Pay-Per-Click Experience

[Rob]

I was toying with the idea of advertising this forum on Adwords from today but I have to say that my experience to date has not been good.

Not sure whether its down to my ad content or what.

Does anyone actually get a result from Adwords or is it only me to seems to get one-way debits to my Credit Card?!!

[strategic]

Since the Google Slap.... or stupid tax.... it has become so hard to get very targeted traffic at a good price.

It seems no matter how much you optimise your ads to have your keywords in title, in the body, and in the landing page of your site, it has still become an expensive exercise.

I'm used to paying .02 - .05c per click, so to see some ads expecting $1.00 per search result is a joke. I think Google will need to wake up to itself, although I welcome the tightening of those utterly useless Adsense Directory sites.... Google was going to ruin its reputation as a Search Engine if it kept it out of control... but I guess the advertising income was just too good to clamp down on them too hard... so instead they have the Stupid Tax... Optimise your ads and pages or pay through the nose for every click!

And your 'niche' is such a monster, you would need to really niche it down to a few 3-4 keyword clusters to get anything affordable.

I suggest:

1) use your affiliate lists to get registered and active on here. (Some ideas below to reward them)

2) offer a free book from your library for every 10 quality posts made here on the forum. (for personal use only)
*** This will get the search engines spidering this forum to see what all the action is, and generate organic traffic for you, at no cash cost to you.

3) get blogging to generate links back to here. ref: ***

4) create a couple of Squidoo Lenses about small business forums and link back here ref: ***

5) Get your MySpace and Facebook profiles firing up ref;***

6) Offer a free ebook download for each of us who do at least four of the actions below for you and send you the links for you to see and check at least:
- one blog/forum entry promoting this forum (and your main site)
- one Squidoo Lens about business linking to here (and your main site)
- one Social Site bulletin that has a link to this forum (and your main site)
- one website page link to this forum (and your main site)
- one article posted on an article directory with to this forum (and your main site)
- one xyz

the four actions could include doubling up... eg links on two websites, or create two Squids etc. They can also include links to their own websites etc. to help promote those as well... Just as long as the marketing web is being built for long-term linking to this forum.

just a though.....

- Helene

[Got2Go]

Hi,

Well I was in fits of laughter!! We have only just started this crap and I must admit we do get a lot of enquiries from this but conversion to bookings is still ordinary but without Adwords, we would not even get any enquiries, as Google has got it worked out so that if you don't pay - you get put back to page 10 and who the hell is going to look past page 2.

You need to find someone who really knows how to make it work properly!

[Rob]

Helene,

Some great ideas there about driving organic traffic - thanks for those and will start looking in them. You're right about the niche being too wide which is why I stayed away from PPC for this forum.

Got to Go - clearly you are in very focused market so doing PPC is profitable (if not even necessary). And you're right about getting the pros in; there are guys to whom you can outsource whole PPC campaigns to but I belive you have to try something yourself first to prove the case for outsourcing!

What line are you in? Perhaps members here can come up with some ideas on driving organic traffic to your site so increasing your ranking. Was it car hire? Confirm that and we can bounce a few ideas around.

[CIDCouriers-dot-com]

I looked at the possibility of joining the Adwords scheme but in my infinite wisdom(???) I decided against it - maybe I'm just a modern day scrooge:D

To my mind it seems that unless you're willing to pay the big bucks then you get forced further and further doen the ranks, I actually had someone point out to me that it's entirely possible for competitors to keep clicking on your adwords and use up your budget for you - not good!!

[JerickT]

I'm also interest to join some PPC campaigns because I would like to know more advantage of it in promoting website and I would like to know if SEO and PPC are good combination.