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.

Google’s Quality Score (QS) system is one of the most crucial factors to understand if you want to profit from AdWords Pay-Per-Click (PPC). It can also be one of the most confusing systems, in part because Google doesn’t give many straight answers as to what they are looking for. However, marketers have begun to piece together a much more complete picture on what quality score is and how to achieve good scores. You will now learn why QS scores are so important, as well as how to improve your scores.

Why Quality Scores are Crucial to a Good PPC Campaign

There are many reasons why a good quality score is crucial to a profitable PPC campaign. These are the most important reasons:

* Raw Traffic – Google doesn’t just show all their ads at once. Instead, Google rotates through all the ads they have in their system. That is why sometimes when you enter your own keyword, you won’t see your ad. The higher your quality score, the more often Google is going to rotate your ads. Extremely high QS advertisers may even have their ad rotated in on every single search. Conversely, if you have a very low quality score, you might not even get any traffic at all. Google will just stop sending you traffic.

* Cost Per Click (CPC) – The difference between a high QS’s CPC and a low QS’s CPC can be astronomical. Someone with a 5 or less QS might have to pay $1.50 for a click, while someone with an 8 to 10 QS might pay $0.10 for that very same click. It’s much more likely that you will build a profitable campaign when you have a high quality score than when you have a low-scoring one.

* Rankings – In addition to actual costs, higher QS advertisers also rank higher. If you have a QS of 7 and you are paying $0.25 per click, the advertiser with a QS of 10 can be paying only $0.10 and still be showing up ahead of you. In short, with a higher quality score you get more traffic and cheaper traffic.

Now that we’ve covered why QS is so crucial, what can you do to improve your quality scores?

Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Landing Page Quality

The two biggest factors that Google looks at are your CTRs and your landing page. Your CTRs are crucial because they are what determine how much money Google makes. The higher your CTR, the more money Google makes per view they give you, because more clicks means more money paid to Google. Therefore Google will naturally rank higher ads that make them more money. Also, a high CTR ad tells Google that what you are advertising is probably what the visitor is looking for. Your landing page is another crucial factor for determining your quality score. Google looks for websites with high content. One-page affiliate sites and squeeze pages with no links to content tend to get lower quality scores.

The Relevancy Triangle

In addition to CTRs and landing pages, Google also looks at how relevant your keywords are to three things: your keyword bids, your ads and your landing pages.

If your keyword bids, the ads and the landing page match closely to what the user enters, you are more likely to get a high quality score.

It’s important to realize the quality and relevance are both important. You could have a very high quality website with a lot of information about candles, but if you are bidding on fishing keywords, you are still going to get a low score. In order to get a high quality score, you need to have high relevance as well as high quality and CTR.

These are the three most important factors Google looks at when determining your quality score, which is one of the most important factors to success in Google AdWords. Learn the system thoroughly and it will definitely pay off.

You may have heard the story of a beginning internet business owner who decided to try AdWords and inadvertently spent thousands of dollars with no return. These horror stories happen because business owners aren’t careful and haven’t learned the basics of how not to throw money away on Google AdWords.

Here is how to ensure that you don’t lose a fortune on AdWords while you build your way to a profitable campaign:

Start with Search Only, No Partner Networks

By default, Google AdWords turns on both content networks and search partner networks for any campaign. Never, ever combine a search campaign with a content network campaign. They should always be separated.

When you are first starting, make sure content network is turned off. Test on search first, then content network if search converts, as content network traffic tends to be quite a bit harder to convert.

Also turn off search partner networks when you are starting. This will reduce your traffic a bit, but it also ensures that your traffic comes from just the highest quality source: Google.com. If search partners are on, you will get traffic from other partner sites as well (e.g., AOL.com) whose quality isn’t as high.

Set a Daily Budget

Generally it’s a good idea to start with a lower budget and work your way up, rather than starting with a large budget and losing a lot of money. Make sure that you set Google to distribute your traffic evenly throughout the day, rather than rush you all the traffic possible. Keep it on this setting until you know you are converting.

When you know you are converting, increase your daily budget and tell Google to send you as much traffic as possible as soon as it comes, rather than distributing your budget over the day.

Watch Your Quality Score

The difference between a “Good” quality score and a “Great” quality score can be as much as four times in the cost of CPCs. Having a great quality score (QS) means having a content-rich, highly relevant landing page with keywords and ads that are all highly relevant. Your CTR also plays a large role in your QS.

If you have some keywords that are getting low QS ratings while others are getting high QS ratings, consider pausing the low QS rating keywords. Your quality score has a huge impact on your ROI. Often times it is much more important to optimize for quality score rather than CPC or CTR.

Track Everything

Know where every single sale came from. The goal is to eventually eliminate all the keywords that aren’t converting and have only converting keywords remaining. The only way that will happen is if you are tracking everything on the keyword level.

As a general rule, spend double the payout/profit on any given keyword before ruling it out. For example, if you make four dollars per lead on a pay-per-lead campaign, then spend eight dollars on a keyword before ruling it out as a non-converting keyword.

If you follow these tips and start small with a budget, run only on Google search, optimize for quality score and track every conversion back to the keyword level, you can safely know that you won’t be throwing money away on Google AdWords. You will also be on track to finding your first profitable campaign in the very near future.

Google AdWords wasn’t the first search engine to come out with the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) model, but they certainly are the biggest and most well-known. However, that doesn’t mean that you should ignore other search engines such as Bing. In fact, there are many marketers who are making full-time livings on search engines like Bing without spending any money on Google at all.

Here are the differences between AdWords and Bing and why might you choose one over the other:

Conversion Rates

Out of AdWords, Yahoo and Bing, Bing traffic tends to convert the best. That means that out of 1,000 visitors, you’ll tend to get more sales from Bing than from AdWords or Yahoo traffic. One common theory as to why is because people using Google tend to be more savvy computer users and more discerning about where they spend money. Bing users tend to be people who just left their browsers on their default search engines. They’re less discerning with their money and their internet habits.

Volume

This is where Google AdWords wins. For any given keyword, you can expect to get ten percent or less with Bing than what you would get if you bid on the same keyword in AdWords. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make significant money on Bing, it just means that your strategy needs to be different.

Bidding Strategy

Generally, with AdWords you don’t want to go for high-profile, high-competition keywords with high volume as the bid prices are just too high. With Bing however, it’s different. Bing’s PPC bids tend to be a little bit cheaper than AdWords, and there also tends to be less competition. That means that on AdWords a keyword like “Lose lower belly fat” may be far too competitive and expensive. On the other hand, on Bing there will be competition, but you may have a good shot at making money with the keyword. Basically, on Bing you’ll need to take advantage of the lower competition to bid on broader keywords. This will help you offset the lower search volume: You increase your total traffic by bidding on higher traffic keywords.

AdWords versus Bing

There are many similarities in strategies between AdWords and Bing. The principles of writing great ads and split testing carefully apply to both systems equally. Choosing the right keywords is as important in one as it is the other. On the other hand, these two systems require very different strategies to master.

AdWords often requires drilling down to very precise keywords in order to create profitable campaigns. On Bing, your main challenge is often getting enough volume rather than getting your traffic to convert.

Each search engine is different and need different approaches. There’s a lot of money to be made in both.

Try Google Adwords for your business in a new account, and get a $75 credit. Just sign up and spend $75 and get $75 in Google Adwords credit. Try Google today

If you’ve heard about the power of Adwords but still haven’t tried it, this could be the best money you ever spend on your business in 2011. Make sure you follow all the instructions on how to write the best ads, paying particular attention to keywords, and make sure you customize all your settings and your budget carefully to make the most of the money.