Next it is important to keep in mind your end goal, which should be sales or to generate a profit.  A common error is to have your end goal as traffic.  Keep in mind that you can always drive a lot of traffic to your site without making any money.  Traffic does not mean success; making money means success or should mean success.  Just keep this in mind while we are heading into the other steps to succeed with PPC advertising.

The effects of having an incorrect goal can be devastating an example is buying 100,000 guaranteed visitors from Ebay or any website that promises a high volume of traffic.  However, what is not known is that this company has an ‘auto-page-generator’ loaded on 100,000 computers that will wiz right past your site and another 10,000 websites in a short period of time.  All that traffic does not even look at your website and will never buy anything in a million years, your website received 100,000 visitors however no sales were made and in the end it was a horrible investment.  A great example of high-quality traffic is advertising through search engines, you may only receive 50 clicks in a day in comparison to the 100,000 however you will receive several sales and make money.

The big three PPC search engines that you want to sign up for are first Google Adwords (adwords.google.com).  The second big search engine to start with would be Bing.  Bing is from Microsoft and is gaining market share it is very important to sign up for Bing (adcenter.microsoft.com/).  The third major search engine is Yahoo.  All three search engines provide high quality traffic and it is extremely important to get started with all three. Bing and Yahoo are currently working together so if you setup two advertising campaigns one of Google and one on Bing you will be able to target over 90% of all internet users.

There are third tier search engines available and several great offers to take advantage of.  I have test drove several third tier search engines and have yet to see a sale from any of them for any of my clients.  The quality of traffic that comes through is very poor and click fraud is extremely high.  With a lot of the 3^rd tier search engines when you signup for $25-100 they will give you free credits for signing up.  A good place to go to get those specials is payperclickuniverse.com/top-pay-per-click-search-engines.php and payperclickuniverse.com/other-pay-per-click-search-engines.php.  If you are interested in signing up go ahead however know ahead of time that they are not as good as Google, Bing and Yahoo.  With a third tier search engine don’t expect to make money.

Again I repeat make sure you sign up for all three big search engines and you will be able to target more than 90% of the search engine market.  Later, after testing results stay with the search engines that produce a positive return.

In the next series we will go over how to setup the actual PPC campaign including setting up a budget, bidding options and setting up the actual campaign.  Find out exactly what common errors are and how to setup your PPC campaign correctly.

Related Articles:

• 75% of PPC Advertisers Don’t Make Money – WHY?
• Dominating PPC 101 – ppc decisions (part 8 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – ad groups (part 5 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – match type (part 4 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – keywords (part 1 of 8 series)

I will be covering in a eight part series with everything from starting a PPC campaign to succeeding with PPC advertising.  In this first part of my eight part series I will be covering how to find keywords and what type of keywords you want to have.

A great tool that I have always used to do keyword research is a Google Adwords Keyword tool adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal with this tool you can type in all of the keyword that you can think of in your industry.  Type in every keyword you could possibly imagine into the white box in the middle of the screen.  For example if your website sells advertising books you would type in advertising book, PPC advertising, advertising 101 book, advertising, online advertising and everything else that you can think of that has to do with your business.  You want as many keywords as possible that have to do with your company so make sure you do not eliminate keywords in this step but add as many as possible.

To find more relevant keywords they are normally a few words long.  Quality traffic normally comes from highly relevant keywords to your industry.  For an advertising book for example a very relevant keyword may be ‘buy advertising book’ it will not receive a very high traffic flow however the traffic that does come will be extremely high quality traffic at a low cost.

Next after entering in every keyword phrase that you can think of that you can think of click on get keyword ideas.  Google will then generate a list of keyword ideas and how often they are searched for.  You will want to export this file to an excel file for future use (found in the middle of the page).

After downloading your keywords into an excel file (could be as large as several hundred keywords).  You will want to separate your keywords into many different groups, keep in mind that more groups is better than less groups.  The keyword groups should be a list of related keyword.  The keyword groups that you put together now will display the same ads so make sure they are similar to one another.  An extremely large number of groups could be hard to manage and too few groups will also hinder your PPC campaign.  An example of a few groups would be advertising books, books, buy advertising books, online advertising and marketing book.

Save your excel file with your keyword groups and store it away for future use. The 2^nd part of my 8 part series will cover which search engines you should sign up for, which should be avoided and what your search engine goal should be.

Related Articles:

• 75% of PPC Advertisers Don’t Make Money – WHY?
• Dominating PPC 101 – ppc decisions (part 8 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – ad groups (part 5 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – match type (part 4 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – search engines (part 2 of 8 series)