Pay per click advertising

Pay Per Click Advertising
The Pay-per-click ads (or sponsored ads) in search engines such as Google or Yahoo work on a bidding system. Advertisers choose to ‘bid’ how much they are prepared to pay every time someone clicks on their ad. The more you bid the higher your ad appears and every time someone clicks on your ad your bid amount is deducted from your account.

It is near impossible to appear in the main results of Google or Yahoo Search when someone is looking for a Virtual Assistant even with a hefty investment in SEO. For a brand new site it will be very difficult to get good results in the main search engines initially especially in Google. The way your website is built can also hinder good rankings in the main search results. SEO relies on target phrases appearing all over your site which might make you look unprofessional or you may want to target a very wide range of phrases, and not have the time and/or budget to optimise your site for these.

Pay-per-click advertising is a good way to get to the top of the search engines quickly and affordably and will allow you test whether internet marketing is likely to be profitable for your business. If managed carefully it can be extremely cost-effective. If nobody clicks on your ad you don’t pay. (Some pay-per-click programmes do, however, have minimum monthly charges and/or setup fees.)

The two main pay-per-click programmes are Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search with Google being the most widely used at the moment. Google AdWords supplies ads to Google, Ask Jeeves, AOL and a number of other sites. Yahoo Sponsored Search ads appear on Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and many other sites. It is a good idea to try out a number of various programmes to see which get the best results for your business.

To get started first choose key words that you want your advert to come up for when searched. There is a free keyword research tool provided by Google Adwords and Yahoo Sponsored Search to help you find lots of related phrases.
The words that you use to describe your VA service are not necessarily what your target audience would use.

Next, subdivide your list of keywords into a number of categories – if you are providing a variety of secretarial services for example, you might have an ‘Transcription Service’ category, a ‘Powerpoint Service’ category and a ‘Diary Management Service’ category. For each category, write a different advertisement, which closely focuses on those searchers’ needs.

Read the search engine’s own guidelines carefully. Experiment with the wording of your ads and try out several different ones to compare the results. If you offer a free consultation or offer discounts mention it! You can use a search engine marketing consultant to help you set up and even run your pay-per-click campaigns for you however this may not always prove cost effective.

Both Google and Yahoo have an Analytics reporting systems which enable you to track and analyse the success of your campaigns. You can see clearly which keywords are delivering the best results for you and which adverts are attracting the most clicks. You can even see which days of the week and times of the day work best for you.