The advent of the internet has changed the face of business, marketing, and advertising. More people can earn money from home by using their marketing capabilities and creativity. This is possible due to tools like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigning.
While social media marketing strategies are wonderful to gain popularity and success on the internet, other methods should also be resorted to. The other face of internet marketing that involves online traffic regulation is Pay-Per-Click campaigning.
Pay-per-click advertising is currently in a full rage because of how everyone involved in the chain benefits from this advertising chain. Whether you're an advertiser or a publisher, you are sure to gain some fruits from pay-per-click advertising.
If you’re new to internet marketing and are hoping to earn some money through the internet, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, you will find a clear breakdown of what pay-per-click advertising is and how it can be used to make money.
Let us delve into the world of pay-per-click advertising and start making big money!
What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
Before you begin to think about earning money through any advertising strategy, you must learn what it is all about. Therefore, to begin earning money through pay-per-click campaigning, let us understand what it is.
Pay-per-click is also known as CPC or cost-per-click. The meaning and implication of the two terms are the same. The only difference is in terms of perspective.
PPC or CPC is an advertising model based on the internet. It is used to drive traffic from publishing websites to advertised websites. The advertiser pays the publisher a certain amount for every click that is done on the specific add.
Most search engines and social media networks like Google and Facebook offer pay-per-click services. The advertiser is allowed to make bids on the keywords related to their niche. Those bids are then used to determine ranking positions of advertisement publishing websites or blogs.
If the advertiser creates relevant campaigns, the high price can be extremely low. This price is overpowered by the income that is generated when traffic is sent to the target website.
PPC is a way of buying visits to the target website instead of employing content SEO to increase its visibility.
Both publishers and advertisers make money through pay-per-click advertising. Advertisers make money indirectly through the traffic that lands on their websites. On the other hand, publishers make money directly through the ads that are displayed on their website or blog.
Making Money Through Pay-Per-Click as a Publisher
Publishers directly profit from pay-per-click advertising. This is so because advertisers pay them money for every single engagement produced on ads through their website or blog. Therefore, the publisher makes money off their website, which could, on the contrary, be sitting idle, generating no income.
Why do Pay-Per-Click Advertisements Generate Income?
A simple way to understand how money is made through ads on your website is to look at your website's space as your property. Now, if someone is putting up an ad on your property, you will naturally get revenue from it.
The higher the profit the advertiser makes through an ad places on your space, the more money you can charge for the service you’re providing them.
There are a few steps that you need to follow to start earning money through pay-per-click advertisements.
How to Make Money Through Pay-Per-Click Advertisements on Your Website?
There are two ways to make money through pay-per-click advertising. The two main branches are AdWords and AdSense. AdSense is used by publishers to display ads on websites in exchange for some monetary value. AdWords, on the other hand, is used by advertisers to create campaigns.
As a publisher, you need to know how to publish ads through AdSense. The following steps will guide you through generating income through pay-per-click publishing.
• Open Google’s AdSense and sign up for an AdSense account. In order to get your website approved for signing up, you must make sure that it looks accessible and active.
• To get your website approved, you must have an updated and credible website.
• Google takes about a day to verify your website, but you can start publishing once that is done.
• To publish, you can copy the advert code from AdSense to your website. This places the ad on your website and links it with the target.
• Once the ad is in place, you must constantly check AdSense metrics. A constant check will help you keep a regular check on per click revenue generation.
• Try out different placements and SEO tools on your page and keep a check on an increase or decrease of clicks.
• Through trial and error, you will be able to find the perfect spot to place your ad.
Factors Affecting Your Pay-Per-Click Income
The amount of money that can be made through pay-per-click publishing is dependent on a few factors. Some of them are listed below.
Visitors on Your Own Website
The only way you’re going to make any money through pay-per-click marketing is by getting people to click on an advertisement. It is obvious that the more people visit your website, the more people are likely to click on the listed advertisements.
It is necessary to build your own website’s relevance and popularity as you start making money through PPC. Building a healthy community that will click on advertisements if asked to is a great idea too.
Your Website’s Ranking and SEO
If your website features in the top rankings of specific keywords, you will naturally get more traffic on your website. This traffic can then be regulated towards advertisements through SEO and smart placement.
Firstly, you will have to build the content on your website in accordance with free SEO strategies and tools. This will get you more visitors to your website. Once that is done, you must target the audience for advertisements correctly.
It is crucial to place the advertisements on your website organically. While you could list relevant advertisements at a particular section of the page, users can easily ignore them.
A great way to ensure that users will click on the ads is by tailoring your page's content around the ad. For example, if the ad leads to a YouTube video about affiliate marketing, you can put that advertisement in the middle of a description of affiliate marketing.
The latter advertisement placement is a cumbersome and time-consuming process, though. It is ideal for higher-paying advertisements so that the users have a reason to go through the long process.
On the other hand, for lower-paying advertisements, a simple listing of multiple relevant advertisements is enough.
Cost of Advertisements
The biggest factor that affects the income that a publisher would be making through PPC is the price that will be paid per click. If an advertisement pays $4.50 per click, you are likely to make much more money by publishing it on your website than an advertisement that pays $2.25 per click.
A publisher should always choose advertisements that pay more for the least engagement required.
Engagement Requirement for Payment
Every ad has different requirements that must be fulfilled by the user before the publisher gets eligible for payment for traffic generation. Some advertisements simply target on getting visitors to the target site. Others, however, require the user to either sign up or enter some information.
Generally, higher-paying ads require the user to put in information such as email address, billing details, etc. The more complex and time consuming the requirement of the advertisement, the higher the price per click would be.
Most low paying advertisements only require users to visit the site and be engaged for a certain amount of time. Some require something as simple as signing up for a free trial.
If you want to make a lot of money through pay-per-click marketing, setting up higher-paying ads sounds like the best option. That is not the case, however. Due to the demanding nature, most users do not end up fulfilling all criteria, making you lose out on payment.
Medium-paying advertisements are generally the best way to make money through PPC marketing.
Relevance of Advertisement
The ads displayed on your website or blog should necessarily be related to the niche that you're in. Visitors of your site are more likely to click on advertisements related to what they're looking for on your page.
The ads must link with your page's content to ensure a higher number of clicks. Target marketing is an important factor in pay-per-view marketing.
For example, if you’re a music blogger, putting advertisements to music stores or piano lessons will be beneficial. If a user is looking for a song’s chords on your blog, they might want to buy a new instrument or learn how to play the song on another instrument.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Publishing Rules
There is a certain set of rules involved in per-per-click publishing. You should surely follow them, especially if you're using AdSense, or you can risk getting banned by Google.
• Do not click on your ads. Doing that is not permissible by Google.
• You should not ask your users to click on the ads. You can add the relevance of that link to your content.
• The ads should be placed strategically throughout the content.
• Do not exceed the limit of 3 ads per page
Making Money Through Pay-Per-Click as an Advertiser
Unlike publishers, advertisers make money indirectly through PPC. They have to determine the amount of money they will make through the traffic that lands on their website the amount of money they have to spend on these advertisements. Their profit is the difference between the two.
Regardless, advertisers make a lot of money through pay-per-click marketing as it helps build the company's overall reputation.
Setting Up a Profitable Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaign
Advertising with a pay-per-click campaign allows you to get a paid promotion and higher ranking in search engines. It allows you to build a platform that brings your product to the masses through Google AdWords.
There are some things that determine the profitability of your pay-per-click campaign. Some of those crucial factors are explained below.
Keywords
Keywords are crucial for any kind of marketing on the internet. The kind of keywords that you use determines the audience that will see your advertisement. Keywords can also affect the price you have to per click the pay price you have to pay to publish websites and search engines and social media networks.
In order to get great per click offers, you must conduct detailed research on the keywords relevant to your niche. The research includes finding out which relevant keywords cost the least while driving decent traffic to target platforms.
Searching for synonyms and rearranging the work order influences the cost of your desired keywords. You can use a keyword planner to understand the kind of search that people conduct on the internet. Panners, like Google's Keyword Planner, also help you determine lower-priced keywords.
It is crucial to narrow keywords relevant to your niche, have a decent search volume, and are offered at a low cost per click. Using irrelevant keywords would surely increase the cost per click as publishers award advertisers with decent campaigns by allowing them to pay a low bid rate.
Advertisement Content
Writing your advertisement is further determined by the platform you are going to share your ad at. The two available platforms are search engines and social media networks.
Search engines display ads according to relevance to the keywords searched for by the users. According to your ad’s value, search engines display target websites in descending order of relevance. The users then click on this list. This is how traffic is distributed through search engines.
Social media networks display ads through 3rd party AdSense websites. Ads approved through AdSense appear on networking websites in the forms of banners. Users can click on these banners to land on the target website.
In case you choose to use networking websites to display your ad, most of your ad will be graphically displayed instead of being explained through content. Designing plays a crucial role in this. You must choose headlines, icons, pictures, and colors that attract netizens. This requires a lot more work than content-based advertisements.
If you choose to display your ad on search engines, your advertisement would mostly focus on content. To begin with, you will have to write an attractive and relevant headline. You will then have to put in a relevant meta-description, which will provide users insight into what they will get by clicking on your ad.
The following things are useful while writing a search engine advertisement.
• Using target keywords in the meta-title and meta-description will increase the quality score of your ad. This will help you get more clicks and will also reduce the per-click cost of your ad.
• The headline and description should be catchy since they titillate the user’s curiosity and interest. A catchy headline will give users a good reason to click on your ad.
• Using a conscience yet informative headline helps the users determine if they will receive what they want through your ad. A strong headline is important to let the clicks flow in.
Making Money Through Pay-Per-Click Without a Website
With the aforementioned explanation of money generation through a website or blog, owning a publishing platform seems crucial. Well, owning a website or a blog for pay-per-click money generation is not necessary. This is because pay-per-click can also be used as an affiliate marketing medium.
Affiliate marketing doesn't necessarily require you to own your publishing platform. This medium of pay-per-click money generation makes you the middleman in advertising.
To do so, you can add direct links to the sites that you do not own. Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter are good platforms to use direct linking to ear revenue.
Direct linking allows you to join affiliate programs and create products for their ads, which you will directly send target websites. You get a commission as and when those ads produce income.
Affiliate pay-per-click marketing
can create an extra stream of income that eliminates the time and effort used to build websites. Here's how you can earn through affiliate marketing on a pay-per-click basis.
• Choose a market that has a lot of search going on. You need to get as many people as possible to make this strategy work.
• Choose relevant and cheaper keywords.
• Look for affiliate merchants that target your niche. Online directories like www.cj.com and www.linkshare.com are some places you can conduct this search.
• Create a PPC ad that will attract buyers and users.
• Create a display link that you can post on other websites directly.
Summing Up
Pay-per-click is a great way to generate income since it benefits all the parties involved. It generates income for the publisher, the advertiser, and even an affiliate marketer.
Pay-per-click is an easy way to earn money through a busy website or your ad designing skills. Advertisers gain more customers and users, which leads to indirect money generation.