Why Pick One Pay for Position Website?

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by Steve Tice

I realized the other day as I detailed several of the pay per click sites, and found several more to report on, that this could all become very confusing. Should a person advertise on all of them or should they pick one to be loyal to? The answer depends on what you wish to achieve and what your budget is.

First, ask yourself, is your site going to benefit from a pay per click site? Are you directly or indirectly selling something on your site?

Pay per click sites are great in that you are buying into their current and future traffic. Whereas some traditional sites can take weeks or months to fully index and add your site, pay per click sites can give near instant returns. On Monday you complete a site and open an account with Goto. Within several days you can be receiving targeted traffic (even faster with FindWhat and most of the other pay per click sites).

However, you need to first create a realistic goal and cost/benefit model to determine if you should be using this type of site. And if the answer is yes, how much should you be willing to spend.

Sites that will benefit most from pay per click sites are e-commerce oriented sites, or sites that generate leads for real world transactions, such as real estate agents. If you want to grow your site traffic, pay per click can be more targeted, and thus more effective than a banner ad. If your site is merely a personal site, or a hobby site, with no current tools to generate revenue (banner ads, affiliate programs, e-commerce), then you would probably not be well served with a pay per click campaign.

Once you decide you need to be online, you have to decide how much you can afford to spend, and on what words will your money be best spent? If you're a real estate agent in Mobile, Alabama, you would be doing a disservice to yourself bidding on the term "real estate". 1st, a top level/marquee term like real estate, travel, mortgage, computer, etc. is going to be expensive. If you serve a local market, or a specific niche, settle on targeting that niche. Sure, if you bid on "real estate", and are one of the top 5 bidders, your traffic is going to increase. But at the same time, what are the odds of someone typing in the term real estate being interested in your specific market. And worse, you are paying anywhere from .25 - $1 or more a click for the honor of increased traffic, and most likely a lack of response from any of the visitors. There are plenty of sites that ask for a $25 opening deposit, which is in most case nonrefundable. However, let's say you open four accounts, and one is very active, one is relatively active, the third produces a few results a week, and the other does roughly the same. Your opening deposits on the slower sites are going to take a long time to dwindle down, both from the slower traffic and also the more affordable keyword bids that you will most likely find on these slower sites. So let's say you have to replenish your best account every 2-4 weeks, your second fastest account every 4-6 weeks, and your other accounts every 2-3 months. When you factor the overall costs of your various campaigns, you are still getting a better value for your advertising dollar than a banner ad or print ad.

Another nice thing about advertising on some of the smaller sites is the fact that you can bid on some of the top level keywords. Let's say you have a website for a computer repair firm in Atlanta, that also sells used computers via your site. You could utilize a site like Goto to target the local market for your computer repair business, such as "Atlanta Georgia computer repair", or "computer repair Atlanta Georgia" and so on. However, you would love to advertise the computer sales aspect of your site via the keyword "computer", but can't afford the over $2 a click fee on Goto. You could go to a site like FindWhat, and bid around .50 a click. Each site is addressing your target audience, and while the traffic may be less at FindWhat, a .50 click is much easier to justify to a small business. Of course, this is all driven by your budget, your profit margin and your capture rate. If you're the computer repair/used computer company, and you generate a sale from every 30th client, and your profit margin is thin, you really can't afford to get caught up in a dollar or more a click bidding war. However, if your firms site generates a sale or referral from every 5th customer, and your profit margins are large, you can't afford not to be a top bidder.

Several other important points to remember about pay per click sites are that you are in charge of how much you spend per month, how much you spend per click and on what keywords you target your bids. Thus, if you are looking to stay within a certain budget each month, or maybe you just want to promote your site 1 day a month, the power is yours.

In a nutshell, if your site is designed to generate a response that leads to a sale, be it an online transaction such as the sale of a book, or if it leads to a real world sale, such as life insurance, you need to be utilizing pay per click!

The information contained within this article is derived from my personal experiences and observations.