Colin Klinkert Dot Com

Using free online classifieds, like Craigslist, can be a good way to get your online business started and generating traffic. What makes these online classifieds worthwhile is the fact that they generally provide highly targeted audiences.

Let’s say that you are promoting a product that teaches people how to cook. Depending on the type of classifieds site you go to, you may find an entire category devoted to culinary instruction. Otherwise, try to fit your advertisement into the most applicable category.

There are pluses and minuses to online classified ads. First, the pluses: most of them are free, so they’ll fit any budget; as discussed above, the traffic is targeted to your specific audience; they are a way to test out your ad copy before starting a pay per click (PPC) or other paid advertising campaign.

Okay, now the minuses: they’re free, so there’s a lot of people who post classified ads, meaning yours could get lost in the clutter; in advertising, you generally get what you pay for, so the amount of time and effort you put into these free ads may not provide the amount of traffic that a paid ad would.

Before posting your ads, make sure to familiarize yourself with the classifieds site’s rules. You don’t want to go through the trouble of posting an ad only to have it deleted a few moments afterwards because it violated site policy.

So are online classifieds right for you? That depends on your current progress in building your business. If you can afford some other, more traditional forms of internet advertising, they’ll probably give you more traffic.

If you are just starting out and don’t have much, or any, money to put into an advertising campaign, online classifieds could provide you with business that can make you the money to pay for other means of advertising.

Brute Force marketers say that doing it all is best, so maybe it’s worth having a look at Craigslist or PRweb for your business?

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What You Need to Know About Pay Per Click Advertising…

What is Pay Per Click?

Pay Per Click is just as it sounds. You create an Ad in which you pay each time someone clicks on that ad. Even though it may sound very simple, there are a few variables when it comes to creating a sale from that click.

What are those variables? When you set up a website, write articles or content, you are working around keywords, and you want to have keywords that are the most popular on the search engines and are related to your product. I am going to use AdWords as my example in this blog.

If you don’t do your part in keyword research, then you are going to be wasting your money. You need to use keywords that are going to bring in sales, and to do this you need to take the time necessary to research them. Because it does take time, many skip this important step.

Do you want a lot of Traffic with little sales, or conversions with a few great keywords? If you know how Pay Per Click works, then you will choose the conversions over traffic.

So, how do you find these great keywords that will turn into sales conversions for you?

You need to find keywords that are relevant to your product. Your Ads need to contain keywords relevant to your landing page and your merchant site.

What if you are looking to buy keywords that are phrases. For example, maybe you are marketing an Ebook on health food. You would look for keyword phrases such as “organic health foods”. If somebody is looking for health foods or even recipes for health foods, they may type in “health food recipes”. The person is looking for as many resources as possible in this subject area. To make their search more successful, and to choose your site, you may want to have the keywords “Easy Health Food Recipes” vs “Health Food”. Which of these keyword phrases would you choose?

If you are worried that you have to pay more for a more relevant keyword, you need to consider that a more expensive keyword that will sell your product is much better investment than that of paying for keywords that are never to be utilized.

Make a budget in regards to your Pay Per Click ads, be aware that you are going to lose some of that money, and learn from those losses.

Final Tips:

1. Be sure your keywords are relevant to your product or niche market. Don’t just chose a few random keywords from a search engine database. This will not attract the attention you are looking for. You want to attract potential customers to your site.
2. Set up several ad groups which are relevant to your landing pages. Remember you are targeting your niche and creating traffic, and because you are going to be paying for ever click on your ad, you want to create an ad that is going to create sales.
3. Start small then upon it. Be cautious of how much you are spending on your keywords. The search engines are pretty accurate as to what the keyword phrases are worth, so you will be getting what you pay for, but just start off small, learn the process, then you will be an old pro at Pay Per Click Conversions before you know it.

Keep track of your ad campaign, monitor the sales and how much money it is bringing in or taking out of your budget. If you spot a problem, you can correct it early on rather than paying for it in the end.

More to come in a Followup post:

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