Pay Per Click traffic is one of the most effective ways to get highly targeted visitors to your website. It’s fast and there’s loads of it. The only problem is that it usually costs an arm and leg, especially in Adwords.
And yet I’m sure you’ve heard numerous times all these gurus rambling on how they can get 5-cent clicks even in the most competitive niches, as if they have some unadvertised cheap payment plan. Truth be told, there is no secret payment plan, everything comes down to keywords you bid on. There are in fact cheap keywords in any niche you can possibly think of and you can get them.
The benefits of it are obvious – cheap and yet highly targeted traffic, but what’s the catch? There is one – it’s rather tricky to bid on these keywords without having the Quality Score kill the bids (in Adwords case anyway). However, given the cheap nature of these keywords, it’s well worth a shot and can have a big impact if you succeed.
What I’m talking about, are the lateral keywords and there are many types of it. The whole idea of this post is to explain the different types of them, the challenges and how to use these keywords.
As I said, there’s no niche that wouldn’t have enough lateral keywords with little to no competition that would be available at 5 cents and under. You just have to put your thinking cap on. Here are the main types of lateral keywords:
- Product titles
- Similar niches
- Unrelated niches but same audience
The first type, product titles is my favorite. There are niches where these keywords are very competitive, yet most niches have little to no competition. These keywords are really a no-brainer – product names are always best converting keywords and it’s quite easy to write an ad copy good enough to get a decent CTR. The best example is weight loss niche and diet names.
Similar niches is another type of lateral keywords but unlike product names it’s a little bit harder to crack. I’m not talking about sub-niches but niches that are outside, yet somewhat related. The idea is to find another niche for your target that would have a smaller competition. For example, weight loss and recipes – the recipe keywords have a very low competition, and I probably don’t need to remind you about the competition in weight loss niche. Naturally, coupling niches like these hurts the conversions, so the best idea to convert this traffic is to capture leads for extra shots.
Finally, the unrelated niches with the same audience (a.k.a bidding on demographics) is the toughest still a powerful way to get cheap pay per click traffic. In this case, your best tool is website profiling services like quantcast.com. The idea is to find the top sites in your niche and check their profiles at quantcast. Look up what kind of demographics mostly visit them (in case of weight loss it’s women over 35) and find other sites in other niche that meet the same criteria. How do you find these other sites? Quantcast gives a list of related websites and categories, as well as you can do some guessing. For example, dating sites are mostly visited by males aged 18 to 50, but also web development sites are mostly visited by the same audience.
There are also other ways to find lateral keywords, you just have to think outside the box. The important thing to remember is that people visit and buy your stuff, not keywords – don’t attach your campaigns to niches, attach them to people. As long as these are the people who would likely buy your products or services, you’re going the right way.
Hi and thanks for your article, very insightful. Do you know what are best pay per click sites outside of Google Adwords or Bing. I tried both, Google was ok, Bing was useless.