When evaluating the potential profit from a PPC program, you will only be charged for the times that the user clicks your ad. However, there is another variable that you must consider which is called conversion rate (CR). This is the number of users who click the ad divided into the number of users who actually buy the product. A rough rule of thumb for CR is five (5) percent. You need to project the economics of the campaign before you launch it. If you have a low cost per click (CPC) and the commission from your affiliate company is high, you can afford a campaign with a low conversion rate. On the contrary, if the commission per transaction from the affiliate company is low, and the CPC is high, you need a conversion rate that is high.

It is a matter of simple math to project the results of a sales campaign. Profit per click = ($ per sale X Conversion rate) – (Average cost per click). Let’s plug in some numbers and see how this works. Assume that the selling commission is $5.00, the conversion rate is 5%, and the average cost per click is $.10. Multiply the selling commission ($5.00) by the CR of 5% to get $.25. Subtract the cost per click (CPC) of $.10 from $.25 and you get a profit of $.15. This does not seem like a lot of money, but the Internet is viewed 24/7 so if you have 1000 clicks per month and convert 5% of them, you will make $150 for setting up the campaign and then monitoring it occasionally. If you set up several of these campaigns for different key words, you can make a nice supplemental income.

You can sign up with any of the popular search engines like Yahoo, Google or MSN and bid for keywords to put into advertisement for your web site. When anyone searching for something via search engine enters your particular keyword, your advertisement pops up on the search engine result page. When it comes to PPC, you should know your niche it is important to have such key phrases which describe your site well and are likely to appear in top search engine results. You can type ‘keywords tool’ in any search engine to get more on this.

Try to pick low competition keywords. PPC market is highly competitive. Find key phrases which are less popular as they will cost you less. Always check for the keywords in either search engines or with the help of keywords analyzer tool. This can save you from over-spending on keywords. It is important for you to create an engaging ad which captures the attention of visitors immediately. PPC ads are generally less than 125 characters. Therefore, create the catchy phrase which compels the visitors to visit your web site and go through it. Use your main keyword in the title of the advertisement and in the ad itself. Try to create another advertisement and place it close to your first one. Then keep track which one gets more click. This will eventually help you to come up with the best advertisement.

Sponsored results or links are those that have been displayed based on a paid amount or set fee for particular keywords. The advertised link or banner generally sports those keywords and does so because when a consumer plugs in that keyword or phrase that advertisement will be presented. These sponsored results vary in rates and in many cases the advertiser can set the limit or amount per click that they are willing to pay. It ranges from a few cents for every click to thousands, depending on the budget and desire for traffic.

Some have concerns about PPC Advertising because they have heard claims of fraud or the intentional clicking on their displayed ads, with no intent to purchase. While this does happen the major PPC players have systems that catch this type of fraud. That doesn’t mean that it never happens, however it is greatly reduced. There is a risk of fraud or unscrupulous actions with any form of marketing, however putting trust into Yahoo or Google is the best bet considering their vast experience and anti-fraud tools.

In the rat-race of highly creative PPC campaigns, it has become delicate to run PPC advertising services. The keys behind the success are the right advertisement, on the right search page, at right time under right PPC program and management. There are some common and simple strategies which make the PPC advertisement effective and help to earn higher revenue.

Generally people search for different related keywords. So, a landing page is to be developed for every single PPC online advertisement. There are some word and phrases, generally called ‘powered word’ or ‘action word’ like ‘click here’, ‘call now’, ‘Know more’ etc., should be used.
Most searched or extended phrases should be targeted. One should always try to avoid ‘trademark phrases’ which might create legal problems.

This is a method of measure of one’s Return on investment (ROI) on his pay per click campaigns. One can know easily the number of sales or leads his website is generating while running the PPC campaign, but with the PPC conversion tracking, he will be able to trace each sales or lead to a specific keyword, ad group and campaign. This information helps one to make decisions on PPC budget and optimize the PPC campaigns.

In this context it is to be noted that a conversion can be a sale or it can be an action performed by the visitor which is desired through the website and which can be measured and analyzed. By PPC tracking one comes to know the keyword and phrases which are responsible for most of the conversion performed by the visitors. So, he can arrange bidding for those keywords among the businessmen and can make a profit. On the other hand, he can discard the keywords which bring visitors but not lead to the intended conversion. There are a number of PPC tracking software available in the market today.

I have had some of them write to me criticizing my ‘crap’ HTML and also my ‘useless’ linking strategies. My site has ‘only a Page Rank of 3′. So what? It is sitting at between #1 on #5 on Google from day to day, at # 1 to #4 on Yahoo from day to day and at #1 on MSN. I will gladly accept their criticism of my HTML and linking when they achieve the same. Till then, perhaps they would be better buying my book that complaining about my websites!

I would feel more predisposed to them if they stopped criticizing me – I only started to do the same to them when I got sick of their comments when they could not emulate my results. Who am I, a rank amateur, to beat them in the SEO stakes!! In fact, I have been at this for many years.

So, SEO tip #1 – don’t believe anything you are told unless those telling you it have at least one of their websites in the top 5 on all the major search engines for a competitive keyword. Mine has >800 million other results on Google.

Tip 2 – use classical search engine optimization. Use Meta tags because some search engines still use them. The main one is the Description Meta tag – Keywords is not so important but use it anyway. It does not hurt you, so use them.

The third tip relates to the title of your website. There are two points that relate to this. The first is that it should be the best keyword that you can find that relates to your niche or website. That means a good demand and low supply, though too much is sometimes written about this since such keywords are not easy to find. If you can’t something with low supply, just use what you want and decide to compete against them. Somebody has to be top, and why can’t it be you? Too many people give up in SEO too quickly. Probably because we are told not to compete against the big boys – by these big boys!!

The second point is that the title of your site need not be stated on every web page. My web page titles are those of the page, not the site. The graphics are the same, but the title is the keyword that they page is optimized for. Why do otherwise? Yet 99.99% do (just a guess!). Then fourth of my SEO tips is related to the headings on each page. The main title of the page should be in H1 tags, and the heading in H2 tags. You don’t need any more, but any subheadings can go into H3 tags, but should contain text that could be construed as minor keywords.

I might be wrong, but who says? I have found that if you ignore the big guys, and compete against them, they can be beat. Check out what they are trying to sell you and you will notice that much of it is obsolete. Such as site generation and article generation software. That’s not an SEO tip, just a word to the wise, from the not so wise. I have no pretensions, but I know where my home page is on Google – and Yahoo – and MSN. Just search for ‘article services’.

The fifth SEO tip is to use your keywords sparingly. Most people still think that 1% – 3% keyword density is ideal, yet it is actually too much. There is an optimum keyword density that has little to do with the keyword itself, but more to do with contextual relevance of the page content to the topic in hand. Which leads to the sixth of the SEO tips: write naturally and honestly. If you know about your subject, write about it in your own language and don’t try to meet any perceived need for a specific number of so-called keywords within your page content.

Seventh, don’t forget about your links. You can get a higher search engine listing if you have lots of links back to your website from other sites. In fact, the links are from page to page, and you get a proportion of the Google PageRank of the page linking to you, relative to the number of other links leaving that page, and also give the page that you link to a proportion of your PageRank, calculated in the same way. The problem with reciprocal links is that most pages are linked to and from pages with a PageRank of zero, even though the website home page can have a PR of 6 or 7.

SEO tip eight. Use your internal linking to maximise the PageRank of a selected page on your website. You don’t need every page on your site listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo: you only need one. So maximise your efforts on that one page. Visitors that page will then visit the rest of the pages on your website, and so will search engine spiders, so you know that every page on your site will be listed and with a chance of being found in a search.

The important point of that tip is to concentrate on getting one page in the top 10. That’s all you need. You will have links to all your other pages once somebody reaches that page in the top 10. Tip nine: Once you get visitors keep them there. Give them useful content and something to do, even if just to click from page to page. Offer them a free gift for completing a quiz on your topic, or free vacation certificates for certain actions: these are easily found on the internet in a form that you can either post or email for them to print their own. Offer them an opt-in form so that you can keep in touch.

That is the most important tip of all – if you can keep in touch with your visitors after they have left your site, then you can offer them new products as they come along without having to seduce them to visit your website again.

Finally, the SEO tip number 10. Enjoy what you are doing, and don’t look upon it so much as a job as something to enjoy, and to do as best as you can. I wish you the best of success since it is very sweet when it comes – as it will come with you.