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Making Money Online With Google Adsense

By Pilar Torres Wahlberg in Featured

For most bloggers, Google AdSense is the first and easiest way to start making money online. But reports of how much money you can actually make with it vary widely across the board. While popular bloggers have had a great deal of success with it, smaller blogs often find AdSense to be frustratingly limited. This discrepancy has been perpetuated to the point that many bloggers now believe that to make money with AdSense, you need to have a lot of traffic.

While that’s not exactly wrong; your site’s traffic has a great impact on how much you can earn from it; it’s not the whole truth either. Most importantly, you should not give up on AdSense because of this, because, as famous bloggers themselves have proven: when it works, it works like a charm!

In order to make money with AdSense, you first need to understand how it works. AdSense is a simple ad-publishing tool that can be incorporated into a variety of online mediums and displays ads based on the keywords within the existing text on the page. Every time a visitor to your site clicks on an ad published in your data, you are paid some money. Hence it is called PPC or Pay-Per-Click Advertising. This is usually a figure in cents or pennies, and the exact figure depends most of all on how competitive and profitable your keywords are.

Types of AdSense

AdSense is available for web content (on blogs and web sites), for search (as when you add a Google search bar to your blog and visitors click on a sponsored search result), for mobile content (for mobile-version web sites and pages), for feeds (so that you can display ads even within your RSS and Atom feeds), and for video, parked domains and mobile applications.

How to Make Money With AdSense

1. Understand how AdSense Works

In order to make good profit from AdSense, it’s not enough to just sign up and start publishing ads. First you must know its rules – so that you don’t break them – and its payout method – so that you can develop your strategy accordingly. Take a look at Google’s AdSense center to begin learning.

2. Choose profitable keywords

Even if you already have an existing web site, in order to make money with AdSense you need to choose the most profitable keywords within your niche. If you plan on writing your own content (as opposed to hiring freelancers or copywriters), it is also crucial that you know something about the subjects of those keywords and can research and write useful material on them.

3. Create useful, keyword-rich content

Once you have chosen your keywords, you can actively start creating content while keeping those keywords in mind. Don’t start keyword-spamming, because users will not find your site useful, and while they might click on an ad just to get away from your page, that’s not a profitable or traffic-building strategy. If your content doesn’t make sense, you also risk getting banned by Google; not just the AdSense program but the search engine too!

4. Place your ads strategically.

The placement of your ads within your content really matters. The optimum placement will of course depend on your design and the placement of your text. You also have the choice between image, text and video-based ads, and how well one works for you will depend on your readership, the type of your content and primarily your existing web design. Many WordPress themes and the like come already enabled for displaying ads, but don’t let that prevent you from trying different options and choosing for yourself which one has the best ROI.

5. Build traffic

The more traffic your site has, the more users will click on your ads – it’s that simple. Traffic building is a whole another blog post, but remember that it goes hand in hand with creating useful, keyword-oriented content!

Making money with AdSense is easy – once you understand the program and follow some simple strategies for maximizing your profits, it’s truly a program you can “set and forget”!

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Pilar Torres – Access our Free Jargon Free Web Marketing Strategy videos aimed at beginners at www.pickaweb.co.uk. You can also visit our Professional Website Hosting Services website for more services. We also offer Reseller Hosting and other services such as Online Website Builder, Dedicated Servers, Domain Names, Data Backup, Web Design, Web Design Templates, Email Marketing, 0800 Numbers and VPS Hosting.

Google/Apple War: What does it all mean

By Pace Lattin in Featured

For those who have been living in a cave, Google recently bought AdMob, the small but highly innovative mobile advertising company for the extremely inflated price of $750 Million. That is the gross national product of the country of Kiribati, a small country made up of a bunch of atolls. While AdMob hadn’t quite made anywhere around that amount of revenue, Google wanted to gobble it up before someone else did and to have a quick way to access the growing revenue stream available on Mobile Applicatications. Part of this strategy was to be able to access the significant population of IPHONE users. However, recently Apple came out with new developer rules that will prevent ADMob and Google Adsense from being displayed on iPhone applications… and thus a significant issue with ADMob’s revenue stream. However, perhaps things aren’t as they seem…

Let’s make this really clear, Apple is looking to break into the advertising and eventually search market. Google, as the all encompassing leader of search clearly dominates the market. However, they recently also decided to get into mobile market with the Google Android system, which while itself doesn’t make that much money for the company, the offshoots such as the product development, application development, google interfacing and even their own google nexus phone has been a significant success. In fact, according to most reputable reports, the open-source android phones are taking over as the dominant force in the market, pushing out Apple. Apple, ain’t happy about their market share being taken. They saw themselves as dominating the mobile space for a long time to come. Don’t forget also that Apple had actually wanted to buy ADMob, but the $750M price tag was way too high – they bought a competitor with just as much revenue and potential, it seems for a significantly lower price tag of $250M.

While some people might say this is a stab at Google for getting into “their business”, there is much more here than meets the eye. Apple has no reason to actually allow Google Adsense onto their applications – because they don’t make a single dollar from those ads. Since Apple is making their own system, they need to ensure that the only way to run advertising on the system is through them. It’s pretty damn simple – Google already has an extensive database of advertisers, and they would easily overshadow any attempt by Apple to compete with them even on their own platform. This wouldn’t fare very well for Apple, if in a year a report came out that not only was Google Android overtaking Apple iPhone, but that the predominate type of advertising on the IPHONE was actually Google.

What is strange about this mobile advertising war is the investment versus the actual possible revenue being made. Everyone is talking about mobile advertising on applications and application development as if it is the “end-all” of advertising and will take over advertising left and right. However, people ten years ago pushed application advertising and ad-supported applications as the method that would take over interactive advertising. Now it’s almost impossible to find any program that actually does this and the predominate type of advertising is in the browser.

I honestly think that this is a very possible future for mobile also. As mobile devices get bigger, as the web integrates with mobile more and more, there will be a growing seamless interaction between the two mediums. In fact, if you think about it, a great portion of the “internet” users are really “mobile” – laptops are a “mobile” device of sorts, and they have become smaller and smaller, while phone screens have become bigger and bigger. At some point in the near future they will meet in the middle and we will have laptop/netbooks that are nothing but combinations of mobile phones, laptops that do everything. Most people that I know who have android phones and iPhones spend quite a bit of their time, browsing the web using it as a “little computer” of sorts and see all the banner and other type of ads made specifically for the websites.

So, does this war really matter? Perhaps for the short term, but within a few years, I can’t see it will really matter except to corner a very small part of the marketshare. Mobile as separate entity, with its own features (mobile billing, mobile applications) will become part of the entire interactive, internet, web-process. No one actually believes that ADMob was worth $750M, but sees it as one chess piece in a greater strategy that both these companies have to dominate the web. This has little to do with “Mobile”.

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In perhaps the fastest growing industry ever, one person has made a name for himself as a leader and innovator. Pace Lattin, the publisher of the top newsletters in new media and online advertising, is one of the inventors of many of the technologies and methods that have become standards in the industry. He has been called many things, including a rabble-rouser, a guru, an innovator and a watchdog — but one thing stays the same: he is one of the most interesting leaders and commentators in the online advertising industry. Marketing Sherpa, a leading marketing research publication called him the most influential journalist in online media for a reason. IndustryPace.com

Google Display Network to Showcase Media to Advertisers

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Google has announced that all their non-search display advertising will be collectively called the Google Display Network from now on, replacing the existing Google Content Network.

The new network covers Google display ads on Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Google Finance, Blogger and other ad partner sites. Google made the announcement on their Inside AdSense blog, claiming the move was to make their display media clearer to advertisers:

“The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites where advertisers can buy ads through Google, including the over one million AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partners as well as YouTube and Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, and Blogger… The Google Display Network offers all ad formats – text, image, rich media, and video ads – enabling advertisers to unleash their creativity and engage visitors on your websites in various ways.”

If you’re an AdSense publisher you’re already part of the Google Display Network. No changes have been made to how AdSense works and no action is required by you to opt-in. However, if you use AdSense for search, your AdSense for search ad space won’t be part of the Google Display Network.

Advertisers will continue to be able to purchase ads on your search results pages in the same way they always have.

Google Adsense May Be King But There are Other Options

By Merle in Featured

When it comes to making money with a website, one of the most popular methods is running text and/or image ads on various pages. It’s referred to as contextual advertising and “inline ads”. Text or image ads are shown which match the content of the pages. Inline ads appear as highlighted words on the page when the visitor hovers over highlighted text on the page. Ads appear in small boxes. Contextual ads are often displayed to the right or left of website copy, or as blocks within sections of the text. The ads shown are related to the content of each individual page. As visitors click on these links, you earn cash.

Probably the largest and most used of the contextual ad programs is Google’s Adsense. Google really is a giant when it comes to the Internet, and their talents go far beyond just being a search engine. Adsense is used by many site owners to bring in a monthly income.

If you’re interested in running Adsense ads, first you’ll need to apply and get approved. Once approved for one site, you can place Adsense on any other site that you own. You can decide to run only text ads or choose from image and text. Various sizes are offered, and you can custom select colors to match the look of your site. Once the code is generated, you paste it on your HTML pages where you want the ads to appear. Simple & easy.

But what happens if you’re not approved by Google, or for some reason your Adsense account were to be terminated? What would you do then? There are other ad network options out there and I’ve gathered some of the best alternatives together here.

Before signing up for any ad program, make sure you read their terms of service and any requirements to make sure it’s a good fit for your website. Also, review the payment options so you’ll know how and when you can expect to be paid. Let’s review:

1) Text-Link-Ads.com: http://www.text-link-ads.com/

Once your site is approved, you insert the code on your page and they sell simple text ads that appear on your site. You have final say over any ads being published. Payments are made via Paypal or Clickbank. You receive 50% of the sale price for each link they serve up. This ad network is acceptable to be run on the same page as Google Adsense as this is not considered contextual advertising.

2) Adbrite: http://www.adbrite.com/

A variety of ad formats to choose from. You can run text ads, banners, inline ads or even full page ads. You can choose to approve or reject ads before they appear on your site. Pays monthly with the default minimum check amount of $100.00. Once your site is approved, ads will appear within 24 hours of your pasting the code. Adbrite has no policy against using other ad networks on your site at the same time.

3) Kontera: http://www.kontera.com/

Contextually relevant ads and ad units which are linked to keywords on your web page. Ads displayed will match the content of your site. For your website to be approved it must be in English, be content rich with more than 50 words per page. You can run text, image, billboard, and video ads.

4) Quigo.com: http://www.quigo.com/publishers.html

Quigo offers content-targeted advertising to those with strong traffic. Publishers with 500,000 or more monthly page views are encouraged to apply. Once approved, simply copy and paste the code.

5) Yahoo Publisher Network: http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Works very similar to Google’s Adsense program. You design your own ads, choosing colors and formats, then paste some code on your page. You’ll be paid per click. Advanced ad targeting and display capabilities can sometimes improve your results. You can choose to be paid via Paypal once your earnings are $50.00, or a check when you hit $100.00.

6) Chitika.com: http://chitika.com/

A full service online ad network which serves over two billion monthly impressions across more than 30,000 websites. Chitika ads are not contextual and can be run on the same page as Adsense. Twenty-four different ad sizes are available. Payment is via Paypal once your account is at $10.00, or a check when you reach $50.00.

7) Miva: http://tinyurl.com/oha28n

Miva offers a wide variety of ad formats to choose from: content ads, inline ads, search ads. You’ll be paid on a per click basis. Payments are made monthly by check or Paypal once your balance reaches $25.00. You can also block competitor ads from appearing on your site.

AffiliatesGarage.com: http://www.affiliatesgarage.com/

A different type of ad network which allows you to display affiliate ads in an “Adsense Style”. You can run Clickbank and Paydotcom text ads on your site or blog and earn up to 75% commission.

9) Bidvertiser.com: http://www.bidvertiser.com/

Display text ads on your website and let advertisers bid against each other. Ad formats are skyscrapers, banners, rectangles, buttons. They even have ads for your RSS feeds. Payout is monthly via Paypal once your balance is $10.00. This one pays on a cost per click basis.

10) AmaSense Ads: http://www.amasenseads.com/

This service allows you to create Google Adsense styled ads for Amazon products. Different ad formats are available which makes it easy to integrate into your site. Amasense can also be used side by side with Google Adsense without any problems.

As ads are clicked on, you earn a percentage of the product which is paid by Amazon depending on the type of product that is bought. You must have an Amazon associate account first before signing up. To get one go to https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

As you can see Adsense is not the only game in town when it comes to running ads on your site. If you have multiple sites, you may want to use one of the services mentioned above, then test, to see which one is a better earning opportunity. You might be surprised at what you learn.

It’s against Google’s terms of service to run another contextual ad service on the same page as Adsense, but there are exceptions to the rule. Most of the services above will tell you if you can run their ads alongside Adsense.

If your websites are mainly information based, network advertising is an excellent way for you to earn an income with little effort on your part. No matter if you use Adsense or another service, it just makes for good dollars and cents.

Merle’s Mission Blog- “Rants, Raves and Random Acts of Kindness” a self proclaimed “Internet Junkie” with a passion for net marketing, affiliate marketing, social networking. An avid Blogger and writer with several niche sites to her credit. Find out more at http://merlesworld.blogspot.com/

5 Money-On-Demand Secrets To Creating Great Adsense Sites

By Nelson Tan in Featured

The rage to milk money from Adsense continues into 2009. While there are many different ways to do this, it’s no secret Google is keeping a watchful eye on spam sites which automatically generate pages consistently on a daily basis.

Every now and then, Adsense ‘experts’ would introduce a ‘fresh’ new way of generating pages which Google “has not caught on yet”, be it article, directory or backlink generators.

While these software are very good at what they do, you can’t solely depend on them for long-term success. It’s a natural tendency that automatically generated content just doesn’t look like quality pages with highly informative, up-to-date content, but it’s my personal observation.

Google Adsense Income: The Three Keys

By Mike Adams in Featured

Many people put together numerous (even hundreds) of niche websites to make Google Adsense income. You may have heard that a good target is earning $1/day from each web site, and you may have wondered if this is possible. Yes, it is, if you understand the three keys to Google Adsense income: click-through rate, earnings per click, and traffic.

You can improve the Adsense click-through rate by modifying your web site design. Observe which changes increase or decrease the Adsense click-through rate. It may sound funny, but you want a site that is good enough that it gets indexed by search engines and attracts visitors, but that is incomplete enough so that people want to leave in search of something more. And you want all of the obvious exit links to be Adsense ad links that seem to offer people what they are looking for.

Earnings per click depend on getting the content on a page (especially targeted keywords) to trigger Adsense ads that many advertisers are bidding on. One keyword might only make you $0.05 per click. Another keyword might make you several dollars per click. You want to target your page content around keywords that have many advertisers competing.

This is actually the opposite of what you want for search engine optimization. In general, you will be able to rank higher in the search engines for keywords with less competition. So how do you do this without destroying your search engine rankings? The secret is called “long tail” keywords.

Long tail keywords are longer keyword phrases that have searches yet have little competition in the search engine results. Be sure the phrases contain keywords that have high advertising competition. Google makes their money from advertising, so they will display the highest price ads that match the content on the page. But since you made sure you have one of the few pages targeted for the long-tail keyword phrase, you should also be able to rank well in the search engine results for the long tail phrase.

Once you improve your click-through rate and your earnings per click, it’s simply a matter of increasing traffic to your site. Getting traffic generally takes the most effort, in my experience. Basically, there are two ways to get traffic: You can buy advertising or you can get traffic through links and search engine results.

You could easily get traffic by buying Adwords ads. But it isn’t always easy to make more income than you spend on advertising. For an Adsense site, that generally means that you cannot profitably advertise it, so you need to get it listed in the search engines and get as many links as possible with a reasonable amount of effort. The two easiest ways to achieve this currently are article marketing and social networking.

Article marketing, sometimes called “bum marketing,” is pretty simple. You write one or more short articles (about 500 words or so) and submit them to article directories on the Web. You get to include an author’s resource box that links to your site at the end of the article. There are even services such as iSnare or Article Marketer that will submit your article to hundreds of article directories for you.

The more articles you do for a given site, the more links and traffic you get and the higher you get in search engine results. And you can get article ideas from anywhere. For example, this article started out as a response to one of my customers about how to do this. Since it was a long response, it was logical to also turn it into an article and publish it!

In social networking, you get your link on various social networking sites. Be sure to look through each site first and see what other people are doing and fit in with the community. Social networking sites have their own community rules, and you don’t want to get banned for spam.

These techniques will usually get your website indexed by the search engines within days. You will also get traffic from them, so don’t just do it for links, do it for traffic also.

Now that you know the three keys to Google Adsense income, click-through rate, earnings per click, and traffic, it’s time to start creating your Adsense empire!

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Mike Adams – There is one more resource you need to create your Adsense empire: content! Creating numerous web sites takes a lot of content. Want a shortcut? Check out Mike Adams’s PLR-Content.com for all of the content you will ever need: http://www.plr-content.com/

How To Make Money Online With Blogs

By Cheslsie Lloyd in Featured

It is amazing how many different ways there are for people to make money on the internet. For this very reason, the internet is filled with entrepreneurs looking to make it big. If you too are wondering how to make money online today, one method that is gaining in popularity is blogs.

More and more people are beginning to realize that blogs can be a great way to make money. It is becoming almost essential to have a blog in conjunction with a web site. The two compliment each other nicely and give you a legitimate chance to make money online today. Here are a few ways for how to make money online with blogs.

Adsense and Keywords

By Phillip Booker in Featured

I need to start with an analogy to explain the importance of keywords. Your selection of keywords is the ‘heart of your business’ as far as adsense income is determined. The heart, yes the most important organ of your body, not your leg or your wrist, but your heart. If your heart is failing, putting a bandage on your wrist isn’t going to work.

So here is the crunch… If your adsense income has dropped or you need to build an adsense business, then look after your heart. It is the life blood of the system, it pumps the money into your adsense account.

It has taken a few hard lessons for me to understand this principle. This is how I felt the pump, pump, pump send a light bulb moment to my brain. It started when the town I live in lost the internet connection. Phew… I’m sure that everyone has lost a connection for as little as ten minutes and thought their world had ended. But I lost the internet connection for three days. I got on with other stuff as you do, but what I did do is re-read some of the books I had purchased.

Of course, years on from getting more knowledge, to re-read an ebook generally is boring; and most of it was, but I kept stumbling, pausing and contemplating on the keyword section of the ebooks. If keywords are the heart of a business you need to dedicate more time and effort to keep them healthy.

If you are starting out, use the system below. If you already have adsense websites and the income has dropped, you need to be aware that trends change and the keyword you chose a year ago may not be the major one being searched for today. Go through this procedure and add another 250 pages.

We all use the keyword tools available and knock up a 5,000 keyword list in half an hour, spend another hour sifting through and choosing our prime keywords. That’s it we’re done. But… would you take an hour and a half to mould and create a heart and expect to live beyond a few months?

Once your website is up and running, I would guess you must spend 2 or 3 hours a day trying to get traffic to your website. This effort could be a little wasted if your keyword choice is hurried.

Here is the best way to choose keywords to maximize your search engine positions. Let’s assume that you need 250 keywords. Up to 50 of those should be first tier. These should include all the main associated keywords and most important should be ‘high’ paying keywords too. These you can check through either the free Google Keyword Tool or through varying software keyword tools.

These first 50 keywords will be the fiercely competed words and as a consequence you’ll not rank very high for them initially. Yet long term, the optimization, the blogs, social networking and bookmarking should help rise those 50 web pages nearer the top of the search rankings.

The other 200 keywords you choose will be ‘long tail keywords’. You may start with a 1,000 to sift through to finish up with 200. First you need to check each keyword separately. Allocate a day to do this, because the effort you put in now will serve you well. The purpose of checking as I’m going to mention is so that you get onto the front page of Google as soon as the search engines crawl your deep inside pages.

The first thing to check is if that long tail keyword gets traffic each month. Between 50 to 500 hits per month is fine for long tail keywords. Above those hits per month and you’ll probably find that too many other websites are competing for that keyword. Below that amount and you may find the quantity of hits vary from a few hits a month to zero hits.

Once you have a selection that meet the first criteria, then you need to check the competing sites. Is there 2,000 or is there 8? To do this you need to put this search query into Google – inurl:my-keywords – replacing my-keywords with your own of course. Use both variations, with dashes separating the words and without dashes. Make a note of the total of competing websites. Once you gone through them all you can make a decision on which keywords are going to get you on the front page of Google.

Even if your web page isn’t optimized too well, if there are only 8 competing websites, you’ll appear on the front page. This will mean a steady but small flow of traffic 50 to 500 hits per month. Multiply that by the sites with long tail keywords and the minimum you could expect, once the search engines have listed the inner pages, is 200 x 50 = 10,000.

There are also other options to consider if you are adding web pages slowly. Use in the Google search box “allintitle: and allinanchor: keyword”. Extra work, but will pay off in the long run.

A reasonable time limit to expect all 250 pages listed in Google, so long as you’ve done the necessary blogging or bookmarking, should be 4 to 6 weeks; it can be done quicker but more work is involved.

Don’t just rely on Google, you’ll need to submit your site to other major engines as well. Plus if you are by chance one of eight on that first Google page, you’ll need to make sure that your description tag is better than all the other tags on that Google page, as they often use that tag to display to content of the site.

10,000 possible hits per month within the first 10 weeks, not bad for a beginner… Realistically if you shared that with the other sites, you may only get 2,000 visitors enter your site per month, but that is still good. Of course… the visitor who clicks your web site link is relatively targeted by this stage and your conversion rate for clicking on adsense ads could be between 10 to 20%. 10% of 2,000 clicks is 200, which could be worth $50 to $200. The day’s work you spent on sifting these keywords has paid for itself. Then you can expect more of the same the following month. As many adsense professionals have 5 to 20 websites, multiply the expected earning by the websites and suddenly you can see the potential, and I may add this is before you start trying to get traffic. Glory days… if you get the job done right.

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Phillip Booker – Senior Adsense Adviser. For more free advice tips and tricks for Google Adsense, please visit my site by following this link: Adsense Advice, Tips and Tricks

Pay Per Play

By Anna Williams in Featured

There is a new form of Internet Advertising called Pay Per Play. What is Pay Per Play?When someone visits a website with Pay Per Play code embedded in it, a 5-second audio ad is played. When the ad is played you get a commission. It’s as simple as that.

You are probably familiar with “Pay Per Click,” or “PPC,” where a webmaster is paid every time a visitor clicks on an ad on his site. Pay Per Play is similar, but the webmaster is paid for the times an audio ad is played for the website visitor, regardless of whether the visitor clicks on an ad or not.

The Pay Per Click Numbers No One Will Tell You

By Carl Davidson in Featured

I often see questions in discussion groups and blogs that ask about basic numbers one can expect from pay per click ads. Unfortunately, there is often no reply to these questions or the reply is too general to interpret.

This article will attempt to satisfy the thirst for this information and explain the numbers you should be monitoring and what you can expect from your pay per click and sponsored ads.

Impression To Click Ratio

After many campaigns on line, I believe the ratio the search engines like is 1% or greater. That is at least one click per 100 impressions. I have noticed that in any ads where my Impression To Click Ratio is less than 1%, Google begins to move my ads down the page and I have to bid more to stay on the first page of results. I have also noticed that when my Impressions Per Click are greater than 1%, my ads seem to rise in the rankings and I can even cut my bids and still stay in good positions. My clients and I shoot for a minimum of 1% Impression To Click Ratio and some ads reach as high as 10%. We suggest you shoot for that range. If you can’t hit that range, you will need to try different keywords and ad variations.

Click To Purchase Ratio

The number of visitors who purchase from you will depend on your price, your offer and many factors. However, as a rough rule of thumb, we suggest 3% is an average Click To Purchase Ratio. It can be much higher or much lower but that gives you a rough average to shoot for. If you are not hitting this number, it try experimenting with the price, the offer, the landing page and the key words.

Click To Freeby Ratio If your landing page gives away a free white paper, e-book or other freeby, we find that a rough average is 3% to 10% of the visitors will request the free information. The biggest obstacle to giving away free items is asking for too much information from the visitor. The less you ask for, the more likely you are to get a request. We suggest you only ask for first name and e-mail address if that is all you need. Asking for age, address, cell number and other extras greatly reduces the requests you will receive.

If you are falling below these numbers, it is often a trust issue. Maybe your site is perceived as untrustworthy or perhaps the links do not work. Experiment and try different things until you hit and exceed these ratios.

Maximum Profitable Bid Calculation

Like all auctions, pay per click sites have a tendency to get us to pay more than we should for clicks. Many of us bid with our emotions. Just ten cents more and we are sure we will get the traffic and sales we need. Before you bid, you should always have an idea of how much you can afford to pay and still make a profit.

To estimate the amount you should be bidding, start by calculating your gross profit per sale. To calculate this number, take your selling price, less the cost of shipping and handling, less the cost of buying or creating the product and all packaging. This calculation gives you your gross profit per sale.

As an example, if you sell a product for $49.95 plus $10.00 shipping, you sell for a total of $59.95. If that product costs $20.00 plus $4.00 shipping plus $10.00 in shipping and packaging, your cost is $34.00. That means your gross profit is $25.95 ($59.95 – $34.00) per sale.

If you sell to 3% of the visitors who click their way to your site and you bid $1.00 per click, you will pay $100.00 for 100 clicks. Of those clicks, if three will buy, your gross profit on your $100.00 investment in advertising will be $77.85 (3 times $25.95). It won’t take long to go broke if you advertising costs are more than your gross profit.

You need to decide how much you advertising should be as a percentage of gross profit and bid accordingly.

Getting More Clicks For Less Money

To lower your bid costs, stay away from the common or general key words and look for “niche” key words. These are more specific keywords. For example, if you sell digital cameras, the key word “digital camera” may be too expensive for you to bid on. However, if you bid on the keyword for your specific model or brand, such as “Canon Digital Camera” or “Cannon S362″ you usually can bid far less per click. These niche words have fewer clicks but if you bid on a lot of them, your total impressions and clicks will be as highor higher than the general key words and your profit will be much higher.

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Carl Davidson is President of Web-Star Marketing, a company that assists its clients in on line marketing. He is the author of hundreds of articles and DVDs. For more information, visit: http://www.web-star.biz

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