If you want to run a successful PPC campaign you need to have goals, you need to define your objectives and what you are attempting to accomplish. Starting up an AdWords account and hoping for a few sales or leads without any direction is probably going to end up in failure. Describe your goals clearly and make them easily attainable. It would be nice to start getting 100 new sales a day and become a billionaire overnight, but that is just not practical or reality. You have your limitations and so does your business and industry. Set your goals to something you are comfortable handling and set them to something that can easily be achieved. You can always refine them over time.

Define Your Objective

What are you looking for, Sales, Leads, Members, Subscribers? How many do you want and at what cost? The obvious answer is “as cheap as possible”, but again, practicality is important. If you make a sale on a product and you pocket $100 from that sale, what are you willing to pay $100 income? Some say $20 and others say $80.

Sales

Sales are one of the most common goals on the internet. You want to sell a tangible good which results in an immediate income. If you are getting into businesses that result in the direct sale of tangible goods, then you need to assess your products gross profit before marketing expenses. If you are selling a wide variety of products you may want to simplify the gross profit by determining your AOV (Average Order Value) and gross profit margin. Example, if 100 products are purchased within a small given amount of time, the average gross ticket amount is $356, of which your average gross profit margin is 20%, resulting in an average pocketed income before marketing of $71.20. Now that you have this analysis set your goals. Determine you targeted ROI, budget and volume of sales your business can handle without sacrificing customer service.

Leads

Leads are different since it adds another step in the conversion funnel. Since a lead is not a direct sale, and does not provide immediate income, you need to figure out the value of a lead and your gross profit from a lead to a conversion. Leads are usually associated with larger sale ticket items such as mortgage leads, financing leads, or project leads. If you were in the bathroom remodeling industry you would want to assess the average gross income value of each new client. Assuming your average contract will generate $3,000 of gross profit after all expenses, but before marketing expenses, you can now determine your targeted ROI, budget and volume of new clients your business can handle.

Memberships

Memberships are interesting since the value of the membership is usually perceived over time. If you are marketing a membership to a program or website, that requires a monthly fee, you will need to determine the average life of a membership and determine the value of each membership for that lifetime. You must also consider the costs associated to keep that member a continual member. If they are signing up for inside tips or training material, you must associate the cost to put that material together. Memberships can also become costly, especially if the cost per acquisition exceeds the return of a few months of paid membership. If you determine the average membership is 2 years at a cost of $19.99 per month, your memberships are valued at $479.76 over the length of 2 years. Now you can determine your targeted ROI and monthly budget. You may also want to consider you level of service as your membership grows. Larger memberships will put a higher demand on content and service.

Subscribers

Attempting to market for new subscribers are probably the least common campaigns, but they still exist. The main problem with subscribers is, there is no direct product being sold. Most income is generated from the referral of affiliate products and charging for advertising space on your site. Similar to a magazine, you don’t charge for the magazine, you charge to appear in the magazine. You can determine the value of a subscriber by adding up the income generated by your site and dividing it by the number of subscribers. Assuming you have 1,000 subscribers and your site generates $5,000 in one month each subscriber is worth $5 per month or $60 per year. Now, with this analysis done you can determine your targeted ROI, estimated monthly budget, and since your subscriber count will likely be increasing you will need to ensure you are still properly monetizing you new found growth to maintain the value per subscriber.

Set Your Goals

The point is, before you start your campaign be sure you define your goals and objectives. What type of conversions are you after and what are those conversions worth to you. Define how much you want to make, and how much you can afford to spend per month for those conversions. Setting up intelligent goals is your first step to a successful internet marketing campaign.

Before starting any internet marketing campaign you should be aware of some common problems, and expectations, and your expectations should also be reasonable, and feasible. This includes your financial commitment, a reasonable return on investment, a defined target audience, market limitations, business overhead limitations, and the amount of time you are going to put into your internet marketing campaign. Building a house with no blueprints is surely going to fall apart, and the same goes for you internet marketing campaign.

Financial Commitment

First off, you need to make sure you’re financially prepared to invest money on internet marketing. I have been asked by many businesses if they can start internet marketing on a $500 a month budget. Some only want to spend as little as $100, or even $50 a month. Budgets so little are already setup for failure. If your budget is this small, I would recommend waiting until you are more financially prepared. My personal minimum recommendation is $2,000 per month, and for certain highly targeted niche markets, $1,000, but also be aware, that many businesses spend upwards of $50,000 to $100, 000 per month.

Return on Investment

Return on investment varies between many industries. I have seen some companies making a 35 to 1 ROI and others are happy with anything between 1 and 2. ROI means for every $1 you invest into marketing you pocket X amount of dollars. A 35 to 1 ROI will put $35 back into your pocket at the end of the month. If I took all my clients, and averaged out their ROI, it would even out to 5. This should be your target, unless you determine it’s impossible for your industry, or it should be much higher. Affiliate marketers should aim for ROI of 2 at the very minimum. Don’t set your expectations to low or to high, and don’t undercut yourself or the competition. You should always be raising the bar to pocket more, and more over time.

Defined Target Audience

Who is your client? You should not be guessing who your target audience is when beginning an internet marketing campaign. Knowing your client will help reduce your advertising costs. Are they old or young, male or female, do they live in big cities or small, what are their interests, and what culture differences do they have compared to what you are used to. Understand your client, what they are thinking, and why they are searching for your product or services. Sometimes this can be very difficult, especially if you are dealing with a much older or younger generation.

Market Limitations

Some markets have no competition while others are flooded. Some markets have millions of searches per day, while others barely get 100 impressions a day. Know your market limitations and competition. If you plan on entering the web hosting market, be aware that search volume is limited, but very competitive, and expensive. CPC is running anywhere from $9 to $18 per click. YUP!!! That’s $18 for one person to visit your website, and they might hit the back button seconds after clicking your ad. Don’t start a marketing campaign only to be shocked on the amount of competition and the cost per click. Do your research!

Business Overhead Limitations

Advertising nationwide or globally can put a large strain on a business that is understaffed, and unprepared to handle a large volume of orders. Imagine going from 10 orders a day to 100 orders a day, or maybe even 1000. Can your business really handle the extra work? Be sure to analyze whether your business is capable of handling the volume of orders. I have seen so many clients fail because they were getting too many orders. Can you believe that? Failure due to a highly successful marketing campaign, you would think this would be a dream come true, but in reality, if your business cannot handle the customer support, and order fulfillment times, you could end up losing more money than a campaign that won’t convert one single order. Why is that? Because not only did you pay for the advertising, but now you paid for shipping costs, warehousing, inventory, the cost of any chargeback’s, returned products, and even worse, legal and litigation fees.

Campaign Management

A common misconception about internet marketing is that you can basically select a few keywords, turn on your campaigns and tell Google how much you want to spend and you’re all done. WRONG!!! If you are going to manage your campaigns yourself, be prepared to spend anywhere from 5 hours a week minimum, to as much as a full 40 hour work week. Some campaigns can become so intense, that it requires more than one person to successfully run them. Campaign optimization requires patience, time and a lot of analytical research. Expect to test, re test, and test your test against another test. That’s right, testing and constant manipulation of your campaigns is what makes them successful. If you do not have the time to do this, you could end up over paying on your advertising by as much as 50%. Imagine that… If you expected to pay $5,000 a month for advertising, you could be paying $2,500 with proper optimization, or you could be reinvesting that extra $2,500 to generate more sales and leads. If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, outsource the work, it will be more successful and you wont be wasting time, or money.

Be a wise entrepreneur, do your research, ask questions, and seek professional advice. You can even get a free market consultation from a professional SEM company. They will tell you what you can expect, and what all of the above answers should be. It’s not a secret. You don’t have a magic product that will outperform all the rest. Internet marketing is highly predictable to trained professionals, and industry average numbers are public knowledge.

If you had trouble understanding any of the above abbreviations
please read my acronym article

Internet Marketing Acronyms – The Definitive Guide

Please post your comments and questions…

Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing is a successful means of advertising for many online businesses, and affiliate marketers. It allows you to be on top of the search engine result pages, at a per click fee. Rather than optimizing your website, via SEO methods, you can climb straight to the top of search result pages within minutes of publishing your ads. However, as exciting as that may sound, many businesses have been burned by spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars, without a single sale. So they blame the system, and claim it doesn’t work for their business model. In all honesty, I have seen just about every industry survive with a successful PPC campaign, even sites with no products to sell. The problem is that PPC marketing is not a passive marketing program. You can’t turn it on, and let it be. It requires intense daily analysis, problem solving, and strategy.

My Search Marketing Background

To give you my background, and credibility in this realm of marketing, I have been involved with pay per click marketing since late 1999 (PPC marketing was invented in February of 1998), and experimented with pay per click when it was first adopted by goto.com, which is now Yahoo Search Marketing. I am currently employed with an agency that handles clients both large and small. I optimize and strategize campaigns for internet companies such as Murad Skin Care, Fredericks of Hollywood, Public Storage, and Union Bank of California. All of which have multimillion dollar online search campaign budgets. I also work with many smaller businesses and even help startups penetrate their market. Prior to doing search marketing for an SEM company, I owned, and managed, my own ecommerce business within the home improvement market.

Enough Bragging, On With The Show

There are 3 major players when it comes to search marketing. Google, Yahoo and MSN, and we call these the big 3. If you have not heard of Google, then you have been living in a cave because Google has the greatest market share of internet, leaving Yahoo and MSN in the dust desperately trying to catch up.

If you have ever wanted to start up a successful Google Adwords Pay Per Click marketing campaign, then listen up. Because I will be adding a new series of posts dedicated to bringing you the inside secrets to marketing on Google like a professional. All those guru’s, and how to guides that you paid about $100 bucks or more are nothing compared to what I will be giving away for free.

But first we must start with the basics of search. I have already put up an article about the SEM lingo in the internet marketing world. Get familiar with these terms, because I will be using them… A LOT!

Internet Marketing Acronyms – The Definitive Guide

If you cannot understand the following phrase, then reading and printing out those Acronyms is a must.

My B2C client csf is as follows. Imp projected at 1.5mil, ctr at 1.35%, cpc is $2.5 with a CR just under 4.8%. Current CPA is $35.48 of which the client would like to get down to $34 by next month in order to meet their ROI goal of 3:1.

If you understood the above then you would realize this client spends $50,625 per month, closes 972 sales, and nets over 1.2 million a year ($101,250 net profit per month).

Happy studying…

More to come soon

Also dont forget to enter into my contest. Im giving away free advertising spots on this blog

Contest For My 4 Ad Spots On My Blog

I have decided to have a contest for my 4 ad spots located just under my navigation bar. The ad spots are 125×125 images ads. If you win, you can put up anything you want. An ad to your blog, or to your affiliate program, or to anything you want.

(Except Porn, Hate, Or Anything Offensive)

Since I have 4 ad spots available right now, this first round will have 4 winners. After this 1^st round I will host this contest again, but this time only for 1 ad spot. The winner of the new ad spot will take over the 1^st ad spot. The person who has the 1^st ad spot will move to ad spot 2. Ad spot 2 will take over ad spot 3, and ad spot 4 will get removed off. You will get a minimum of 4 weeks of advertising for FREE! Every week I will re-host this contest for the 1^st ad spot and move all the rest accordingly.

If you want to win one of these ad spots you must do one or more of the following

1. Link back to my blog within your blog roll with a quality Anchor Text Link of your choice

2. Write a review of my blog and introduce me to your readers

3. Write a review about one of my articles

4. Include an anchored text link in your Forum Signature

5. Provide some type of other text link back to my blog.

Once you have done one of the following above, come back to this contest page and leave a comment to let me know what you have done and how you have done it. At the end of this week I will announce the 1^st 4 winners and then continue to host this contest every week after that.

The winners will be picked either at random or based on the person I feel that has best represented my blog with a text link. There are no entry points, and I will not be picking names from a hat. The winners will be based on who deserves it, and who put their best effort forward to win the contest.

Good Luck!

I have put together a small list of blogs with high Page rank that use the nonofollow, dofollow or u comment I follow rule. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs with page rank of 0 thru 5 so I decided not to include those. This list is only blogs that have a PR of 6 or above.

My list of PR6 (page rank) blogs that pass comment love

http://randaclay.com/

http://bloggeruniversity.blogspot.com/

http://www.jangro.com/

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

http://larholm.com/

My list of PR7 (page rank) blogs that pass comment love

http://michaelmartine.com/

Are you ready for this? I was able to find one PR8 site that passes link love. Please do not spam him!!! Do not ruin it for us. Comment wisely, otherwise I will never post this again…

http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/