Keywords

What is a visitor worth?

If you had to answer the question "What am I willing to pay for a visitor to come to my website?" what would you say?

Nothing? Twenty cents? a dollar? more? The truth is all of these answers make sense because it really depends on the quality of the visitor in question.

To illustrate I'll re-word our original question and add some important conditions to our hypothetical visitor..

• How much would you pay for a visitor that purchases your CD?
• How much would you pay for a visitor that comes to see you perform live regularly?
• How much would you pay for a visitor that signed up to your email list?

These types of visitors are worth something. If they buy your CD or come to your show and pay a ten dollar cover charge they are worth some of your advertising money.

Search Engine Marketing

If you've been following any type of financial news lately you've probably heard that search engines are becoming extremely profitable. This is because search engines can provide advertisers with extremely targeted visitors. They do this by allowing advertisers to place relevant ads on their search results pages for specific search terms.

For example if you sell shoes you might bid to have your ad show up when someone searches for shoes. If you sell guitar amps you would bid on the term "guitar amps". With search engine advertising you only pay if the searcher clicks on your ad, not for ad exposures and the prices are set by auction. That means keywords that have lots of advertisers bidding on them cost more per click than those that do not.

Click this link to see Google's search results for the keyword "music".

After clicking the link above (it will open a new window) on the right hand side of the page you will see a whole list of sponsored results. These links are all advertisers that chose to have their ads appear when the keyword "music" is searched for. Because that word is searched for millions of times a month you can bet there are a lot of advertisers who want to show up on this page! And that means those advertisers are paying a lot of money for that word. Some words can earn up to five dollars a click.. even more!!!

But of course there are some real bargains out there too!

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