Yahoo recently offered some useful pointers as to how to make one’s pages more relevant according to their search engine. While there were some positive comments on the blog post, the majority of people either attacked, or came up with such moronic comments I am beginning to wonder what planet most people live on.

Assuming for the moment that they are not going to merge their search with Google any time real soon, the fact of the matter is, yahoo ppc is still a lucrative game, especially if you want to get women who shop as part of your traffic.

The trouble is, people would rather whine and blame, than do the hard work to maximize their marketing platform. Yahoo was telling people how to succeed. It was up to them if they wanted to listen or not.

The secret to any business’s success is whther or not the person takes action.

It IS tough to come up with great content and great landing pages, but if you do your keyword research and know your market thoroughly, and have an excellent product at the right price point, you will succeed.

But you can’t just put up a budget of $40 and thnk you are gong to get huge reslts, or be surprised if you run through that in a matter of minutes because you did not set your bids and budget properly.
You need to test and track. Set your budget small, and  don’t expect instant riches.

Don’t go for broad keywords, have to bid high, and then burn through your cash. Go for targetted niches, and make sure you have a relevant product that fulfills a genuine need within that niche.

By testing different ads, and different landing pages and conversion rates, you can see which is most successful, and do more of it.

Above all, don’t fall for the ‘eyeball myth’. Eyeballs don’t have wallets. You need to not just get them to look, but to BUY.

And if you don’t have an email capture on your site for lead generation, then you are also wasting money.

And if you did not get a single sale, no matter what the price of the bid, clearly there is something wrong with your sales letter.

As for the bids, it is competitive, and new players will come in, and old ones drop out. Take the suggestions at any search engine as to what you should bid daily as just that, suggestions, and track where you are, test, and track and test again.

One person complained that they were going to stop advertising with Yahoo until after Christmas.

Taking off all ads til January just means that you are going to be missing out on opportunties that many other advertisers will be all too happy to take advantage of.

As for people claiming that Google clicks are cheaper, I have been getting far more clicks on Yahoo gor months now, for far cheaper.

That person also failed to mention that Google’s quality score is a bizarre algorithm that changes randomly, meaning I was earning great cash one day, then got Google-slapped and earned ZERO buck the next day, and for a week after that.

In fact, in some cases, I have STILL not been able to restore those campaigns no matter what I have done-content, url, landing page, and so forth.  Luckily, there is Yahoo, dirving traffic for me just fine, and giving me a very high quality score for the pages Google refused to approve.

Google will also actually penalize you for things like iframes in your design–how is that fair? Or not having your email address on the page. Or having a lead generation aspect to the site. All these things affect quallty score, but do they REALLY give searchers a quality experience if they are looking forbooks in my niche and get taken to ebay instead?

Google makes all the rules, and you can’t play even if you DO have the cash.

With Yahoo, I get great traffic, that converts, and no guessing games.

So I’m certainly hoping that the two do not merge their search technology, so we can have a choice, and Google won’t be able to determine ‘relevance’ based on their technology but no common sense.

Our friends over at Insider Secrets have just started a series of articles on Pay Per Click basics you might be interested in.

PPC basics articles

There are some guaranteed benefits when you get to maximize the PPC strategy. The best thing is the speed—you can have a campaign up and running in a matter of minutes if you know what you are doing.

(This is also the down-side—you can lose your shirt if you don’t know what you are doing!)

You can test ads fast, find out what is working, test your landing pages, you can even take your successful on line ads and salesletters and PPC lets you advertise to the whole of the online community. It is also relatively easy to set up.

At first glance, PPC advertising may seem very expensive.

You might also be concerned about click fraud. Could someone maliciously keep clicking your ad?

Most adserver networks have safe-guards in place and are thus able to recognize fraudulent clicks.

In addition, you might want to protect yourself by only showing your ads on the search engines, not on their whole content network.

You can also set a budget for a certain period. The moment your budget has been used up by a number of clicks and your bids for that clicks, your ads will no longer be displayed until the next 24 hours period, or until you add more money to the account, whichever comes first.

With PPC advertising, you can still basically control your campaign, as you get to create your own ad. You can also manage a very highly targeted audience, and still stay within the bounds of your budget.

After all, they are ALREADY LOOKING for what you have to sell if they type in Wedding Favors and you are advertising your wedding favors store.

Be as precise as possible with your keywords as well, because the more exact, the better. Compare video games, or gamin, to Xbox 360. Or cookie wedding favors. Those buyers are much closer to an actual purchasing decision, so if you can get your ad high enough above the fold to catch their attention, but not so high you break the bank, you have a motivated group of buyers looking for what you have to sell.

Most of the providers of PPC advertising will allow you to specify the target market, either by topic, industry or geographical location. You can also check if your ad gets to be shown at all, and if it is competitive with the rest. You can see your click through rate, and gauge your return on investment.

PPC

PPC means Pay Per Click.
You show your ads on a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN’s live search, and pay a sum of money every time someone clicks on your ad. These are sponsored listings that you see whenever you make a search. There will be a charge whenever a visitor or web surfer clicks on any of your ads.

First you have to decide on your keywords. Next you have to write a compelling ad or two, which you can then run to see which performs best. There is also the bidding process. The highest bidder for the price per click will definitely get the chance to be first listed in the search engine, though with Google, they also have ‘quality scores’ which are supposed to determine relevance, that is, how closely your page is related to the keyword you are trying to bid on. (We offer more specific guidelines on how to make the most of your PPC budget in the PPC section of this site)