Bits ‘N’ Bytes

About PPC from the website owner’s perspective by Jeffrey Gross.

Unless you are an SEO expert who helps others get their site higher on searches, SEO is not a way to make money in and of itself. Unless you have a real product that you are selling, simply making a site on a popular subject or specific niche is not going to pull in ad dollars. That just is not how the internet works.

Despite this though, you would be amazed how many with a passing understanding of SEO, Pay Per Click, and seemingly the internet in general, think they can throw together a web page rich in some niche SEO, and via the magical Google ads placed there, they can quit their day job.

In reality, PPC is the bastard child of advertising – let me explain.

When an advertiser buys a billboard, he pays the one who owns the billboard a set fee, and this is based on how many see the billboard, not how many people buy the product.

When an advertiser buys magazine ad space, a commercial, or anything else, they pay according to presence. It’s not about “buy now” it’s about name recognition.

Web pages though really got the short end of the stick. It’s not about how many people see the ad; it is about how many actually click. Could you imagine if TV worked that way? There would be about 3 shows on the tube because no station could afford it.

So you see where the disadvantage lies.

The next disadvantage is what is paid, literally percents of pennies. Let’s simplify the process – there is more to it but basically… Pretend you have a hundred thousand hits a day – which would be awesome but likely is not the case. Pretend you also have an unheard of conversion rate, 10%. You also don’t have this most likely. Pretend you have a decent price per click, 0.5 cents. You’re making a whopping 5,000 pennies a day! Yeah, 50 bucks. And that would be an amazing success story.

Here is the only way to really make money on PPC (unless you’re Facebook or porn):

1. Get a percent of the money made on direct sales stemming from your site, not a per-click rate.
2. Have a product, and sell it from your own site. And use SEO to drive traffic.

Basically that is it. SEO works when you have a product. If you are an Advertiser, PPC is a cheap way to get your name out there at minimal cost. Nothing more.

Jeffrey Gross is an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Enthusiast who lives on Long Island, NY. Jeff’s Search Engine Optimization company (nPromote) helps Long Island business owners (and business owners across the country) get their businesses to the top of the search engines. In his spare time Jeff teaches Search Engine Optimization to small business owners and enjoys lecturing at local colleges and other venues as well.