(Paying for Pay Per Click Without a Plan)

An example of Pay Per Click without a plan is when a business continually pays $500,000 dollars per month for Google adwords and NEVER ranks highly on the natural search engines for those same keyword purchases month after month.

In the new Theme Zoom course, Gateway to Multi-Channel Marketing, Art Crowley makes the point that when you understand LTV (lifetime value of your customer) and you use the LTV system to acquire customers, you will eventually have an unlimited marketing budget. This means that you can pay more than anyone else in your niche to acquire a prospect through PPC.

People have used the knowledge of LTV to argue that creating a plan to rank highly on the organic search engines is perhaps not necessary when you have an unlimited marketing budget.

I don't agree.

Even when you have an unlimited marketing budget, spending huge amounts of money on PPC with zero exit strategy seems silly. It is much more affordable in the long run to create a simple plan that will help you start the process of ranking for profitable terms. When you rank for these terms on the organic search engines, you will start getting traffic to them for free.

This "PPC addiction and over spending" is the main painful scenarios that drove me to create Theme Zoom, because I saw unmanaged PPC spending happening all too often with my clients.

Outsource everything . . . including your shoes!

- Tom Peters, Re-Imagine

If a business owner finally understands the power of Buoyant Themed Linking and combines this knowledge with long term business planning, he/she can simply outsource different legs (agendas) of the website success stool.

For example, you can get someone to create themed content and another person to generate the technical pages with SEO specifications. The integration of these two will inevitably lead to a more profitable (and valuable) website.

Obviously you don't need Theme Zoom to integrate these agendas, but software can certainly can make this sort of planning more systematic and less expensive.

For far less than half a million per month, this business owner could be building two of the other legs of his Website Success Stool (educational and technical) while pursuing his direct response marketing agenda far more effectively. If you were to calculate all of your keywords to Theme Zoom specifications, it would take around 90 minutes per keyword.

In other words, with an understanding of how to organize and automate a natural keyword ranking strategy, you could transform your "strategy-less" business into a profit machine that benefits from ALL of the data already being collected from your (direct response) PPC campaign.  You extend and increase your volume profit by combining your PPC data with your technical SEO efforts. This will often completely wipe out any competition that is not applying similar knowledge.

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics

Does your competition have similar knowledge?

As of 2007 and well into 2008, very likely not.

Make no mistake about it-  the majority of small businesses out there who spend tons of money on PPC do NOT track the most expensive money keyword to account for organic rankings.

They do not have an adequate plan to map and track these terms over time. As a professional consultant I saw this was a serious problem in the industry.