My Yahoo Pay Per Click Search Marketing experience

I have been using Yahoo’s Search Marketing (currently offering a $25.00 sign up advertising credit) for well over a year now to drive traffic to my Pre-Paid Legal affiliate site. Since I began this marketing technique I’ve learned some very important lessons. I’m no expert on pay-per click advertising or anything like that, but I’ve learned enough to make money doing it.

I only use pay-per click advertising for promoting a specific product or service. I find it to be the best way to promote products because there are millions of searches conducted daily on the major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I find pay-per click advertising to be less effective on something that is too wide spread. An example of this would be my sign up bonus site. This site has way too much information on it and really isn’t promoting a specific product. Instead it promotes a lot of products and services. Also since my site is fairly new, only a little over 1 year old, not too many people even know what I have to offer is out there. Therefore, my sign up bonus site does better in organic searches. Organic search results is a whole other subject that we won’t get into at the current moment.

What I’ve learned from using Yahoo’s Search Marketing. One of the biggest reason I chose to use their PPC services is that Yahoo will Geo Target specific States and Provinces. Since Pre-Paid Legal’s services are limited to certain US States and Canadian Provinces, Yahoo Search Marketing turned out to be a great match in my online marketing ventures of promoting it.

Your ad has to be very specific. When I first started using Yahoo Search Marketing my ad was something like this, “Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. – Legal protection for less than a cup of coffee a day.” This ad was fine, but not very specific. It would very easily get mixed up as being Pre-Paid Legal’s main website or close to it. I definitely didn’t want this because then I would get clicks from current members and associates just trying to log into their back offices. Even worse, I would get current members trying to contact me thinking I am Pre-Paid Legal’s Corporate office wanting to cancel their membership. This really sucks. Now their click cost me money and all they wanted to do was cancel their account.

Now my ad is very specific. I even got it to the point where I don’t want people to click on my ad. I know this sounds silly, but it’s true. You really have to set up your pay-per click ad to the point where you are only going to get specific hits that count. Now my ad reads something like this, “Independent Associate of Pre-Paid Legal – Sign up to become a member here.” As you can see this really shuts a lot of people out. I’m an Independent Associate now, not the main website. Not only that, but you can’t even get more info at my site, it is only available for interested prospects to go ahead and sign up right away.

I’m not saying that it is really that simple. You’ll still get people clicking on your ad trying to cancel their accounts, etc.. But the number of bad clicks will drop dramatically and you’ll receive a lot more targeted hits from the prospect’s search results.

The last thing I wanted to cover was the bids. You can go ahead and be really competitive and spends a whole lot of money per click or you can just do the minimum bid and put a high daily budget to get more clicks throughout the day that won’t cost you as much per click. If you like Yahoo’s PPC advertising, then take a look at my recommended pay-per click sites to see if there are more you’ll want to try out.

**Disclaimer – Affiliate links are used on this post.