Welcome back! As you may remember from the last post I promised to teach you the basics of marketing and monetizing your site. For this post I will deal with PPC. I must of course remind you this is not a comprehensive guide.

Enough said, let’s get our hands dirty!

What is PPC

PPC is an acronym for pay per click.

They are the listings that appear when you Google (or Bing) something of interest and on the side you see an area commonly titled “Sponsored ads” or something of the sort. Below is a screenshot of what I am talking about.

Now the main area contains the individuals who won the SEO game (more on that later) and the right has guys who paid to be on the first page when a user googles “Website designer”. Now to get here you don’t have to go through the long process of gaining popularity in the industry or niche you play in, to get to the top. You just buy your way there!

How does it work

You basically buy some keywords that are relevant to your business and every time a user queries Google for those keywords your company website shows up in the sponsored section. It is that easy!!! Well maybe not….

Google is the biggest search engine around, as such I am going to assume this is the default choice and will stick with it for the rest of the article. With Google, openness is really not one of their strongest suites; basically you have to bid for keywords, blindly! That is the search engine giant does not divulge information concerning bid prices or click through rates. All you get is Google’s bill and then you figure out the rest yourself.

Other companies are far more open and actually publish their bid rates. See overture.

Average cost per day per 1000 visitors

Due to the bidding we have already talked about, an average figure would mean nothing really even if it was available (remember Google’s policy). This value depends entirely on the keywords you wish to buy. For example cost has been reported to go as high as $100 per click for “hot words” and as low as $0.01 per click for niche words. These values are arrived at by working backwards from the cost.

Read on to see if this method is for you or not.

Is it best for you

PPC just like all the others has some advantages as well as disadvantages.

Advantages

1. Fast Results: Google serves billions of searches a day. With this kind of traffic your website will get noticed fairly fast if it happens to feature somewhere on up there. From the moment you finalize the transaction, your traffic may literally jump up by factors of hundreds in a matter of days or even hours.
2. Fast Response: While building up organic traffic takes time, this method is instant. This means if a new product is suddenly in season you may be able to start selling and promoting it immediately.
3. PPC is in a lot of cases cheaper than SEO
4. This marketing method carries very little risk, only the money invested in can get lost. This means that you do not need to worry about your site getting banned from a search engine for PPC services.

Disadvantages

1. You can lose a lot of money fast! Probably the key words you find to be of interest are also of interest to your competitors. You can then get locked in an expensive bid war which is at best a Pyrrhic victory. Even if you’re not locked in such a bid war Google does impose some restrictions on certain keywords pushing up costs even more
2. No economies of scale. While economics stipulates clearly that the more you produce (or buy) the cheaper it becomes, this rule simply does not apply to PPC. Here costs escalate in proportion to the clicks regardless of the volume.

Finally

In conclusion, PPC is a really great tool and can do a world of good for your website. You should use it only for targeted campaigns and always keep an eye on the costs.

Feel free to drop me a comment, tell me what you think.

Chencha

With so many WYSIWYG editors as well as readily available templates, it is easy to get tempted to simply work your own website instead of hiring a professional.

While this may work for some businesses, it tends to be generally a bad idea. Outlined below are the reasons why.

First Impression

People generally don’t follow the motto “don’t judge a book by its cover”, so the first thing they do is, you guessed it, judge your book by its cover. The same goes for website designs-people visit your site and immediately make a decision if it is a place that they are going to spend time (and money) on, or if they’re going to simply group you with the millions of other sites that have exactly the same look and feel (hey it’s a template remember!) And move on to catchier competitors!

Highlight your profession/business

Your website is a marketing tool (and if it isn’t it should be!!). Being a major part of your business it makes sense that you have the necessary tools to appeal to potential clients as well as a clear and simple call to action. Now I know you’re a busy professional and just don’t have the time to learn the latest tools and technologies going around! It makes sense to call the guys who literally eat and breathe this stuff!

People are attracted to beautiful things

While this may seem intuitively obvious, you would be surprised at the individuals that just don’t put this into consideration when setting up their websites!

The formula is rather simple:

Great products/service + Great presentation= fantastic sales!

Cross browser compatibility

Your visitors will be accessing your device from very different browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer etc and even different devices Mobile tablets and so on. Just in case you didn’t know, these browsers may render the exact script very differently or even not at all! Furthermore some devices just may not support that fancy template feature thereby crashing in the most ungraceful way! A professional designer probably already has experience with these spectrum of browsers and will design the site in a way that ensures the site always looks beautiful even when accessed from the least powerful browsers.

Clean neat bug free code

A software bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. (defn from Wikipedia). For most first time coders, bugs are usually the order of the day. In fact back then my professor used to insist that the best way to write bug free code is to really just write code and weed out the bugs. That is the only way to learn. While this may have been good maybe even great advice in a learning environment, the same can’t be said of a professional environment. I mean are you willing to experiment with your clients?

SEO

Some people can’t believe it, but the benefits of a professional web design also trickle into your search engine rankings and visibility. To begin with a professional Web Designer ensures that the code markup is clean and easy to read – great for spiders that crawl your page. The other increase in search visibility comes from all those links and added exposure draft of your website gets regularly on the web-design blogs with the awesome designs they find on the web and the new clients you bring in will provide a link back to your site at the bottom of their site, increase your back links (this is something you would have to check whether your clients are OK with-I know from my company that 9 times out of 10 they fine with it).

Please take a second and leave us a comment letting everyone know what benefits you reap from having a professional website design.

Thank you!