Building Email Circulation with Paid Search

See how the external source of pay per click (PPC) may benefit your online business

The Internet marketing model of pay per click can benefit publishers, especially if you have a very niche market.

To spread some light on the topic, PPC is a model used by advertisers on websites. The advertiser is charged a specific amount only when their ad is clicked on.

Associated with PPC is cost per click, or the CPC. This is the amount of money the advertiser pays search engines or online publishing hosts for a single click on the advertisement that in return brings the visitor to the advertiser’s website.

For some, PPC has become a favored model since it provides the opportunity for purchases to be made, wherever people may be surfing the web.

Is PPC right for you?

PPC isn’t a huge part of our marketing strategy. We rely heavier on organic forms of marketing that do not require the exchange of money, like organic search engine marketing and social media marketing.

However, PPC can be an added form of promotion when a special event or product is coming up. For instance, we have been promoting for our Content Marketing 2010 Seminars through internal and external promotions. We decided that PPC was worth utilizing for these promotional efforts, as the events are one-time opportunities.

Creating a PPC campaign

There are a number of PPC providers around the Internet. We felt Google AdWords was the best destination for our ads, since Google is the most popular search engine on the planet, and their AdWords program is one of the three largest PPC providers, along with Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

[text_ad]

After choosing the PPC provider, you will have to familiarize yourself with the specifics for the ads.

With Google AdWords, the ad’s headline can be no longer than 25 total characters, including spaces. The body copy of the ad cannot be longer than 70 total characters, including spaces, and has to be broken up between two separate lines. The final component to the ad is the website URL, which will be below the body content and containing no more than 35 total characters including spaces.

Here is an example of an ad we created for the Content Marketing 2010 Seminars:

Content Marketing Seminar
See results by applying our 7-step
system to your online efforts
www.mequoda.com/seminars

After selecting the PPC provider and writing your advertisement according to their guidelines, you then have to select the keywords you want to target and set a limit on spending.

The keywords can be found easily with the help of the Google Keyword Tool. You can compile an extensive list with it, and then carefully select the words that resonate with the advertisement you will be running.

When it comes to a limit for spending, you can set a specific dollar amount for a specific time frame. For instance, if you have an event and want to run the PPC campaign for a period of six weeks and have a budget of $3,000, you could set the campaign up so no more than $500 worth of clicks can take place in the week. This way you can have the campaign last for your ideal amount of time.

Building email circulation with PPC

If you are using PPC to build email circulation, be sure to have the ad point to a data collection page of yours. One of your most popular free downloads could be a landing page you’d use.

Even if you are using PPC to drive traffic into a paid product, as we are doing with our Content Marketing Seminar noted above, you should include a pre-selected email newsletter offer on the first page of your order flow. This way, if the user abandons on the credit card ask, you’ve still collected that person’s email address.

For more on building email circulation, join us as Don Nicholas outlines over 40 different practices in our Building Email Circulation webinar on June 15th.