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!)