MBA-Advantage.com is an online accounting course designed to help those going through an MBA pass their accounting module.
This client found me through my blog and wanted to partner with an expert in online sales. She was in the process of adapting the product for online sales. My task was to set up the online sales process. After much discussion about deadlines and budgets, we stripped that down to the bare minimum to start: a landing page, and a pay per click campaign. The idea being that that gets us started, and we can add all other stuff as we deem it necessary.
The graphics aren't mine, by the way, the client provided those. Actually nor is the text, except I've improved it in places.
Overall the page, payment processing including saving bits and pieces to the database once a sale is made, providing the download links for the client, and working out and running the PPC campaign came to about £800.
It's only just gone live, but I'll report back on sales once we've hit our stride.
If you haven't come across Pay Per Click (PPC), Google Adwords is the main place to start although there are plenty of other places. The idea is you don't pay anything for the ads that appear, you only pay when someone clicks on them and comes through to your site. Nice and easy. Except it isn't. It's fiendishly complex. For instance, the amount you pay per click is set by demand and by how well your ad performs and how relevant it is to the search - you place ads by keyphrase, so that when someone types in "cat boxes" your cat box superstore ad appears. Which keyphrase you use is key. Perhaps no-one searches for cat boxes. Perhaps everyone searches for "kitty boxes". All of that is just the start.
Facebook also offers Pay Per Click advertising and is interesting because of the different ways you can target. Here you don't just target by keyphrase, you choose your demographics: age range, sex, married or single. So I keep getting ads for drum shops and geek t-shirts, which is pretty cool because I drum while wearing geek t-shirts.
On most Google searches, the first few links at the top, and those in the right hand column (both labelled 'sponsored links', and anywhere else you see that phrase), are pay per click ads. When you click them, the advertiser pays Google. But don't get any big ideas about getting back at your most hated companies. Google is very sophisticated, and they know when you keep clicking.