Can I suddenly turn this into millions? No. Is it encouraging and am I on the right track? You bet.

Here’s my secret :: there is no secret to success with PPC marketing. Even my mentor who is currently grossing $25,000 a month will tell you there are no easy answers and that what works for him may not work for you.

Step 1 :: Have a good offer

This is the easy part. You can either promote your own products, or someone else’s products via affiliate marketing. But whatever it is, you’ll do better with an offer that is legitimate and high quality.

Surprisingly, I’ve even had good luck sending PPC traffic to specific blog posts, so even those of you with only blogging experience can make more from your websites than you are currently making on just organic traffic to your site.

Step 2 :: Have a good landing page

A landing page is where you will send the people from the search engines to hopefully buy your offer. This is where things get a bit tricky and a LOT of experimentation is in order. But here’s what I’ve learned from my best landing pages:

• Don’t leak your traffic
  This means that the only things on the page are links to buy, or to sign up for something requiring the visitor to give you their email address. This isn’t the place for links to free resources or irrelevant ads.
• Do make the page EASY to understand in under three seconds
  This doesn’t mean you can’t have a lot of information. It does mean that you need to let your visitor know why they are there and convince them to read more :: fast.
• For intangible products, the higher the price point, the longer the page should be
  You will need to sell, sell, sell on this page if you are pushing anything priced higher than $30-$40. This doesn’t apply to higher priced consumer goods, especially if the visitor knows what they are looking for. An example would be a certain brand and model of a laptop – all you want is a buy now button with a features list.
• Make the sale fast and easy
  If your visitor has to go through 5 pages to just get to your shopping cart, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Step 3 :: Set up your PPC campaign

Although Google is easiest, it’s also the most expensive. But all paid search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN Adcenter, Enhance and Search123) follow the same basic premise:

1. Build a keyword list
2. Write your text ads
3. Set your bidding budget

Again, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to what works here. Two people selling the same product and bidding on the same keyword might have a very different conversion ratio based on the landing page and text ad that is written. So although it is a risk to perhaps lose a little money in your testing phase, once you get it right, you can put your campaign on auto-pilot and let it make money for you (checking periodically, of course!).

A few more tips for success:

• Try at least 5 different text ads, and add one or two every few days. Search engines will automatically rotate your ads to help you determine which ones get the most clicks – drop the ones that underperform.
• Bid on very highly targeted keywords – which still could mean hundreds. Include common misspellings and know the editorial guidelines of the search engine. “Blog Hosting” and “Hosting Blog” are considered the same with Yahoo, different with Google.
• Do a lot of keyword research – Google has an excellent free tool in their AdWords system, plus Aaron Wall has some excellent free keyword resources.
• For serious keyword research, I can’t recommend KeyCompete.com
  more highly – it tracks and pulls competitor keywords for you.
• Test, test, test – have I made this point abundantly clear yet?!

Most search engines have some kind of free coupon to get started – here’s a few of them to give your PPC campaign a low-cost kick-start:

Technically, these offers require anywhere between $5 and $50 to get started, so aren’t exactly free. Combined though, they offer $300 worth of PPC (Pay Per Click) and text link advertising for $125.

Yahoo! Sponsored Search $5 for $25 worth of clicks

Yahoo Sponsored Search is second only to Google’s power – and Yahoo’s paid ads appear on a wide network of big sites, including CNN and AltaVista. They also have an extremely helpful user-interface and a how-to section.

Enhance Interactive $50 for $75 worth of clicks

Enhance Interactive is a niche search engine marketing company that serves ads for a variety of sites, including Dogpile, VeriSign, OpenList.com and MyZip.com. They also have testimonials from big players such as BizRate and HotWire, as well as some advertising alternatives such as paid inclusion (flat fee guaranteed inclusion in search results).

Although some companies require a minimum of up to $.10 bid per click, Enhance has a very low $.03 minimum bid per click. So the money spent with smaller search engines can potentially go much farther than with the big players.

Search123 $50 for $70 worth of clicks

According to the Search 123 site, their visitors come from portal pages, a Spanish language network, niche content sites and some branded search directories. They also are unique in that they offer free account set-up, keyword research and expansion, and account management and optimization services. None of the other search engine marketing companies do that!

Google and MSN Adcenter are infamously vague and inconsistent with their coupon offers – I suggest just hunting around on the internet in the hopes that you can uncover a deal from them that is unexpired.

PPC is not for everyone – but for anyone who is making money off of their website, it’s really a must to at least test it out. You don’t want to be leaving money on the table!

According to the Search 123 site, their traffic comes from portal pages, a Spanish language network, niche content sites and some branded search directories. Although the Yahoo and Enhance offers provide a bit more free PPC traffic than Search 123, these coupons can usually only be used the first time you sign up – so ANY a new source of discounted PPC traffic is worth it’s weight in gold.

This Search 123 offer states that if you deposit $50 into your Search 123 account, they will up your account balance to $70.

These are some of the SEO tools I use daily and some I dug up just for this post. Either way, your Google Juice drinks are on the house ’round here!

5 :: McDar’s Keyword Analysis Tool

This is a nifty little tool that let’s you know exactly where you rank for any term. It will also let you know the top ten results that your competitors might have. So for any search term, it will let you know if your site shows up at 10 or 1000 – and anywhere in between.

When I first started putting up web sites, I used to go through the thousands of results to see where I would find my site because I didn’t know these tools existed (embarrassing, I know!!) . By the way, you’ll have to click the Keyword AnalysisTool link in the sidebar because the site uses frames.

4 :: WebConfs’ Backlink Anchor Text Analysis

Most people know that the anchor text you use makes a big difference in how a page or site is ranked for certain terms. But until now, there was no single place to go to analyze the anchor text people have used to link to your site. This is a fascinating tool and I bet you get lost there for a long time… like I did!

3 :: SiteMap Generators for WordPress Blogs and Non-Blogs

Creating and submitting a sitemap to the search engines is one of the best ways to get your entire site indexed (the only way?). This is something I hadn’t done until recently because I 1 – didn’t understand how important it is and 2 – didn’t understand that it is the easiest thing on the planet to accomplish!

The WordPress plugin is a no-brainer – you turn it on, set it up in about 5 or less clicks, and you never have to think about it again. the non-blog version entails a few more steps, but is still easy. If you haven’t done this yet, take 20 minutes and just get it over with. The search engines will love you for it.

2 :: The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool and Firefox Extension

If you want to know what keywords people use the most, then the Keyword Suggestion tool is for you. Before I start any new category on my site, pick a new domain name, or sometimes even write a headline, I will check this tool to find out what exact keyphrase or keywords will get the most search hits. This is because sometimes the words I use to describe something aren’t the same as the masses. There have been times when the difference between my original idea and the most popular phrase has been hundreds of thousands of searches – so it pays to know what people are searching on.

The SEO for Firefox Extension is a tool that pulls relevant marketing data for each search result right into your search window. It displays page rank, bookmarking links, .edu and .gov links, Alexa and Technorati rank, plus almost 20 more data points for each result – and it works in Google as well as Yahoo.

If you’re still on IE, it will probably make you switch to Firefox just to get the extension!

1 :: HitTail

I use HitTail all of the time to track both the terms people use to find my site and incoming referrals. Although you can do this in Google Analytics, I find their user interface to be a big pain in the behind to get to the info you want, plus there is a time delay.

With HitTail, the data is in real time. But even better, you can get an easy, clear view of your long-tail search hits on one screen. You can then flag phrases to follow up on, by including them into page titles, post content, and the like.

Although Shoestring Smarts is all about free, there are times when it is worth it to drop the few extra bucks to get the right tool or information for the job. These two recommendations really can’t be beat, and they really are affordable and will pay for themselves several times over:

Aaron Wall’s SEO Book has all of the information you need to put these tools into action – and then some. The SEO Book is both for entry level and experienced web masters, and it is the top selling SEO resource on the internet. It’s also endorsed by Seth Godin, The Wharton School of Business, and Darren Rowse himself (and eMom!!).

KeyCompete.com is a PPC user’s dream tool – and for those of you selling products or services, it is essential. For as little as $19 dollars, you can find out exactly what search terms your competitors are bidding on. You can then take this knowledge to launch your own PPC campaigns, or optimize for natural results so that you can get free traffic that your competition pays for. It’s a beautiful thing.

Some of Enhance’s clients also claim that traffic they send converts to sales and leads better than from the big search engines. They also have a guaranteed inclusion program to ensure your site is listed in several niche search engines for a yearly fee. Take advantage of the fact that these guys are the underdog to Google and grab some free advertising from them today.