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Building Targeted Traffic (Part 2)

by Priya Shah

In the first part of this article, I covered the techniques you can use to build targeted traffic to your website using free search engine traffic.

As always when you want something free, you must pay for it in other ways, in this case, in the time you must spend creating and optimizing a search-engine friendly site.

But what if you don't want to go through all this trouble of 'optimizing' your site?

And what if, even after all this effort, you do not place anywhere near the first 3 pages (very likely because there may be many excellent sites out there competing for the same keywords).

Well, no one said it was easy. But there IS a quicker and easier way to get targeted search engine traffic.

That is, if you're willing to PAY for Quality Traffic!

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engine Traffic

Pay-per-click search engines like Overture and its numerous clones allow you to BID for keywords of your choice, and charge you only when your link is actually CLICKED on. So you only pay for the VISITORS you get.

Google itself has a Pay-per-Click option called Google AdWords Select. To see how it works, go to google.com and do a search for any keyword.

To the left of the page, you will see the usual search results. But on the right of the page, you will see boxes with ads related to the topic of your search.

YOURS could be one of them.

Google AdWords is easy to set up and edit and your ads will start appearing on its searches immediately for the keywords you choose.

The Advantages Of PPCs

1. You don't need an optimized site or even your own domain name. All you need are a few user-friendly SALES pages that get results for you—something that you can achieve by writing excellent sales copy or hiring a copywriter to write it for you.

2. The higher you bid, the higher your placement.

3. Bids start as low as $0.01 (for the smaller PPCs) or $0.05 (for Overture). Of course, if your keyword is competitive, your actual minimum could be much higher.

4. Many of the smaller ones will give you a free deposit to get started. If you find them responsive, you can continue with them. You will find many of the PPCs that pay you to advertise in the free e-book here.

The Disadvantages Of PPCs

1) Managing your bids to remain competitive and not spend more than a cent of what your competitors are paying can take up ALL your time, but you can find some bid management software and resources that will help.

2) If your keyword is competitive, it can get VERY expensive to sustain a PPC campaign.

3) Your website must have useful content and good sales copy to improve your CONVERSION rate, so that a large percentage of your visitors become customers or join your program. If your site doesn't CONVERT visitors, you're wasting your money.

4) PPCs though targeted, are little more than ads and consumers are smart enough to recognise that. Sooner or later as with all things on the Internet, they will get jaded and lose their importance.

But they are here to stay, because they provide an important source of revenue for search engines. In fact, the bigger players like Overture, are supply paid search results to other search engines and are displayed at the top of the search results at Yahoo.

So I suggest you "make hay while the sun shines" and cash in on the PPC wave.

Priya Shah runs blogging courses at BlogBrandz and is the author of Number One In Your Niche.

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