How To Avoid Costly Mistakes in Using Pay Per Click Internet Marketing – Successful Home Based Business

When starting a network marketing or small business using internet marketing, many people have limited experience or knowledge in the industry. This can lead to a few mistakes when applying the first internet marketing strategies for building a successful home based business. Those mistakes can not only cost money, but can also affect one’s confidence and motivation.

One of those mistakes is using pay per click marketing without adequate knowledge.

I’m not saying that you should become a theoretical pro before you start marketing your business, but you must learn as much as you can as early as you can. When you start marketing for a successful home based business online, you are likely to use pay per click marketing as it is a very efficient strategy to bring traffic immediately. The problem is that the less you know and apply the right tactics with pay per click marketing, the more it will cost you! Amateur pay per click marketing can be very damaging to your finances in 3 different ways:

1. You may need to pay more per click to have a good position on the search engines 2. You may receive a great amount of traffic, but poor quality leads (quantity vs. quality) 3. You may have poor performing ads which bring no traffic, and therefore no leads and no income, and take you further from having a successful home based business.

When I first started using pay per click, I was pleased to see the amount of traffic I could generate for my website. My ads were ranked well on Google, my click through rates were always increasing, and a good percentage of visitors were opting-in and officially becoming a ‘lead’. HOWEVER, after an expensive month during which I generated more than 1000 clicks and more than 100 leads, I realised that I was talking to the wrong people. Many were indeed interested in learning about my business, products and opportunity, but most weren’t the serious determined entrepreneur-minded leads I was looking for to join my successful home based business! I did get some great leads through this process, but at the end of the day, it cost me more time, money and energy than it should have. Even worse, the people I was really looking for probably didn’t even see my ads.

There are plenty of resources to help you learn how to use pay per click marketing effectively, how to improve your website ranking, and how to reach the right audience and get quality leads. The bottom line is, the less you learn about those principles and techniques, the more it will cost you and the less it will pay off in terms of having a successful home based business.

Here are my recommendations for tackling pay per click marketing when you are starting out in internet or network marketing and building a successful home based business:

1. This is a must: Learn the basics on pay per click marketing. The ‘Definitive Guide to Google Adwords’ by Perry Marshall is a great tool, straight-forward yet comprehensive, and will help you create your campaigns and assess your results.

2. Get some basic knowledge on how websites are picked up and ranked by search engines. You need this so that you can choose an effective title, description, keywords, content and links for your website and to expose your successful home based business.

3. Continue to broaden your knowledge and apply new strategies step by step to continually grow your successful home based business. Do make sure you know the basics before you start spending your entire marketing budget (it may be worth waiting another 1-2 weeks to learn more before marketing your business), and then get into the more advanced stuff. Continually analyse your results and refine your marketing campaigns. Remember that the internet is always changing and what works today may not work forever.

4. Identify your target audience. Write your ads to speak directly to them. Consider if your ads could be misleading or unclear – this is how you get the wrong people clicking on your ads (and pay for it). Ensure also that you continue to target your audience on your website; even though you have already paid for the click, you don’t want to waste your time calling the wrong prospects. By delivering the right message and information through the content on your website, people can pre-qualify themselves for your successful home based business before signing in to your website and becoming an official lead.

5. Keep track of your leads and analyse the statistics. How many leads were not serious candidates? How many were not even looking for what you are offering? How many leads were high quality leads? What was your cost to generate each lead? Find out if there is a pattern in your results and continue optimising your marketing campaigns to continue growing your successful home based business.

6. Consider that getting less traffic (in particular the paid one) can be a positive thing. Put simply, you don’t want to spend money on bad leads for your successful home based business. Quality is more cost-effective and will bring better results than quantity. Hit and miss is not cost-effective.

7. Consider using the services of an expert marketer until you can generate quality leads yourself for your successful home based business. You may be able to join a trusted marketing cooperative for example. Be cautious however about purchasing leads from a third party, as you may not know the nature, origin or quality of those leads.

Justine Simard helps others build a Successful Home Based Business with a true path to financial freedom and personal growth. Start your own business and be guided by a group of successful entrepreneurs in learning and applying all strategies to run a profitable home based business.