Switching from SEO to paid advertising - How do I learn the ropes?

Thanks for the advice, but do you guys know any good high quality products or sources that can teach me some knowledge before I start spending money on advertising?

Thanks.

Hi PBMax,
While it may be a different reason for each person suggesting Bing Ads, I think the most common reasons you see it on this forum is that there are so many people that have had their website, and/or account, suspended for violating AdWords policy, and recommend Bing as an alternative, though it has a tiny fraction of the traffic available from AdWords.

Most people start with AdWords, because it's a no-brainer, that is where the majority of your buyers will be found. However, it seems many folks that are into "affiliate marketing" are also into taking "shortcuts", including shortcuts that violate AdWords policies. It is only after getting the boot from AdWords that many will buckle down and actually try to follow policy guidelines. So they will only know how to advertise on one of the second tier networks, and hence the recommendation for a second tier network.

Some will tell you that Bing Ads tolerates more shenanigans, But I do not see much difference in the advertising policies between AdWords and Bing Ads, so I don't buy that argument. AdWords is a little quicker to enforce, but they both seem to hold close to the same standards.

Others have a disease that I have dubbed "CPC Myopia". They have not yet learned how to measure the true value of a click, and treat every click on every network as if they all have the exact same value. They often to have no conceptual grasp of the priciples of profit-driven marketing and how scale effects total profits, hence the term myopic. They will simply never grasp that a dozen eggs at $1.29 is actually a better value than a single egg at $0.15, or for some reason they cannot transfer that same reasoning to the sightly more complex calculation for total profit on an ad campaign.

Profit = (Value-Cost)*Clicks

A pretty simple calculation, though it's shocking how many marketers forget to consider the number of available clicks into their calculations on profitability.

Yet others have found a niche that has far fewer advertisers on Bing, for whatever reason, and they are making the assumption that the same will be true for everyone else.

However, for most of the rest I think they may just listening to the folks that were banned from AdWords and blindly following their advise, or even worse repeating it over and over like it is a truism even though they have never even tested for themselves. For those folks it is as you said "stepping over a dollar to get a dime".

Mobile is an option AdWords offers which I will look into, but I'm still tinkering with the basic desktop ads so that will have to wait. I understand mobile is huge, but it's not that big of a deal (yet) for the niche my clients are in.