Blog Marketing: Should You Use Pay-Per-Click to Promote Your Blog

In yesterday’s post, we talked about pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, ie, what it is and the three most important elements that go into making up a successful PPC ad. If you’re intrigued, you may be thinking, “Hmmm, this sounds good, I want to give it a try.”

Hold your horses there fella. You can lose a lot of money quickly with pay-per-click marketing if you don’t know what you’re doing. So following are a couple of things to consider. If both of them fall into place, then by all means, try PPC marketing.

2 Things to Consider Before Starting a Pay Per Click Campaign

Your Ad Budget: The beautiful thing about PPC marketing is that you don’t have to spend a lot to see results. In fact, you can start a PPC campaign for way less than a hundred bucks; really $50. A lot depends on your niche though. But if you learn the nuances of how to bid, you can get great results from a modest budget.

Before you dive into PPC, take the time to read Google’s “Cost and Payment” section. It is brief and is a great starting point (you should do more in-depth research if you’re new to PPC) to learning about how to price, bid, set a budget, etc.

Marketing Tip: No matter which type of marketing you indulge in, remember to only do marketing you can afford to repeat. Prospects have to see your ad 7 to 28 times, depending on which source you read, before they will act. So, if you run a PPC campaign for a week or even a month, it might not be long enough to assess whether it’s a good marketing option for you.

Whenever I buy advertising, I try to do at least three months. That’s usually long enough to give me some concrete stats to make some reasonable assessments.

Your Landing Page: Once you’ve determined that you can afford to run a PPC campaign, you need a good landing page. Your landing page is every bit as important to your campaign as your ad.

If you don’t know how to write an effective landing page, it’s wise to hire a copywriter who does. So this is another cost added on. Good landing page writers are not cheap. Writing a landing page is a skill because it has different and all of them should be present for it to be as effective as it can be.

If you decide to hire a landing page writer, place an ad on Craigslist for “landing page writers.” Rates are going to be all over the place and you may be tempted to go with the cheapest one. But you don’t want to skimp on price because the job of a landing page is to convert (ie, get the prospect to take action).

So you want a writer who knows what PPC (hence landing pages) is all about. Otherwise, you’re playing Russian roulette with your marketing dollars.

If you can afford these two elements — and you’re looking for a quicker way to grow your blog’s traffic than organic marketing (eg, article marketing) — then by all means proceed with a pay per click campaign.

Tomorrow, I’ll give you some PPC marketing tips to keep in mind after you’ve started your campaign. That way, you’ll be able to judge success on an ongoing basis.

Written by Yuwanda Black from Inkwell Editorial
Posted on March 17th, 2009 and filed under Promote your blog
Do not forget to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates

7