If it is your intention to get your business and website up and running successfully as fast as you can, one of the best ways to advertise is by pay per click. You will find that this is the quickest way forward in drawing targeted traffic to what you have on offer. However, there is a right way to be involved with pay per click advertising and if not carried out properly you stand to lose quite a bit of money. This article is going to explain how pay per click works and hopefully it will help you to decide whether or not it is for you.

Pay per click advertising is quite easy. Google or Yahoo search engines will let you buy advertising on a pay per bid basis. You are given a choice of how much you are willing to pay for a specific keyword and the more this amount is, the higher your advertisement will appear on the pages of the search engine.

Your particular ad will be displayed at the right hand side of the search results page. For example, if you place a bid of 15 cents in order for your ad to appear, every time someone clicks on it, you pay 15 cents because the viewer is directed to your webpage. If everything looks interesting on your webpage then hopefully sales will be generated from the people who are viewing it. Now, don’t you feel that this is a fair deal?

Unfortunately, there would have to be a downside and in this particular instance that downside is that pay per click advertisements can end up costing you a packet if no leads are generated from them. If, for example you have a specific keyword for 15 cents per click with a hundred people clicking on your advertisement this would mean you have to pay $15.00. If you do well and achieve 50 sales from these clicks then it is clear that your campaign is turning out to be a good investment.

However if from the hundred clicks you make only a few if any sales you have ended up spending $15.00 for very little or maybe even absolutely nothing. The more clicks you receive on your ad the more money you will owe so there has to be some sales being achieved from these clicks to make it a profitable proposition for you.

A really good thing about pay per click advertising is the speed at which you can see the results. It’s true, you can have your ad on the first page of the search engine results and be generating traffic and potential sales to your webpage in a matter of minutes after the initial set up and posting of your ad. The best way to do this is to find keywords with a low bid price which are likely to generate a sizable number of clicks. You will need to test, track and practice your pay per click campaign to ensure you are getting the very best results possible.

Tutorials containing detailed instructions are provided by many of the large pay per click advertising companies such as Google and Yahoo and this will help you to get the most from your campaign. They also have forums for users to be able to ask and answer questions and taking part on these forums can save you loads of time and money in the long run. It’s vital for you to learn how to use pay per click advertising and it should be mentioned that it’s best not to hurry, take the time to learn about what you are going into and your results are going to be much better.

So, if it’s a fast and inexpensive way to generate traffic to your website that you are looking for you may want to think about pay per click advertising. You need to be making more money than you are spending so be careful, keep an eye on your conversion rates and be prepared to make any necessary changes to your campaign as you go along.

Internet marketers new to the business are initially more than happy to simply drive traffic to what they have on offer. Needless to say, before long they become conscious of the fact that the conversion rate is much more of an important measure, even more so if they are paying for the directed traffic. If sales do not materialize some may give up completely, but others start to appreciate the need for testing and do something about it.

Split testing is one of the most powerful forms of testing and it lets you make comparisons between different parts of your campaign. The most straightforward is A/B testing. This is when separate factors such as say, for example, two advertisements, two headlines, or two landing pages are compared to one another. Some systems have this facility for split testing already built in. If you happen to be advertising by use of Google Adwords, the procedure to compare the click through and conversion rates of different advertisements is quite simple.

Following a number of clicks it becomes apparent which advertisement is performing better than the others. The not so successful ad then gets put out of use and another one replaces it and the test process starts all over again. When this form of testing is repeated over and over again the end result will be an advertisement which generates both more clicks as well as sales. The marketers with more experience use split testing techniques like Taguchi testing which compare more than one variable at any given time.

Those marketers who know what they are doing would say that split testing is the obvious way forward. However, it’s not the only kind of testing which will develop the bottom line. Advertisers on pay per click are able to make use of hundreds and thousands of keywords for their campaign and quite often these keywords will give a good return on the investments made. However, many of them can be a drain on the budget as whilst attracting clicks they do not necessary produce sales.

This can make the difference between a campaign being a super success or a disappointing failure and is usually the point when the new marketer withdraws from the campaign as it is becoming too expensive. If only they knew, if they were to track the conversion rate of individual keywords, the business could quite easily turn into a nice little earner.

Another way of looking at is to take into account how much time the visitor actually spends on the site for each individual keyword. This provides information in connection with the AIDA principle, which proposes that likely customers go through stages of Attention, Interest, Desire, and finally Action. In theory the longer a visitor continues to read a sales page, the further along the AIDA process they are. The keywords which keep the visitor on the landing page for a longer time are more than likely to be winners. When using this procedure, keywords which are not performing so well can be identified without the necessity of spending a fortune whilst waiting for a big number of actions such as sales to take place.

Marketers using testing and doing it in the right way are much more likely to achieve financial success especially when they are implementing other analysis strategies as a means of making their decisions.

While your homepage will give visitors the basics and general idea of your website, what if visitors want to know exactly what information is present, and where it can be found? A sitemap is the solution to this conundrum. Like a table of contents, a sitemap may be quickly scanned to see what information the site contains.

Undoubtedly, your next question is: What’s a sitemap? Simply put, a sitemap shows the structure of your site; e.g. how the pages of your site link together. If there are a very large number of pages on your site, it may end up being a challenge to create, and confusing to visitors. This can be helped somewhat by listing links the way the site maintainer would see them, as a sort of “tree” – this is called a hierarchical view.

Sitemaps are not just for humans anymore, however. Search engines bots, aka spiders, search through sitemaps compiling links in their search for certain keywords. Having a well organized sitemap in place can help you show up in more searches.

Benefits of a Sitemap

You may be thinking that this business of creating a sitemap sounds like a lot of work. While it can be so, there are a lot of benefits to having a sitemap, for instance:

1. A sitemap can be used as a tool for planning web design.

Even if your site is very small, having only a few pages, it’s a good idea to have the structure of your website plotted out this way. This will be a big help when adding pages in the future, as you will already be able to see where they will go. Your site will not become a tangled mess pages without their relation to one another difficult to decipher.

2. No page will be left unvisited.

The search engine spiders will visit each page of your website if you have the foresight to create a sitemap. Your pages will be included in search engines databases, increasing your page rankings, meaning more visitors for your site in the long run.

3. Visitors will have an easier time to navigate your site.

One factor why visitors stay on a site is ease of navigation. A sitemap gives your visitors an idea of what the contents of your site are. They can also easily find those pages they’d like to see within your site. Without a sitemap, your visitors may not stay on your pages, returning to search engines to search for information that may right there on your site.

4. A sitemap can encourage more traffic.

As your website grows, you must update your sitemap to keep pace with that expansion. This way, visitors can see that content is being added, which encourages them to become repeat visitors. This is doubly important if your site sells products or offers a service. Potential customers will know right away about your newest products or services by examining your sitemap.

5. There is potential advertising value when using a sitemap.

With a sitemap, potential advertisers have an easier time evaluating targeted ad placement on your site. This, of course means extra income for you.

The benefits of sitemaps are well worth the time and effort of creating them. Not only do they aid you in designing your website, they make navigation more easy for visitors, help your website get higher search engine rankings, increase traffic, and help you get more income from advertisements.