Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Pay Per Click ???

PPC is one of the four basic types of Search Engines. PPC is also one of the most cost-effective ways of targeted internet advertising. According to Forbes magazine, PPC or Pay Per Click, accounts to 2 billion dollars a year and is expected to increase to around 8 billion dollars by the year 2008.
Let us take a quick look at how PPC Search Engines work.
These engines create listings and rate them based on a bid amount the website owner is willing to pay for each click from that search engine. Advertisers bid against each other to receive higher ranking for a specific keyword or phrase.

The highest bidder for a certain keyword or phrase will then have the site ranked as number 1 in the PPC Search Engines followed by the second and third highest bidder, up to the last number that have placed a bid on the same keyword or phrase. Your ads then will appear prominently on the results pages based on the dollar amount bid you will agree to pay per click.

How do you make money by using PPC into your affiliate marketing business?

Most affiliate programs only pay when a sale is made or a lead delivered after a visitor has clickthrough your site. Your earnings will not always be the same as they will be dependent on the web site content and the traffic market.

The reason why you should incorporate PPC into your affiliate marketing program is that earnings are easier to make than in any other kind of affiliate program not using PPC. This way, you will be making profit based from the clickthroughs that your visitor will make on the advertiser's site. Unlike some programs, you are not paid per sale or action.

PPC can be very resourceful of your website. With PPC Search Engines incorporated into your affiliate program, you will be able to profit from the visitor's who are not interested in your products or services. The same ones who leave your site and never comes back.

You will not only get commissions not only from those who are just searching the web and finding the products and services that they wanted but you will be able to build your site's recognition as a valuable resource. The visitors who have found what they needed from you site are likely to come back and review what you are offering more closely. Then they will eventually come back to search the web for other products.

This kind of affiliate program is also an easy way for you to generate some more additional revenues. For example, when a visitor on your site does a search in the PPC Search Engine and clicks on the advertiser bided listings, the advertisers' account will then be deducted because of that click. With this, you will be compensated 30% to 80% of the advertisers' bid amount.

PPC is not only a source of generating easy profits; it can also help you promote your own site. Most of the programs allow the commissions received to be spent for advertising with them instantly and with no minimum earning requirement. This is one of the more effective ways to exchange your raw visitors for targeted surfers who has more tendencies to purchase your products and services.

What will happen if you when you integrate PPC into your affiliate program?

PPC usually have ready-to-use affiliate tools that can be easily integrated into your website. The most common tools are search boxes, banners, text links and some 404-error pages. Most search engines utilize custom solutions and can provide you with a white-label affiliate program. This enables you, using only a few lines of code, to integrate remotely-hosted co-branded search engine into your website.

The key benefits? Not only more money generated but also some extra money on the side. Plus a lifetime commissions once you have referred some webmaster friends to the engine.

Think about it. Where can you get all these benefits while already generating some income for your site? Knowing some of the more useful tools you can use for your affiliate program is not a waste of time. They are rather a means of earning within an earning.

Best know more about how you can use PPC search engines into your affiliate program than miss out on a great opportunity to earn more profits
i hope this will help you a lot
more you can find at www.ktmonline.com

for your easyness just collected some definations

Bid - The amount that an advertiser is willing to pay for a click on a specific keyword.
Budget - The amount of money that an advertiser sets aside for an advertising campaign. Different publishers allow for advertisers to set daily, weekly or monthly budgets.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR) - The percentage of clicks on a link. This is usually a percentage based on the total number of clicks divided by the number of impressions that an advertisement has received.
Conversion Rate - The relationship between visitors to a web site and actions considered to be a "conversion", such as a sale or request to receive more information: the percentage of people whose clicks have resulted in a sale or desired action in relation to the total number of clicks on an advertisement.
Cost Per Click (CPC) - The cost or cost-equivalent paid per click-through to an advertiser's website.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM) - The amount an advertiser pays for one thousand advertisement impressions, regardless of the consumer's subsequent actions.
Delisting - The removal of a listing as a result of inaction or poor performance.
GeoTargetting - An advertisement targeted at a specific geographical region, area or location.
Impressions - The number of times an advertisement is viewed by web surfers.
Keywords - Search terms or phrases that are related to an advertisement or ad copy.
Landing Page - The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking an advertisement. Often, this page is optimized for a specific keyword term or phrase.
Linking Text - The text that is contained within a link.
Pay Per Click (PPC) - Advertising model in which advertisers pay for click-throughs to their website. Ads are served based on keywords or themes.
Rank - How well a particular web page or web site is listed in a search engine or advertising results.
Return On Investment (ROI) - The percentage of profit that results in a marketing or advertising campaign. Naturally, advertisers want the amount of money made to exceed the money spent

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Search Engine Marketing Services: Trends and Predictions

Search Engine Marketing Services: Trends and Predictions


The search engine marketing industry is consistently evolving, sometimes at a pace that makes it hard to believe that search engine marketing services can stay on top of all the latest developments. The one constant for search engine marketing firms, and for the industry in general, is change--usually for the better, sometimes for the worse, but almost always significant. The industry is not for the faint-hearted or those who abhor change. However, savvy search engine marketing firms try to look ahead to anticipate trends. Here are my predictions of issues that search engine marketing services will face in the short term.

More Accountability Demanded from Search Engine Marketing Firms
Search engine marketing firms that use tactics designed to trick the engines into showing results that aren't directly addressing the search query will struggle, as more companies begin to look at the larger goals that lead them to investigate search engine marketing services in the first place. The "traffic-centric" mindset will evolve as companies begin to demand accountability from search engine marketing firms in terms of bottom line increases. Ranking increases delivered by search engine marketing services will be questioned if they do not lead to significant traffic increases, and traffic increases will be questioned if there is no subsequent increase in business generated from the website. This is a good thing for quality search engine marketing firms, since the "snake-oil" practitioners that have given the industry such a bad name will never be given serious consideration by any company that does its homework in the vendor selection process.

Rising PPC Costs and Increasing PPC Frustration
As larger companies with huge budgets continue to jump into the pay per click (PPC) arena, costs will continue to rise. (Average PPC costs have increased 37% from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006.1) These well-funded companies will use PPC as a branding tool as much as a sales tool, which will squeeze out many of the current smaller advertisers. In fact, the top 10 PPC advertising companies, based upon the number of PPC impressions, include such names as eBay, NextTag, Vonage, Time Warner, Orbitz, Target, and Yahoo.2 More large companies will continue to join the fray, many of them throwing ROI out the window and bidding high prices for desirable keyphrases for the sake of branding. This means that search engine marketing firms will find small- to medium-sized companies turning to SEO to achieve results when they no longer can afford PPC.

Increased Interest in Organic SEO
While PPC costs rise, there is also a trend that no doubt disturbs the engines that offer PPC programs. Sixty-six percent of consumers "distrust" paid search ads. Up to 85% of searchers say they "tend to ignore the paid listings", while 87% of commercial clicks take place "on the natural (not sponsored) search results." Three times as many marketers who outsource the management of their natural SEO to search engine marketing firms and who also participate in pay per click advertising recognize a higher ROI from their search engine marketing services than from PPC. These facts, coupled with the fact that Google has recently announced that it will begin to take the relevance of pages into consideration when deciding in what order the ads will appear (which will mean that effective PPC campaigns will need at least some basic organic SEO), point to one obvious result--an increase in the number of companies that investigate organic SEO programs, whether internally generated or provided by outside search engine marketing firms.

Continued Reluctance from Agencies to Pursue Search Marketing
To most, it seems like a perfect fit--traditional advertising agencies joining forces with (or purchasing outright) PPC providers and organic search engine marketing services. However, the average agency is scared to death of search engine marketing services in any form (although some forward-looking agencies have finally jumped on the search engine marketing bandwagon). The reasons are simple: accountability and metrics.

Advertising agencies have for years made money based upon a percentage of what a company spends on advertising. This model has been the accepted norm for decades. However, it raises some ethical issues. What is the motivation for an agency to recommend decreased spending on non-performing initiatives? Moreover, what reasons does an agency have to report on the effectiveness of each of its campaigns? (If an agency's clients dug deeply into any such metrics, they would likely reduce their advertising spend based on the performance of individual campaigns.) Many PPC service providers have adopted this model, even though the goal of a PPC campaign should be to monitor the metrics of a campaign to decrease the spend (eliminating underperforming key phrases, for example).

Good search engine marketing services offer metrics that scare traditional advertising agencies. If these agencies were to present such metrics to their clients, those same clients may start to demand similar metrics for other campaigns (television, radio, magazine ads, etc.). Until the "percentage of spend" model is altered, large agencies will continue to reject search engine marketing services and will not recommend them to their clients.

Continued Focus on Google for Organic SEO
In general, where Google goes, other engines will follow. Smart search engine marketing services will continue to optimize for Google, which currently accounts for half of searches in the United States. However, instead of trying to trick Google by unraveling the latest, ever-changing algorithm, search engine marketing firms will instead need to use the "piggyback" approach. This approach entails learning from the extensive studies that Google conducts of its users (learning by observing the commonalities of the types of sites that consistently rank highly) and applying those same attributes to client websites. In this way, search engine marketing firms not only make sites better for Google, but also for users. As other engines try to close the relevancy gap in search engine results, search engine marketing firms will be rewarded as the tactics they have used for Google success become the accepted industry standard.

Conclusion
The use of search engine marketing services is still a new, "unproven" channel to many companies. Even so, it is changing the way that many traditional advertising agencies must do business. With PPC costs on the rise, and the effectiveness of the PPC channel coming into question, more companies will investigate the hiring of search engine marketing firms using organic tactics for their Internet marketing needs. Smart companies that outsource organic or PPC advertising will no longer say "what have you done for me lately"--they will say "prove what you've done for me lately." Search engine marketing services that are on top of the curve will be more than happy to do so.