The Maui Website Traffic School

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the fastest way to get top placement on all of the search engines. Once you have an account set up with Google, MSN or Yahoo!, you can have your ad up on the Internet in less than five minutes. That’s fast!

But with speed and placement comes a price, and that price is money. If you choose to use pay per click adversing you will pay every time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website. If you know what you’re doing, this is a fantastic way to encourage potential customers to visit website and purchase what you’re selling.

Here’s how it works.

All of the major search engines allow you to advertise on their site. For this example I am going to use Google.

You start by creating an account with Google. The process is relatively simple. You give them your credit card number. Then you write your ad, create a link to the web page where you want to send the visitor who click on your ad, tell Google where you want your ad to show up and how much you’re willing to pay per click and you’re done. Well, it’s not quite that simple, but simple enough.

Creating your Ad

A Google ad, also know as Adwords, has a specific format with rules you must follow if you expect Google to show your ad. Here is a typical Google ad we might run for our WeeblyVids website. Google allows 25 characters in the first line, 35 characters in the second and third line and the URL to your site in the last line.

Build A Website For Free
Don’t Pay A Penny For Your Website.
Learn To Build It Yourself For Free.
http://WeeblyVids.blogspot.com

Once your ad is completed it’s time to select the keywords you want your ad to be affiliated with. For example, our website shows people how to create their own website using free software from Weebly. It includes 36 videos that they can watch on their computer while they’re learning how to use the software. So, we want our ad to show up on the Google search results page when someone types in the search term,”how to build a website” or “free website.” Actually there are hundreds of different terms people use to find our site and we try to let Google know about all of them. You will do the same.

The next step it to tell Google where and when you want your ad to show. This is a really cool feature. For example, if I had a local Maui business and the only people I want clicking on my ad are people who live on Maui, I can tell Google to only show my ad to people with computers on Maui between the hours of 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. It’s magic.

I can also tell Google to show my ads on their search results page and/or on other websites. This is known as contextual ads because they will show up on web pages all over the Internet where the text on the page has to do with the keywords you selected. Notice the ads that show up on the web page we created about slide show software. The people who place their ads on our site know that the people who visit this page are very likely to be interested in what they’re selling.

Then you tell Google what you’re willing to pay for each click. Generally the more you’re willing to pay, the higher your ad will show on the search results page. but this is a huge generality. If you want to consistently have your ad show at the top of the page you must pay close attention to your click-through-rates and the quality of your landing page. You can learn more about this by reading about the Google Quality Score.

The cost per click for an ad on Google ranges from pennies a click up to many dollars a click. You can get a pretty good idea of what you will have to pay per click by going here.

There are some great resources available to learn how to advertise your site on Google and the other search engines. I would encourage you to start with the material put out by each of the search engines and then invest in the materials that show you how to really get the most out of your advertising dollar.