Search engines, as evil as they can be deliver web site traffic and providing you stick within search engine guidelines, can be very profitable. Many people ask should they use pay per click advertising on Yahoo and Google or just focus on building natural web site traffic.

Pay Per Click is a good option to test the water because can quickly find out which keywords drive the most traffic and what keywords convert into paying customers. You can also use tools like Google website optimizer which allow you to do things like landing page split testing. Never overlook testing as it often overlooked and if you ask any successful internet marketer they’ll tell you that they never stop testing. PPC also gives you the ability to start building web site traffic almost immediately and has tools that can tell you what you need to do to reduce your cost per click, how to improve relevancy and how your landing pages stack up compared to the keywords you are targeting.

Natural search is a longer term process but if you get it right you can’t beat the free traffic. If you have an established site then you can get some reasonably fast results by with some work and optimizing of your landing pages to your target your selected keywords. Sites that aren’t thin affiliate sites will generate more natural traffic than they do from their PPC campaigns and provide a much better return on investment.

This week my friend and I finally landed page one rankings on Google for a franchise company for a number of targeted keywords. They are now getting between 100 - 150% increase in traffic to their franchise information pages and their online inquiries are way up. They also run a PPC campaign which doesn’t even come close to matching the amount of traffic and leads they are now generating from natural search.

I like to use PPC to test affiliate offers to see if it converts and makes money. If it does then I’ll think about creating a site to target natural traffic so I can make a bigger profit. A current affiliate offer that I promote using PPC is getting cheaper to promote as the months roll by and I’m making 100% profit but why pay for the traffic if you can get natural search traffic free and make more of the money and get higher volumes of sales.

Tags: afffilate marketing, natural traffic, pay per click

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 11:28 pm and is filed under spindigg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.