A lot of the website owners I meet through this website come here because they are looking for help getting their website to ideally rank in first place on the first page in Google. Most of those business owners, which might include you, want top rankings because they think that doing paid online advertising probably isn’t worth it. But, is paid online advertising actually worth it?
Yes it can be very much worth it, but not in every case. Let me explain what I mean by that.
It is worth it if you take the time to learn what you are doing. It is not worth it if you just want to buy ads and hope for the best. Don’t worry though. Learning how to use paid advertising profitably is not as costly as you are imagining and certainly doesn’t take as long to learn about as you are imagining.
If You Are Totally Careless With Paid Advertising You Will Get Very Poor Results
Let me give you an example. Google Adwords is one of the most popular paid advertising models. So, let’s use that as an example.
Google allows you to buy pay per click advertising that gets shown in two different areas. The first area is showing ads on search engines like the Google website itself when people go to Google to search for things. The second area they show ads is on partner websites (more than one million various websites) that participate in the Google Adsense program.
If you just create any old advertisement and pay them to display it everywhere they can, then you will get less than stellar results. You will get plenty of website traffic. But, most of that traffic will not convert into customers for you. The reason for that is because you are advertising to people who are in two different places mentally. They are in different stages of the buying process like I explain in The Prospect Evolution Theory.
In the one place your ads are shown(the search network), if you choose the right keywords, you will be getting traffic from people who are ready to buy from you right now. In the other place your ads are shown (the display or content network) you generally get people who are not ready to buy from you right now.
As you can imagine, if you are getting visits from people who aren’t ready to buy from you right now, then you probably aren’t going to sell them anything. They might like what you have to offer, but they still don’t buy right then. Do you see the difference?
So, you can easily spend a lot of money getting traffic to your website that just simply doesn’t want to buy. If you do that, you will be very disappointed in the return on investment of your paid advertising campaign.
If You Are Selective With Your Paid Advertising You Can Get Excellent Results
Let’s use the Google Adwords example again. If you buy ads on the search network and you target the right keywords, then you will bring in traffic from people who are ready to buy from you right now. And, if you set the whole thing up reasonably well, then yes, some of them will buy from you. You will make money.
The key is to identify the right keywords and to create the right ad and the right landing page for those keywords.
You can make money from the display network too. In my experience you have to go about it a bit differently though. That is a lesson for another blog post.
You can also sell a lot of goods and services by carefully buying advertising on other websites where your primary target audience exists. Suppose you sell organic crackers that are ultra-healthy. You can probably make a profitable investment placing a banner advertisement on a public forum for organic food lovers.
The key is to identify websites where your target audience is already spending their time. Then you get your advertising in front of them at those places. Test different ads with different offers and figure out which ones work the best.
If you want paid advertising to be really profitable, then you have to set it up using tests. Those tests will teach you which ads and which offers will get people to respond. You will become more profitable over a period of time as you hone your skills.
