If you are like most people, you may have limited experience and knowledge when starting your own network marketing business or home business using internet marketing. As you set up your business and apply your first internet marketing strategies you can make a few mistakes that could not only cost you money but also cost you motivation and confidence.

One of those mistakes is using pay per click marketing without adequate knowledge.

You are likely to use pay per click marketing when you start marketing your business online, because it is a very efficient medium to get traffic to your website immediately. The drawback in using pay per click marketing early on is that the less you know and apply the right tactics, the more you will have to pay! I am not saying here that you should become a theoretical expert before you start marketing your business using pay per click, but you must learn as much as you can as early as you can. Being an amateur at pay per click can be very damaging to your finances in 3 ways:

1. It will cost you more to be placed in a good position on the search engines
2. You may receive a lot of traffic, but only poor quality leads (quantity vs. quality)
3. Your ads may be performing poorly, and therefore you may have no traffic, no leads, and no income as a result.

I was really pleased to see how much traffic I received from my first pay per click campaigns. My click through rates were good, my ads were performing well and many people were opting-in my website and becoming true ‘leads’. BUT, I realised after an expensive month where I generated more than 1000 clicks and 100 leads that I wasn’t talking to the right people. Sure, my leads were interested in learning about my business, opportunity and products, but where were the serious determined entrepreneur-minded people I was truly looking for? I did get some legitimate leads out of these numbers, but summing up, it cost me a lot more money, time and energy than it should have. Worse even, the people I was hoping to attract to my website probably didn’t even see my ads.

There are many resources available to help you learn how to set up effective pay per click marketing campaigns, how to improve your website ranking, and how to generate quality leads by targeting the right audience. Here is the bottom line: The less you learn about it, the more it will cost you and the less profitable it will be.

Here are my recommendations for tackling pay per click marketing when you are starting out in internet or network marketing:

1. Learn the basics on pay per click marketing – this is a must! Perry Marshall has a ‘Definitive Guide To Google Adwords’ which is easy to understand yet comprehensive, and will help you set up your ads and analyse your results.

2. Get some basic knowledge on how websites are picked up and ranked by search engines. You need this so that you can choose an effective title, description, keywords, content and links for your website.

3. Continue to broaden your knowledge and apply new strategies step by step. Do make sure you know the basics before you start spending your entire marketing budget (it may be worth waiting another 1-2 weeks to learn more before marketing your business), and then get into the more advanced stuff. Continually analyse your results and refine your marketing campaigns. Remember that the internet is always changing and what works today may not work forever.

4. Identify your target audience. Write your ads to speak directly to them. Consider if your ads could be misleading or unclear – this is how you get the wrong people clicking on your ads (and pay for it). Ensure also that you continue to target your audience on your website; even though you have already paid for the click, you don’t want to waste your time calling the wrong prospects. By delivering the right message and information through the content on your website, people can pre-qualify themselves before signing in to your website and becoming an official lead.

5. Keep some statistics on your leads. How many were actually not looking for what you are offering? How many were not serious candidates? How many leads were high quality leads? How much did each lead cost you? Find out the pattern in your results and change your marketing campaigns accordingly.

6. Accept that less traffic (especially the paid one) can be a good thing. You don’t want to spend money on bad leads. Quality brings better results and is more cost-effective than quantity. Hit and miss can be an expensive approach.

7. Until you have sufficient knowledge to create campaigns that generate quality leads for yourself, consider using the services of an expert marketer. For example, you may be able to join a marketing cooperative within your company. However, be cautious about purchasing leads from a third party, as you may not know the origin, nature or quality of those leads.

Tags: Pay Per Click

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