PPC has its challenges as well, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s about the fastest way to get direct, targeted traffic to your site, as long as you know what you’re doing.

So please, please, I beg of you… don’t make these PPC mistakes!

Mistake 1. Home Page = Landing Page. Big mistake, and very common. The fact is, you simply cannot tailor your home page for enough keywords to allow you to get a high quality score for your entire campaign. Simply not possible. You need to have a separate landing page for each keyword, ideally, or at least for each closely-related group of keywords.

Mistake 2. Landing page is too confusing. You’ve probably gone to these. You’re searching for something, and there are a dozen sites that look like they will have information you are looking for. Starting at the top, you work your way down the list. Even the best sites only get 5-10 seconds of your attention, so imagine what a crappy, busy site will get? Only as much time as it takes your visitor to find and click the “Back” button.

You need to include good information about the product, but above all it must be clearly presented. If they can’t find the information they are looking for, and do it quickly, they will be gone.

Mistake 3. Landing page too “heavy.” If your page takes too long to load, because of scripts or graphics or whatever, your potential customer is gone. People aren’t going to wait around to see what you have to say unless they have some super-compelling reason.

Sure, you can have some images, but make them good ones, and be sure they are adding value, not just taking up space. You’re not printing this in a high-gloss magazine, either, so you don’t need a super-high resolution photo. Go with lower res. Your page will load faster and your customer will stick around a little longer.

Mistake 4. Frightening your customer.

People who visit your site do not know, neither do they trust, you. You need to build that trust before you start doing junk like asking them for a lot of personal info. You can usually get away with a first name and an email addy, if you have something free to provide in return, but asking for more than that (like phone number or home address) without a dang good reason is asking for trouble.

Mistake 5. The Hard Sell. Fact: people don’t want to be sold to. It’s as simple as that. No one visits a website so someone can sell them something.

But you’re in it to make money, right? So what do you do?

Well, you need to build the persons trust, show them you understand whatever problem it is they are trying to solve, and that you have the solution to their problem.

That’s it.

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Google Adwords takes it a step further, with “geo-targeting.” That means you are now able to target specific geographic areas with your ads. MSN and Yahoo may have something similar, but this article will focus on Google.

This may or may not be helpful for your business. There are some areas of your country that may be better targets for your product or service than others. Geo targeting makes sure you are only showing your ads to people you specify.

You can also use Google Analytics to make sure your geo-targeted keyword campaigns are converting into sales for you.

Which areas may be better for your business may not be as clear as not selling snow shovels in Miami. You need some data to begin with.

Once you have been running general ads for a while, log into Google Analytics to see where your hits and conversions are coming from. You may be surprised with what you find. Use the “Map Overlay Report” to get that information. Compare geographic visitors to geographic conversions. Some areas may be better browsers and some better buyers. I’ll let you decide which to focus on!

Once you have identified a region that appears to be converting better, you can create a new and separate campaign for that very region. Use city/state/area names in your title and description to increase click-through rates.

You change the region selected by editing campaign settings and going to the “target audience” section. There, you can select by country, state, city, or zip code (in the USA).

Have fun and let me know how that works out for you!

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