If you are a publisher, small business, corporate giant or affiliate marketer, wouldn’t you want the advantage of being able to test the marketplace - FAST ?

There is no point making or finding a fantastic product which has taken valuable time and money in the planning and creation of it to find that there isn’t the market you thought there would be after all.

So many make the mistake of trying to educate the market to want their product or service - without properly testing whether there is a market of buyers that will want their product or service. And this is often disappointing, costly, or even fatal for their business.

With PPC, CPA or CPC you can quickly and effectively find out if it is going to be profitable, or a winner, in a matter of days or weeks for a fraction of the budget required with other methods. Where else could you test the market so cheaply and effectively, rather than lay out a fortune over months with focus groups etc, only to find out, too late, you’ve run out of financial runway?

PPC or CPA ?

With both forms of marketing, you could get traffic virtually instantly - and you must be prepared to convert that traffic into leads or sales. A landing page is the target of this activity (see info about Scriptlance, elance, rent-a-coder for cost effective web graphics etc) and it must elicit a specific action by a visitor, made to feel  comfortable about giving you their email or personal information.

But if you don;t know how to go about it don’t worry - you will have resources and support from a campaign team assigned to you, and you can decide how quickly your market test can take place with the vast marketplace that is the Worlds Wide Web. A campaign lasting a couple of days a week, or longer, depending on your daily budget, can tell you whether you have a market for your product. And you could find it a longer term proposition to keep business rolling in.

I don’t know of any other way that can give you virtually instant feedback for such a low expense. ROI (Return On Investment) can be swift when you have a unique sales proposition, great customer service, or price over the competition, to advertise, and get your keyworded sales message right (watch video “How to Write a Killer PPC Ad“)

So - are you familiar with these terms?
PPC is Pay Per Click; CPC is Cost Per Click, CPM is cost per thousand impressions. These relate to Paid Search (Sponsored Advertising as seen on a search page on the right) with such as Google Adwords. CPA is Cost Per Action (or Aquisition) and this can be in several forms, and managed by CPA Networks.

Paid Search is in the form of sponsored adverts (normally on the right hand side of a search page or paid placement on a relevant web page). As an advertiser you only pay for valid click-through’s or if a valid specific action takes place,  so this medium can be very cost effective.

Google Adwords, MSN AdCenter or Yahoo (Overture) are the most used Search platforms for PPC campaigns. There are hundreds of others, a few may be worth a look and would cost you less per campaign but may not get enough traffic to test your product or campaign quickly. I would suggest you stay with the top three in the beginning where you will get many helpful training resources and tools within your account  (See Below for links to the Google Adwords Learning Centre and other Resources).

An advantage of PPC is that you can write your ad and get traffic within minutes. Or if there is a seasonal or economic lull in business from other sources, you can tweak a campaign in advance or short notice.

Once you sign up - You will have resources to help you learn about how to choose keywords, bidding for competing keywords, (or long tail keywords which tend to get you more qualified traffic, especially if you are on a budget). And how you can set the demographics, region etc; and your daily spend, which you can set to  a maximum of as little as a few dollars a day.

CPA Networks are used by countless worldwide big brands and is also an option for the smaller business. As an advertiser your product or service can be campaign managed, across many advertising mediums, by experts.  Affiliate Marketers and webmasters must strictly adhere to the terms set for where and how each offer can be advertised, and can expertly drive traffic to the offer landing page with PPC (or, if allowed, create a better landing page if it would increase conversions).  Social Networks have huge traffic (Facebook is pretty close to that of Google!) and can finely target your campaign.

Check the reputation of each CPA Network and whether they keep a strong check on click fraud, and pay commission in a timely manner.  I have listed a few established ones at the bottom of this post and you can contact them for further advice.

Researching the right Keywords is central to all your (or your campaign manager’s) on-line marketing activities and absolutely crucial here too. And there are several free tools you can use to help build out your keyword lists to find the golden nuggets that will bring in a consistently profitable campaign. You can find these best by thinking as the prospect, not as yourself.

Both the company advertising and the affiliate who may be considering promoting their offer, must scrutinize the landing page very carefully to make sure it has all the characteristics necessary, and appeal to the demographics of the market it seeks, for a successful campaign. And not forgetting a precise clear and strong Call to Action - without this being just right all your hard work will be wasted.

The less you ask the prospect to do i.e. just enter their email, the lower the commission payout can be per action, but likely more clickthroughs. If the landing page asks for name, email, gender, postcode etc the more social proof (i.e. testimonials, well known brand images), relevancy and valuable your offer must be. Some of these are usually high price products or financial services and a very nice affiliate commission if you choose to promote these.

You will find it pretty straight forward to set your campaign to rotate different versions inside such as your Adwords account to see which converts best for you. Check your stats within your account every 7 days, dump the least performing one, keep the best and test a new one against that one over the next 7 days, and so on, until you have the best performing ads that will perform for you on autopilot from then on. See the post “How to Write a Killer PPC Ad“)

Click Fraud can take place, and as an advertiser you need to minimize your risk to it. Check your  log data from your campaigns for unusual changes, such as clicks from a country that you don’t advertise to, or other unusual activities or results etc. Whoever you are advertising with will want to know and you do get refunds.

This is a brief overview, and I haven’t covered Keyword Research here (you would be amazed at the new ideas you get from delving into these and you will find out more in the next post) so if you need help, you can find plenty of free resources or contact your account manager for further help.  You can use FREE keyword tools or buy a recommended market leading one such as Keyword Elite by Bryxen Software - ideally use a mixture of both when compiling and expanding your keyword lists.

To succeed you should master at least one of these methods to make the really big profits online or at least until your SEO efforts and traffic sources have been truly established. But even then, wouldn’t you rather have some control over market forces by giving sales a boost before or during a market downturn?

If you master these, you will quickly know when you have a product that flies. And by tweaking your ads until you have the best combination you could be making substantial profits - at will.

Here is a useful list for getting started with PPC:
Google Adwords Learning Centre
MSN AdCentre
Commercial Intention Tool (excellent tool for Keyword Online commercial probability checking)
Yahoo (Overture)

Keyword Generator Tool  Free Tool
adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Free tool
Wordpot Free Tool
SEObook.com Keyword Tool Free Tool

PPC Webspy Free Tool, with totally optional choice to upgrade.  (This is a really cool keyword research tool with a twist, and especially for affiliate marketers!) It extracts keywords from other Google Adwords ads, and does other cool things that you have to check out! And don’t take a long time to manually get the same hot keywords information when it need only take moments.

There are many CPA Networks but take a look at:

GlobalDirectMedia - Make Money! an excellent UK based cpa network

www.Maxbounty.com
www.NeverBlueAds.com
www.AzoogleAds.com
www.Copeac.com
www.HydraMedia.com