although you need to ensure you do your sums with this method quite carefully because the costs can be quite high, and it is easy to lose a lot of money if your not careful.

What you want to do is have a think about where your customer base hangs out when they are not online, what they read, etc.

It can be incredibly beneficial advertising your products offline, because most of your online competition is probably not doing it. To me this is just screaming “untapped market” !

To start the process, research popular trade magazines, periodicals, newspapers (specifically if there is a regular “section” for your niche market in a particular newspaper, etc).

For example, if your product is computer related, many newspapers have a computer “section”.

If you take the time to do this, you will find a number of areas where potential customers can be found.

Now, of course the process is a lot more complicated for offline ads since there is no simple method of clicking a link to get to your website.

Rather, they have to read your ad, find your link, remember it and/or write it down, and then get to the computer and find the piece of paper and/or remember your link and type it in. In today’s fast paced world with most people having a million and one things on their minds it’s not an easy ask, so you need to make it as easy as possible for your potential customer.

Firstly your URL needs to be as small as possible, to reduce the chance of a typo, but also to make it stand out.

Which one of these links stands out for you?

http://joebloggs.com/affiliates/make-me-mega-bucks/overwhelmingtraffic

Versus: -

http://dollarsonline.com/special

I am sure you will agree the 2nd URL would look a lot better for the potential customer. You may ask why not just make the URL getmore.com instead of the special? The reason for that is tracking.

Because of the investment required, you need to make sure when investing offline, that you carefully track the number of visitors arriving on your website. Probably the best way of doing this is to have a unique URL that you only use in a particular type of offline ad, and that is not linked from your normal website. E.g. Other parts of your website should not link to this URL (although it would obviously be ok for this URL to link to other parts of your Website).

By adding a subdirectory to the URL, it can give you an easy way to track the response for a particular ad or type of promotion. e.g. the /special in the above example.

lternatively you could have used a subdomain as follows: -

http://special.dollarsonline.com

Tracking where your customers arrive from is always important (we discuss this in future chapters in more detail) but in this case it’s imperative for you to know where they came from so you can make decisions in the future about where to best spend your offline advertising budget i.e. which offline ads are generating the best response.

I recommend the following with each campaign

1. Have a unique URL for each campaign or type of offline ad
2. Have a special offer to the potential customer that is only available if they go to that exact URL.
3. To ensure that the URL you specify is not linked to from other pages on your website (and thus not indexed by the search engines) so you can make a special offer if required to those people (and only those people) who visit that URL. Remember that getting people to visit that URL helps you in tracking the overall success of your campaign.
4. Offer a special incentive (discount, coupon, free report, etc) to all visitors.

How about sponsorship? This is where you get behind a local club or organization and in return you get the ability to place an advertisement in their newsletter, or a sign in the clubrooms, etc. Club members tend to get behind their sponsors so if your product is of interest to people it could be an easy sell.

Something I have done in the past is to have a URL on my car and an attention-grabbing headline. Yes I have made sales from this, obviously not hundreds of visitors a day, but for a once off cost it can really pay off, stickers for cars are usually pretty inexpensive.

Visit local council and see if you can pay for an advertisement in their newsletters, or what about schools? Plenty of scope here so long as your product and/or information is relevant!

Give offline marketing a try; remember most of your competitors probably aren’t doing it, so it could be a goldmine for you. Increased web site traffic is but one of the benefits of using this approach.