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In Lesson 1 I will describe the basics of CPC from a new advertisers perspective, how does it work, where do I start?

Cost Per Click (CPC), also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing describes a method of advertising on the web where you pay only for “clicks” you get to your web site. The amount you pay per click is determined by a number of factors. Whether it is successful or not is also determined by your offering. I’ve spent millions on CPC ads, so I have learned a few things that I will pass on to you.

So how does it work? CPC advertising is structured on a bidding system, meaning you bid for specific key words that you want to target. For example, an advertiser who sells “digital cameras” can bid on that key word. When someone clicks on your ad and goes to your web site, you pay for that click.

CPC advertising allows you to highly target the audience you want , even geographically. The theory is, only someone who is looking for a digital camera would type the word in and therefore be someone you want to show your web site to in hopes that they visit your store and eventually buy, or in a local case a hope to visit the store or call.

This differs from the CPM (Cost Per Thousand) newspaper style model, where you buy an ad for a fixed price and hope that its designed well enough that people click on it or read it. This ad is usually served to a general audience, not targeted by key word, so they are less likely to click on your ad.

The CPC model has become extremely popular for advertising on the Internet, as it produces a highly targeted visitor to the site that you only pay for when they do. The main advertisers that offer this are:

Google Ad Words

Yahoo Search Marketing

Microsoft Advertising

Google is the biggest followed by Yahoo and MSN. In fact, I would say Google has more volume in ads then Yahoo and MSN combined at the time of this article.

So you want to try? What do you do?

1. Set up an account with one or all. If you are starting, just pick one.
2. Determine where you want to advertise. What countries do you ship too? If you only sell local, you don’t want to advertise around the country, otherwise your ads will be clicked on by people who you can’t sell too. 
3. Determine the key words you want to bid on. I would recommend you to start with the most competitive products you sell, or the strongest part of your business. CPC ads do not just have to be product based, you can advertise a service as well. All the ad systems have a key word tool that will help you identify relevant key words. A tip here is to keep the words more specific. For example, if you select “digital cameras” you will be paying a fortune for this word, as there is a lot of competition and searches done for this term. However, if you select “Panasonic Lumix” you will get a more targeted buyer and a higher conversion rate.
4. Determine where you want to link to. Once the user clicks on your ad, where does the link go? Linking to a relevant page would be ideal. Don’t link to your home page when you can link direct to the Panasonic Lumix camera page, you’ll get better results.
5. Bid. The higher you bid, the higher your ad gets placed. If you bid really high, you will be at the very top. But be careful, you will also get the most clicks.
6. Set the budget. If you are experimenting, make sure this stops you from getting into trouble. If you don’t know what you are doing, you could end up spending a fortune before you know what happened. Set a monthly budget (NOT daily), so you don’t exceed the money you’ve put aside, you can always increase it, but not decrease. Get you feet wet first. Daily budget’s are in some cases really just a monthly budget, so if you set your daily budget at $30, it is really $30 x 30 days = $900. Your spend could reach $900 in ONE DAY!!! So watch out.
7. Determine time of day. Ads can be targeted by time of day (not in all systems). This is useful as you don’t always want to display ads when you are not there to answer questions. This could result in you loosing the customer.
8. Start small, keep it simple. Master the basics, learn the system, there is plenty of time to expand. If you don’t, you could bite off more then you can chew. Also, keep experimenting, most people don’t get it right the first time.

These are the basic minimums. I could go on all day about other things related to CPC. Your page, web site design and policies also have a large influence on your success but this will have to do for now. Stay tuned for more.  

CPC advertising is a highly competitive game, with lots of competition, veterans have a vested interested in keeping newbies away, after all it eats into their bottom line. There are cons to this system as well, but if you want quick targeted traffic at a controlled budget, there are not many other choices you ha

As someone who advertises heavily using PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising), I would consider myself an expert. I’ve used Google, Yahoo, MSN to name the major ones in my past and present.

If you are not familiar with PPC, it is essentially like this. A whole bunch of advertisers BID for the position of their ads when a key word is searched on a search engine. Meaning the higher you bid, the higher placement you will receive and the more traffic you will get (higher placement attracts more clicks and thus more traffic).

It is highly targeted and seemingly cost efficient, because you don’t pay unless someone clicks on your highly targeted ad.

You can further control how these ads are placed by limiting your bid, daily spend, time of day, geographic territory and what sites it may show up on.

PPC advertising is great because it allows even small businesses to instantly gain traffic on a limited budget. If you aren’t sure how to do this or don’t have time, go to any search engine and type in PPC, you will find a range of services of companies that have popped up to manage PPC.

PPC has become a huge industry, it’s main players are companies like Google (Ad Words), Yahoo (Search Marketing) and MSN (Microsoft Ad Center) and is a major source of revenue.

The World Turns on PPC, but as we know, the world is not perfect. More to come.

Hello,

I am very pleased to be able to present our Blog to the web. This Blog is a placeholder for our future web site. We are currently developing something bigger and better then was ever done before that will change the way online marketing works today.

I have spent millions in advertising and have learned that although you can succeed, the big winners are the advertisers, they always win. Our site will change this.

It’s going to take some time, but stay tuned, hopefully I’ll include some useful Blogs along the way.

Richard