You’re an affiliate, small business at best. You can’t afford to spend $1,500/month on pay per click marketing even if it doesn’t sound like much for some. How do you go about it? In this article below, we’ll discuss a few tactics that can help you when you start out on a low budget.
- Keyword Research
The very first step is to do a proper keyword research. You can’t afford to bid $1.79 for a phrase match of “weight loss pills”, just to stay in position 8 or 9. This means, you need to go after long tail – more specific, higher chance of conversion having keywords.Structure your keywords properly. Go after the low hanging fruit, but put each combo of keywords into specific adgroups. For example:- Product Names – Go into adgroup #1
- Competitor URLs – Go into adgroup #2
- Other Keywords – Into #3 group
You can create one work per adgroup with tools like SpeedPPC or you could do it manually. Either way, make sure you pick the cheapest, least competitive and possibly the highest ROI yielding keywords.
After you choose the best keywords, it’s time to focus on ad writing. There are many tricks in the book. If you’re planning to do this long term, go ahead and buy some books about the topic. You’ll pat yourself later.
- Writing Engaging Ads
This is an art form in itself. But Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when writing PPC ads. Just like with any copywriting really:- Headline – Purpose is to force them to read your ad, nothing more.
- Ad – Must contain call to action (Visit us, free quote, apply now).
- URL – Play around with www. And without. Uppercase letters vs. lowercase.
- Benefits Not Features – What’s in it for them? Why should they care? What your product accomplishes for them? Not how it looks or how cool it is.
- Powerful Words – Effective, Powerful, Jam-Packed, Masterful – these are examples of effective words that catches searcher’s attention.
- Psychological Tactics – Will you use scarcity tactic, paint a nice picture , use news references in your ad? You can test different angles to see what works best initially.
After that you need to squeeze the best out of your landing page. If your website doesn’t tell them to act now (buy, signup, call), you’re wasting your money. Period. So last step is to focus on your website.
- Landing Page
It’s important to see what others are doing. Take a look at your competitors, and do it better. If they collect leads, then maybe you should grab user’s name and email instead of directly selling now? Figure out what others are doing and improve upon it.- Design – Sometimes ugly sell best. Sometimes not. It’s going to be hard to sell design templates with an awful looking site. On the other hand, fancy graphics may slaughter your conversion on a join relief landing page. Top competitors will show you what works best.
- Copywriting Tips – You should hire a pro or at least invest in education in this topic. Copywriting, psychology of a buyer could easily be your most important skill you’ll ever learn. Nevertheless, here are a few tips:
- Power of “You” – Talk to your visitor as if you were talking one on one, face to face. “You, your” – these will make them feel more personal and draw to read your copy.
- Mental Images – Describing things in detail, with lots of adjectives paints a picture in your reader’s mind & sucks them into your copy further.
- Power of “YES” – Asking questions is old technique. Ask questions that people answer only with YES. This will set their subconscious mind towards positivity, trust, which will help you lure them into buying.
Wow, that was weird huh? The topic of this article is low budget PPC advertising and I went to details of copywriting. How come? My point here is that if you’re on a shoestring budget, you can’t afford to lose. But you’ll lose nevertheless, we all do, it’s part of the process. So at least try to lose less.
By having better web copy, more engaging ad and doing a thorough keyword research, your PPC management should last longer (be profitable) for one. And help you gain ROI much faster.
Laser targeted keywords that people are looking for like product names, competitor URL’s are ideal (if you can bid on them), because users already know what they want. They’re sold; you just need to direct them to your site. This brings you the great ROI opportunity.
Effective ads will bring you the CTR and possibly differentiate you from others if you read some more copywriting tips. High CTR drops bids rapidly, especially on Facebook, so it’s something worth looking into. If you can acquire a lead for $0.50, while your competitors pay $2, you can kill.
Converting landing page is a must these days if you want to get anywhere with advertising. All sales process parts need to be polished. But if you take time to understand your customer and write to them, addressing their problems and providing them with a solution, you’ll go a long way.
Final Thoughts
As a low budget PPC marketer you must save every penny and focus on ROI as much as possible. Therefore preparing your PPC campaign is so important. Main areas (keyword research, ad writing and landing page design) that we discussed are your ticket to profits. If you don’t have the money, then better spend some time polishing these aspects of your campaign if you want to achieve success.
