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.

I made a lot of changes to www.signupandmakemoney.com today. I started off by changing the line height to 50% more. It is about the equivalent of half of a double space. I believe that more space between the lines makes the text a whole lot easier to read.

I also changed the secondary headings to make them a little bit smaller than the main headlines. The most noticeable thing I have changed on the site is I shortened the list of sign up sites a whole lot. I’ve gotten lots of opinions from various people and they all agreed that the list on the home page and the advertising page were way too long. I agreed with them and have been meaning to change this for some time now. So I did it today. The home page is much more presentable now that I’ve created about 7 new pages to shorten the list of paid to sign up sites. I have categorized the new pages with these titles:

Social Network sites, Investment sites, get paid to sites, gaming sites, cash back shopping sites, survey sign up bonus sites, etc…

I also shortened the Online Advertising page as well. I had way too many links on it. Search Engines want less than 100 links per page. I may still have more than 100 links on my marketing page, but at least I know it is much closer to 100 links than it was before. Take a look at my Online Advertising page to see how many links I have on it. The new pages I made to shorten the Online Advertising page were:

Safe List bonuses, Traffic Exchange Bonuses, and Traffic Sites bonuses.

This will make it much easier to view each site in it’s own category and shorten the amount of links I use on the actual advertising page itself.

Besides that, I also shrunk every page of my site. I originally had every page at 95% table width and decided to go down to 85%. I believe my page doesn’t need to take up that much of a user’s browser window. I don’t have enough stuff on my site to take that much room up.

Every change I make to my .com site I also make to my .ws site. View my down line training section to see what I’m talking about. I like to keep the sites looking the same. You know, same format, same look, etc…

It was a long day today. I made a lot of good, positive changes to my site. The next thing to accomplish is to add videos to my site. I’m going to start by adding an introductory video on my opt-in page, then I’ll add a video to each of my main site’s home pages to give a brief overview of what can be accomplished with the site.

Panda Research is free to join and they will deposit $5.00 into your commission account once you sign up with them. I like Panda Research, but the thing I don’t understand is that in the back office all of the links are called surveys. When you click to take a survey with them you’ll notice that the links really aren’t surveys, they are paid to sign up offers. This is a little bit misleading to me especially since their slogan is, “We want your opinios, help us to help you!”

Don’t get me wrong, not all the sign up links in the back office are paid to sign up offers, some of them really are surveys. I just think Panda Research should do a better job of categorizing their offers so their members don’t get confused.

I’ve been a member of Panda Research for a long time and have never paid a single dime to them. I even have to admit I’ve been inactive as a member as welll, but thankfully my account has never been suspended or deleted. I think that’s a great thing about Panda Research in general. Any Company that has been around for awhile is more than likely not going to go anywhere because they probably have a good business plan set up.

Not only can you get paid by completing offers with Panda Research, you can also refer others and get paid. If you refer someone, not only will Panda Research pay the new member $5.00 for joining, but they will also pay you $5.00 for referring that new member. There is no limit on how much money you can make for referring new members to Panda Research.

There are actually a lot of paid offers in the back office. I could easily say they have more than $200.00 worth of paid offers and surveys you could take. According to Panda Research’s frequently asked questions the average time it takes to complete each offer is about 10-15 minutes. That’s not too bad.

Something I don’t like about Panda Research is that you have to earn at least $100.00 to get paid and it will take at least 30 days to process your payment. One more limiting factor is that they only accept members from the United States. Other than that, Panda Research looks like a good Company to join as far as I’m concerned.

If you like Panda Research, then you’ll like my other recommended sites that pay you to sign up with them at my main home page.