CNY Webmasters

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have heard atleast a bit about the current financial crisis that is going on on Wall Street and echoing throughout the world. Many webmasters have been watching with their own concerns…”What effect will this have on internet businesses?”

Some feel that this will help internet businesses that focus on selling webmasters tools, tips and tricks as people begin looking to the net as a way to make more money or even a place to begin a total new career. This may be true on some levels, but others of us, me included, have to worry about our own bottom lines.

With people worrying about their personal income and financial situations, advertisers may become less able to pay prices we have become accustom to on our own websites. Google, who came out with amazing earning, yet again, last week even has concerns about their own adword clients and their budget changes.

Lesson learned, world news is always important to consider when running your virtual business. My websites are nearly all in the financial niche, so I obviously have other concerns, but it is important to always be thinking outside the box. Considering what is happening in the world and how your business can use it to its advantage. Ok, so that may sound shallow but it is not meant to. I am by no means telling you to take advantage of those that are financial distraught these days, but consider how your company can use it to gain loyal customers.

If you sell products, you can consider having a sale, or offer freebies that may help them during this time. Add more interactive elements on your website that will be helpful, and keep them coming back.

Example, put up a financial calculator that will show them auto loan options, mortgage rates, CD rates etc….(you get the point)

You have to look your own personal niche and decide what relevant news effects it, obviously not everyone will be effected directly by this if your not in the financial niche, but perhaps you offer new information on how to get their own websites up and going etc.

This wasn’t meant to be a lengthy post. Merely trying to help you open your eyes and realize that everything going on in the “human” world effects our virtual businesses. Depending on what you do with it, it may greatly benefit your business.

Pay-per-click or ppc advertising can be costly and grossly ineffective. When going ppc you need to really watch costs, conversion and ad effectiveness. While we are new to the ppc arena we do know that mistakes can and will cost you.

First off always go with Google Adwords and Yahoo!, MSN is ineffective and you will get very little traffic from them. By far Google has been our best performing ppc platform, obviously with 60-70% search market share.

Choose your keywords carefully, general terms do not and will not convert. We run an annuity website, but using the term “annuity” is too broad, costly and competitive of a keyword to be effective. In other words, you will spend a lot of money for low to no results. But, the keyword annuity comparison, while competitive, is a better fit with lower competition and low cost per click.

Google offers a keyword tool to help you pick the keywords best for your website. Pay close attention to advertiser competition for the keywords, more competition means higher costs for you. We concentrate on lower cost keywords that fit our sites best. This method keeps our costs lower and conversions higher. We also offset our costs with Google Adsense so those who do not buy will hopefully click off our site and we can recoup a portion or more of our cost per click.

Ad variations are also important. Create several, and we mean several, different ads with your focus keywords in the ad. If the ad contains the keyword that you are bidding for then you may get a higher quality rating which can mean lower cost per click expense for you. Ad quality is extremely useful for ppc advertising and pay close attention to it.

Cost control is extremely important when using ppc advertising. Since you have greater expense exposure than traditional banner advertising, which is generally fixed costs, you have to watch costs. We refuse to pay more than $.50 a click, therefore we set out maximum bid for $.50 and daily budget at 20-$30 a day. From there we watch conversions and which ads generate more clicks.

Do not assume you will get business from ppc, it’s like a website, just because you have it that doesn’t mean that it will work or generate money for you. Log in to your Adwords account at least daily to check your stats, make adjustments and hopefully you will have conversions.

Cheap keywords and enticing ads will create sales for you. One last thing, never bid the same amount for content advertising as you would for search engine advertising. With click fraud and mfa sites abundant, you will find that content ads are next to worthless, IMHO.

If you are doing ppc arbitrage be very careful and keep your bids low and content keywords high to maximize returns. A 10-20% rate of return on arbitrage is EXTREMELY good.