The Heavy Chef Project

Setting up the Pay Per Click Campaign

Two months after starting the "Pay per click for web profitablity" category on the blog we finally get around to actually doing the pay per click campaign:-)

The site (www.artrevision.com for those that have forgotten) sells hand painted replicas of famous works of art. You choose the artist and their work and the highly talented Yolande will paint the replica to order.

For the first step of the campaign I took a very similar approach to the way I would go about an SEO campaign: Research the keywords. In fact Nicola (my lovely wife) was at a loose end this afternoon so I asked her to do it.

When we had all the data my first instinct was to look at it from an SEO point of view. Where were the gaps we could exploit and what were the popular or niche words that people searched, yet had little competition online.

But with PPC it is slightly different. Yes you need to know what people are searching for and what the competition is like, but the added factor of "cost per click" is vital. At this point I thought it best to send the results through to Andy (from UK PPC firm Custwin - www.custwin.co.uk) and see where he takes it. So now I’m ready to sit and learn whilst I watch a master at work. (No pressure there Andy :-)

Initially we’ve set a small budget of 100 (R1400) for the month and will focus on maybe one particular artist. The low budget is always an approach we recommend with most of our web marketing. Start small and build up - watch what works and what doesn’t. That way you can adjust anything from the site to the text to the images to the ads, etc, etc - until a good return on investment is reached, then you can invest more knowing the return will be worthwhile. Remember: pay per click is about creating profitable websites, not going bust quickly.