This document is designed to help newcomers understand how to advertise with pay-per-click (PPC) search engines. The concepts in this guide are easy to follow and can be used for any PPC site.

Pay-Per-Click Search Basics

BOLSCAN.COM enables advertisers to bid on keywords to list their sites in Internet search results. The amount bid determines the rank of the advertised site. The bid price represents the cost to advertiser; it's how much the advertiser is charged each time a consumer clicks on a PPC result and visits the advertiser's site. Advertisers will commonly bid on multiple "keywords" or "keyword phrases" to increase the number of potential customers who see their results and visit their sites. The pay-per-click advertiser who bids the most will be listed first on the search result page.

So, how do you get started?

Step 1: Think About Your Business!

• What products or services do you sell?
• Who is your target customer?
• What words are your target customers most likely to use when looking for your product or service?

Example:
Let's say you own a bicycle shop called "Mary's Bicycle Shop". Your target customer is someone who wants to buy a bicycle, bicycle parts or bicycle gear. What "keyword phrases" are your customers likely to use when searching for a bicycle? Take a look at this list:

• bicycle
• bicycles
• bike
• cycling
• bicycle tire
• bicycle tires
• helmet
• bike jersey
• Schwinn

These are all phrases that someone might type into a search engine if they were looking for a product you sell. Select keywords like these as terms to bid upon.

Take a few minutes to write down a list of keyword phrases related to your business.

Step 2: Add Keywords

First, click on "Manage Listings" and "Add Listings". This will bring up a simple form. In the first box, called "Search Keyword" you can enter the keyword phrases you created in Step 1, one per form.

Now, you should see a box called "Bid". This is where you enter the amount you are willing to pay to have your site listed under a particular keyword phrase. The more you pay, the higher you will be listed and, typically, the more traffic you will receive. You can either leave your Initial Bid set to the default, which is "$0.01", or you can change the bid price to a higher amount to ensure maximum exposure, but before hit the "Search Bids" key.

Next, enter your "Site Title". In our earlier example for Mary's Bike Shop, a title may be "Mary's Bike Shop - Top Brand Bikes!" The title usually includes the name of your website and a short slogan or generic description. It must be no longer than 70 characters. (A character is any letter, number, symbol or space.)

The next box is for the "Site URL". The Site URL is the web address that someone would type in to reach your website. For example, our URL is http://www.bolscan.com/us/. Make sure to enter the FULL URL, including the "http://" before the website address.

Last, enter a longer "Description" of your site. The description can be up to 150 characters long and should give the visitor a simple idea of what your site sells. For our example, a description may be "We have been providing the top name brand bicycles and parts to our customers for over 30 years. Items can be shipped within 3 days anywhere in the country!" This is where you should sell yourself to the customer and entice them to visit your website. Remember: Do not lie! Don't say anything that is not true and don't tell users you sell anything you don't sell. While using a false description may get you more traffic, it will not be "qualified traffic" and visitors will leave immediately.

Then you are done filling in the boxes on this page, press the button labeled "Add Listing" and submit your pay-per-click keywords.

Step 3: Fund Your Account

BOLSCAN.COM works on a debit account system, meaning you must pre-pay your account in order to receive traffic. When your funds run out, we stop the advertising until you fund your account again. This works out well for many advertisers because they can set a spending limit - you will never receive a bill from BOLSCAN.COM.

To fund your account, click "Payment". We only accept payment via Paypal. The funding is immediate. The minimum payment is $10 for first-time and return customers. As soon as the payment is posted to your account, your advertising will be live and your site can begin to receive traffic.

Step 4: Adjust Your Bids

Now that your account is active, you should adjust your bids to make sure you are in the optimum position. The first thing to do is decide how much you are willing to pay. The more you are willing to pay, the higher you will be listed in a search and, typically, the more traffic you will receive. It is NOT always best to be number one, however; you should only bid as much as you're willing to spend to get a customer to your site.

How should you decide how much to bid? Let's look at an example. Let's say that Mary (from Mary's Bike Shop) receives 100 visitors to her site, and that of every 100 visitors, 5 visitors buy something. Mary also knows that on average when a customer buys something, she makes $10 profit. That means:

5 paying customers x $10 profit per customer = $50 profit

$50 total profit / 100 visitors = 50 cents-per-visitor profit

Using simple math, we see that even though not every visitor buys something, on average a visitor is worth 50 cents profit for Mary's store. That means that Mary can afford to pay up to 50 cents per click to "break even". If she pays any more than 50 cents per click, she will lose money; if she pays less than 50 cents per click, she will make money. Mary may decide that she wants to spend, at most, half of her profits on advertising. This means Mary wants to be listed as high as possible while paying 25 cents per customer.

You can use the "Change Keyword Bids" option to change your bids. This will show you all of your keywords. You can manually adjust your bids so that you gain the position you want. When you are done make sure to submit your changes.

Step 5: Start Seeing Results!

That's it! Your account should now be live and you will begin receiving traffic. You should still plan to log in to review your account activity, adjust your bids and make sure your account is funded. A healthy account is a well-tended account. Adjustments in keyword lists, bid prices and advertising (title and description) copy can all have a large impact on your success. The amount of traffic you receive will depend on many variables:

• Popularity of your keyword phrases
• Relevance of your keywords to your product
• What position you are listed in under each keyword phrase
• How interesting your site description is to a searcher

Don't forget though that the most important part is the price you are paying per visitor, not how many visitors you receive. We suggest you start slowly and test out different site descriptions, keyword choices and bid amounts to see what works best for you.