Do you feel like you are spending a lot of money on PPC but that you are getting little in return? For small business owners and internet entrepreneurs, spending even a couple thousand dollars on PPC can feel like an incredible amount of money. To ensure that your ads actually bring your business results and to make the most out of your PPC investment, implement some of these money-saving tips.

1. Make sure your ads are geographically targeted. If you are a dry cleaner in Brooklyn, only place ads for people in your local area. This will help to lower ad impression, raise CTR, and give you better ROI and a higher quality score.
2. Use the negative keywords match feature to your advantage. When you use the negative keywords match feature, you can filter out keywords for which you do not want your ads to show. The words “free” and “cheap” are common elements of negative keyword phrases. For example, if you sell web templates, surely you don’t want people searching for “free web templates” to click on your ad. You will have to pay for those extra clicks and all of those unwanted impressions will lower your CTR. Use the negative keywords match feature to filter out such negative keywords. However, you may find that some negative keywords would be of benefit to your campaign. Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, choose “negative” in the drop down menu under Match Type, and determine which negative keywords may serve you.
3. Create separate ad groups, ads, and landing pages. Rather than targeting a slew of keywords with one ad and one landing page, group similar keywords in individual ad groups, create individual ads for them, and then point them to your designated landing pages. By doing so, you can improve your CTR and conversion rates because the landing pages will be more relevant to the terms that users are searching for.
4. Use ad scheduling. Ad scheduling allows you to control the day and time that your ads appear. For example, if your business offers a special Tuesday deal, you can schedule your ad campaign so that your ads promoting the Tuesday deal only show on Tuesdays. Or if you are running your ads 24 hours a day, you might find that by running them only during a certain time frame of the day instead, you get better conversions. Let’s say you have a health website. You will probably get more clicks and conversions in the morning for keywords like, “morning after pill,” “morning sickness,” “morning headache,” and “hangover.”

Don’t use broad match. Many people are simply unaware of the different keyword match features that are available in Adwords. By default in an Adwords campaign, your keywords are set as a “broad match.” The problem with broad match is that your ads will show up when people search for different variations of your keywords, even if they are not on your keyword list. Google is likely to consider many words as relevant when they are really not. Use the “phrase” keyword match type to ensure that your ads only show up when people search for the exact keywords on your list.

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NOTE:  The following is a guest post from one of my favorite internet marketing mentors.

Why I Love Affiliate Marketing – Part 3
By Jimmy D. Brown of “Affiliatenaire”

Some people have the ability to persuade others and talk them into just about anything.  Especially when it comes to influencing their buying decisions.  They know how to push the right hot buttons, say things the right way and generally get consumers into an emotional frenzy to the
point they are ready to click an order button.

There are two key words in that paragraph that really need to stand out in your mind:  “some people”.

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Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers. While a great looking website  can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-ngine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

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How to make $1000 a month online from scratch – Part 8 of 8

Over the past 7 weeks I’ve been outlining the plan of attack for making your first $1000 a month online. Completely from scratch.

This series made the following assumptions:

• You will have 5-10 hours a week to work on the business.
• You’ll have very few, if any, technical skills.
• $400 to invest.
• A willingness to work hard, stick to a plan and resist distractions.

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In my previous list building article I was discussing how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your squeeze page. Though very effective, the traffic sources I listed were also very beginner friendly. Today I’m going to take it to the next level and show you have to drive even more traffic, with some more advanced resources – note that these aren’t supposed to replace the resources in the last article, they are meant to be add-ons to your overall traffic strategy.

But before we get started on that we need to take a close look at your conversion tracking…

Conversion Tracking & Split Testing

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Welcome to the third article in my list building series. In the first two articles I discussed ?how to set up your squeeze page? and ?how to write your follow up series?. Today I?m going to show you the next step – how to drive traffic to your squeeze page, and how to make sure that traffic converts into new subscribers, and thus money in your pocket.

There are hundreds of ways to generate traffic – I?m going to focus on the ones I use the most, which of course also are the most effective for me. As with the other articles I?m going to rank theses step by step – note that it does not mean that #1 is the best, it means that I believe #1 to be the easiest to master and get results from. You don?t have to use all the traffic sources, you need to figure out what works best for you and how many sources you can use effectively. But at the same time you don?t want to limit yourself to just one source.

You will always hear a lot of people say that this and that traffic source does not work or does not create results. I couldn?t disagree more, there is no such thing as bad traffic. It?s what you do with your traffic that matters – what offer you present and how you do it. Sure you will likely get a better conversion rate from PPC than you will from traffic exchanges – but at the end of the day, what matters is your return on investment (money or time). Comparing conversion rates across methods is like comparing apples to oranges, but you can compare cost per sign up and use that to find the traffic methods that work best for you.

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