Pay Per Click Realities and PPC Bully

Pay Per Click Advertising – the gurus make it sound so simple, promising instant riches – all you need to do is post a couple of ads and voila! you’ll have cash flowing into your account.

But in reality it isn’t that simple. In reality you can lose your shirt, and nobody will give a continental. The Google advertising machine will roll relentlessly on rewarding an elite 5% while 95% try it, fail at it and move on disenchanted.

So how do you get in that 5%, well the cold hard reality is that you need to learn and the only real way to learn is to get your feet wet and that can be an incredibly expensive exercise.

But you can stack the odds a little in your favor and cut out maybe three months of hard yards and lost money by learning from an expert.

There are lots of people out there that claim to have the whole thing licked and will dazzle you with impressive screen shots and videos showing you how easy the whole thing is, but they really will only show you the good stuff and not the hours of hard work that goes in to creating a successful PPC campaign.

For what it’s worth most of these courses will tell you to do the following

1/Do Your research – put in some hard yards looking for profitable and hot niches that have untapped potential. This seems easy enough, but in truth is extremely difficult. I know that I spent a whole day last week researching a promising source and in the end had to pull the plug because I just couldn’t seem to find the right angle or a way to make it pay. It was a frustrating day.

2/Start with many keywords, group them in small ad groups and discard the unprofitable ones

3/Split test your ads

4/Track everything

5/Constantly refine your campaign -build your own landing pages, check out the opposition

It works with time and practice, but it’s hard work.

Now to complicate matters for the novice marketer there are some fairly ingenious software coming on to the market that “assists” the marketer to make money.

The first of these was released in the much hyped Clickbank Code released by Michael Jones, I say much hyped because the sales copy was extreme and frankly put me off, but one interesting thing about the product that made me take a second look was a nifty piece of software that could advise me whether a Clickbank promotion was likely to be profitable before I started – I nearly went back and bought in right then, but was distracted by another piece of software that caught my eye on the same day which claimed to do much the same thing but without he hype – a product called Affiliate Prophet.

This looked the goods to me and I had made up my mind to buy it when I discovered PPC Bully.

PPC Bully is an incredible piece of software that takes the hours of research and drudgery out of PPC marketing by effectively allowing you to spy on your competitor’s best performing campaigns and keywords and structuring a campaign that will mirror and even improve on theirs.

The concept of stealing from your competitors is not knew and has been openly  advocated by many different PPC gurus and eBooks for as long as I can remember – but is it ethical?

Now I have to confess that I’m uncomfortable about this.  I  believe in the free  market, but I also believe in fair play and I wonder about how I would feel if my campaign was effectively ripped off of me by some upstart with a cool piece of software.  A campaign that I had done the hard way and invested countless hours and dollars to make successful.

But the simple fact is that to seriously compete with the big boys I need some serious software and while Affiliate Prophet and the software offered by the Clickbank Code will certainly help my business, the simple fact is that PPC Bully could blow  me out of the water and for that reason i feel almost compelled to buy it.  Your thoughts on these matters would be appreciated.

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