Chris Cardell reveals the secrets of pay-per-click advertising and how it can increase your practice profits



Whatever type of business you are in, whatever the size, you can use this revolution in marketing to increase your profits. If you were to ask me what the single-most important development in marketing has been over the last 2 years, the answer would be simple: pay-per-click advertising.

Now, at this point, you’re either familiar with pay-per-click advertising and have a sense of what it involves, or it’s something you’ve not come across before.

Whatever the case, read on. Over the last few months, I’ve discovered that 90% of the businesses that already use pay-per-click advertising have no idea of its real potential and are losing out on fortunes.

Let me be clear with you about how important this is. I have never seen one single marketing strategy that can so dramatically improve a business’ performance in such a short period of time.

Here are the essentials that you need to know about pay-per-click advertising.

A dream come true
If you’re new to this, pay-per-click advertising simply means paying to put a listing for your website at, or near, the top of the search engines. With a few variations, it basically means you’re paying to get to the top of the search engines. However, you don’t actually pay a penny to appear at the top of those results; you only pay when somebody clicks to visit the site. That’s why it’s called “pay per click.”

How much you pay for each click depends on how much competition there is for the search terms that you want to use, and how high up on the search engine you want to be. Either way, you choose how much to pay—and you can also specify a maximum daily budget.

However, it is important to realize that this isn’t just about search engines and Internet marketing. The principles here involve the first and biggest marketing revolution of the 21st century.

There’s a reason why those nice people at Google have become billionaires—they have created the most effective direct marketing tool in the world. Why? Because there is simply no easier and faster way to reach potential patients. The impact for you and your business could be enormous.

Let’s use an example to demonstrate how this can work. How would a general dentist traditionally advertise his/her whitening services? They might advertise in beauty magazines and hope that a few out of every thousand people flicking through the magazine could be persuaded to read the ad—and then buy the services.

Compare that to an ad that appears for people who have specifically searched for the term “teeth whitening.” What do these people have in common? They’re almost certainly seriously thinking about having whitening. To be able to reach such precisely targeted buyers is a business owner’s dream—and it’s now a dream that can come true.

The basics
Here are some of the basics of pay-per-click advertising.The biggest pay-per-click company is Google. The other main company is Yahoo. If you are new to pay per click, I would recommend spending some time checking out both of these websites.
I’m going to focus on Google. It costs about $8 to set up an account, there is no minimum spend, and, best of all, your campaign can be up and running within minutes.

Here’s how it works. First, you write your ad. It needs a catchy headline and a few words of compelling copy to get people to click on it. Then you select the keywords that you are going to bid on. For example, for tooth whitening, you might choose to bid on the terms “teeth whitening,” “tooth whitening,” and “cosmetic dentistry.” This means that every time somebody searches using any of these terms, you want your advertisement to show up on the pages showing the results of the search.

Next, decide how much you are willing to pay every time somebody clicks on your ad and comes to your website. The more you are willing to pay, the higher your ad will be placed. How much you need to pay to be near the top will depend partly on how competitive your search term is. For example, bidding on the term “ballroom dancing training San Francisco” will be a lot cheaper than bidding on the term “Internet marketing” because Internet marketing is a very competitive area.

A word of advice
People get too obsessed about how much each click is going to cost. Actually, the cost of the click is not important. What is important is the business generated by each visitor to your site and whether it’s profitable. It can often be worth paying what seems to be a large amount for all these website visitors because, providing you have selected your keywords properly, these visitors are highly qualified leads and highly likely to (or at least are interested) do business with you.

Secrets
I would like to share with you two of the Google “secrets” that people are either not aware of, or if they are, they aren’t utilizing to their full potential. These secrets can make a real difference to the profitability of your Google pay-per-click campaign.
The first relates to the position of your advertisement. The ads on Google appear down the right hand side of the page, and the ones near the top get significantly more clicks than the ones further down. If your ad is so far down that you appear on the second or third page, you are likely to get very few clicks.

So, obviously, you want to be as high as possible. Many people think that the only way to move higher up is to pay more per click. But another thing that is really great about Goggle is that the amount you pay per click is only around half of what determines your position on the page.

The other 50% is determined by the number of people who click on your advertisement. This is known as your click-through rate (CTR). So, quite simply, ads that get clicked on more often get a better position and, of course, that means they get clicked on even more often, and you end up in a cycle of success.

It’s the quality of your advertisement rather than the quality of your service or treatments that will determine the number of people who click through. In other words, businesses that write better ads get more people clicking and end up paying a lot less. If I am willing to pay $2 per click, and you are willing to pay 50 cents per click, but your ad gets three times as many people clicking on it as mine, you will appear above me, and be paying only half as much as I am.People who are good at marketing and people who are good at writing ad copy do really well on Google. This is yet another spin off on your decision to get good at marketing.

The second Google secret is linked to the first and will help you get better at writing copy. Google lets you run two different advertisements at the same time for any of your keywords. This is important because it means you can test two different ads at the same time, and you can rest assured that one will almost certainly outperform the other.

In a nutshell
The secret of how to get really good at Google pay-per-click advertising is to always run two advertisements at the same time. Once it becomes clear which of your two ads is performing best, delete the underperforming one. Then write a new ad to try and outperform the better ad.

Keep doing this over time, and your CTRs will go up and up. You will soar above the competition, safe in the knowledge that not only are you getting more clicks, but you are paying far less than them for each click to your website.

By following these guidelines, I can pretty much guarantee that you will save hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Good luck!

Bio
Chris Cardell is a leading expert on entrepreneurial success and advanced thinking. He shows business owners, managers, and the self-employed how to win more customers and increase profits using advanced marketing, advertising, and Internet strategies. Visit www.cardellmedia.co.uk for more information.