12.30.04
Overture - A Can’t Lose Pay-Per-Click Strategy
The absolute quickest surefire way that I know of to get instant
website traffic is using pay-per-click search engines. You bid
on the search terms of your choice and as soon as your account
is set up they start sending traffic your way. I use a variety
of pay-per-clicks but Overture is my favorite. Today I’d like to
show you how and why I use them.
With regular search engines, you can’t really “tell” them what
terms you want to be listed under. With pay-per-clicks, you get
to specify exactly what terms you’d like to be listed under. At
Overture and some of the others, the staff does review your
listing to confirm it is appropriate. If your listing is
appropriate, you get listed under the term you want to attract
targeted traffic with, and you get to specify how you would like
your listing to read.
There *are* less expensive ways of getting traffic to your site.
However, it is not as tightly controlled. Overture’s minimum bid
is 5 cents per click. With many terms, that’s all you need to
bid to appear in the top listings (even at number 1).
Controlling exactly how your listing appears ensures you spend
your money attracting only the traffic you want. It also ensure
that you discourage the type of traffic that you don’t want.
I’ll give you an example for illustration. I have a site that
sells a “soul food cookbook.” I want the traffic I attract to
this site to be interested in obtaining a soul food cookbook….
especially if I am paying for this traffic. So I use that phrase
or a related phrase in my Overture listing. I also use it in my
title and the description. I tell them exactly what they will
find on my website in my listing. Traffic attracted through
these listings are seeking “soul food cookbooks” so they buy my
product!
In deciding how much to bid on a pay-per-click term you must know
your conversion rate. You need to know how many sales each
dollar generates. For example, I spend an average of $1 on
Overture traffic for each sale that I make from this traffic. I
sell a $20 cookbook and my profit margin is sufficient to make
this campaign smart business. The traffic from Overture also
generates 4 signups to my website recipe exchange mailing list
for each dollar I spend. It could be much higher but I land the
traffic on a webpage focused on making the sale rather than
getting new subscribers. A very high percentage of these
subscribers will eventually purchase either my cookbook or a
related product.
A spill over effect of this pay-per-click campaign is that my
Overture listing gets me a top listing on many other search
engines. Overture’s paid listing feed the search results at
Yahoo!, MSN, InfoSpace, Lycos, Alta Vista and Netscape. This
spillover drives incredible traffic to my sites. For example,
my traffic from MSN nearly doubled with one of my Overture
campaigns. Microsoft is the default homepage for a lot of
internet users (since it is the default browser pre-installed
on a lot of computers), and having a top listing with them is
well worth the expense.
When setting up an account at Overture, the most important thing
you can do is to make sure you are targeting the right keyword
phrases and that you really finess your listing. You want
customers to arrive at your site ready to buy your product or
join your list. You don’t want curiosity seekers when you are
paying for traffic. You don’t want to get “cute” with your
listings since attracting the wrong visitors really does no one
any good. It might even generate a lot of complaints.
Overture has a tool you can use to investigate what keywords were
searched on the most - recently. I use this tool but I also
subscribe to a service that emails me the top 500 most searched
terms every week. They send me weekly reports and I build mini
sites around these terms. I sometimes funnel traffic from these
mini sites to other topical sites. Some mini sites I also design
as direct sales sites. Both strategies will work well for you if
properly employed.
A properly designed pay-per-click campaign is a can’t loose
proposition. You know that for every $100 spent exactly how much
you can expect to earn. The only variable in the formula for me
is how fast Overture can send me this traffic. You do want to bid
the minimum bid possible to get the listing you want. You don’t
need to be number 1 since it is the words in your listing that
really generates the click. I do consider being one of the top 3
bidders very important.
I also keep my mini sites’ costs down by hosting my keyword rich
domain names on quality, low-costs hosts. I use a web host that
allows you to host additional domains for only $5 per domain. You
do have to have at least one domain hosted on their regular $25
per month plan (500 meg of space and full-featured). Then you can
host as many additional domains as you want for only an extra
$5 each. This makes building a series of mini sites related to
the theme of your product or main site so affordable you really
should use this business strategy. Check out this host at:
http://williecrawford.com/cgi-bin/tk.cgi?fivedollarhost
To get the full details on starting an Overture account, just
visit: http://williecrawford.com/cgi-bin/tk.cgi?overture
I’ve just given you a very brief overview of one of my
pay-per-click strategies. Using this strategy, I routinely turn
every thousand dollars invested into over $10,000. With the right
product or service, you can too. If you’d like to learn more
about the strategies and techniques I use to generate hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year, grab the recordings from the
Internet Marketing Power Workshop. All of the instructors not
only show you how we run our very successful businesses, we
will also helped attendees troubleshoot unique problems in
their own businesses. Grab your copies now at bargain pricing!
http://williecrawford.com/workshop-videos.html
Willie Crawford has been teaching others how to build an
on-line business since late 1996. Frequently featured in
radio, magazine and newspaper articles and interviews, Willie
teaches the average guy what the top marketers are doing but
seldom talking about. For example, Willie demonstrates the
power of automated residual income through his system at:
http://ProfitAutomation.Com
Visit now for a business boost.