PPC Management: For Those With Cashflow!

Every business thrives when it adapts to its own resources and limitations. If you have a large pile of startup funding, but not much by way of income, for example, it’s the right time for your business to invest in those things that will turn your initial capital into cashflow over time. In the world of Internet marketing, the most common example of that kind of thing is SEO — paying up front to build long-term organic traffic to your site.

But if what you have is cashflow — you’re already selling product and making money, just not enough money — then you need to invest in something different. Something that works a bit more in the short-term, kicking your RoI up immediately (though without the build-up of value that SEO offers). That thing is pay-per-click marketing, or PPC — but the PPC market is too volatile to try to operate on your own, which is why most modern SEO companies also offer PPC management services.

The attractive thing about PPC management is that ultimately, from your perspective as a business, it looks like this: you set aside some budget each month for your PPC campaigns and to pay your PPC manager…and then you essentially stop worrying about it. They’ll set up your campaigns properly, select solid keywords to market to, get people clicking through to see your site, and they’ll send you a report every month about what exactly you got for your money.

If you need to extract more from your PPC campaign, you can do that in two ways: either by increasing your budget so that you can tackle higher-volume, more-profitable keywords, or — and this is the lifehack — by investing in Conversion Rate Optimization. CRO is basically “tuning up your website so that it attracts more visitors to buy,” and it enhances the effectiveness of both SEO and PPC.

PPC isn’t SEO, though — if you pay for PPC management for five years and then stop, what you have is a five-year history of paying for a ton of visitors. If you pay for SEO for five years and then stop, what you have is about the same total expenditure for a lot less visitors…and a position on the search engine results pages that will keep drawing in visitors for several more years to come. Ultimately, every business’ goal should be to get off of PPC management — but for many cashflow-oriented entrepreneurs, PPC management is the bridge you need to get to that point.