It is no secret that to make a living on the Internet you have to have traffic. It’s common knowledge and something you know you have to have but don’t necessarily know how to get it. The reason you created a website in the first place was to get visitors. Chances are you have spent many hours trying to create the perfect website. You may have used Microsoft Frontpage or one of many other editors to create your website.
If you can get large amounts of traffic, you will certainly be able to convert them into paying customers. At least that is the hope of most webmasters. Some of the greatest websites that have been developed at great expense over the years have fallen by the wayside. However, there are many small sites that have done quite well.
By using Google AdWords, you can focus on your target audience. Let’s say you have a website that sells vacuum cleaners, given a choice, which would you rather have, a thousand visitors per day generally looking for everything under the sun or a hundred visitors specifically looking for vacuum cleaners. My pick would be the one hundred unique visitors looking for the cleaners. Why, simply because my conversion rate would be much higher.
Are you spending money to make money?
We’ve all heard the saying, “You have to spend money to make money.” Although it is not always true, it does have an application when using the advertising service that Google has called Adwords. I have used AdWords continuously for several years and I have to say that I have spent a lot of money with them. But the other side of the coin is that I have made more sales than I otherwise would have. In other words, I took in more money than I took out.
“You can never go wrong making a profit” is what former Glenn Turner student James E. Tolleson and his brother Rodney Tolleson used to say. This is true, with a caveat. If you spend a thousand dollars on advertising and get a thousand dollars in profit, you have made a good investment. However, if you spend a thousand dollars to run ads and only make a hundred dollars in profit, your risk-reward ratio is too high.
Which risk-reward ratio is correct? Well, that’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. Personally, I like a ratio of three to one. If I can spend a thousand dollars running ads, I would like to see a profit of three thousand dollars.
