First lets talk about Pay Per Click. You have been to google, yahoo, MSN, and done a search.  What do you see at the top and along the side when you search? Ads. These are Pay Per Click ads that are generated because the advertiser thinks that what you put in to search for is related in some manner to them.  Essentially the advertisers are bidding against each other for the placement of the ad, and also it’s position.  In some industries or markets, this can be very cheap for key words or phrases that people are likely to search for.  However if your trying to reach the most generic single term search your going to pay more to get a good position in the search results.  As I said the amount you bid determines where you show up. In some markets the generic key words are so expensive that unless you have a very big ad budget it’s best to stay away from Pay Per Click ads.

There is also an ongoing issue of are the people doing the clicking actually customers or are they bots or competitors trying to click you out for the day. Think about do you click on ads or do you look through what is called the generic search results?  Is there an advantage for a competitor to keep you out of a search term or run up your costs for ads?

Testing Pay Per Click ads, or at least looking at what it costs to get a good position is worthy of checking out for your site, however if you follow some of the other methods available most of which are free and generate real customers, your probably better off.

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In order to determine if it is worth your advertising on a site in this manner is a matter of dermining the value. Getting an ad on the local High School Hockey team is great for your local shop or other online business but for another it may not be.  Where ever you place your ads you need to know who is visiting the site and all sites can provide some information on how many unique visitors they have per day, how many repeat visitors and where they usually track in a site.

Everything is logged on the net in some manner or another. Servers track everything from computer address, to a bot scanning your site, what kind of browser, the operating system, time of day, types of files, everything is tracked which leaves a perfect trail that you can use to spread your ad money where it works best.

PPS ads are probably not going to generate lots of traffic to your site and unles you find that there is going to be a value above the number of people who click to your site the better off you are.  There is also an ongoing debate on paying for ads on sites as it may look like your paying to have a link to your site by the SE’s however if they offer up ads from google and the like at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be a big SEO, SEM, or SERP problem.

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Hard Goods: Obviously if your selling a product you want someone to make the purchase.  If you have followed along with the various general concepts, website concepts your site is full of CONTENT that makes visitors feel that your offering the best thing since sliced bread.  Selling things will be easy if you get traffic to your site.  Getting Traffic to your site will be discussed in the SEO, SEM, SERP, and General Internet marketing techniques.  But if you have hard goods that your selling on your site, the sales pitch on your site should sell the product.

Soft Goods: If your offering soft goods on your site generating revenue can be done in a couple of different ways and or both ways.  One is to use like I do here and have ads from Google, Yahoo, or other ad service put ads on your site that when people click on it you get a commission on the click.  These are Pay Per Click ads and they will be discussed further here in this section.  Then there is pay per inclusion types of ads these are advertisers that are paying you directly for either links or for graphics with links to their sites.  These are usually more profitable, but both are valuable to generating revenue.  The amount of clicks you get depends again on how many people visit your site.  Another way, that is used less is the pay per view, much like Pay Per View TV people have to subscribe and pay a fee to view the site.  This works if you have the right kind of site, generally an adult site is something people are willing to pay to view.  The more visitors, the more clicks, the more you can charge for direct ads on your site.

Attracting Visitors is the key and that is what this site is really all about.  Getting you set up so that you start to get visitors and customers as quickly as you can.

Sparky.

Now there are good ways to get search results and there are bad ways.  In most the search engines if you search for a term without quote marks you get results that are different than those with quote marks.  Suggest you try searching both ways and see what kind of results you get from the various search Engines that are out there.  Your looking for the number of similar businesses or competition to your products.  In the case of my Gourmet Coffee site there are MILLIONS of sites that I am competing against.   1.95 MILLION at last check for the search term Gourmet Coffee.  However my main product line is Flavored Coffee so when a search for that is done it comes up with only Half a Million or 25% of the Gourmet Coffee search.  Thus I have focused my Coffee site to really push the flavored coffees, adding new ones and making sure that part of my site is always updating with new things.

Now that you have an idea of the numbers of competitors you are facing it’s time to look at what they are offering.  Check some of the sites that come up in the results, not just the first one (though for reasons to be discussed later and in other areas look carefully and bookmark the top 5 so you can go back to them later).  You now need to decide is your product going to be able to compete against the competition?  Can you offer a better price?  Can you offer more information? In the case of Blog sites, can you be more entertaining, informative, or a better writer?

DECISION TIME..  Do you go forward? That is a question only you can answer, but you should not be diswaded by the number or quality of the other competitors, mearly have the confidence that you will take some part of the market share that is out there, or create more market share by virtue of your surpassing them in your marketing of your “product”.

Even with Millions of competitors out there, and more growing everyday, doesn’t mean you can not make money off a “product”.  The key to any successful company is how well they are able to market their products vs the competition and the costs of doing business.  Obviously the fewer the number of competitors there are, the better your chances of becoming tops in search results for search terms, but that should not be the only factor going into your decision.

More to come keep watching.

Sparky

So what do you have that would be of interest to people that they might be willing to pay for in one form or another? There are so many directions you can go here it boggels the mind.  From something like an advice site about what ever you can offer advice, an online community of people, a blog about your thoughts about the day, you would be surprised the kinds of soft goods that are making people lots of money off the internet.  Actually there was a person who had a site that sold PIXELS… (pixels are the little tiny dots that make up the stuff you see on your computer screen).  For a Buck a pixel you could buy pixels on his page. Now you have to realize that on the average computer there are 1024 pixels wide and 760 pixels tall.  That comes out to 778,000 + pixels at $1 each. 3/4′s of a million dollars were available on his page.  Most pictures are better than 200 pixels wide by around 200 tall, that is 4o,000 pixels or $40,000.  Company’s were paying to place their logo on the site as an advertising expense.  The person made lots of money as they got exposure on the network news and became rich.

Nothing is TOO STUPID, STRANGE, OR IDIOTIC that you will not find an audience. Many blogs thrive on doing the insane.  Take a look at the Onion.  They make money making up stuff, same for the Inquirer and other Rag Mags as I call them.  YOU CAN DO THE SAME if that is what you want to do.

If your going to go with soft goods then you need to be knowledgable in a particular subject or not. Look at the popularity of Poltical Blogs.  Do any of these people have any special training in politics?  Some yea, most no but they all have readers that come there day after day to read what it is the person has to say.  They either are their because they agree with you, or they want to see what kind of crazy nonsense you might be spouting today. People on the net find it entertaining and also for information, if you can do one or the other you can have a soft goods site, like this one.

As with all sites soft goods sites need to have CONTENT (have I mentioned how Content is KING? yea I think so), and if your lucky you might find through the market research you do that you might have few competitors out there or millions in any case there is always room for one more.

The way you turn that into money is through the use of google, yahoo, msn, or other types of pay per click or pay per show ads. Some sites like this one, use ads generated by the content on the page.  You may notice that ads are different on different pages, that is how those kinds of ads work and we will discuss that in more advanced parts of this site.  The other kinds of ads are ones that people or companies pay to have on your site.  These can be just a simple link to graphic images and much more.  If you go to a site where you see ads at the top, that is why the site is free.  Someone somewhere is paying the bills.
Sparky