Pay Per Click Advertising...Avoid Scams

Pay Per Click Scams Reviewed

There are an increasing number of search engines on the web. Day in and day out there are more and more wrong choices to make. At some point someone should write a guide to avoiding the pay per click mistakes. This is that article.

Your time is a valuable resource. Once you start getting into thinking about free, always consider your time worth some finite amount of money.

Many search engines offer distribution levels near 0. In fact, the only traffic some of them get is people signing up for accounts looking for a good deal. A free $10 account means nothing when these $10 of bids will never be used up by real people.

A search engine is one of the hardest things on the internet to promote. There are endless streams of competition, and with little content it is hard to drive traffic it a search engine without buying ads. Most sites never actively advertise, and thus they go nowhere.

Whats worse about this free play money is that the cost of entry is virtually $0. I downloaded and installed the free version of Smart Search by Smart Scripts. It took me less than 5 minutes to install and I know nothing about scripts.

If a low entry cost was not bad enough, there are also user agents which aim to fraud you out of your money. Typical conversion rates on the internet are usually around 1% to 2%. That’s not very high, and as a new webmaster your site is likely to have flaws which hold your conversion rates even lower. You may assume that you just did not do well and add another $10. Lucky for you, there are clicking agents which aim to fraud you out of your money.

Soft Caca and Free Hit Generator are a couple fine examples of fraud driven software. Both programs are available for around $100. These programs will allow a webmaster to control which ads get clicked on and how often. Another wonderful feature is that these programs generate random IP numbers so it seems like real people are visiting your web site. Even the frequency between clicks is controlled by the script.

What are the solutions to this problem? Well first you have SEO forums. Stick your nose in and see what others have to say. If nobody knows of the search engine it is probably not worth any effort. There are web ranking websites such as < a href=http://www.alexa.com>Alexa, which should give you an idea about the web site as far as distribution. These numbers may vary wildly, but anything that is not in the low hundreds or low thousands is not usually worth your time. In addition there is a technique I call the casino check.

The casino check basically checks search engines for expensive queries. If you search for "gambling" or "online casino" and nobody else has bid yet, then most likely there is no reason for you to. If the most aggressive, profit driven companies, with the largest profit margins have not yet bid, it is not worth your time. If the search engine had legitimate distribution you can bank on the fact that there would be bids on those type of terms.

Some pay per click search engines are powered through back feed listings from other pay per click search engines (SearchFeed powers many of them). Usually a good way to find these type of pay per click search engines is to look at the bid amount. If the top bid is less than the bids below it, they are being back feed by another search.

If the site does not look legitimate or has no search partners, you are probably wasting your time. The best pay per click advice is to stay with the big guys off the start and optimize they hell out of those campaigns. Andrew Goodman wrote a great report about Google AdWords ($49) which I would recommend to anyone serious about pay per click advertising.

I also have links to all my recommended software and search engines at my PPC Toolshed Page. Best of luck, and may the clicks be with you!

by aaron at Search Marketing Info