If you want to increase web traffic to your site, you may have considered article marketing. This is a sound part of your traffic generation strategy, but it is imperative that you complete your keyword research beforehand. This process takes time and knowledge though, and there’s no guarantee that you will achieve the traffic you are estimating. But more importantly, you have a new campaign and no proof that it is actually profitable. Fortunately, you can use PPC to drive a small group of targeted traffic to your offer and monitor the response. Sort of like a focus group for your web campaign.
In poker, they say you gotta pay to play. And what seems like a valueless bet actually can be a strategic purchase of information.
Don’t worry about actually turning a profit with your new PPC campaign, but focus on getting some actual metrics to analyze. You want to create some traffic to your site, through your email funnel, to your squeeze page, whatever. if you make a few sales or generate some leads in the process that is gravy, but you are paying for the information first and foremost.
For example, say you generated 1,000 clicks through Google Adwords to a squeeze page, but only got 5 sign ups. You may want to take a look at improving the landing page copy, call to action, load time, fonts, etc. But if instead, you had 25-50 people sign up then i would instead focus my initial energy on monitoring the follow up email campaign to see how people were reacting to it.
The most important part of the puzzle is setting up conversion tracking. By adding a code snippet from Adwords to your webpage, you can track the action visitors take up to a desired result such as viewing a thank you page. Being able to effectively monitor which keywords generate the highest conversions could be useful information not only for your paid traffic generation strategies, but also for your free traffic strategies.
If your goal is to build a list, why not start by putting up 2 ads that directs traffic to a lead capture page that offers people a free report (on the thank you page) for signing up.
Then, check your click through rate, conversion rate, cost per click and other metrics to identify areas where you could improve this campaign. Remember, start small and iteratively move through your campaign testing and improving each area. A/B test the ads, landing page, offer, visuals, etc. be methodical. Repeat until the result justifies your ad spend, either in terms of list built, product sold, or whatever metric you are using as your benchmark for success.
Each time you revise something run another benchmark test and see what got improved. For example, if an ad has been shown for a keyword 500 times and you’ve gotten no clicks, you may want to scrap it and focus on a different one.
Using PPC to get information about a new niche or idea can be a powerful strategy if used correctly, and can save you months of writing articles about topics no one will pay you for in the first place. It’s money well spent in my opinion.
If you liked this article, check out my other post on how to increase online profits for your web business. Or, plug into the same proven online marketing toolkit that I use.
