Easy Pay per Click Alternatives" that Work without any SEO

By John Alexander

For years I avoided Pay Per Click simply because I could get all the traffic I needed in the natural rankings without paying for it.

But eventually I discovered that there were some nice advantages for doing PPC for some clients.

Traditionally when we think of Pay Per Click, we are usually referring to Google Adwords or else perhaps, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture.) Then there are also other newer PPC systems such as Microsoft's Ad Center. Besides these big well known PPC opportunities, there we still have many other smaller ones such as Findwhat, Espotting and many others.

Now Pay Per Click advertising is not really search engine optimization, but its more in the league of "paid advertising." While many of our Workshop students come to class to learn how to lower their PPC costs or eliminate them to gain new visibility in the organic rankings, we also teach on Pay Per Click (for those who need to learn how to lower their cost per lead or manage their campaign's effectively.)

However, for this article, I wanted to touch on yet another alternative to "traditional PPC" along with offering you a a few tips for getting started.

So let's talk about a PPC marketplace that has nothing to do with search engines at all.

Its a little bit different and one of the advantages is that you can pick and choose a campaign based on geo-targeting and certain other interesting demographics. In this type of PPC you can choose to place your text ad or your banner advertising on literally hundreds or even thousands of Web sites.

Question: Is this the same thing as buying "text links" someone may ask?

Answer: No, it is not. It actually about buying advertising space on literally thousands of Web sites where your ad will get millions of impressions (often at a much less expensive rate than traditional PPC.) Does this replace traditional Pay Per Click marketing on the search engines? Definitely not. Nor does it replace the exposure you can get using good search engine marketing skills for creating high performance information pages that at the rank top of of the results the natural way.

So then why even talk about it or discuss it?

It is just something else that you can do on top of everything else even if you are just learning SEO skills or just getting started optimizing your Web site.

Introducing the Adbrite Marketplace:

How many Web sites can you gain new exposure from?

Actually you can post your advertising to over 54,661 Web sites with the potential of 470 million impressions. This of course depends naturally on the budget you are willing to spend.

But the program literally helps you estimate how many clicks and how many Web sites your advertising will appear.

Click here to try out Adbrite's Traffic Estimator

Adbrite's traffic estimator allows you to set your Maximum PPC as well as your maximum daily budget.
Then just click "estimate traffic" and it gives you a breakdown of estimated:

impressions per day
clicks per day
number of Web sites your ad will be shown on
clicks per day
and the percentage of your daily budget spent

Other tips and advantages to consider:

You can often get exposure for keywords and topics that traditional PPC rates are much higher for.
Experiment slowly and start small with a variety of ads in your campaign to see which ones work.
Adbrite supplies you with code to use in your pages to measure your impressions and conversions from traffic that you get from your ads so you can measure what is working and what is not.
Remember as with traditional PPC, you don't want thousands of keywords. Maybe start with only 5 or 6 closely related keyword phrases that actually relate to your ad copy.
IMPORTANT: Spend some time on writing compelling ad copy. Adbrite will allow you to write up to 100 ads for a campaign, but I would try to go for about 5 or 6 really well written ads that lead to a single, well-written landing page where you bring the visitor into your sales letter.
IMPORTANT: You want to track your different ads to see which ad copy is converting.

Remember that the idea is not to try and reach 100% of the Web sites throughout the entire marketplace. Set your spending wisely and even if you only reach 5 to 10 % of the Web sites in the marketplace. Aim to reach those that relate to your offer. The most important thing is that your sales letter needs to be well-written enough and convincing enough to influence them 100% of the way on the buying decision. You ads need to be well written and compelling to accurately describe your offer. Don't forget some good calls to action in both your sales letter and your ad copy.

Final tip: Start out with a smaller budget and spend wisely, track everything. As with any kind of "paid advertising" test all your ideas out but spend modestly at first to start, until you get a feel for how it works. All you need to make a difference to your bottom line sometimes, is just a small group of new visitors on a steady, ongoing basis in order to increase your profits.

Check out the Adbrite center now.

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About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first comprehensive online search engine marketing courses. John is author of an e-book called Wordtracker Magic and has taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world wide. John's articles can be read in publications like REALTOR Magazine, Search Engine Guide, WEBpro News and many others.

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Easy Pay per Click Alternatives" that Work without any SEO

John Alexander

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