Beginner's guide to making more money with pay per click advertising

If you've heard of pay per click advertising, then you'll know that it's capable of making millionaires alongside broken, bankrupt bums.

But what factors divide the two?
If you'd like to harness the awesome power of the world's most effective online advertising medium and avoid losing your shirt in the process, please keep reading...

With pay per click advertising, it's all about ROI - Return On Investment. You spend money to make money, just like investing in stocks. The beauty is that if you're smart and follow the right advice, you can pay a few dollars to make fifty or sixty back. Now that's the kind of investment I'd want to continue to make everyday, and here's 5 tips to get you started on a killer return for your money on Adwords (even if you're a real beginner)...

1. Make sure you use your keywords heavily in your ads and landing pages
This means in your ad title, ad description, ad display URL, in your landing page title, in your landing page meta description and also in the body text of your landing page of course. This will give you a really good quality score which will in turn reduce the cost per click on that keyword, hence opening up the profit margin for you.

2. Explore cheaper clicks on the content network
You've likely seen Google ads on other people's webpages right? Well, that's another form of PPC advertising which anyone can activate on the PPC campaign. All you need to do is select the content network option and pick your placements (the types of websites you want your ad to run on). Google automatically suggests high traffic websites based on the keywords you feed it, so there's a high amount of relevence when you start running your ads on these websites. The beauty of the content network is that you can get the same ads in your normal campaign running at rediculously lower cost per clicks. Again, this will open up your potential profit margins and reduce the risks of breaking even or going into negative!

3. Begin with higher costs per click
This is something many PPC advertisers overlook and is a very effective, under the radar way to increase your profits long term. How? Because when you start out with higher costs per click, your ads get shown higher in the ad listings. Therefore, more people click on your ad and this enhances the clickthough rate. When your clickthrough rate increases, so does your quaility score. When your quality score increases, your cost per clicks go down!

4. Use A/B split testing frequently
Your quality score (and subsequent cost per click) all starts with how many times your ad gets clicked. More to the point, if your ad doesn't get clicked as much as it could be, then you're leaving huge amounts of money on the table because no-one will ever reach your offer. So in order to increase the click through rate of your ads, you must splity test different ad variations. Google has a simple split testing feature built in that allows you to easily set up multiple ads to run for the same keyword and from there, you can see which ad is getting the most clicks. Then you simply drop the low performing ads and begin a new test against your winning ad.

5. Fine tune your landing pages
The more relevant your landing pages are to the keyword that a visitor used to find your ad, click on it and reach your page, the better. Put yourself in your visitors shoes...

If you were searching for White Tennis Shoes in Google, then you saw an ad for White Tennis Shoes, you'd likely click on it right?

But when you click the ad and arrive at the website and the first thing you see is "Sporting Equipment, please pick a category..." then you're going to click away pretty fast right? However, if you landed on the page and saw "White Tennis Shoes, please select your shoe size and press enter", then you've got a potential sale on your hands. Simple right?

The truth is, you'll have to put some in some work to create multiple landing pages for different keywords, but the payoff is the difference between making a mint online from the comfort of your own home vs going bankrupt and stressing yourself to death in the process.