Online marketing as an overall subject contains a number of techniques that unfortunately can take some time to bear fruit, as in leads and sales from your web site. For example, if you optimize your site for search engines, then build up links to your site, it will get results. But it won’t happen overnight. It will take months to build it up.

Once you build up those links to that optimized site, the results are well worth it. But what about the smaller business, who can’t afford to spend time and money building it up slowly? Or what about the business owner that needs those leads or sales right now?

Instant Gratification

We live in a society where instant gratification is the order of the day. Order your food and it’s ready by the time you drive to the first window. Order an e-book and download it and read it right now. Order some software and download it and use it right now. Order that new digital camera and it can be delivered to you tomorrow. Clearly, we’re used to getting what we want right now.

Luckily, one of the online marketing techniques offers this kind of immediate satisfaction – paid search engine advertising. You might have heard of Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing. That’s where you open an account, put some money in it, then put up some ads.

You select a keyword or keywords, and then when someone enters that keyword on the search engine, they will see the regular results (called “organic” search results) and they will also see the “sponsored listings,” which will include your ad. The sponsored results appear in the right hand column and sometimes at the top of the left hand column.

And as I mentioned earlier, it does not take months before that ad will appear. In fact, you can open an account and have your ad online in a day or two. You can be driving business to your web site almost immediately.

Another nice thing about paid search engine advertising is that your account only gets debited when someone clicks on your ad and thereby arrives at your site. So you only pay for results.

The Important Elements of a Paid Search Campaign

The important elements of a paid search engine campaign are:

1. Selecting the best keywords or key phrases
2. Creating a compelling free offer for the campaign
3. Creating the ads and “landing pages”
4. Managing the campaign, measuring the results, tweaking the ads and landing pages, and managing the bids

Key Words

There is an exact methodology for selecting the best keywords or key phrases. This is one of the most important aspects of the whole campaign and if not properly done, the rest of the campaign will fail.

This selection process is done at the beginning before starting the campaign. The number of people searching for that word or phrase each month, plus other factors are taken into consideration.

Free Offer

When you are doing a paid search engine campaign for the purpose of lead generation, I have found that in order to achieve the highest possible number of responses, it is necessary to create a compelling free offer. This is usually some free information having to do with the service being promoted, that one offers as part of the campaign.

For example, for a realtor, we offered a free report on how to buy a home for no money down. With a company that consults people on how to avoid sales tax on the purchase of private aircraft, we offer a free “white paper” entitled “How to avoid paying sales tax on your aircraft purchase.”

The goal with such a free offer is to get the web site visitor to fill out a form, giving you his name and contact information. With some sort of free offer, a person is much more likely to do this.

The item, usually a free report or white paper, can be created in a PDF (portable document format), and then emailed to each person who fills out the form. In that way, there is no hard cost for each report. Then you contact them a few days later and start the sales process with them.

Creating the Ads and Landing Pages

The ads that appear on Google or Yahoo’s paid listings, or sponsored listings, are short text ads, 60-80 words.

Once the person visiting the search engine sees your ad and clicks on it, he will then arrive at a page you select from your web site. The best way to do this is to create a customized page for them to arrive at, which we call “landing pages.” These pages usually have some text, some pictures, and a form for the person to fill out. It is not optimum to have navigation buttons on these pages, so that the person does not go wandering around your site. We want him to do one thing – to fill out that form.

Managing the Campaign

Once keywords have been selected, the free offer item created, and the ads and landing pages created, it is time for the campaign to go live.

Both Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing give you the option to set a daily budget for your campaign. So you work out how much you want to spend per month and then set your daily budget accordingly.

Yahoo Search Marketing typically has lower bid costs than Google, so if one desires to have a lower monthly ad budget, we recommend starting out on Yahoo only.

Once the campaign goes live, you need to monitor the results:
• How many people are clicking on the ads and arriving on the site
• How many people are filling out the form for the free offer
• Your position in the collection of ads for each keyword, meaning whether your ad appears in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., position

By monitoring the above we can see how well the campaign is going, and then make adjustments accordingly.

If you choose your keywords well (with decent numbers of people searching for them) you can start driving traffic to your web site right away. Instant gratification, online marketing style.




John Eberhard is President of RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), an Internet marketing and web design firm in Los Angeles. He has been doing marketing in a wide variety of fields for 17 years. To subscribe to his newsletter go to http://www.realwebmarketing.net/freenewsletter.html