Editor’s note: This is Vittorio Bosio’s first guest post to this blog.

You just finished writing your white paper and set up a page on your website where people can download it. What you need now, is traffic.

The quickest way to drive targeted visitors to your website is Pay-Per-Click advertising. And the PPC engine that can send you the most people is Google Adwords, even though we shouldn’t forget about the other main players, namely Yahoo Search Engine Marketing and MSN Adcenter.

With Pay-Per-Click advertising you are able to write an ad that promotes your white paper and display it when someone searches for your keywords. Unlike banner advertising, you don’t pay every time your ad is served (an “impression”), you only pay when somebody clicks on it.

Let’s analyze why PPC is the traffic source you should start with to give visibility to your white paper.

It Is Immediate
Provided you already know which keywords and keyword phrases you want to target, it can take as little as 15 minutes to get started with Google Adwords.

This doesn’t mean that you are done in 15 minutes, though: you are about to learn what other kind of activities you should carry out. Nonetheless, the time required is much less than what is needed to do Search Engine Optimization. And nothing stops you from letting your Adwords campaign bring traffic while you do link building and other activities that will help you score higher in the organic results (where you don’t pay for the traffic).

It Is Very Targeted
You get to decide who sees your ad. You don’t want any traffic, you want targeted traffic, that is likely to download your white paper and buy your products or services.

With Google Adwords, you don’t only pick the keywords that should trigger your ad, you can also specify in which countries you want your advertisement to be seen. But it doesn’t stop there: you can get more granular and specify single cities. If you offer your services in particular State or metropolitan area, you are going to use this option, to pay only for visitors that meet that requirement.

You don’t only control the distribution, but also the time when your ad should be active. For example, if you see that the traffic doesn’t convert as well during week-ends, you can have your campaign automatically deactivated during those days. You can even select times of the day where you don’t want your advertisement to be seen.

Test And Keep Testing
One distinct advantage that Pay-Per-Click has over other sources of traffic is the possibility to run tests, to see the effectiveness of the copy you have on your landing page and which keywords bring you the most targeted traffic.

Start by testing your headline: a good headline can make or break your campaign. You just need to create two different versions of your landing page and have software rotate them for you, so that half of your traffic sees the first version, the other half the second. You can use Google Website Optimizer, which is free, or go with a paid software, such as AdTrackz, the one that I use.

Your testing should not be limited to your landing page: test different versions of your ad too. This is particularly important because Google rewards advertisers who get the most clicks out of 100 impressions by letting them pay less to achieve the same position. This ratio is called Click-Through Rate and your goal is to progressively increase it over time by constantly running split-tests to come up with better versions of your ad.

Start Little, Then Grow
If you do your homework and invest some time testing different versions of your ad and landing page, you will increase both your Click-Through Rate (how many clicks you get out of 100 impressions) and Conversion Rate (how many visitors download your white paper out of 100 clicks you receive).

When you feel that things are starting to work, you can increase your daily budget or your Maximum Cost Per Click, to have your ad shown closer to the top.

And when you feel you conquered Google Adwords, you can move to Yahoo SEM and MSN Adcenter to see how that traffic converts and whether it is worth advertising on those networks too.

Benefit From What You Learned
If you take my advice and start testing your landing page, you will soon find out what works and what doesn’t. And you can use that same landing page with other sources of traffic.

The secret is to test the water and achieve a good enough conversion rate with Pay-Per-Click advertising, then start expanding by doing SEO, banner advertising, article marketing, etc.

Once you have a page that you know can convert traffic, you just need to pick a new traffic stream and bring it to your website.

About the author: If you are interested in video tutorials and articles that can teach how to increase your web site traffic and build a list of targeted prospects for your business, you are going to like what Vittorio Bosio is saying on his blog: www.TechSavvyMarketer.com.

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>> Related Articles on This Blog

• Pros & Cons of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• Should You Consider Search Engine Optimization?
• Search Engine Optimization Tips And Tricks
• Search Engine Optimization Tips: Meta Tags
• Thursday: Search Engine Optimization and White Papers

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 5:57 am and is filed under Lead Generation, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.