Smaller PPC Search Engines

An Adult Webmaster Article

Written by Tom from Tom's Newbie Booster

Sick of Big Brother pulling your ads over at Google? Finding Overture's 10 cents per click is leaving your bottom feeling a little sore? Then it could be time to venture out into the wild wild web and look at some of the other offerings available on the search engine PPC traffic market.

As I've mentioned before here on the board, and as most will already be aware, there's a world of other search engines out there who are offering webmasters like us surfers by the click. The best place to start finding them is to look here - http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/ - where you can find the major ones, and a lot of smaller ones you'll never really need too.

Although I don't think much of Alexa's traffic stats, they're as good a rough guide as you're going to get as to what SE traffic each engine is capable of getting (and delivering). Use this chart - http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/alexa-results.shtml - and stick to the ones that show 5 (or preferably 6) figures in the 'Alexa Visits' column. There's many PPC search engines out there - but they don't all have that much traffic.

The good news with smaller search engines comes in two parts:

1) There's a lot less competition. It seems like everyone and his wife is using Overture and Adwords to promote their own products, or adult and mainstream affiliate products. It never ceases to amaze me how fast new products appear on google adwords - often the same day an affiliate program releases them to be promoted. And trying to find available keywords and phrases to get listed under is getting harder and harder.

2) Price. Pure 'n' simple! Google's minimum click is 5 cents (add 17.5% to that if you're in the UK!) And overture's minimum price per click is a whopping 10 cents. And these could go up at any time.

Although signing up for a PPC search engine is normally free, before you see any action you're going to have to deposit around 25 bucks. While it's unlikely you'll make a fortune back on your initial investment (although it's not uncommon to get a sign-up or two at this stage), you'll get a very good idea about the possibilities of each engine - and be able to see exactly how the system works. One thing I found you have to look out for is auto-rebilling. Check the billing page, or the page where you deposit funds, and uncheck anything that says 'renew automatically'. Otherwise you might cut through a lot of cash on your credit card while you're asleep that night!

One of the first things I'd recommend doing would be to add each PPC search engine's login page to your start page. This is the page that your browser is set to load up when it starts. This can be a regular HTML page which is stored on your hard disk - for 'super-fast' bookmarks. It's not going to be good enough to add them to your regular favorites / bookmarks because you're going to be checking them a lot as you check reports, and try to figure out how the system works.

The next thing I'd recommend would be to get some good referrer stats. This will show you exactly where your ads are appearing. One problem with PPC engines is that they boast they'll show your ads on many different places. These are usually partnered sites or other search engines. But you need to know where. If your ad / listing is appearing on some JUNK warez type search engine, then you're not getting good quality traffic for your bucks.

Which phrases you choose are always important with the search engines, and even more important on the pay per click search engines. And I'd say that they're more important yet on the smaller pay per click search engines. This is because you're not going to have the same luxury as you have on google or overture - where even obscure phrases will get a number of clicks. With smaller PPC engines, there's less monthly visitors performing less searches. It's likely you'll need to use more competitive phrases than you usually do. It all balances out in a way because there'll BE less competition for those phrases.

The smaller PPC engines will all offer some kind of predictive tool which will give you a guess as to how much traffic you'll get. It may just tell you how many searches in a month that phrase gets. Either way it's going to be a rough guide at best. The only way you'll find out for sure is to test it out. You'll find that your phrase either doesn't get any action, or will eat your budget up pretty quickly.

The kinds of phrases that someone searches for on say google won't vary all that much from the kinds they'll search for on a smaller PPC search engine. They'll still be searching for 'porn', 'hot milf' and all the other phrases we go for. So using Overtures keywords suggestion tool, even though it might not be specifically meant to be used for the smaller PPC search engines, is still a valid way to choose phrases to get listed under.

I've had good results with smaller PPC search engines and please share any successes / info you have with 'em too.

Good luck!

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Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com