This is part of my 30 Days To More Traffic Series

Using pay-per-click you literally pay an amount of money for every time a web surfer clicks on your URL through PPC programs like AdWords and GoClick. There are numerous books written on using PPC for traffic. In short, although obvious, the key is to not get burned.

Some PPC Tips:

Do the research and the math. Find out how much it will cost per click in your niche (using a tool like the https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

If you’re pushing an affiliate program or your own product, test with organic traffic to find out your conversion rates. If it looks like you’ll make a profit with PPC, start with something like $1 per day and test.

As said, you can get burned badly with PPC. However, it’s a high quality source of traffic. If you’ve tested, I recommend giving it a shot.

When you are paying to send traffic to your product’s sales page, don’t risk a lot of money on any one product. Some products will cost you more money in advertising than you make from the sales of the product. I usually follow the Double Rule.

The Double Rule

The Double Rule says if I am selling something for $10 and I spend $20-$30 in advertising without any sales then it’s time to cut my losses and try something else. To break even I would have to magically make 2 sales without any additional advertising costs. This is very unlikely and that’s why it’s time to find another way to sell your product.

The Double Rule also says that if you have made 2 sales but have spent much more on advertising than you have earned it’s probably time to stop losing money and find another way to sell your product.

It’s critical you put limits on what you spend or you may lose your shirt.

Photo by jurvetson

Imagine what it would be like if you had a crystal ball that will allow you to look into marketing in such a way that you would already know what worked, long before you got started.

Actually, there is no need for you to imagine this because it already exists and it is available to every one of us.

If you are involved in pay per click marketing, you no doubt already realize that choosing the proper keywords is much more than half the battle.

As a matter of fact, far too much money is lost as we gamble away our opportunities with unprofitable keywords.

There is a way, however, that you can spy on your competition in such a way that you will be able to tell which keywords they are willing to pay for, month over month.

Armed with this knowledge, you can go into a new campaign or strengthen an existing campaign without having to worry about testing and tweaking in order to make things profitable.

Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine, Spyfu.com.

This is one of the best keyword tools that is available on the Internet which not only allows you to see pay per click ads for a keyword that you may be looking for, it allows you to look at them through a crystal ball.

Almost all of us that are committed to our pay per click campaigns are already scrutinizing the keywords on a regular basis by watching the competition that comes and goes on Google over time.

With this unique tool, however, there is no need for you to wait an extended period of time in order to see who is using those keywords and who is using them consistently.

Let’s start off with a simple search at Spyfu.com.

Type in any search term that you are interested in pursuing for your campaign and you will instantly see a list of advertisers that have purchased for that particular ad.

The interesting part about this is that those advertisers are not from a search that is done in real time. As a matter of fact, those are cached from about a month ago, giving you easy access to your crystal ball.

All you really need to do is to compare the advertisers that are listed on Spyfu.com with any existing advertisers that you find by doing a Google search.

When you do this, you will have a snapshot that will allow you to see who has been consistently paying for ads for that particular keyword over the past month.

Many of these advertisers test regularly, as I’m sure that most of you do. The trends among these advertisers will very quickly tell you if those keywords are profitable for them or not.

What would you do, however, if you wanted to take your research one step further?

After all, somebody could easily allow their AdWords campaigns to run for a month without turning them off.

If you want to be able to spy on the competition for up to a year, you can easily do this with a website called KeywordSpy.com

After you load up KeywordSpy.com in your browser and run your initial search, you will see a tab that is titled “Time Machine”.

Inside that tab, you will find a wealth of information that will allow you to spy on your competition for up to a year into the past.

This will help you to have a well rounded view of who has been paying for these search terms, where they have been sending the clicks and how long they have been sending them there.

There is one more added benefit of using the KeywordSpy.com service.

It will also let you see the ads that these companies have been using.

This will help you to get a good idea of what has been pulling in quality traffic for your competition and what you can do to pull them in as well.

Although you would not want to copy their ads word for word, you can use it as a guide and really get a leg up where you need it.

Use these two tools in your everyday efforts to make your PPC campaigns productive and profitable.

Treat them like the crystal ball that they are and they will help to make your advertising future bright.