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.

Word-of-mouth marketing can get people to talk about you and make it work for you and your small business. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learned about new business before the Internet or major advertising networks. With an online business, getting the word out using this strategy can be done without a lot of major marketing dollars on your part. Most of it will be done offline, which is probably your untapped market right now.

Strategies for Word-of-Mouth Marketing

* Customer service – This is one of the crucial areas of your business. You could be the biggest company, but if you treat your customers as though they are not important to you, they will take their business to Company B and let everyone know why. How much you value your customers will keep them talking long after they have purchased the product. Online, you can provide help pages and auto-responder emails for customers needing help with purchases or other questions.

* Become visible in the community – This includes advertising in your local community newsletter or church directory. People can become aware that you exist and find out what your services are.

* Give out samples – Sometimes you have to give some to get some. Donate sample products to prize baskets for fundraisers. Donate your own prize basket to raffles and other community events.

* Create promotional items for family and friends to share – Invest in shirts that contain your logo. Give away key chains, bottle holders, cups and refrigerator magnets. Family members can distribute them to their friends. Be sure to poll them to see what kinds of promotional items would be the most popular.

* Sponsor a sports team – This could be the local little league team. Buy them shirts for their team and get your business name on the back; they will be representing you in every game that they play.

* Hold home shows – Create a presentation and ask friends to book a show. In exchange for the use of their home, they can receive free products or services. You can do this free of charge for the opportunity to expand your client base. Ask everyone that attends the show to sign up for free coupons or your mailing list if they don’t decide to buy anything. Also give away free trial samples so they can share them with friends.

There are a number of ways to expand the reach of your business. Word-of-mouth marketing can be done by valuing your customers and also increasing your visibility in the local community.

Webinars are one of the best marketing tools available to entrepreneurs. They are powerful instructing and communication devices and are easy to use, yet can have a powerful impact on your connection with your audience.

Let People Meet the Real You

It is one thing for people to read your writing in text form, yet quite another to see your face on video or to hear your voice on audio. One advantage of webinars is that they are unedited. Unlike a video product, where you can spend as much time as you want preparing it perfectly, the webinar will never look as smooth, but believe it or not, that is actually good. People get to know the real you, with no editing, through your voice and possibly visually, depending on how you set up the webinar.

The Benefit of Multimedia Presentations

Webinars take advantage of various media simultaneously. You have audio coming in from your microphone, and you may have video coming in from your webcam, but you also probably have a slide presentation or mind map presentation to lead your audience through. This helps add structure and flow to the lesson. In addition, you may have websites or live demos to show. You may have pre-recorded clips that are all a part of your presentation. Unlike text or podcasts, webinars gives you a whole range of different kinds of media to take advantage of.

Build Trust with Two-Way Conversations

Instead of just “teaching at” your audience, with a webinar you can also see in real time what kind of reactions your audience is having to your materials. In some set-ups, this takes the form of questions that participants can send in. You pick and choose the best questions and answer them right then and there.

In other set-ups, there will be a chat room visible to both participants and the organizer. You can pick topics and questions right out of the chat room and address them live. A lot of connection is built when the audience can see you addressing their concerns in real time. They know you are really listening. Adding a two-way conversation to your toolbox can help improve your connection to your audience.

High Sales Potential

Finally, webinars are powerful sales tools. At the end of an informative, exciting and connected webinar, your listeners are going to be exceptionally receptive to a sales offer. Make them a great offer and you will see a rush of sales come in instantly.

As you can tell, webinars are great for building trust and credibility, which benefits your brand in the long run. In addition, they can also help you bring in more sales immediately. They take a little bit of time to set up the first time around, but once you have done your first webinar, it is very easy to repeat the process.

From launching a new product to refining an existing business, surveys can help get you the data you need to make informed decisions. With the right kinds of data to determine who your customers are and what they want, you will be able to make informed decisions that result in happier customers and increased profits.

Determine Your Customer’s Demographics

How old is your average buyer? Are they male or female? Are they married or single? What is their annual household income? What are their hobbies? What are their other interests? What country do they live in? This kind of data is invaluable when it comes to writing your marketing.

For example, the kinds of colors that work well when targeting college students are different than when targeting those over age forty. The kind of wording and copy is also drastically different. If you know who your demographic is, you will be able to use demographic-targeting advertising such as Facebook ads or direct mail to reach them. There are so many benefits to knowing exactly who your customers are. Unfortunately, there is often no way to find out without asking them, and a survey is the ideal way to do so.

Identify Future Products

What aspects of your current products do they like and want to see more of? What kinds of products would your customers like to see in the future? What are problems in their lives that aren’t being solved yet? Instead of launching products that you think are good ideas, a much more profitable and risk-free method is to first determine what your customers want and then create it for them. If your customers know that by completing a survey you help serve them better, they are usually happy to oblige.

Evaluate Your Current Performance

Did they like your product? When did the package arrive? How many rings did they have to wait before customer service picked up? Unless you ask, you will never know what your customers are really thinking about your product. Even if you could improve your product easily, you won’t know what you need to change without getting feedback. Remember that people love to be heard. They love giving their opinions and are usually more than happy to take three to five minutes to answer a few questions, especially if they are already a customer.

As you can tell, there are many different ways to use surveys to help guide your business. You can use surveys to figure out who your customers are, to figure out what they want in future products and to gauge how well your business is currently doing. Don’t be shy about asking. The more feedback you have, the more you will be able to help your customers solve their problems.

There’s a big difference between a well-run survey and a poorly run one. A great survey will get you many results and the results will give you answers that you can directly apply to your business. A poor survey may or may not generate many response and the responses you get won’t help guide your business. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for writing surveys.

DO: Establish Goals Before Writing Questions

A survey should have a simple, concise goal in mind before anything else. A good goal, for example, is to figure out “What are students’ biggest problems in college?” A poor goal, for example, is to figure out “What our customer sentiments are towards our brands and products.” It’s too general, too broad and has too many open ends.

DON’T: Use Many Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions can give a lot of good information, but they take considerably more effort for someone to answer than merely checking a box. A survey that doesn’t have a prize or incentive needs a maximum of only one or two open-ended questions.

DO: Keep it Short

Keeping your survey short will ensure that more people finish your survey. If your survey is long, people will often abandon the survey before finishing. If your survey is long, you also run the risk of having them scan the survey, see how long it is and decide it’s too much work to even get started. Cut out as many questions as you can, while still ensuring that you answer your primary question.

DON’T: Start with Difficult or Boring Questions

Try to position the most entertaining or interesting questions towards the beginning of your survey. This is so you can “hook” people into the flow of answering the survey. The more complicated or boring questions should be reserved for the end of the survey, when they will likely answer them anyway since they are so close to finishing.

DO: Offer a Prize or Incentive

Run a contest. For example, PayPal often runs cash-prize surveys, where one survey winner will win a certain amount of cash. You can also give away digital products to everyone who answers a survey. That way, there’s no randomness at all and anyone who completest the survey will know they will get something out of it.

DON’T: Use Complicated or Ambiguous Language

Don’t use jargon or write questions that could be interpreted multiple ways. Don’t use long words when you could use short words. In other words, aim to make your survey so simple that a ten-year-old could answer it.

All these do’s and don’ts together will help you run a simple, concise survey that will get you all the responses you need.