Getting Traffic to your website, web store or web...thingy

Sell Online with a Yahoo Store Newsletter Archive

Get Traffic 2 - The Sequel.

(Get Traffic Faster)

(By the way, I'm punishing Andy for his evil grammar and typos. This newsletter is from Audrey.)

Pay Per Click Search Engines are the fastest and easiest way to start promoting your store once it is up and running. Really, they are!

For those of you unfamiliar with Pay Per Click Search Engines, they are search engines that you pay for a spot in. In other words, you choose a keyword (actually many keywords) decide how much you will pay that engine per click (or per customer) and they include you in their results for that keyword. The higher you bid, the higher you are ranked.

This is not a new idea anymore, the leading PPCSE, Overture, has been around for at least 4 years now. But, it is still a great idea and powerful traffic generator for new store owners.

By bidding on keywords that relate to the products you're selling in your store, you can start getting traffic just days after you open, instead of waiting months to be ranked by the free engines like Google and MSN.

And besides, results from most of the PPCSE’s are listed in the free engines.

Take Overture as an example. If you are one of the top 3 sites for a particular keyword in Overture, your store will be listed under the Sponsored links section at the top of Yahoo!, MSN and Alta Vista. Sweet Deal!

So is using PPCSEs a good marketing idea for new store owners? Absolutely!

But, as always, you want to have a strategy before plunging into what is becoming a highly competitive arena.

Andy and I recently opened a new Yahoo! Store. Once we were happy with the site and our homepage copy was nice and tasty, we went to the biggest of the PPCSEs, Overture to get our store out there.

Many of the more general keywords that fit our store had enormous bids. Some as high as $1.99! Now for most new store owners, including ourselves, spending nearly $2 per visitor when we’re just starting isn’t prudent because we don’t know our visitors to sales ratio (the number of visitors it takes for us to get a sale). So we started looking at the more specialized keywords.

Here is the best strategy for a new store owner to adopt. Before you start placing huge bids for top ranking, know your visitors to sales ratio. This ratio is incredibly important when you are paying for your visitors.

Basically, your visitors to sales ratio is the number of visitors it takes you to get a sale. You use this ratio to decide how much you can spend on your paid advertising.

Say you have a product that you make $40 profit on. You decide you’re willing to spend half of that for advertising, $20. In the example above, we would only be able to get 10 visitors from Overture if we bid $2 for our keyword, we simply didn’t think that was enough.

But, we found about 50 keywords that specifically described our products and had super low bids. Some of them actually hadn’t even been bid on yet!

So instead of bidding for the number one spot for the big 10 keywords, we took the number one spot in about 50 of the not searched for quite as often keywords.

We’re getting the same amount of traffic from those 50, much cheaper, keywords as we would if we had bid for those really expensive keywords… and we’re spending less money!

This is a strategy that really works for the new store owner. Trying to get in and compete with the big dogs right away will break your bank and probably won’t get you a whole lot of sales. Bidding on the smaller keywords allows you to grab the attention of people searching for specific things and saves you money.

Once you start getting traffic and sales you will be able to determine your visitors to sales ratio. And once you’ve figured it out, you’ll know how much you can spend on those big keywords without losing profit.

Now what I’ve just said applies mostly to Overture. They are by far the biggest and most popular PPCSE. But what about all those “others” I mentioned?

There are quite a few smaller PPSCEs out there. Some of them, like FindWhat, are up and coming, but a lot of people don’t utilize them because they have never heard of them.

Bingo! You can grab the top position in many of these smaller PPSCEs for pennies.

After we placed our Overture bids, Andy and I went over to FindWhat. We looked for those keywords that were so expensive in Overture and found that they were well within our planned marketing budget for our new store. As a matter of fact the most we paid for a top listing was $.06.

The minimum opening bid in Overture is $.10. WOW! We grabbed all the keywords we could think of and smiled smugly to ourselves.

The traffic that our cheap FindWhat keywords have brought us just about equals the traffic we’ve gotten from Overture. We saved a ton of money.

These smaller PPSCEs are not to be discounted. Search results for FindWhat appear in AOL and Yahoo! How better can you spend a penny?

And there are many more! Here’s a list:

7Search

GoClick

Xuppa

Kanoodle

Ah-ha

Epilot

FindWhat

Search123

IQSeek

MetaMission

Resources

I’m going to use the “F” word (avert your eyes for a moment).

"FREE!"

There is a cool little program out on the internet called

“Good Keywords”, and it’s mighty keen.

This little program resides on your computer and behaves in a very similar fashion to Overture’s search suggestion tool with the added bonus of incorporating information from Lycos, Google, Teoma and other services like Alexa.

How 'bout that?

Muhahaha….

If you want to expedite your supply and demand searches, and optimize the keywords you’re using on your web site to get traffic, this little FREE program is a must-have.

Download Good Keywords before they start to charge money for it.

Audrey Kerwood