Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is one of the fastest ways to drive a lot of traffic to a new website. You don’t need to take the time to build a reputation or establish back-links, but simply to have a profitable sales funnel and be able to fine-tune your PPC until you are spending money only on traffic that is profitable. Here are a few smart ways to do that.

Start with a Smaller Network

Try starting with a network such as Microsoft Bing. Though Bing has much less traffic than Google AdWords, the conversion rates tend to be a bit higher. You will have less competition and often lower bids.

In the beginning you won’t be using up all the traffic that AdWords can give you anyway. Instead of using a high-volume network, consider going with a high return-on-investment network instead. You don’t risk ruining your AdWords Quality Score with low click-through rate ads. Instead, use Bing or another smaller network to test out your keywords and ad copy before porting them over to AdWords.

Track Every Sale Back to the Keyword

Track every sale back to the keyword it came from. With proper tracking, you will be able to eliminate unprofitable keywords very quickly. Unless you are tracking your sales back to the keyword, you will probably spend a lot of money on campaigns that aren’t profitable. As a general rule, if you have spent more than double your profit on a keyword without making a sale, then cut the keyword. For example, if you are selling a product that earns you a $20 profit and you don’t make a sale by the time you have spent $40, then cut the keyword.

Start with Exact Match

Exact match keywords cost more than broad match keywords, but will usually have much higher conversion rates. The idea is to aim for people who are in the exact right mindset for what you are selling. Exact match allows you to filter out the browsers and instead get right to the buyers. Start with moderate volume keywords that your ideal buyers would enter. Bid exact match and get that to be profitable first. Then broaden your reach with phrase match. If you’re still profitable, then experiment with broad match as well.

Being Smart with PPC

Avoid volume until you have proven your campaigns to be profitable. Once you are profitable, scale up as quickly as you can while tracking diligently to make sure you are still profitable. As long as you are, then aim to get as much traffic as you can.

There is a lot of competition and many pitfalls in PPC. However, the rewards more than make up for the effort it will take to figure it out. Start small and start profitable, then make your way up from there.

Here are a few smart ways to build a strong brand and consciously construct how people think of you and your company without having a corporate advertising budget:

Buy Advertising at 80 Percent Off

Advertising in your local radio or newspaper may not be too expensive for the small business. If an ad’s rate card rate is $1,000 a month, there is a very good chance you could get it down to $600, $400 or even as low as $200 with some shrewd negotiating.

It is important to realize that most newspapers struggle to get advertisers. When a newspaper goes to print, any unused ad space is money lost. Since it costs them the same amount of money to print the paper, they will often be happy to take your money, even if it’s far below what they would normally receive. Start by asking what their remnant rate is, the price for unused advertising space. You can often get an immediate 30 percent discount this way.

Then ask if they honor the 15 percent in-house advertising agency discount, which is the discount that ad agencies received which isn’t passed on to the client; in other words, by not using an ad agency, you can take the discount for yourself. Now you have already saved 45 percent. Then try asking for their bulk rate for three, six and twelve months. The goal is to try to get the twelve-month rate for a one or two-month test to determine if the medium works out for you. Using a combination of negotiation techniques, you can get as much as 80 percent off.

Small Businesses Need to Focus on Response First

A large business can afford to put their time and energy into just branding, rather than direct sales efforts. A small business, however, needs to focus their main attention on building sales today, and save branding for tomorrow. If you are spending money on advertising, your goal is responses. Those can be email sign-ups, telephone calls or sales, but branding just isn’t enough for a new small business. Aim for sales and reap the benefits of branding as a side benefit.

Use a Variety of Media

Research has shown that people who see an ad again and again through different media are a lot more likely to buy. Let’s say someone sees your banner ad on a relevant website. Then they see an article you wrote on an industry leader’s blog. Finally, when they are searching for information on a related topic, they see your Google AdWords ad. By now, you have built up so much credibility just by appearing multiple times in different media that people are likely to click just out of curiosity. If you are marketing a local business, try mixing local media such as radio, newspaper and perhaps even direct mail or postcards.

These are a few smart ways to build your brand effectively. Take care of your bottom line first by generating sales, while being conscious of your brand. Use a variety of media to target the same audience and never ever pay full rate card.

StumbleUpon is a social networking site that connects you directly to others who share the same interests, and can be a fantastic tool to drive traffic and grow your business. However, in order to gain the most benefit there are a few key strategies you can utilize.

#1 Identify Your Goals

Goals help you stay on track. They also help you know when a strategy is successful and when it needs to be fine-tuned or eliminated. So what do you want to accomplish with your StumbleUpon tactics? For example, “I want to increase website traffic by ten percent.”

#2 Create a Strong Brand

It’s important to make sure you are representing a cohesive brand personality or image whenever you communicate on StumbleUpon. Your profile is also a significant brand builder. Here are a few tips to strengthen your brand through your profile:

* Post a picture – Just like other social networking websites and even your website and blog, it is important to demonstrate that you are a real, live human being. It’s also a good way to share who you are.

* Choose topics strategically – Choose topics that are relevant to your business.

* Connect with like-minded Friends and Followers – Connect with your industry gurus and experts. You can also connect with your competition this way and upload other social networking contacts.

#3 Schedule Your Interactions

Most often when people join StumbleUpon and other social networking websites, they create a few key posts and then they forget about it. If you want to reach your goals, you’ll want to participate on a regular basis for it to be effective.

It is important to know that this is a task that you can outsource. You don’t have to spend your valuable time networking. If you are managing the task on your own, set aside a few minutes every day submitting sites to StumbleUpon, interacting and reviewing. Submit regular content that offers value and helps build your brand and awareness. You can make this step significantly easier by installing a StumbleUpon toolbar on your browser.

#4 Strategic Content

Of course you will want to submit some of your own content. However, you want to make sure the pages you submit are strategic. Don’t submit everything, but rather only content that you believe will help you reach your goals. Create content specifically for your StumbleUpon audience.

#5 Testing and Tracking

When you are creating your StumbleUpon goals, make sure you also create a way to test and track your results so that you will know if your efforts are successful.

#6 Integrate

Include StumbleUpon into your other marketing efforts. For example, add StumbleUpon buttons on your website content pages to motivate Stumbles and reviews.

#7 Advertise

Once you have a solid StumbleUpon system and are achieving the results you desire, take a look at StumbleUpon advertising. Like Facebook and other social networking advertising programs, it is highly targeted and may be more effective than other advertising programs.

StumbleUpon offers businesses the ability to build traffic, awareness, SEO and much more. Create your goals and a strategy to achieve them. Implement systems and tactics and then test for success.

If you are making a bit of money from AdSense but know you could be getting even higher CPMs (cost per thousand), then read this post carefully. You are about to learn a handful of powerful, proven tips and tactics for improving your AdSense CPMs.

Try Saying Sponsored Links

AdSense doesn’t allow you to tell users to click on advertising or to disguise advertising as non-advertising. However, AdSense does specifically allow you to place the text “Advertising” or “Sponsored Links” above an AdSense box. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, a normal-sized sentence, bolded that says “Our Sponsors:” can often increase conversions. Test it out in your market.

Match or Contrast

There are two ways main ways to get high conversions in AdSense. The first and most common is to make your AdSense format match as closely to your website as possible. The text color, font, font size, link color and AdSense borders should all match the layout of your site. When you do this, it is much more likely that someone will think the ads are part of your website or endorsed by your site and click on a link.

On the other hand, one less used but also successful tactic is to do just the opposite. Use contrasting colors or designs to deliberately make the ads stand out. Design the ad boxes in such a way that they literally pop out of the screen, drawing attention and possibly clicks.

Experiment with both methods to see how they work for you.

Always Split Test

Learn to use channels. Channels are somewhat confusing at first, but once you get the hang of them they are extremely powerful tracking tools. When combined with Google Website Optimizer, you can test a wide range of variables at the same time to figure out the best way to make the most money from your traffic. Test everything you can think of. Colors, placements, ad sizes, number of ad units – everything. You never know what will work until you try.

Placement Tips

In general, you will get a higher click-through rate by having your ads above the fold than below the fold. A classical location is the large square ad in the upper left corner of a post. Navigation bar ads are also another popular and successful option. Be sure to customize the settings so the navigation bar units look as similar to your actual navigation as possible. Finally, placement near images or other eye-catching elements on your website tends to work very well. Make sure not to misrepresent the ad as being related to the image, or you will violate the terms of service.

These are a handful of proven strategies, distilled from the experience of many marketers. You will rarely have a very high CPM when you are just getting started; however, over time, with consistent testing, you will find your CPMs rising higher and higher.

Google AdSense is a simple, no-nonsense way of turning web traffic into money. Instead of going through the hassle of selling advertising or creating your own product, with Google AdSense all you need to do is go through a ten minute set-up process and you will be earning money right away.

How Google AdSense Works

Google AdSense is what’s called a “contextual advertising” program. Basically, AdSense will read all the text around the ad, figure out what the website and webpage is about, and then serve up ads that are related to the category of your website. For example, let’s say you’re running a website that teaches people how to cook better. You don’t have a cooking store or product to sell, but you want to make some money from your website.

All you need to do is put up Google AdSense. Once AdSense is live, it will read the text on your website and figure out that it is about cooking. It will then serve up ads by advertisers targeting people who enjoy cooking. For example, you might have ads selling baking pans, utensils and cookbooks.

Every time someone clicks on your ad, you will get paid. The amount you are paid depends on how valuable the click is to the advertisers. For example, if you are running a candle-related website, you might make only $0.10 a click. On the other hand, if you are running a legal website, you might get paid as much as $3 a click.

How to Set Up Google AdSense

To get started, go to http://www.google.com/adsense/

You will need to register an account. In order to do so, you must first have a website up and running already so Google will know where you plan to put the ads. Then walk through the AdSense set-up process. At the end of the process, Google will generate a small snippet of code. Copy and paste this code into your HTML editor. Upload the file, and then wait about five minutes for it to process. Once AdSense has had a chance to read your website, it will generate the ads and you will soon be up and running. If you don’t edit your own website, just copy and paste the code and email it to your webmaster.

What Type of Websites Work Well with Google AdSense?

The best kinds of websites for AdSense tend to be content websites that get traffic primarily from search engines. It’s very rare that you will be able to make more money from AdSense than you are spending from another advertising source. For example, it doesn’t really make sense to try to advertise in a magazine for your website and try to make the money back with AdSense.

Because search engine traffic is free, you will almost always be profitable if you are driving traffic from search engines to AdSense. Content websites work best because you have increased trust already and people will tend to click on your recommendations and links. Also, AdSense tends to earn less than selling your own or other people’s products, so it doesn’t really make sense to use AdSense in conjunction with an ecommerce site. In short, AdSense works best with content sites that are ranked in search engines.

These are the basics of how to use Google’s innovative AdSense program. Setting it up takes less than ten minutes. If you’re already getting traffic, you can very soon be expecting a check from Google.