Online business snippets….
Copyright 2005 Richard Grady
There are a couple of things I want to share with you this week, both based on my own experiences recently….
Keep a very close eye on your PPC advertising
Over a year ago, I wrote a newsletter about how I had managed to save myself $750 a month by cancelling one of the pay per click advertising campaigns that I had been running for months and months. I spent some time tracking the conversions from the advertising and found that the number of sales resulting directly from that particular campaign were minimal and as such, it was pointless continuing with it. At the time I made a point of recommending to everyone that they keep a close eye on their own expenditure and track results carefully.
Obviously I listen to my own advice and it occurred to me recently that one of my other pay-per-click campaigns may not be as lucrative as it once was. I therefore devoted some time to tracking conversions from this campaign and found that it had gone from being my main source of sales a few years ago, to now contributing hardly any sales at all. At the beginning of the month, I cancelled this campaign too and it has made absolutely no difference to my business turnover. The amazing thing is that this campaign was costing me nearly $2000 a month which is now money in my pocket :-)
So why is PPC becoming less effective?
It is, of course, impossible to say that PPC is actually becoming less effective and the fact is that it works for thousands and thousands of people. However, it has certainly become less effective for me and I think that the main reason is simply competition. When I first started the above campaign, there were no other advertisers offering a similar service to my own. Today there are something like ten different alternatives. This has two main effects - firstly it means that customers have a much wider choice and regardless of how good my service may be in comparison to the competition, some people are inevitably going to buy from one of my competitors. Secondly it means that the cost that each advertiser is paying for their exposure has increased considerably and this means that they have to either make more sales or increase their prices in order to make the increased advertising cost worthwhile.
The above situation is one which is likely to affect pretty much all online businesses that use PPC advertising at some point. This is why you need to get your business to the point whereby you can comfortably turn off your pay-per-click advertising campaigns (if you ever need to) and still generate sales. This means spending time now building traffic from other sources. Believe me, the time I have spent over the past few years writing articles, getting good search engine rankings, building links and gaining strong affiliates and joint venture partners has certainly been worthwhile and has made the difference between me having a profitable business today and having nothing.
Mac vs PC
Something else that I wrote about last year was my dilemma as to whether to replace one of my Windows computers with an Apple Mac. I was forever hearing about how reliable they were and how pleasant they were to use and I couldn't help being tempted….
So last week, after months of deliberation, I took the plunge and replaced my old laptop with an Apple iBook. I have to say, it is one of the best computer purchases I have ever made!
I don't have the space to go into detail here about the various features and benefits of the Mac but if you are like I was and keep thinking about buying a Mac but don't actually do it, take my advice, go and get one (even if it is a secondhand one from eBay) - I am sure you won't be disappointed.

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Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html


Custom Made Pay Per Click Search Engines are Dead?
Is it worth for webmasters to create own Pay-Per-Click search engine? Is it worth to advertise through custom made Pay-Per-Click search engines?
There was a very popular idea some time ago: "Create your own custom made Pay-Per-Click search engine and make extra money from your web site". At first sight that idea looks very attractive. You can buy your own custom made PPC search engine for between $100 and $900. It is even possible to find free Pay-Per-Click search engine scripts in the Internet. So, it is not a problem to get PPC search engine script and add new functionality to your web site. Customers will open up accounts, add funds and bid on targeted keywords. They will pay for clicks and receive new visitors and you will make extra money from your web site. It looks fine, but... Unfortunately, it is just a theory.
Let's review that idea from the point of view of PPC search engine customers, not from the point of view of webmaster. The customer needs to pay some minimum to open up an account and then spend that money for bidding. What the customer will obtain in reality?
1. Cheap bids. Most likely, clicks from your new PPC search engine will start out at 0.01 cent, because the number of customers will be quite low at first.
2. Traffic. Well, it depends... If you incorporated custom made PPC search engine to the existing web site with good traffic than the customer can expect considerable number of visitors from your web site. In opposite case, when you created new PPC search engine from scratch, it will be some episodic clicks.
3. Some bonuses. This feature depends from marketing tricks that you will use to attract customers. It may be $10 - $20 that the customer may use to bid on keywords at every new opened account. Such feature will cost you nothing, but may be important for the potential customer, especially if you started new PPC search engine. It may be some kind of referral system where your customers can gain credits to their accounts by referring others to your PPC search engine.
What is most important for the Pay-Per-Click search engine customers? It is traffic. People advertise through PPC search engines to get more traffic at their web sites. Therefore, it will be very hard to attract new members for your PPC search engine, if you cannot propose considerable number of new visitors for their web sites. So, if you want to start new Pay-Per-Click search engine, then you should be ready to spend some considerable amount of money on advertising and promotion. In opposite case you will not be able to propose traffic to members of your PPC search engine.
As you can see, attracting idea may be quite troublesome at a closer view. Customers will not spend time and money to advertise through Pay-Per-Click search engine, which does not give traffic. They will better use something like Google AdWords or Overture. I think that idea of custom made Pay-Per-Click search engine is dead except the cases when you add PPC functionality to the existing web site with good traffic or when you can propose some new fresh idea that will attract advertisers.
About the Author:
Michael Kashirin is a webmaster of TRY-2-FIND.COM Meta Search Engine and LOOK-4IT.COM Meta Search Engine.