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List Building Using Pay-Per-Click (Part 7, List Building Strategies)

BY: Sean Mize
Words: 388

I have purposely left this method of adding subscribers to your list for later in the series, because of the cost involved. You may have noticed that with all the other methods, the only cost involved was your time, unless you chose to pay someone to do the work for you.

This strategy does cost money, which is fine if you a) have it in your budget and/or b) have already established a revenue-per-subscriber base, and you can keep your lead acquisition cost to less than that figure.

However, sometimes paid search engine traffic does not convert as well as the other methods in this series, and sometimes it does not purchase as much either. So be sure and only spend on pay-per-click (PPC) what you can afford to lose, and make it only one part of your list building strategy.

One personal note here: Earlier this year I predicted that there would be a massive movement among offline advertisers, from print adverting like the yellow pages to zip code targeted search engine traffic, and that that phenomenon would drive up the cost of PPC advertising online. I think that is occurring, and that means two things: PPC is becoming harder to monetize for the online marketer, especially the beginner, and PPC profits for the PPC companies will continue to be high, keeping bid prices high.

I think that many of the downloadable books on how to make PPC work, etc., although they may have worked really well when they were printed, are not as effective today. So just be careful buying instruction manuals on this subject! Now, off my soapbox!

Testing is critical when using PPC. You cannot just set it and leave, unless your pockets are bottomless. Assuming you already know your conversion rates, both opt-in and sales, send a sample, perhaps 200, PPC leads to a similar landing page to the one that you have been using. Then stop the campaign. Compare the response rates with those of your other campaigns.

You may need to make major changes. One, you can change your opt-in page. Try using a longer script, or a shorter script. Try giving away more free. Or, if sales conversion is low, don�t give anything away free. That way you only get people who really want what you have to offer.