For the majority of internet marketers, PPC is a great way to sell products. You choose search keywords that are likely to bring customers to your landing page and pitch them all the way through the close. Unlike SEO, you don’t need to wait for links to mature and your rankings to reflect. With PPC, you can setup a new campaign and have it served to your target audience within the next few minutes.
As such, most people see it as the best way to put a product into potential customer’s line of sight. Since majority of marketers use it for that, it’s easy for newer webmasters to assume that’s direct marketing is solely what PPC is geared to serve.
What many don’t realize is that PPC is a completely valid vehicle for both establishing a new website’s brand and growing its audience. In many cases, you can even use it as platform to indirectly build your site’s link profile.
Of course, PPC won’t be free. Yet, if you get your site in the hands of the right people, it can pay off in valuable dividends over a short time. If you have a new blog, for instance, PPC can be an ultra-fast way of letting people know about it. You can target your potential readers easily by advertising on search terms that they’ll likely be looking for on the search engines.
Even better, you can use PPC to target influencer’s in your industry. If you have an education resource, for example, you can target school professors who are looking for web sites to recommend to their students. Impress that one professor and you’re likely to have a steady stream of new student traffic typing your URL in their address bars. If you have built your site to be a concise resource for your industry, you can target writers who are researching for expert resources on your subject. At worst, you’ve had one new reader who will likely refer to you again in the future. At best, your site can get a mention, even a link, from wherever their article eventually gets published.
Never dismiss PPC as a vehicle for direct sales alone. Done right, it can prove a valuable asset for your site’s promotion.
-Brett
