** Continued From: How to Buy Traffic! - Part #1

Generally, you want to try to figure out how much money you are going to make from any given advertising campaign. You need to be able to gauge how many signups you think you are going to get, or that your sponsors are going to get, which will give you an idea of the total revenues you should be able to make from a given ad spot.

If you know that search engines are giving you around a 1:100 conversion, and you figure you can spend $500 on Overture and get 1,000 clicks from it at $0.50 per click, then it is a fair guess to say that you will get 10 signups for your $500. Now, if you are only getting $35 per signup, then you will only make back $350 on your initial investment of $500. Not a good deal.

So, the number one lesson to take away from the example above, is cost per signup. You could have done a little bit of math before starting the Overture campaign and seen that it was not a good idea to try. How? By working out your cost per signup. If you know that search engine traffic converts at approximately 1:100, then you know that 1 person out of every 100 is going to signup. Now, you need to figure out how much it will cost you to get 100 visitors to your site. With the Overture example above, with every visit costing you 50 cents, 100 visits is going to cost $50 (100 x $0.50). So, if you are getting only $35 per signup, you do not want to spend $50 to get that signup. Your goal is to pay less than $35 for each signup, ensuring that you make at least some profit on every sale.

So, if you can drop your bid on Overture a bit, down to maybe $0.30 per click, you will drop in the rankings and get your traffic at a lot slower rate, but your cost per signup will also decrease. Instead of getting your 1,000 visits in a week with the number one bid of 50 cents, you will maybe have to wait a month to get the same volume with the lower-ranked 30 cent bid. But, if we do the math, we see that your signups are only costing you $30 to generate, while you are getting $35 for each, netting you $5 in profit each time. While five dollars may not sound like a lot, if you can do that twenty times a day, that is almost $40,000 per year in revenues.

An even better way to get yourself some signups is to pay an advertiser on a per-sale basis. If you can find a site that will send you all sorts of traffic and is willing to take $25 per signup they generate for you (instead of being paid for clicks or impressions), then you know that you are going to make ten dollars on every sale they send you.

"You want to try to figure out how much money you are going to make from any given advertising campaign ... number one lesson to take away ... is cost per signup."

And since they are getting paid for every sale their traffic makes, they have all the extra incentive to send you the best quality traffic, since they are going to want it to convert as much as possible so that they can get paid. These are the best deals for you to find, but you will have to be careful, since most of them are going to want to get paid nearly the same amount you are getting. So you are going to have to do a lot of looking and likely some negotiations to get the right deals that work for you.

You may even want to look at setting up your own affiliate program, where you offer other webmasters money for sales, clicks or whatever else you are looking to buy. The trick is to make sure that you are offering less than you are getting.

If your site sells memberships for $35, then you are safe offering $30 to any webmaster that refers a sale. If you want to offer payments for each click that webmasters send you, then you are going to have to get the calculator out again. You are going to do the same math as you did above, though with some modifications.

If your site is getting conversions in the 1:100 range, assume that webmasters will send poor quality traffic, maybe converting as bad as 1:1000. So, if 1,000 visits are going to earn you one single $35 sale, then you should be offering 3.5 cents per click to break even. To make sure you do not lose money, drop that figure down to 3 cents or lower. If your affiliate program starts to take off, it works great for you, since you now have all sorts of salespeople out working for you - and you only have to pay them when they bring you results!

It is one thing to pay for clicks and sales (and most people prefer this style of "pay for performance advertising), but what if you are talking about impression-based deals? These are the type of ad campaigns where you are paying the advertiser just for showing your button, banner or text link. How do you judge the potential effectiveness of this sort of campaign, how can you tell if you are paying for performance?

Well, you have to break down the numbers into a form that you can use to analyze. Not to scare anyone, but it is almost like your old high school algebra, where you have information in one form and you need to change it to another form in order to compare it and draw conclusions.

This is actually not that hard to do and I am going to show you a simple way to do it. If the campaign you are looking at is going to give you 100,000 pop up impressions for $500 (at half a cent each), for example, then you need to know how many clicks, approximately, you are going to receive. This is where, unfortunately, you need to trust the advertiser a bit. You need to ask them what sort of ballpark click through rate you can expect that you are going to get.

You need to be able to estimate the number of clicks to get an idea of the visitors that are going to come to your site. If you are leery of asking the advertiser, you can also go with some industry standards, where you can expect to see a click through rate of around 0.1% which is fairly average for the internet.

So, with 0.1% of the advertiser's surfers clicking through on 100,000 pop ups, then you can feel safe estimating that your site is going to receive around 100 clicks from this campaign. If you are still seeing an average 1:100 conversion on your site, then you can count on getting around 1 signup on this campaign. See? Easy to turn impression information into sales data.

So, the above campaign would give you one signup for $500, right? Not a very good deal. You are not going to want to buy those 100,000 impressions, since they will not make you back the money you will have to pay for them. This is the sort of math that you need to do with any proposal, before you lay your hard-earned cash down to buy any ad or traffic. This is the way to make sure that you do not get burned and that you get not only your money's worth, but more money back than you initially lay out.

Once you have a number of free and paid traffic streams sending steady visitors and signups to your site, you have to make sure that you are getting everything you can out of these surfers. There are quite a few ways to do this, to maximize the traffic you do get. Two of the best ways are 404 redirects and exit consoles.

When a surfer clicks a link of yours that is outdated, or they try to find their way to a part of your site by changing the URL, they are likely to get a 404 "page not found" error. Instead of just letting your surfer see this error message and likely leave, program your server to send them to a default page instead.

You can use this default 404 page to either promote a sponsor's site, or to promote another of your sites. The trick is to make every surfer count, make every click work for you, instead of letting them go to waste. You never know, you may generate some extra signups by doing this, which just lowers your overall cost per sale.

You can also set up a console to pop up when someone is leaving your site, to take one last crack at them before they are gone. If you are working with a sponsor company and promoting their sites, try popping one of them up in front of the surfer as they are trying to leave. The thinking is that if the surfers are not interested in your site, there is a chance they may be interested in another site that is similar, yet different. It can't hurt to make them one more offer before they are gone, because once they are gone, you have no control over them anymore. The trick is, since you are paying money to get this traffic, you want to give them every chance to sign up for something and make you some money.

Make your money work for you - the harder you make it work, the more likely you are to make more money.

If you do the 404 redirecting and exit pop ups the right way, and stick to your targeting, you may be able to gather up a lot more signups than you had before. But you have to keep the same lessons in mind that you learned above. Make sure that if you are running a toon site, that you pop a toon site to your exiting visitors. If you are running an oral site, then make sure that your 404 page is sending them to a page dedicated to oral content. You may even want to set the 404 to send the visitor back to your front page, just to make sure that they don't want to sign up with you.

Same with the exit pop up, use one to send the surfer back to the front page of your site and if they are still not interested, hit them with another site of the same theme to make sure that they have one more chance to sign up.

So, those are the basic lessons involved in buying traffic, analyzing your buys, and then maximizing the traffic you do buy. There is a lot more involved than what is discussed above, but this is just a simple starter guide to get you thinking the right way.

There are any number of variables that are specific to you and your site, and those are left to you to figure out and act upon. With some trial and error and some solid logical thinking, it should not take too long to get you on the road to not only generating profitable traffic, but buying your traffic like a pro.

Good luck and happy advertising!