Starting a PPC campaign with Adwords and YSM

I have decided to expand my marketing by introducing PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. Since I earned a solid amount of money last month I wish to reinvest some of it while learning the new tricks of the trade.

What is PPC and how does PPC work

Basically, PPC works like this. You make an advertisement. This advertisement appears on places you choose, like search engines and websites. You of course have total control of what keywords you want to promote through that advertisement. Then you decide how much you want to pay for one click on your add. This is called the bid. Depending on your bid and other people's bids for the same keyword your ad will be displayed in a better (or worse) position.

Let's say you decide to pay 10 cents for one click. That means it will cost $10 to have 100 visitors to your site. If by conversion methods you can earn more then $10 then you have a profitable campaign and vice versa. When you get it profitable you can reinvest all the money you earn to have more ads for more people until you hit an equilibrium between cost of advertising and money earned. Of course you can improve conversion or find better sources of income for visitors and the game starts over.

Setting up a PPC campaigns with Google and Yahoo

I decided to use Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing advertising networks. These are the two strongest networks from two strongest search engines in the world today.

If you haven't signed up with those yet, I suggest you search the net for coupons first. Both networks have them so try searching for "adwords coupons" and "yahoo search marketing coupons". You will generally find Google Coupons of about $50 worth and Yahoo coupons of hefty $100. This is "free money" and you should use it.

Setting up an account with these two providers will still cost you a little money from your credit card. $10 to start an account with Adwords and $30 for Yahoo. But if you take all the coupons you will end up with $190 of ads money to spend for the cost of $40. $190 could relate to around 2,000 very targeted visitors.

That is and isn't a lot. Depending on your niche, you will have to earn more then $200 from 2,000 visitors. Good thing is that's 2,000 very interested people in your product but it all comes down to niche and conversion from there.

How to start a first PPC campaign

After setting accounts with Adwords and YSM, you are ready to create your first advertisements. This will be a purpose of another article, but let me just give you a hot tip. Google has excellent advertising support team and you can basically take it from there. Ask them directly (you will find a link in your Adwords screen) to help you create an advertising campaign that will suit your needs and usually within a week you will get an useful answer and a ready campaign from one of their experts. It pays for Google to spend money helping you, because ultimately you will be spending more money helping them.