If you are a newbie starting out your site or an affiliate trying to get customers for the product, you must be aware that it is an extremely difficult exercise to get traffic to your sites with organic searches from the search engines. With many search engines and their different ranking algorithms, it is also a time consuming activity to optimize the site to get into search engine rankings. Even a small change in the website can lead to huge drop in your rankings and your income. Pay per Click advertising gives a ray of hope in getting the much awaited traffic in a very short duration.

In Pay per Click advertising, you bid on your choice of keywords to get the visitors. Since you pay for each visitor click, Pay per Click advertising can also lead to huge costs. But if managed correctly, PPC advertising can work wonders for your site and sales. Before you dive into PPC advertising, there are certain important factors that you should consider. Below listed are some of the factors:

Keyword: Keyword is probably the most important factor when it comes to getting a visitor. You should start with researching for the relevant base keywords for your ads. Base keywords are the generic keywords associated with your site or product. If you are promoting weight loss products then “weight loss”, “losing weight”, “lose weight” can be some of base keywords.

You should then use these base keywords to create a list of keywords that you would target in your ad. There are a lot of free as well as paid tools are available for keyword research. You can start off with the free tools like www.goodkeywords.com, freekeywords.wordtracker.com, www.thedowser.com, or Google keyword tool. These tools will help you identify the similar and relevant keywords used in organic searches. These tools will also help you understand the competition for each keyword.

You should continue your research till you manage to find keywords with relatively smaller competition. Generic keywords should be avoided since such keywords will have a huge competition and very high bids. Long tail keywords will have lesser competition and will produce good results.

If your site or product is about weight loss exercises, people searching for “How to lose weight with exercise” will find your site useful rather than someone searching for a weight loss pill. Once you get a list of relevant keywords, you should optimize the list by using various modifiers and negative keywords.

Ad Text: After you have a list of keywords that you plan to use for the PPC campaign, you need to create an advertisement. You usually get about two lines of 50 characters and one line for AD title to create your advertisement. You have to be creative enough and make the most out of this space. Usually if the advertisement text contains the targeted keyword, it gets a high click though rate. Ad titles starting with “How To”, “Secrets to” will also attract more clicks. Depending on whether you are targeting a site visitor or trying to sell a product, keywords like “Discounted”, “Benefits” will also find many clicks.

Landing Pages: The next important factor is the landing page where the visitor lands upon clicking your ad in the search engine. You may have used perfect keywords and created a perfect advertisement but if you do not work on the landing page, all the money spent on acquiring the visitor will be lost.

The landing page should always be relevant to the keyword used in the ad text. If you had clicked on the advertisement with text “weight loss exercises” and ended on a page selling “weight loss pill”, would you stay on that page? Usually it is always good to create separate landing pages relevant to the keywords used in the ad text. If you promote weight loss pills but your ad text talked about weight loss exercises, you should build a landing page based on weight loss exercises. You can then have a link to the page that sells weight loss pills. This way the visitor will find relevant content and a reason to stay on your site, plus you will get an opportunity to make your visitor look at the page selling “weight loss pills”. Landing pages are also important for split testing of your PPC ads.

Analysis: after you have created your ad campaign, the last important task is to track your campaign on a regular basis. You should make it a habit to visit and view your campaign reports on a daily basis. These reports are an important source for valuable data. You will get to know which keywords are performing better and where you are losing your money. Combining these reports with analytic sites will help you monitor the health of your ad campaign.

During campaign monitoring you should watch for the keywords which become inactive for search either due to low quality or due to low bid amount. Though you can keep the keyword by increasing the bid amount, it is not recommended. Ideally you should take such keywords out from the campaign and put them in a separate list. Inactive keywords might also indicate that they have been placed in a wrong group and hence have a low quality score. Removing such keywords will also ensure that the overall score of the campaign increases thus reducing the cost per click.

Pay per Click advertising is definitely not a cup of tea for everyone, but if used correctly it is also not less than a gold mine.

Hong Kong, 3 March 2008 – Alibaba.com, the world’s largest business website connecting buyers and suppliers, and Ringier Trade Publishing, Switzerland’s largest media group and a leading publisher of trade magazines, today announced a content sharing partnership in Asia.

Alibaba.com will provide Ringier’s trade related articles and technical information to its online community of members. In return, Ringier will include a page highlighting product and supplier leads from Alibaba.com members in both print and electronic versions of its Asian trade magazines.

One of the largest publishing houses in China and Asia, Ringier publishes titles in 15 industry categories including plastics, packaging, food, metalworking, textiles and pharmaceuticals. Its magazines in Asia have a combined annual circulation of more than 1.6 million.

“Alibaba.com wants to partner with best-in-class organizations to bring more value to our members,” said Kenneth Liu, Alibaba.com Vice President of Global Operations. “Ringier’s high quality information can help our members keep abreast of the latest trade news and enhance our suppliers’ technical know-how. By delivering trade information in multiple media formats we can connect buyers and sellers around the world who have different media consumption habits.”

“The content swap agreement with Alibaba.com is an excellent example of how print and online media can support each other and offer our respective media users with relevant information that is vital to their business,” said Mike Hay, President of Ringier Trade Publishing Ltd, Hong Kong. “Alibaba.com’s content in our trade journals will provide our readers with new sales leads and potential business. At the same time, our high value technical articles and trade news will provide Alibaba.com members with important technical and marketing news. “

About Alibaba.com Limited

Alibaba.com (HKSE:1688), a member of the Alibaba Group of companies, is one of the world’s premier e-commerce brands and the largest business website connecting small and medium-sized buyers and suppliers. Our international marketplace (www.alibaba.com) focuses on global importers and exporters and our China marketplace (www.alibaba.com.cn) focuses on suppliers and buyers trading domestically in China. Together our marketplaces form a community of more than 24 million registered users from over 200 countries and regions.

About Ringier Trade Publishing Ltd.

Established in Hong Kong in 1998, Ringier Trade Publishing is a division of Ringier AG of Switzerland, the country’s largest media group. Today, Ringier Trade publishes 25 industry titles for the China market in sectors such as plastics, metalworking, pharmaceutical, automotive, food and chemical processing, along with five industry titles for S.E. Asia. It also has an active conference business that held 16 high-level two-day technical conferences in China in 2007. In India, Ringier publishes five industry titles covering the plastics, packaging, food processing and textile categories.

More Info: alibaba.com