Pay Per Click

I knew it was only a matter of time until I looked into the marketing strategy of "pay per click". In a nutshell, it's where you pay advertisers like Google, Facebook, etc to display your ads to targeted users and you pay them per click.

This is a fantastic way to drive targeted traffic to your website. The only problem is it can be quite expensive. So far I've only tried to advertise via Facebook and I've only started with a small budget of $5 per day to see if it helps drive potential customers to my site.

The great thing about Facebook is they have so much personal data on millions of people. You can modify your target audience based on things like demographics (age, sex, location), likes, dislikes, education, and more.

Once you select your target audience and build your ad, Facebook will then recommend a bid price to get your ad featured. If your market is more narrow, the price will generally be higher. For me, it was between $0.89-$1.31 per click.

Facebook also gives you the option to pay per impressions. This means that you pay them a fixed amount and they will show your ad to 1000 users on Facebook in your target audience. The price is generally lower for this service, but may not be as effective.

Last night they targeted about 14,000 users before I got 5 clicks on my advertisement. It's pretty amazing how fast $5 has come and gone. The average price per click for me was $0.99. I know it's a tiny budget, but I figure if sales are generated from this targeted marketing, then it should pay off.


The average price per 1000 impressions for me was around $0.50. So I would have easily maxed out my $5 daily budget before getting 5 clicks. I will have to investigate this further, but for now I'll be doing Pay Per Click.

I'm also looking into Google AdSense advertising. With Google I would imagine it would be better because the targeting is even better. For example, someone Googles "Levi's silvertab jeans". There's a good chance that they're a serious buyer. So your ad can be displayed on that page and if clicked, you may get a sale.

(After I posted this, I looked on my blog and saw an advertisement for Google Adwords for a free $75, so I signed up to see if I qualify, woo hoo free money!)

Food for thought. I'm staying at it. I heard from Ezine Articles about my submission and I need to make a few modifications i.e. self-promote less =). I hope it doesn't take another week for review, but we'll see.

My First Experience

I feel new here... this being my first time trying to make money online and all I think that's normal. I admit it was an overwhelming experience to start. There were many schemes and legitimate sites that I had to sift through to get started. I consider myself a competent citizen and I don't see any reason why I can't make a little extra money online using the skills I've obtained over the years from school and just from living life.

The first thing I've started to do is answer questions. It sounds simple enough and actually it is. I chose this as my first option because I genuinely enjoy helping other people by using what I already know. There are several sites that offer cash incentives for helping others, but the one I chose was www.webanswers.com.

This seemed like the easiest site to "get my feet wet" and so far that has proven to be true. It only took a few minutes to setup my account and get started. I then proceeded to search for questions and try to answer them. What I've found so far is you should be selective with the questions you decide to answer. My strategy so far is to look for questions that I can answer that have anywhere from 0 to 3 answers. This is because sometimes it's hard to say what the questioning user is looking for and you may be able to provide additional insight on the topic. The key is to write a thoughtful response that provides the original poster with a comprehensive answer. Most of the questions with less answers thus less competition require a paragraph or two to fully answer the user's question.

Then if the user selects your answer as the best, you can start generating advertising revenue using Google's AdSense. This means that from now on any ad revenue generated from people visiting the question will be split between you and webanswers (60% for you and 40% for them) However, you must post at least 10 times before you can register for or link and existing AdSense account, but you'll still be able to generate revenue on the questions where your post was selected as the best answer. Currently, I'm still waiting for my AdSense account to complete the registration process, but so far I've answered 19 posts and received 3 as the best answer.

Some of those posts were early on when I was just trying to get 10 posts under my belt, so the numbers are slightly skewed, but I don't expect an accepted answer rate of more than 20%. So far it's slow going, but like I said, I do enjoy helping others out, so I don't mind taking 5 to 10 minutes here and there to answer others questions and help solve problems.

I've found that this site will be great for answering my questions as well. As I continue to renovate my home and run into issues, it will allow me to gather ideas for free. There are plenty of other question and answer money making sites out there as well.

I'd love to hear about some sites/ techniques that you've used and your thoughts on them.