Banner advertising is very popular with pay per click (PPC) advertisers; the ability to broadcast an ad in many places related to the ad is a very tempting offer. If you have ever owned a Google Adwords™ account, you will know that a large mass of clicks come from banner or contextual advertising. When advertising on search engines, you are paying for your text advert to be positioned in the search engine results, but contextually based advertisements can be placed anywhere online. As attractive as that sounds to the advertiser, is it really such a good idea?

Contextually based ads are spread to any website that the advertising agency (or search engine) considers being congruent with the ad. As accurate as this can be, it may be able to very well result in adverts being misplaced on non-relevant information WebPages, more often than not, on compatible informational sites. It makes sense to advertise where information is relevant, like an informational site, but if the end-user is looking at material about a product usually they are, regularly, not ready to buy it. Of course this is not true for every field, and in some cases (when marketing to high school students for example) contextual based adverts can be very beneficial.

In most cases where you are selling a physical product, service online, or online product, search engine distributed adverts give a much better response. With a long tail keyword list, that is, a very specific group of keywords targeted at buyers in that specific topic, the conversion rates can be extremely high on search engine positioned ads. The conversion rate of contextually based ads has been proven to be significantly lower than its search based counterpart. Simply, this means a lot of clicks and not many sales. The search engines know this and put a lower price per click per contextually based ad.

Google’s contextual ad broadcasting system is a system called Google Adsense™. It is complementary to Google Adwords™ and displays those ads that are created within each Adwords™ campaign with contextual advertising enabled. Every site with Google Adsense™ is “spidered” for content relevancy, and once the topic and keywords have been pulled from the site, it displays the appropriate ads. For the majority of the time this is pretty well correct. But if the content is very generic or does not contain the suitable keywords and lexical words, it could very well display something unrelated.

When advertising on pay per click, patience is a vital key. Putting up an ad campaign and expecting thousands of clicks in a day only works in some fields, and without contextual advertising you may only get a few clicks through to your site. The majority of the time it is going to be a few weeks before you see results, that is, without good keyword research. With the correct keywords you can see a sale within minutes or hours.

So how do you choose what is right for your particular campaign? Generally if you want to have more targeted traffic and create sales only use search engine placement, and turn off contextual advertising. If you are trying to create awareness contextual based advertising is a great way to do that.

There are a ton of search keyword tools on the internet. So do not get lost before you even start your keyword research.

There are free and paid keyword tools. For free ones, most internet marketers are using Google’s keyword tool. Why not? Whether you are a ppc advertiser or aiming at search engine optimization, Google is the boss. However, Google’s keyword tool has a negative, that is, Google is likely to show you terms which offer high prices instead of high search volume.

Then for the paid search keyword tools. Most internet marketers would recommend Wordtracker. It is a superb keyword tool. Wordtracker helps you find or think of related terms by offering a built in thesaurus and lateral search. The lateral search looks at page details such as keywords of pages which are thought to be competing or related to your topic.

Other stars in the industry of search keyword tools are keyword discovery, wordze, Semrush, etc. It is difficult to choose the best one because each of these listed above has unique features and a swarm of supporters. It seems the only solution is to test every one of them by yourself and see which one suits your needs the best. Well that means you need to spend a fortune on the test.

Others say that there is not a perfect keyword tool for every individual’s needs, so you need to combine 2 of them for the best results. That is maybe the only way to narrow down the choices among the ones i have mentioned. It is always true that we will not find out whether something fits in our needs the best until we actually use them.

I wish you good luck on finding your most wanted search keyword tools.

If you are an aspiring affiliate marketer, you probably know by now that having a good education in affiliate marketing is essential if you really want to become a successful affiliate marketer. But what you might not know is that the possession of the necessary affiliate marketing tools is just as important as having the necessary knowledge. You simply cannot translate your knowledge into action without the needed tools of the trade. Below I will discuss some of the most important affiliate marketing tool that you must own in order to make tons of money online.

Website creator. Some people say that you can earn money online without a website. That is true. There are people who are actually making money on the Internet even without owning a site. Still, you will be severely limiting yourself of the many opportunities to make money online if you don’t have a website. This is why a website creator is very much important to all affiliate marketers. There are many free websites builders available on the Internet so you really would not have a problem obtaining one.

The next affiliate marketing tool that you will need is a text editor. This is going to be particularly useful if you are into article marketing since you will be doing plenty of writing and editing. There are many text editors available but not all of them caters to the special needs of affiliate marketers. Individuals in affiliate marketing are very particular when it comes to keywords so it would be nice if the text editor has a built in keyword research tool.

Affiliate marketers could also benefit from a software that can track their marketing activities and provide them with necessary affiliate marketing statistics. If you are into pay per click or PPC marketing, you will definitely benefit from a tool that can track which keywords you’re targeting are productive or not.

These are just some of the affiliate marketing tool that you need to be a successful affiliate marketer. Wouldn’t it be nice if you can find all of the above affiliate marketing tools in one place?

Successful pay per click management depends on testing a number of variables to determine the optimum strategy for your company. Doing what someone else is doing probably won’t work. Every business is different. Every marketing message is different. Every potential customer is different. To maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns you need to manipulate the following seven variables, trying different things for each until you find the right mix.

1. Bids. You might think that the number one spot on a search engine results page will yield the best results, and you might be right…or you could be dead wrong. We have seen numerous occasions when, while looking at keyword performance at various positions, the second or third (or even lower) position maximized our traffic. You won’t know what your best position is until you try different levels of bids, which will place your ad in different positions (all else being equal), and then look at the performance data to see which positions generated the most clicks or conversions.

2. Keywords. What you are probably going to find is that there is a small set of keywords that generates most of your traffic. Those keywords are also probably your most expensive ones. You need to constantly expand the keywords in your campaign, trying to find the ones that generate leads at less cost, even if they produce far fewer of them.

3. Ad copy. The secret to discovering what ad copy works best can be boiled down to three words: testing, testing, testing. That’s not just the secret to writing paid search ad copy – it’s the secret to writing any advertising copy for your business. You should run multiple ads for all of your ad groups. Then periodically turn off the ones that are not performing and create new ads that are slightly different from the ones that are working.

4. Landing page copy. The same secret applies here. You could argue that landing page copy is more important than ad copy. If the visitor has already clicked your ad and arrived at your site, then you’ve already paid for the visit. So this is where you have to make your money. The only way to know what landing page copy will generate the most conversions is to split-test different pages. To do that, all you have to do is create duplicate ads that link to the different pages. You also need to make sure that you have conversion tracking scripts in place. If you don’t know which pages generated sales or leads, then it’s a pointless exercise.

5. Search engines. Google is the king of paid search, with Yahoo! a reasonably close second, but there are many more options. Microsoft still doesn’t have nearly as much search traffic as the top two search engines, but it is constantly adding new features to its search marketing platform and doing everything it can to catch up. It’s a good option. Ask is the fourth major option. Beyond Ask, you begin dealing with second tier search platforms such as Miva and Enhance. The second tier platforms will be much cheaper, but likely provide much poorer performance. But the only way to know is to try out different platforms until you find what works best for your business.

6. Targeting. If you sell products or services to a local market, then you should concentrate your paid search budget on that market. If you sell primarily to teens or some other well-defined age group, then you should seek search marketing options that allow you to target your ads to that group. If your target market has these kinds of specific properties, then you should configure your pay per click campaign to target those groups.

7. Desired action. Decide exactly what action you want your paid search visitors to take and concentrate your landing page copy and design on getting them to take that action. The last thing you want to do is send the visitors to your home page and give them lots of different options. So it is critical that you decide from the start what you want your visitors to do. Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter? Contact you via a form? Buy a product? Decide on ONE thing and focus your efforts on getting your visitors to do that one thing.

The above list represents the seven major variables you need to manipulate to achieve the greatest possible return on your pay per click investment. It is highly unlikely that your campaign will be profitable right from the start. It takes time to figure everything out. Even if it is, you should never stop testing these variables. Just because you’re profitable doesn’t mean you can’t be MORE profitable. Now get to work!

Whenever you want to rank well for your website or any of your webpages, you need to know the right keywords to target. Whenever you want to succeed in your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you need to know what the right keywords to bid are. In other words, targeting the right keywords are so important for any webmaster or internet marketer, without which they cannot survive. This is the number one reason why a keyword tool, whether it be software or a service, is such an important piece of device for today’s internet marketing and search engine optimization. However, selecting a good keyword tool can be a nightmare without having a right perspective of how a good keyword tool should function. In the following discussion, I will tell you three major elements you need to bear in mind before choosing a keyword tool.

Element 1: How Good is Their Database?

Simply put, different keyword tools and services retrieve their keyword data from different resources. Some databases may depend upon just a few major resources such as Google API and Yahoo API; whereas some others may possess a broader network from other smaller search engines. For example, Keyword Discovery pulls its data from a wider variety of search engines. Meanwhile, Wordtracker has to depend on Dogpile and Metacrawler as their major resources to pull its data. One of the caveats you need to be aware is that if the resources they depend have problems of speed to access their main database, you will have a tough time to retrieve your data. For instance, those who depend on Overture keyword tool will have a similar problem of retrieving data from time to time.

Element 2: How Accurate is Their CPC Data?

I always come across commercial hype most commonly used by internet marketers to tell people that they can get a list of Adsense high paying keywords just at their fingertips. This means that based on cost-per-click of Adwords, the keyword tool can help you to estimate how much you will get from certain keywords for your Adsense. Frankly speaking, most people will find this feature very disappointing because most likely they will not get an accurate estimate from those data. Why? The reason is simple. Google Adwords provides two kinds of searches for advertisers, namely regular search and content search. For regular search, people will get search results by typing keywords or keyword phrases into any Google search box, mainly from Google search page or Google search box located in their browser. From there they will get multipages of search results together with a horizontal box and a vertical box of Adwords advertisement appear on top of and beside of those regular search results. Whereas, content search occurs when you plunge into a webpage where there are certain Adwords advertisements placed anywhere on that particular webpage. The advertisement can be blended into the webpage content such as articles. The truth is that Google Adwords allows advertisers to place different bid values on regular search and content search respectively. In most cases, advertisers will place a bid price of content search much lower than that of regular search. This is the reason why the high paying keyword list that you get from most keyword tools will not reflect a true value of your Adsense advertisement.

Element 3: Is the Keyword Tool a Subscription or Software?

The third question you must ask before choosing your next keyword tool is whether it is a subscription service or a piece of software. If you choose subscription service, this means that you have to pay subscription fees periodically. It can be weekly, monthly, or annually. The two most widely recognized online keyword research tools are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. On the other hand, if you choose a keyword tool as software, you will just end up paying a lump sum of money once for all without any recurring fees. However, keyword software tends to have a more limited range of keywords in its database if compared with those online keyword research services. Try to ask yourself this question, “Do you have a large collection of websites to optimize or numerous per-per-click campaigns to monitor?” If your answer is affirmative, then it may be wise to subscribe to an online keyword research tool that requires recurring fees. If not, software can be a better choice. All in all, choose wisely.

Using keyword tools writers gather phrases needed to construct highly targeted content aimed at search engines. If the arrows hit their mark search engines will drive traffic to your site and sales will be increased.

There has never been a shortage of keyword tools to choose from.

One of the main questions has been what the benefits of free vs. paid keyword tools are.

Whether you use a stand alone or online software, paid keyword tools tend to have more features. It is also common practice among software developers to update the software frequently adding and expanding current databases and features.

Free Keyword Tools

You may find flexibility an issue with free tools because of constrictions on the number of keywords that are return per search.
Updating to a paid subscription service will provide access to 1000’s of search phrases compared to just 100’s.

Even though free keyword research tools may have limited capabilities there are still some very good tools available.

Prime examples of this would be the Google Adwords tool, Overture, and WordTracker to name a few.

Subscription Based Services

Paid keyword services will vary in cost depending on the length of subscription.
The length of subscription can range from 1 day to annually.

In the case of Keyword Country subscriptions start at $12 for a day up to $299 annually.

Not only performing LSI searches for industry related keywords but multilingual enabled for 14 languages.
This is very useful if you’re trying to reach a global market.

Keyword Spy

A monthly subscription based service has a research and tracking version for small business costing $89.95.
The tracking version allows for real time monitoring of competitors in search engines.

The professional edition would include both versions for $139.95 monthly.
Keyword Spy will track affiliate ID’s and products in Pay Per Click search engines for 9 affiliate networks like,  Commission Junction, Linkshare and Clickbank.

This tool also will track competitors PPC ad variations and landing pages.

Any of these Keyword Research tools would be a great asset when added to your arsenal of marketing techniques: But, no tool will gain you the sought after results if you do not know how to use it appropriately. Training and application are everything.

Training For Internet Marketers

SEOBook is a comprehensive training program in internet marketing, search engine optimization and pay per click.

Their free keyword tool is a must have for any webmaster, showing results from, blogs, forums, news, social networks and general search.

Aaron Wall founder and developer of SEOBook a paid and free membership site created in 2003. Monthly subscriptions are $100.

Consisting of over 100 training modules and videos in keyword research, link building, articles, website monetization, pay per click ads and SEO community forums.

This is also a great place to find free webmaster tools and gadgets.

In Closing

If your marketing efforts have not currently reached a level that would allow for experimentation with pricier keyword tools, then stick to what you can afford until you see a ROI of time and energy.  If you are at the other end of the spectrum then a paid subscription service may be just what you’re looking for to boost income and savings.

SEM or search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing that promotes websites by enhancing their position in search engine result pages. Pay Per Click is one of the methods adopted in search engine marketing.

Now one may ask, what is Pay Per Click? Many consider Pay Per Click as an easy method of reaching the top rank on search engine results page. But it is not so. This method can however if used in a discreet manner one it may help to improve the rank.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is used on search engines, advertising networks, blogs, where advertisers have to pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website. Advertisers make a bid on keywords, which they consider as their target market may use as search terms while looking for a product or service. When a keyword query, matching the advertiser’s keyword list is typed by the advertiser, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser’s ad is visible. These ads are known as “Sponsored link” or “sponsored ads” and appear above the “natural” results on search engine results pages.

Many customers may feel that PPC being a paid marketing strategy is an easy thing to handle, when it is actually not so. The PPC advertising campaigns often face stiff competition when it comes to price bidding and it is definitely not an easy task to manage a series of advertisements, keeping into mind the financial aspect. One has to be very careful before engaging any Search Engine Placement Services.

Before engaging the Search Engine Optimization Service one should find out whether the SEO firm has the experience and expertise in PPC advertising model so that they can work out the complete PPC campaign for the client and can give assurance of its success. Moreover, the professionally qualified consultants should be able to provide the best deals on PPC services for guaranteed increase in the business prospects. The Search Engine Placement Service needs to be very competitive and cost effective, giving the best guarantee for assured results

Google Adwords is far and away the most popular PPC advertising platform on the internet. The reasons for this are simple: a well designed user interface, a large number and variety of publishers to show the ads and, most importantly, a long history of positive ROI rates for advertisers. Adwords can be intimidating to new users, but it really isn’t very difficult to learn the skills you need to get started.

This article is meant to be a basic introduction to Adwords. So if you are already very familiar with it, this might be review. The first problem most people have with Adwords is setting to and sticking with a budget. Most people get frustrated because they haven’t bid enough for their clicks, resulting in their ads having a low position. After a couple days of poor results, most new advertisers quickly increase their bids and the results is a pile of expensive traffic that brings back little, if any, return. When you make your Adwords account, set a small budget. Use keyword tools (many of which are available on the links page of this website) to determine which searches are most popular and try to find searches that other advertisers haven’t thought of. This is the best way of getting cheap traffic to your website(s), since less competition means lower cost per click.

However, cheap traffic is not necessarily good traffic. Let me repeat that again, just because you are getting cheap clicks from Adwords does not mean you are using your advertising dollars effectively. Targeted traffic is the key. If your website is selling software tutorials and you bid on phrases such as “free software” or “download photoshop” you might very well get many, many visitors (very inexpensively), but I can guarantee that your conversion rate (sales/visitor) will be horrible. Even key phrases like “free tutorials” will fail to create a positive return. Generally, never use the word “free” in your ads, unless you are actually giving something away for free. Users will click, costing you money, but are almost never interested in shelling out cash for a product.

Conversely, using key phrases with the words “buy” or “purchase” will decrease the number of clicks you receive, but will certainly increase your conversion rate and ROI. Going back to my previous example, bidding on key phrases such as “buy dreamweaver tutorials”or “professional photoshop tutorials” will give you visitors that are interested in buying the product you are selling and willing to spend money if your product matches their needs. In my next article on Adwords, I will discuss strategies to write high quality ads to help improve your click through and conversion rates.

When you have gathered all the keywords you need and have incorporated them in your ad copies, when you have placed your bids and activated your ad campaigns, what’s left to do with your PPC campaign?

Of course you don’t just sit there and wait. The internet has become such a popular business avenue that everyone is vying for a position in the market to have a piece of that pie. Because of this, no ad campaign is fool proof, you have to work at it with continuous effort and not let your guard down.

First of all, DO know your limits. It’s easy to get excited during a bidding war. Create a budget for your campaigns and stick to it. You don’t want to overspend for a top position when a lower one will generate you a fair amount of Click through Rates (CTR) just the same.

Don’t bid too high or too low. As mentioned above, bidding too high to get the top spot will more likely generate a bidding war between you and your competitors. Conversely, if you bid too low, the less likelihood your ads will gain much visibility. You don’t have to get the 1st position to get high CTR, 3rd to fourth position would do just fine.

Do have different ad groups for different keywords and key phrases. Create several ad groups or campaigns where you can place highly related keywords together. This will allow you to make well suited ad copies that will reflect each ad group more specifically.

When using a landing page for your ads, don’t just bring traffic to your homepage. A common mistake among rookie advertisers is simply aiming their ads at their homepage where all their product info and other details that the consumer wouldn’t be interested in is shown. You only have a few seconds to turn a viewer to a customer so it is strongly advised that you link your ads to where the searcher will get the information or product he is looking for. Be sure the landing page is related to the ad you have placed. This will highly affect your CTR. Engage the customer through your ad but convince them completely through your landing page by giving them what they are asking for.

Do monitor ineffective keywords, ad copies, and campaigns. You should not leave your ad campaigns for too long without checking which ones are not working for you. The longer time you spend keeping useless keywords or ineffective ad copies, the higher your expenses get.

You can also replace or modify your keywords and ad copies with ideas you can get from your competitors. There are keyword tracking tools out there such as KeywordSpy that allows you track down your competitors’ keywords and see which ones are working strongly for them and which ones are not. You can even look at their current ad copies and see what makes their advertisement work.

Lastly, you don’t have to run your campaign 24/7. To prevent spending too much on your campaigns, schedule your ad group wisely. There are two ways you can go with this: (1) You can go with your competitors schedule and take advantage of what could be a good time to sell your products or (2) you can avoid other advertisers and take advantage of low competition. You can experiment with these two tactics and see which would suit your campaign the most.

Pay per click campaigns, popularly known as PPC have long become an important part of search engine marketing. Although it involves some investment but the mileage PPC brings is worth it. It helps buy a better position for any website on the search engine result pages.

PPC is basically an advertising technique where you need to pay for each click made by a visitor on the advertisement that has been placed by you on the search engine search. The biggest benefit with PPC is that you can select the keywords you want to target. The higher your bid for each click, the higher you will rank in the paid website sections.

Many websites highly depend on the success of PPC. Therefore, it is essential that it is well planned and managed for effective results. With rising competition, success of PPC has become even more critical. It is wise to depend on experts to ensure good results in return for the money you are investing. Most of the time PPC is outsourced to experienced agencies to conduct the campaign and to monitor it.

PPC has become popular because of its ability to reach out directly to target audience with the help of few target keywords. Since your advertisement comprises of the selected keywords, only the visitors looking for your particular services will click on it and will be guided to your website. So, you ensure quality and relevant traffic directed to your website.

It is essential to shortlist the different search engines that you plan to target for your online advertisement for PPC much in advance so that you’re other steps are taken accordingly. In some cases, you might even end up finding thematic search engines that suit your business. Smaller search engines charge lesser than the larger ones and the more popular ones. So decide your investment according to your priority. You should be sure that the returns make up for the money you invest in pay per click campaign.

When you outsource your PPC campaign to a reliable company, the SEO team provided for your project, will conduct a research and select the right keywords to represent your business and create an advertisement for you. Results are monitored continuously and reports are prepared on monthly, weekly and daily basis to judge the effectiveness of the campaign. The reports quantitatively show number of visitors coming from each engine.

However, it is not possible to rely entirely on PPC for business. Your website also needs to be attractive and engrossing enough to make the visitor linger on and browse through the pages. This means that your website also needs to be up to date with the latest trends and information in your particular industry. If the leads are being converted into business, then PPC can be regarded as a success.

Compared to other search engine marketing techniques, pay per click brings about quicker and quality results. However, it is a continuous process and all businesses with a websites that are willing to invest should opt for this online marketing strategy to generate better ROI. If well managed, PPC is a smart method to attract quality traffic to your website and to generate potential business leads.