How to Become a PPC Marketer

Pay-per-click advertising is a relatively quick, effective and highly measurable method of driving high-volume, targeted traffic to an offer. PPC marketers use targeted keywords in search engines to drive users who are actively seeking a specific category, thus yielding higher conversion rates.

1. Decide Where You Want To Market. There are many things to consider when choosing which search engines to set up your PPC campaigns. Most importantly, which search engines are your future customers using? You also want to take volume and traffic quality into consideration. Are they well-established? It is important to understand that the traffic varies across search engines- consider volume, user demographics etc. Your PPC ads will not necessarily generate the same success wherever you choose to place them. Cost is another important factor to consider when choosing where to place your ads. You may find that the same keyword bid is much cheaper (or more expensive) across different traffic sources. Keep in mind that the search engine will evaluate your site based on the quality of your content and this evaluation will have an impact on the price you pay per click for each visitor. The more credible and relevant the landing page is to the user, the lower this price will be.

2. Setup an Account. Most search engines have a quick setup process. It is to your advantage to have your landing page and offers ready to run before signing up for an account. Note that some search engines require a small deposit in order to get started.
3. Choose a Niche. It’s not a good idea to pick your absolute passion but you should pick something that interests you. After all, you want to promote something that will make you want to work on your site every day. The niche you choose should also correlate to your personal strategy. Do you want to be a little fish in the sea or the big fish in a little pond?
4. Set a goal and plan. Determine your daily budget, goal profit and target ROI (Return-on-investment). It is also helpful to provide yourself with a time-line in which to achieve your overall goal. This will help you stay focused along the way should you reach obstacles starting up your campaigns. Keep in mind that most start-ups don’t turn an instant profit, so if you are breaking even in the early stages, it is not entirely negative.
5. Decide on a budget With PPC marketing, you must first spend and then modify your budget. This is because there are many variables and market factors involved in PPC costs, including the competitiveness of the niche and where you choose to run your ads. To begin, find a comfort level for your initial test and understand that you will be able to modify your budget freely once you are able to optimize using your campaigns‘ performance data.
6. Don’t be afraid to test offers. Your Affiliate Manager is perhaps your greatest asset and will always provide you with the hottest offers. Even if an offer seems to be working for you, don’t get too comfortable. You could find that a new offer performs much better with your traffic and increases your profitability. After all, every hot offer out there once had no statistics to prove it was a top performer.
7. Optimize Your Keywords. With increased competition, many top tier keywords have become saturated. For limited budgets, it is best to step just outside the box. The most effective way to do this is targeting long-tailed keywords. Using this method, affiliates are able to cut bid costs, improve their search position and increase the quality of clicks through narrow targeting. There are several great tools available to determine the best long-tailed keywords in a specific niche, such as Google’s external keyword tool and Wordtracker. Another common strategy is targeting misspelled variations of popular keywords. Using a keyword tool, you can research some common typos related to your website’s niche as well as assess their potential traffic volume.
8. Optimize Your Ad Copy. When writing your ad copy, keep in mind what would make you want to click your ad if you were the consumer. The key is to attract targeted clicks while staying true to the content of your landing page. Don’t over promise, yet don’t under deliver.
9. Optimize Your Landing Page: The top affiliates are constantly making optimizations to their landing pages to increase conversions and stay updated with the latest trends. Take an objective look at your landing page. Is there a call-to-action? Is the page easy to read? Are the links to your offers easily visible? On the same note, you want to make sure your site is not solely pushing offers without much additional information to the user. All of these things are easy optimizations that will lead to higher conversions.
10. Focus Many new affiliates come into the PPC game wanting to make quick money on the internet with no real strategy or plan. The saying “jack of all trades, master of none” applies here. Pick a niche, build your campaign and continue to optimize and scale as necessary until you are ready to comfortably (and profitably) move on to a new vertical