It's not about traffic; it's about generating leads. That's right. It only took me eight words to give you the secret super tip on using pay-per-click (PPC) search engines successfully. It's not about generating traffic to your website; it's about generating leads from the traffic for which you are paying. This slight shift in understanding about where the value resides in PPC search engines could make all the difference when it comes to capitalizing on the web promotional resource known as PPC. How are you currently using PPC? Most (and this is spoken from experience) PPC advertisers bid on tens of thousands of keywords and direct all of that traffic to the same page on their website. While it is a good idea to use as many keywords and key phrases as possible in your overall PPC marketing campaigns, what a prospect finds when they visit your landing page is more important.

How should you be using PPC? If you are you only trying to “make the sale,” you could be losing the visitors who are looking for information about your products or services. By exchanging informational sales material for a prospect’s contact information, you will dramatically increase your long-term return on investment.

Research has shown that when customers are knowledgeable about the products and services they are seeking, they are more likely in the future to buy from the organization that provided them the information in the first place. If you are paying one cent per visitor and receive just five sign-ups for a newsletter, you have already covered your costs because the average value of one qualified email address is over twenty-five cents! So to answer the question of how you should be using PPC, you should use it not just to make direct sales, but to generate leads.

Putting it into practice: There are many ways that successful web marketers get Internet surfers to provide personal information. The most preferred are 1) surveys and contests in exchange for a “freebie” and 2) newsletters and articles, which provide information about what the surfer is searching for. To put this into practice, promote a page that equally 1) provides information about your product or service and 2) emphasizes your special offer or offering. You will see that even if they don’t directly purchase the product or service you are selling, chances increase exponentially that they will want to find out more information and sign up for your special offer thus providing you with a qualified lead.