Work From Home - Avoid These Pay Per Click Blunders

When you work from home 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 your home business opportunity. 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.

You are likely to use pay per click marketing when you start marketing online your home business opportunity, because it is a very efficient medium to get traffic to your website immediately and start building your successful work from home scenario. The drawback in using pay per click marketing early on is that the less you know and apply the right tactics, the more you will have to pay! I am not saying here that you should become a theoretical expert before you start marketing your home business using pay per click, but you must learn as much as you can as early as you can. Being an amateur at pay per click can be very damaging to your finances in 3 ways:

1. Being placed in a good position on the search engines will cost you higher bids 2. You may get a lot of traffic, but leads of poor quality (quantity vs. quality) 3. If your ads are not performing well, you may get limited traffic and in turns no buyers and no income, and hinder your work from home opportunity.

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 online home business, opportunity and products, but most were not the serious determined entrepreneur-minded leads I was looking for to join my 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.

Many resources are available to help you learn how to use pay per click effectively, how to secure your website rankings and how to generate quality leads by reaching the right market for your work from home business. 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.

Here is what I recommend when tackling pay per click marketing when you start advertising your home business opportunity online:

1. Learn the basics on pay per click marketing - this is a must! Perry Marshall has a 'Definitive Guide To Google Adwords' which is easy to understand yet comprehensive, and will help you set up your ads and analyse your results.

2. Learn the basics on how websites are picked up and ranked by search engines, so that you understand how to create an effective title, description, keywords, content and links for your own website and to invite visitors to view your home online business opportunity.

3. Continue learning step by step and applying new tactics to always perfect the online marketing of your home business opportunity. Again, get the basics before you do anything (it may be worth studying another week or two before you start to advertise), and then get into the more sophisticated stuff. Never leave your active campaigns fixed or worse, unattended. Test your ads and always analyse your results so that you can improve them. The internet is constantly changing and what works today may not work next month.

4. Identify your target market. Build your ads to specifically talk to your audience. Ask yourself if your ads could be misleading or have other meanings - this is how you get the wrong people to click on your ads (and pay for it). Ensure that the content on your website is also targeted at your audience; even though you have already been charged for a click by the time they get there, you don't want to waste more time and energy calling the wrong prospects if they opt-in your website. You can use the content on your website to help people pre-qualify themselves to your home business opportunity before signing up and becoming a lead.

5. Keep some statistics on your leads. How many were actually not looking for the home online business opportunity you are offering? How many were not serious candidates? How many leads were high quality leads? How much did each lead cost you? Find out the pattern in your results and change your marketing campaigns accordingly.

6. Consider this: less traffic (especially the paid one) can be a good thing. You don't want to waste money on bad leads. In terms of cost-effectiveness and getting results, traffic quality is better than traffic quantity in marketing online your work from home business. No more hit and miss.

7. Consider using the services of an expert marketer until you can generate quality leads yourself for your work from home 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.