Can You Make Money with PPC Ads?

The Smoking Niche. Maybe the ‘stop smoking pill’ is a profitable keyword in the smoking niche.

You’ve looked around the internet, seen lots of ads. Maybe even heard that you can make money with PPC ads or Pay Per Click ads. I certainly have over the years. I even set up a few Google AdWord ads for an internet marketing product some years ago. However, in my case Google never approved my ads.

When I created my ads I was careful to make them almost exactly like some existing Google PPC ads I had seen. However Google never approved my ads. That’s even after trying three different versions of them. I gave up! The last time I looked those ads were still in y account unapproved.

Previous to that, my son had set up some Google AdWords ads, which are PPC ads. He had much better luck than me. Even so he really didn’t make any money from his ads. The ads were too expensive.

Over the years, especially more recently I’ve read where others have said PPC ads were very expensive, especially Google AdWords. I suspect that is true, but everything is relative. Although their ads may be expensive still people are using them. They must get good results to keep using them.

Using Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads

Even though bigger markets are harder to work in, if you use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and a proven way to convert your paid visitors into cash, that’s all you need to compete with the big players in any market.

Just think about that for a minute. Right off the bat you’ll be light years ahead of those who are taking the long road to profits by depending on free traffic. It is certainly possible to make money with PPC ads. Of course it helps to know what you are doing.

Sure, your costs may be higher when using PPC advertising if there’s lots of competition but the truth is that if you pick your keywords properly and you set up your campaigns in the right way, you’ve got the same formula that the marketing gurus use to rake in big paydays every month.

If you think I am making this up here is a reconstruction of a conversation I had with someone who handles the PPC costs for a small company in Southern California. He writes the checks to pay for those ads.

Here is a short summary of our conversation about PPC Ads:

Charles: I tried PPC advertising some years ago, but didn’t like the idea of paying for traffic and I also didn’t have much luck with it.

Ray: You probably didn’t do enough or maybe you didn’t do any keyword research.

Charles: I did a little.

Ray: Our company does all their online business using PPC advertising. We don’t even have any merchandise.

Charles: What? Do you sell physical or downloadable products?

Ray: We sell physical products. They are drop shipped direct to the customer.

Charles: What kind of ads do you use? And do you spend much money on ads?

Ray: We use Google AdWords. Actually we have a company that specializes in that and they create our ads and run them for us.

Charles: Wow! That sounds awfully inefficient to me. Do you make money from the ads?

Ray: Yes, for sure. I’ll tell you, we spend between $25,000 and $35,000 every month on AdSense ads.

Charles: But the company you work for is a small company. How can they afford that?

Ray: The ads essentially pay for themselves plus make us a nice profit. We run the ads, people order and we collect the money. The products go directly to them and we don’t touch anything, except the cash we put in the bank.

Charles: I’m shocked! Spending that much on ads, yet making many times more profit than what you spend on ads. I will have to do some serious thinking how I can use my AdWords account to make me even a small percent of the profits you guys do.

PPC Ads can be Profitable

That was the gist of a conversation we had right before Christmas last year (2012). Although they were spending big money on PPC ads, it shows it is possible to make big bucks off of these little ads.

The niche they were in was a specialized niche and not very big, yet it offered big money returns. I might also mention that the online business was something totally separate from their brick and mortar business which was a retail store. It had nothing to do with anything they sold in the store.

OK, that doesn’t prove the little guy or a beginning niche affiliate marketer or any marketer can make big bucks with PPC ads. But it proved to me that if one does things right, that money can be made with those little PPC ads.

It will almost certainly take some trial and error, and with that some wasted money trying to find out which ads work and which are the most effective. But once you get it right the sky could be the limit if the market is big.

So if you are looking for a way to advertise a product or service don’t totally disregard PPC ads because you’ve heard they are expensive or haven’t worked for you in the past.

Have you had any luck with PPC Ads?

I will be trying PPC ads again myself in the near future – possibly September or October 2016. If you have had any good luck with PPC ads please leave a reply below to let others know.

Oops! I haven’t had a chance to try PPC ads again. I’m swamped with other work for now. It’s now late 2017, but maybe in early 2018 I’ll get that chance.