Two Ways Of Getting Paid For Traffic
As I write this, there's two main ways of getting paid for web traffic through advertising; using Google and not using Google. It’s not all doom and gloom though, Google need to keep on their toes as Microsoft (bing is their search engine) and Yahoo signed a deal in July 2009 where essentially Microsoft took over the search engine part of Yahoo, and they both share the revenue gained from advertising.
World Domination By Microsoft!
It’s no secret that Microsoft want to dominate the search engine market and take over from google, but they’ve still got a bit of work to do. According to Nielsen Mega View search, in July 2009 Google had 64.8% of the US search engine market (meaning 64.8% of people use google in preference to anything else for their searches). Microsoft and Yahoo in their partnership have 26.1% and the few remaining breadcrumbs are left for companies like AOL and AT&T Worldnet, and the plethora of smaller lesser known search engines.
While these numbers seem to favour Google, the key thing is that their market share dropped by 1.3% from the previous quarter. Although that seems to be a small drop, it means that Yahoo is snapping at their heels and are a real danger to Google’s domination of the market.
Google Are Still In The Lead
Anyway what’s that all got to do with getting website traffic. Well, Google are still the main place to advertise, but as I mentioned in my previous posting, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Bing and Yahoo are absolutely places you should also be targeting for advertising and because they want a bigger market share their prices are mostly cheaper than Google.
How Does It All Work?
Nuff said about that. How does paid for advertising work? PPC or pay per click is the most widely used method. You create an ad and put it on a search engine website, and whenever someone clicks on the ad, you pay an amount to the search engine. The amount you pay depends on the keywords that you’re using in your campaign.
Keywords become expensive the more popular they are.
For instance if you create your ad campaign using the keyword weight loss, it’s going to be a very expensive keyword to use because it’s so general. You need to use a more specific term such as Atkins Diet, as that will have less advertisers using it.
What you should do for starters is use Google’s free keyword tool.
Just type in Google keyword tool into Google and it will be the first result. If you type a keyword or phrase into the keyword tool, it will tell you how many searches per month that keyword gets. The more searches, the higher the cost of advertising with those keywords, so again you need to do some research on this to get cheaper keywords.
For an example of what these ads look like just go to Google and do any search. On the right hand side of the page you’ll see all the advertisements various people have created, and are paying Google to place them on that site.
If you click on an advertisement (which you should only do if you’re interested in that product, as it’s costing the advertiser each time – which could be you!), then the advertiser is charged a certain amount and you go through to their website to view their offer.
Placement Targetting
Placement Targeting is another very effective way of advertising.
Placement Targeting allows you to specify what websites you want to place your ads on.
This can mean huge exposure for your ad campaign if you go for high traffic sites, especially if they are targeted for your niche (hint: think the competition’s website). It’s a more involved process to setup placement targeting, but it can work out much cheaper than a straight PPC campaign.
The really great thing about PPC and placement targeting is that you can get traffic coming to your site almost instantly, but the caveat is that it is going to cost. You can control your budget as most search engines will let you set a daily limit on your advertising spend and you can also say how much you’re willing to pay for the keywords you’re advertising with.
For the other two articles in this series click the links below
Please leave us a comment. What else do you want to know about paid for advertising?
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