Making Pay Per Click Work For Your Business

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is one of many tools available to the serious internet marketer. The power of this medium of advertising should never be underestimated for reasons we will explain in this article.

When anybody sets out to become an internet marketer with a view to building a work from home business they are immediately faced with two major obstacles:

1. How do I attract visitors to my webpage(s)?

2. How do I convert visitors to buyers?

Maybe we should add a 1a: How do I direct visitors to the page on my website where I wish to make a sale. We throw that one in based upon our own experience where less than 5% of free visitors actually click on the sales pages of our site and 95% click on information pages. This tells us something that confirms an often quoted internet fact: “The vast majority of people use the internet as a free source of information and not as an estore.” Therefore if you fail to give information a great number of would-be buyers will leave your site and these are your future buyers.

Next question: How long does it take to build a website until it is receiving 1,000 unique visitors each day? Answer: A very, very long time. We are talking years here not weeks or months. Based upon our (honest) experience if only 5% of that 1,000 will visit your sales pages then you only have 50 potential buyers each day. If your sales pages are really good 5% of the 50 that visit will buy something and this translates to 2.5 sales per 1,000 visitors. Assume you make $25 per sale in profit it equates to daily earnings of $62.50 from 1,000 site visitors. You’re not going to be able to quit the day job on that level of income.

This is where pay per click becomes such an important tool in the marketer’ armoury because by using PPC you direct everybody that clicks on your ad to the page you want them to be on: Your sales page. I know it costs money and I’ll get to that before I complete this article so all of the accountants reading this just sit down, take a deep breath and polish your calculators.

Before we get to cost there is one other thing I have to point out: When you use PPC you will only get between 1%and 2% of the people that click on your ad that actually makes a purchase. The reason why 5% of people that enter your sales page from your website buy but only, say, 1.5% buy from the ad is because you have built some rapport with people that enter from your website so they trust you a little more.

So now we have the situation where you pay hard earned cash to get a lower sales conversion rate, isn’t that a bit scary? We know it is because this is where most people give up trying to be a successful internet marketer and their work from home dream starts to fade. We also know because I went through the same doubts and it took me two whole years before I determined that I wasn’t getting enough sales by relying upon free sources of traffic.

Now let’s take a look at the math (that statement brought a smile to the faces of the accountants).

You pay an average of 15 cents per click for your chosen keywords and get 1,000 clicks in a day which sends 1,000 visitors to the page you want them to be on. That is a big achievement because you are rarely able to achieve that by your own free methods. These people we know are actively searching for what you have to sell, in short they are willing buyers with credit card in hand. If we take an average of between 1% and 2% of these visitors will actually buy your product it means we have 1.5%, or fifteen buyers from your thousand visitors. 15 sales at $25 per sale = $375 but you still have to pay for each of the 1,000 clicks at 15 cents per click and that is $150 which must be subtracted from the $375 sales profit and you are left with $225 income in a day. Add to that the few sales you get from your free traffic and you are already looking at over $1,600 per week. Now you can start thinking about booting your boss.

Pay per click is a good tool if used properly.