If you really want to make money from PPC you need to make multiple landing pages on your site. These are pages that match A) The searchers intent and B) What you said in the ad. Those will give you a better quality score and you'll get higher conversion rates. Basically you want to carry through the message of your PPC ad onto your landing page. If your ad says 15 day free trial, your landing page headline should say something about the 15 day free trial.

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/ They have 2 free webinars a month and tons of optimization examples on their site.

http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer And to run your tests, google website optimizer is probably the best free tool out there.

The more focused you get the higher your profits will be. So instead of 1 login page (which I'm sure converts like poop) you should probably have 20-30 different pages tailored to your ad groups. Ideally you'd have 1 adgroup with 1 keyword phrase and 1 matching landing page but that quickly becomes a scalability issue.

At work we're up to about 400 landing pages but we use some software that automatically A/B tests pages and makes creating pages pretty fast (but it's like $4,000 a month for the software).

Does anyone know the site www.websitebroker.com ? It has got a lot of websites for sale. Anyone knows if it's legit?

I think you're exactly right. Conversion rates aren't great. From my own blogs, something like 5% of clicks result in a sign-up. But from some other sources, it's far below 1%. I'm sure by creating tailored landing pages, I'd get better rates, and also would solve the problem of getting Adwords to show my ads. The problem is, my site is just a 'skin' (similar to poker sites' skins) and I don't have full control over the 'landing page'. It's unlikely that I can get multiple versions of it, and any changes I need would take time to get implemented. Would it make sense to create a true 'landing page' that people reach prior to the site, containing detailed tailored information?

yeh does anyone know if that site is legit? it has a lot of listings.

most of the listings seem fishy. either it's 5k for a 15k/month site, or on the ridic expensive end 350k for a 4k/mo, 62/1k, etc. now i'm a total noob so perhaps these are legit worthy turnkey opportunities, but meh.

the few that do seem to fall within 10-15 months profit all got started this month. good or bad? no proven sustainability vs. hasn't reached peak yet - which way should i look at that?

I dont know anything about that particular site, but here's another that seems to have good reputation.

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/

bump..very nice and informative thread

For sure an inspiring thread. I'm an experienced web developer that is looking to build a network of sites. Ideally I'm looking to partner with someone who has SEO/promotion skills and enjoys that side of the business. If you are interested, please feel free to PM me about any possible partner project.

great thread max very interesting, have you been able to buy any other sites recently?

How important is it that the domainname is targeting your most important keywords?

For a new domain it's VERY important. For ours, we found a domain name that's 11 years old, and related to our keywords but not exact(www.horseswest.com with keyword dressage saddles) and that's worked out really well so far.

Nice site. I think you'll do well with it. Is that your 1877 number or is that the dropshipper?

thanks Eihli. That 877 number forwards to me , my wife, and/or my partner. My wife is the saddle expert fwiw.

i've wondered that before, dont know answer though

Its important because you will get a much better google pagerank position and get a better SEO(Search Engine Optimization). But if you wanna start a new brand you can forget about the keywords on your domain name because its not worth and you can get a nice SEO without the keywords on the domain too.