PPC presents a very difficult learning curve for some marketers. And many a Home Business owner has made at least one of the 8 mistakes listed below:

1. Obvious and Highly Competitive Keywords

Whenever you can think of a keyword easily, there’s usually a high demand on it between advertisers. Which means the newbie advertiser is going to be clawing at hundreds of ads for a first page placement with extremely high click cost and low conversion.

Giving a searcher too many options lowers your chances of getting them to take the action you want them to, eg, opting in or buying. Therefore, when starting out, you should avoid bidding on extremely competitive keywords.

There is an infinite supply of keywords available and you would be mistaken if you insisted on bidding on the one impossible keyword…eg, “make money from home”.

2. They're bidding only on high or low volume keywords

Owning an ad campaign that covers all the major keywords in the market is key to generating thousands of daily leads.

Using a mindmap or a plan of the TYPES of keywords people might search for in your market will allow you to sweep the entire market and capture much more searches. On the other hand, if you restrict yourself to a keyword like “mlm” and derivatives of it, you will only be able to talk to people looking up things to do with mlm and explicitly using “mlm” in their search.

3. Bid on the wrong keywords

Quite often advertisers pick the wrong keywords that don’t capture the mindset of their prospect. For example, if you’re selling a training affiliate product for network marketers, it would be a bad idea to bid on “mlm leads”. People searching for such a keyword are usually looking for a place to buy ready-made leads at a good price.

They have little interest in generating leads of their own. And even the best ad will usually fail to capture their interest. It’s simply irrelevant.

4. Bid too low

Bidding too low can be an expensive exercise. The problem is that when you bid low, your ads will not be seen as frequently and will not be clicked as often. This results in a lower Click-Thru-Rate.

High click-thru-rates are rewarded with cheaper cost per click. And lower click-thru-rates are punished with increasing cost.

Therefore, by bidding too low, you are likely to hurt your click-thru-rate and increase your cost.

Your quality score can be seriously impacted by a click-thru-rate that is consistently dropping. Which means your ads will simply stop showing on Google unless you increase your bid to or more.

5. Confusing the searcher when they land on the website

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is people who embark on PPC only to send all the traffic into the wrong kind of website. Websites with too many external link take that traffic you paid for to arrive on your page and send it AWAY from your page where you will probably never see it again. Corporate webpages and replicated system pages are often horrible when tested with PPC because they tend to do this. They cause confusion and do not properly benefit from each click.

A better strategy is to send clicks that come from each keyword to a keyword-specific landing page with ONE purpose. What do you want to do? Produce a sale? Get a lead?

Your page needs to focus all the visitor’s attention on doing that ONE task you want. That's exactly why squeeze pages are so similiar in pay per click.

6. Write misleading ads

Ads that mislead are not usually intentional. Few Google advertisers know what to say in their ads and they're usually poorly written and appear to have no focus and no call to action.

The best strategy, i found, is to use the same headline on your landing page as your ad copy. This makes it directly 100% relevant.

7. No tracking

A horrible mistake I see sometimes even the experts make is not tracking every step the customer takes from search, to click, to opt-in, to reading your emails, to buying your product.

Knowing and understanding how many impressions it takes to get a click, how many clicks it takes to get an opt-in lead, and how many leads it takes to generate a sale is extremely important. They are what determine your profit.

After all, you will only succeed with PPC if you can minimise your cost and increase your revenue to get the highest possible profit.

8. No Split-Testing

Split-testing is probably the third most important skill to master after keyword research and ad-copy.

Even the worst copywriters can do very well on Google if they split-test.

Split-testing can be done at every stage. It gives you a reference point from which you can determine if one version of your ad performs better than another.

If one version of your landing page gets more opt-in leads than a second version. It’s possible to find huge differences in response when choosing colours, laying out your page, and testing different wording.

Jim Yaghi, author of PPC Domination is a Google Adwords PPC expert who generates as much as 15,000 profitable leads a month in the competitive Adwords Training niche.