How can I get PPC to work for me

Thank you for your input Nick.

The actual CDs costs me less than £2.00 to produce, pack and post and we sell them for £10.95 so the margins are excellent. The downloads even better as they cost nothing. Some of the recordings are 5 years old and still sell well. There is very little effort, we run the whole business from a small bedroom so minimal expenses.

The problem is how many we sell which on our current website is very few. However, Amazon is a different matter as we are selling up to 300 a month.

I am confident that with the right SEO we can increase our visit count sufficiently to at least match what we are doing on Amazon and if this was the case, we would be very happy netting a cool 60k plus a year and with our kids gone, we can live nicely on that.

As you say, maybe as I thought, PPC is not for us but I just wondered if I had been missing a trick.

It has changed ALOT in 1 year, google more about partner categories,
because you can target people based on their offline activites via 3rd party data analytics like
Acxiom.

Custom audience, this is amazing tool, if you have your own list. you can download the email address of you subscribers and make an ad only for your subscribers to see on facebook.

I think Adwords could just be too competitive here so the SEO strategy would probably be more suitable. BING is indeed cheaper but it has hardly any traffic (like 10% of what Google has) so getting traction might prove a bit more difficult.

Oh ok, gotcha. That's great. Just be sure that you are staying in touch with your email list often to build a rapport and trust so they'll always know who you are when you email. If too much pass since you last emailed, they sometimes forget who you are and see your emails as just spam. Even if you are just emailing to say have a great weekend or happy holiday with your website name and logo in your signature, it matters a lot to your list even if you aren't directly selling at that time.

And yes, it's true that Google has the most traffic. There's no doubt about that. But don't let anyone tell you that Bing/Yahoo don't have a lot of traffic, especially until you have tried it for your self.

Anyone who says Bing doesn't hardly have any traffic either haven't used them or simply don't know what they are doing in their ad campaigns.

I get almost 40,000 clicks per month from my Bing ad campaigns alone, and counts for about 63% of my total online revenue. So there is definitely LOTS of traffic. It's all about proper keyword research. The only exception is in certain very small niches, you may have to rely on Google to get a considerable amount of traffic.

But I am sure you are aware you would need to utilize all traffic sources possible. So learn both Google and Bing PPC. And even some 2nd tier PPC networks (such as Looksmart, 7Search etc) can give you some great quality traffic. And yes it can be expensive, that's why you should only use keywords that are as targeted possible.

Don't bother with bidding on broad match keywords, let the big companies waste money on their campaigns by doing that. Trust me, you can profit greatly by using only the most targeted keywords.

One other thing I would recommend is learn Retargeting. I personally use Retargeter.com and AdRoll.com. Especially when PPC in general can be expensive, setting up retargeting campaigns can increase your sales greatly.

Some may argue that retargeting doesn't work or it's a waste. But same as I mentioned above, those who says something don't work has either never tried it or simply haven't done it correctly. I began to make more money with less traffic within the past couple years since doing retargeting.

Hope that helps and that you find greater success from now on.