Adwords seems almost mandatory for online PPC traffic generation, with Google as the most popular PPC engine available.  However, as the most popular PPC engine, Google Adword keywords are often very dear, and a short-run ad campaign can cost a lot of money.  There are ways to get more traffic while spending less using Adwords.  Let’s look at three tips for doing so.

Tip 1: Use Hyper-Targeted Keywords.

Hyper-Targeted keywords are the actual keywords that sell – the ones that indicate your surfer is sitting there, credit card in hand, ready to make the purchase.  In general, I use the following three phrases when selling “product”:

Buy Product

Purchase Product

Order Product

And of course, use each of them with all of Google’s features – in quotations and in brackets, for each type of matching.  So for instance, instead of just Buy Product, you would use: Buy Product, “Buy Product”, and [Buy Product].  Depending on how in demand an item you have selected, these three primary power words – Buy, Purchase, and Order – can bring you more targeted traffic than you expect, and these are people who are ready to purchase real-time right now!

Tip 2: Use Site-Targeting.

Another feature of Adwords that most users miss out is the site-targeting option.  Campaigns can be keyword-targeted or site-targeted.  The beauty of site targeting is that you can target sites at the top of the organic Google searches.  This works better in some cases than others, obviously, but when it works, you end up paying a fraction of the cost for clicks that you would for keyword-targeted campaigns. 

To optimise your results, select a few top keyword phrases and enter them into Google.  Look at the first 5 results for each one (or more if you like) and notice whether or not those sites use Adsense.  Also notice the Adsense placement – is it near the top of the screen?  The top left position is best, but as long as the ads are visible without scrolling the page, that site has great potential.  When you paste that site’s root into Adwords, it may or may not be approved.  If it is an approved site-targeted ads site, you’re ready to go!  Now edit the campaign and change the site’s root out with the direct link you got from your Google search – now only that page will show your ad!  Your CPM (cost per mille, e.g.1000 visitors) will be alot lower than if the full website was showing your ads, and you know your traffic is coming from people who searched for the term you entered.

Tip 3: Show the item’s price in your ad.

This one may sound obvious, but it can go a long way towards removing expensive clicks that had no intention of converting.  In my experience, showing the item’s price in the ad has weeded out approximately 80% of non-buyer clicks.  It reduces the total number of clicks, of course, but those clicks are higher quality traffic.  This is very effective if your price is lower than most other prices on the same product elsewhere. 

These three secret tips will give you an advantage in the Adwords game.  Best of luck!

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For online tips see Stephen’s Power Marketing: https://stephenomearaonline.com/powermarketer

PPC, or pay-per-click ads, have the potential to reach large audiences online.  Used correctly, PPC can drive loads of targeted buying traffic to your website.  PPC also doesn’t have to be expensive.  Let’s discuss three great tips for optimising your PPC investment to the maximum!

Tip 1 Use Long-Tail Keywords

Long-Tail Keywords are generally meant as keywords using four or more words.  Short keywords, such as “buy Viagra”, are always over-bid, and will cost you several dollars per click.  Using keyword tools, you may find that there are several related long-tail keywords that get decent volumes of search traffic but cost so much less.  Perhaps “buy Viagra online pharmacy” or “buy some Viagra online now”, for instance.  These long-tail keywords will cost you far less, and while they receive fewer searches, you will ultimately receive more clicks at a lower price. 

Tip 2: Monitor Campaigns Closely and Use Split-Testing

A lot of PPC campaigns that do not profit could be tweaked and refined a bit to become profitable.  In many cases, certain keywords are underperforming, but you don’t know it or why until you really delve in.  Split test your campaigns, and take care to weed out keywords that receive large numbers of impressions but a small number of clicks.  These keywords are messing up off your Click Through Rate (CTR), which causes your ads to cost much more but to place lower. 

Additionally, by split-testing, take care to weed out keywords that receive many clicks but no conversions.  If the conversions don’t cover the cost of the clicks, that keyword is a loser. Kill it!

Point 3: PPC Shines for List Building

One area where PPC really performs is in building lists.  Acquire a product such as a 10-page report or a 5-part email series that you can offer in exchange for an opt-in.  Create a page with the opt-in form; then set up an auto responder to send your opt-ins the promised product.  Then create a PPC campaign, be as mad with the keywords as you want, and set a limit on how much you are willing to spend before pausing the campaign. 

Driving large amounts of traffic onto the page short-term will allow you to quickly build a strong list for promotion of related products.  Your list will be your best friend, so build wisely!  If you create a product, allow users the option of opting in on the download page.  A list of people who have already purchased something is worth ten times as much as a much larger list of people who may or may not ever buy anything.  Think of your larger list as silver, and your buyer’s list as gold.

Using these tips, you will have an edge over your competition. Good luck in your online marketing!

For online tips see Stephen’s Power Marketing: https://stephenomearaonline.com/powermarketer

The best way to make money online, bar none, is to have your own product to sell.  Of course, it helps if that product is something in demand, and if your niche is willing to pay premium money for it.  There are some important factors to look at when creating a product.  Let’s take a look at how you can come up with your own profitable product to sell online.

Firstly, the biggest mistake most product creators make is creating a product first and attempting to find an audience for it afterwards.  You should actually go about this in reverse.  In other word, find a market, with an audience of thousands of people who want something, and then create a product that fits their needs.  This is a simple tip, but the most important one as far as having a product that is in demand and can be profitable.  Thousands of unwanted products sit online and never make a sale.  This problem could have been remedied with a little customer research first.

Secondly, try to find not only a market that wants something, but a market that wants it badly!  Information products do especially well on this point, and many of the most successful products are merely those that are marketed correctly to an audience in great desire for the information solution.  For example, internet marketers, especially newbies are often desperate to make money online quickly.  When was the last time you spent $97 on an e-book to help you do so?  Teens and adults who suffer from excessive acne are desperate to learn about what lifestyle changes or miracle cures are available to clear up their skin.  Someone worried about a pregnancy, a wedding, or a divorce would be very motivated to get fast access to answers to the questions they have.  Pick a desperate audience and supply them with the answers they want, and your product will be a winner!

Lastly, be ready to get outside of your own comfort zone.  Maybe you found a market for some information that is simply not within your knowledge zone.  Spend a couple of days researching that topic, via Google, online forums, professional help articles, and through any other means at your disposal.  What you will find is that in most cases, you can gather the data you need from many different sources and then piece it together into one cohesive product.  It’s not that most buyers couldn’t do the same thing, but they’re paying for the convenience of instant answers and not needing to research all aspects themselves.  If two days of research yields you ten years of product profits, isn’t that a worthwhile pursuit?

Also with information products, you can start with simpler lower risk ebook product or report and after successes, you can graduate to more extensive larger content offerings including courses which you can charge more for…!

So remember, the most important part of product creation is to discover a product that needs to be created!  Find a market that is looking for something, and then fulfil that need with your information solution. Then begin your online marketing efforts, and see the cash flow in!  Good luck in your Information Product adventure!

For online tips see Stephen’s Power Marketing: https://stephenomearaonline.com/powermarketer

A major challenge new internet marketers face is learning how to advertise their products, affiliate offers, or websites without spending a lot on PPC ads.  There are ways to do out this, some of which can help you to lower your PPC campaign costs while others require no investment.  Let’s take a look at some of these methods for lowering the investment you need to make in marketing products or services online.

There are a few proven ways to reduce your PPC ad campaign costs.  Poorly constructed campaigns will drain your money faster than any other forms of online marketing, and if you are a beginner, chances are you are making some mistakes that are costing you a lot of money! 

Keyword-targeted campaigns are the most commonly used campaigns, so keywords are either your best friends or your worst enemies.  Many sources of internet marketing “knowledge” seem to state that giant lists of general keywords are the best route for pulling traffic.  While this does pull lots of traffic, short, general keywords can be the root cause preventing an otherwise good campaign.  Lots of traffic equates into lots of per-click costs.  General keywords, however, do not generally bring converting traffic.  The thing to remember about traffic is this – one highly-targeted potential buyer is worth thousands of non-targeted non-buyers.

Prune your keywords back and eliminate general, slightly-related terms that are only meant to pull more people in.  These keywords, in almost every case, will not convert.  They will also cost you more per click.  Go for the long-tail keywords and the highly-targeted keywords.  Let’s explain more.

Long tail keywords are keywords that consist of four or more words.  Let’s say you’re selling a product to teach people to make money online.  “Make money online”, “make money”, “earn money”, and similar search terms are some of the worst keywords you can use, as these are some of the most over-used and over-priced keywords possible!  Use some keyword programs and sites to get some long-tail keywords however, and you may end up with a list with keywords such as “earn more money online today”, “make money as an internet marketer”, “how do I make more money online”, etc.  These terms are going to pull less traffic, but if you put together a good number of long-tails, you will still pull a substantial number of hits.  The great part is that long-tail keywords are going to cost you much less than the general keywords, and therefore you can get twice the traffic for half the price. 

Highly-Targeted keywords are keywords such as “Buy product”, “Purchase product”, and “Order product”.  These terms are very specific; they will bring in those searchers who are ready to purchase a product right now.  This is some of the best traffic your site will see!

Also, Site-Targeted campaigns in Google are an often overlooked but highly profitable way of running a campaign.  Find the sites at the top of an organic search for your keywords, put them into your site-targeted campaign, and see those sites’ traffic filter into yours for a fraction of the PPC cost. 

Lastly, one of the most effective marketing tactics is also free!  Article marketing has proven to be one of the best ways to drive quality traffic.  The best part about article marketing, aside from being free, is that your articles value compound, and can bring you traffic for months and months!  This is a cumulative effort – the more articles you write and put out there, the more traffic will continue coming to your site.  It’s brilliant, it’s easy, and it’s free – it is well worth the effort!

You have some ideas to lower your marketing costs and improve your traffic quality. Go do it!

For online tips see Stephen’s Power Marketing: https://stephenomearaonline.com/powermarketer

Information products, including reports, e-books or courses, are one of the most profitable products you can sell online.  There are many reasons for this – development price, printing costs (or rather lack of printing costs) and ease of distribution.  Internet users have become accustomed to consuming e-books and short reports as a form of online product, and they are more than happy to pay for the information they want.  As all of us has areas of expertise (eg they know more about than others), this puts you at an advantage.  Let’s see how you can profit by creating an information product.

Let’s get the basics to creating an information product.  First, pick a main topic, something you’re somewhat familiar with.  Next, search online and find any forums, communities, or question boards that deal with your topic (or a subset of your topic).  Read through some of the questions that are asked and try to nail down a specific problem that many people need the answers to.  Research the topic more, discover the answers and other, related information that may be of use to these people.  Take your findings and write your report, e-book, or whatever you’re creating.  If you are a software programmer, you may actually solve problems by creating a specific program.  Complete your product, place a sales page online, and drive the people who want the answers in your product to your site. 

If you are creating an e-book or short report, you may well wish to create it in Adobe .PDF format.  This is simple enough, as there are several free or inexpensive options.  I use PDF995 (http://www.pdf995.com), which is free, easy to use, contains no watermarks or penalties for not registering, and creates a professional product.  If you already own Adobe Acrobat, so much the better!  Users are far more accustomed to downloading a PDF than a DOC file, and many people don’t have Microsoft Word.

Be careful that if you create a software package, debug it until the point where you can’t break it easily.  You may not get a second chance to maintain your buyers, and if your program crashes or appears unstable, many of them may immediately request a refund.  They may also be wary of any products you release in the future.  Make sure your program is stable, works properly and answers the basic needs of your target users.

Always offer a refund policy.  Many people will not buy without one, as they don’t know you and they have no way to know if you are peddling gold or crap.  A refund guarantees, in their minds, that there is no risk involved with purchasing your product.  In my experience, refund requests are non-existent, although if you do not satisfy your customer with your product, I’m sure refunds would be more frequent.  Even terrible products have a relatively low refund rate, so always offer one.

Good luck with your product creation, and I wish you success!

For online tips see Stephen’s Power Marketing: https://stephenomearaonline.com/powermarketer

There is a lot of interest and noise today around writing a blog for a living.  In truth, it is harder to make money this way than many would have believe.  But, if approached properly, blogging can become profitable.  Let’s review some practical steps you can take to create an online blog that will make money.

Firstly, a personal blog is not likely to work.  Some people believe they can blog about their daily lives and make money.  But as an ordinary person, your life isn’t that interesting.  If you want to pull traffic, you are going to need to offer a topic or topics that interest people directly, and in many cases answer the burning questions that people have.  For instance, an Internet Marketing blog might have all general IM posts, or may be divided into sections for PPC posts, article marketing posts, affiliate marketing posts, and product creation posts.  Such a blog offers topics that many people are interested in, many subniches of that topic that people want more info about, and posts can give great advice, or share experience that can help others.

After building a niche based blog, you can add Google Adsense around it.  Try to keep your Adsense in places that receive the most focus – the top of your blog (specifically top left if you can), between paragraphs in the text, or at the bottom right after the text ends, for people who are looking for more information after reading your post.  These locations seem to do well.  However, making money with an Adsense-only blog can be hard.  There is one other thing you should do to make your blog more profitable – affiliate offers.

Once you have established yourself and built some rapport with your readers, you want to begin sprinkling affiliate products into your posts.  Don’t overdo this or you will upset your readership!  However, in a post describing a particular problem, you may post a link to a product that solves that problem.  That link would be your affiliate link, and any sales resulting from your blog post’s link would pay commissions to you.  You might place one or two text affiliate links to useful relevant products in the sidebar of your blog.  Be sure you don’t make it hard to search your blog for all the ads and affiliate links!  You want your users to feel that you are blogging for them as priority, and your affiliate links are only helpful addition you are including.

By establishing yourself in a niche, offering useful content and tips to your readers, and sprinkling your blog with well-positioned ads and affiliate links, you will start to see an income coming from your blog.  Now continue to tweak and test what works well and what can be improved so that you can continue to make your blog more profitable, while becoming more and more appealing to your target audience.

Good luck blogging!

For online tips see Stephen’s Power Marketing: https://stephenomearaonline.com/powermarketer   

Online Marketing offers a lot of opportunities for income generation by tapping the huge global reach of the World Wide Web.  With access to the online billions, you have the potential to reach large audiences with your products, marketing and promotions.  But how do you begin to tap into the power of the internet?  PPC, or pay-per-click ads, although popular, are expensive. They can be complex and competitive. So used incorrectly, these can result in a drain of money and the traffic depends on money and advanced tactics, not ideal for newbies.  Enter article marketing – a free way to reach thousands of people quickly, bringing long-term traffic to your website regularly.

So what is article marketing?  Put simply, article marketing is the writing of free relevant articles that point back to your website.  These articles are submitted to article directories across the internet, and from there they can be used by other people for content on their websites, with the condition that your author bio box remains intact.  This is the beauty of article marketing – a few minutes of your time consistently e.g. daily can yield you months of results and it compounds once you continue to invest!

Let’s look at the basics.  An article is approximately one page of text, using Microsoft Word.  Articles generally contain between 400 and 700 words, they should be informative, helpful to the target audience and easy to read.  You can find word count programs on the internet.  My favorite is: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/countwords.shtml – you paste your article into the box, click “Calculate Words”, and it immediately tells you how many words are in your article.  You can even take the code from this site and put it onto your own website.  It’s completely free.

When writing articles, stay with relevant topics you know well.  Or find an article similar to the one you want to write, read it a couple of times, and then rewrite it entirely using your own words.  You can also get some ideas from several articles, and then combine them into a totally new article.  You can purchase PLR (private label rights) articles and use them on your site, ideally alter them and submit them to article sites (be careful with this one – you must change them enough to be unrecognizable from the original, or you will be flagged for duplicate content). 

To get your articles circulating online, I suggest these sites are the most important ones available: http://ezinearticles.com, http://goarticles.com, and http://articledashboard.com.  These ones, in my lived experience, have the most users and the most clout with Google.  They are all free to submit articles to.  Be careful to follow their rules (especially EzineArticles), to keep from having your account suspended or your articles rejected.

Finally, do make sure you create a biography box that will draw readers to your site.  Your author bio should give an overview about you and give readers motive to visit your site.  This is where the traffic comes from, and the amount of traffic good articles can generate will blow you away!  Write useful articles consistently, and you will see ezines publishing your articles, this will bring you more traffic from their visitors. 

For online tips see Stephen’s Power Marketing: https://stephenomearaonline.com/powermarketer