Pay Per Click Advertising - It's Trickier Than I Thought

Pay Per Click advertising is something I always thought was the easiest, most sure-fire way to get an avalanche of instant traffic to your websites...and always there, whenever you're ready for it. (And willing to pay a little bit for it of course, too.) So until the last couple of weeks I had never even dabbled with it at all. Since I do have a handful or so of websites put together now, I figured it's time to direct some traffic to them and see what happens. Should be a piece of cake, right?

As it turns out, there's a lot more to pay per click advertising than I realized. I had the introductory credits to use toward Google, Yahoo and MSN that you get when you open an account with BlueHost, so I figured that using those would be a good excuse to get started. I'm not used to spending ANY money on these little business experiments of mine, but you've got to start somewhere I guess!

I was pleasantly surprised that MSN only requires you to put $5 of your own money into the account to get the $30 credit added when you open it. Even I didn't mind that, being the cheapskate I am! :) Yahoo calls for more like $30, but they add another $50 to it. I haven't tried Google yet, but it's similar to Yahoo I think. And it's surprisingly quick and easy to actually open the accounts; it's all done entirely online.

Quick is the keyword, though, because before you know it they start prompting you to enter your first text ad to start with. Suddenly you find yourself thrown into the ad writing business - which is like a whole art of its own. Right on the spot I'm sitting there, trying to draw on all the ad writing tips I've ever learned to come up with an ad that makes some sort of sense.

Then, of course, they ask you to enter all of the keywords you want to have your ad matched to, and even offer you the option to write several more ads to test against each other, which I was totally unprepared for as well! :) The good news is that you can always change your ads, add more, delete some or all, or even just scrap them all and start over again anytime you want. So there's really no pressure.

It's pretty cool though. I find it to be a lot like placing regular classified ads. Except these ads go live within minutes - so you can start seeing results almost immediately. It's kind of neat how websites that have been sitting, unknown to everyone in the world other than myself, can almost instantly begin registering visitors. (And even Google AdSense clicks, which is much more exciting!)

The volume of traffic from the pay per click ads, however, hasn't been what I expected so far. (In the little bit I've tried so far, anyway.) I was expecting more, although I'm sure the popularity of your subject matter makes a huge difference, and also how much you're willing to pay per click. Pay more and your ad appears at or around the top of your competition; pay only the minimum bid amount (which is what I did) and your ad may hardly ever appear, depending on how many competing ads are out there. But the minimum is only 10 cents per click for Yahoo, and a mere 5 cents for MSN. Prices like those do give you a fair chance to make a profit, even if you don't get as many visitors.

The real challenge is...AdSense ads sometimes don't even pay that much per click. You never really know what they'll pay until they're clicked. Some ads might pay a dollar or more on the same site as other ads that only pay a few pennies, so it's hard to predict. Naturally, the idea is that hopefully in the end you receive more than you pay for all those paid visitors. But when your sites rely mostly on AdSense for revenue like the ones I've made so far, it looks like it might be tough to turn a decent profit. Add in a few affiliate sales to the mix here and there, or maybe sales of your own products, etc., and it should get easier.

So you need to bid at or near the minimum per click to give it a chance to be profitable, yet at that rate the amount of traffic you receive just isn't very impressive. I guess the answer to that still goes back to my original idea of just creating LOTS of different sites until it all starts adding up to something worthwhile.

So while pay per click advertising is a super fast way to direct some traffic to your websites...unless you're willing to pay a higher amount per visitor, there are probably better ways to create traffic. I haven't tried paid banner or text ads on other websites yet, but those might be a better choice in some cases. For now though, I'm going to continue experimenting with these pay per clicks and see what else I can learn. (And hopefully earn!)

Free Online Press Releases

I just found a great website that allows you to post press releases online, totally free of charge. It's a great way to promote new websites as you create them, which I plan to do, or whatever new products you might be marketing, etc.

You can find it here at: Free-Press-Release.com

There are many other similar websites that charge varying amounts for allowing you to post press releases, but this one really does offer totally free listings. Of course, they also give you the option to pay for a premier version which includes greater promotion, etc., but that's only an option that they make available if you choose to use it. Check it out!

I've Been Busy Lately!

I haven't posted here in about a month - wow how time flies when you're having fun. (And when you've been busy!)

I've been quite busy lately, working on what I've settled on as my decision on what to apply myself to, as far as money making endeavors.

Looking through my (mostly junk) emails I came across something about a case study on someone's success at creating profitable websites. It's like, yeah, what else is new? But in this case it was impressive enough sounding that I ended up reading it and even studying it, trying to get the main idea of what has worked for the person who wrote the article.

Without actually promoting it for the guy, I'll just describe it as a software program that "creates" websites in a mostly automated way. Not fully, but mostly anyway. And the main idea I took from this article was that the key to the author's success was not so much that he did everything right, but that he did lots of what he did find to work.

More specifically, he created not just a few, but several hundred websites that consistently made at least small amounts of money each day. The result, in his case, was supposedly a consistent $15,000+ monthly income after only about six months of work. (Yes, I'd say that's something worth looking into, wouldn't you?!)

Needless to say, about the only way you could pull this off is to use something that does, in fact, automate the whole web site creation process so that it enables you to create lots of websites fairly quickly. And true to my usual form, I didn't just take this guy's word on what is the best program to use to accomplish this, but instead started searching a bit on my own for something I could use myself to get similar results.

And guess what? I found something else that I think is even much better than what that person was promoting. The one I found actually creates streaming video sites on whatever subject you choose, rather than just collections of free articles from around the web. And I think most people find streaming videos about the subjects they're interested in more exciting that just rehashed articles that can be found all over the place already.

So just finding this motivated me to finally open a web hosting account with BlueHost, which is the one that is highly recommended by Holly Mann, who uses the service for her own sites. After doing a lot of research on different web hosting companies, I decided that this was a good one to choose because not only are they one of the least expensive services for what they offer, (as low as $6.95 per month), but they also allow an unlimited number of subdomains for any domain names you host through them. And since I plan on creating a lot of websites here very shortly, this is important. Plus, an added bonus is that your first domain name is on them - it's free of annual fees for as long as you keep your account, which is nice.

Shortly after setting that up, I've now already created 3 web sites so far, all decked out with Google AdSense ads, ClickBank ads and even Amazon ads - all placed automatically by the program! It's really great, since it's so easy to go from start to finish all in one sitting. So I can really see the possibility of setting up dozens or even hundreds of similar sites before long. In fact, I now PLAN on doing so!

So maybe now you can see why I've been so busy lately that I haven't even posted here for a whole month! In fact, to be honest, I actually don't see myself continuing to post here all that often from here on, since there's really not much of any need to. I think I've found what I've been looking for since I started this blog. So I'll be busy doing what I should be doing, and that's creating more and more new and unique websites to make money with. Once they're set up and online, they don't go anywhere - they just keep making more money without doing much of anything to them. Truly "Auto-Pilot" as one of the latest internet marketing cliches goes!

OK...I guess I won't keep it a secret. I wasn't really planning on revealing this here when I started writing this post, but if you'd like to check this thing out for yourself you'll see that I'm not exaggerating. The program I've been using is called Instant Video Site Creator, and on their website they even include a few sample video sites that they've created as examples of what you can do with the program.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about the possibilities! So if I'm not posting on here very often anymore, you'll know what I'm up to! I plan to take this opportunity to get lots of sites up and online and start building my own personal "virtual real estate" empire on the web. I figure whether I really end up having the kind of success that other guy had or not, I'm going to give it an honest effort and find out for myself what's really possible.

Wish me luck! And of course, good luck to you as well, if you decide to try the same thing. Take care!