Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Honest Review of PPC Coach

By Mike Wong

Pay Per Click marketing (PPC) is an extremely lucrative market to get into and there are many PPC marketers out there that are making millions of dollars a year with it. However, learning PPC can be quite a daunting task, especially for newbies. If you dont know what youre doing, you can lose a boatload of money in a short period of time. This is where PPC Coach comes in. PPC-Coach is a monthly subscription program that teaches you all the ins-and-outs of PPC. From keyword research, to landing page creation, youll be guided step by step by PPC coach and his many friends.

For $50 a month, you'll gain access to the PPC Coach membership site. When you join, you'll start off learning the month 1 Method and each subsequent month you remain a member will give you access to a new PPC method. Each method is described and includes the affiliate merchant and specific offers to use. However, you should probably choose your own offers to prevent saturation.

As of now, there are almost 1500 members, and more than 50k posts in the PPC Coach forums. There are lots of informative posts being posted every day on the forum. PPC coach himself is always online answering questions, along with Coach v2.0. You'll also find lots of great posts from members like SteveL and Harry1970 who are regulars and are quite the PPC marketers themselves. I think the forums are probably the most valuable part of the PPC Coach membership.

If you're having problems with your landing pages, just make a post and you'll have other members offering you solid advice on how to make it better. Having problems installing one of the tools? Not a problem as it is highly likely that someone else has experienced your same problem before.

On the PPC Coach main page, you'll have access to the videos. These videos are Camtasia screencasts created and narrated by PPC Coach himself. I really like the fact that Coach shows real life examples which he uses to explain the topic he's describing. Most of the videos range from 15-20 minutes long, and they cover everything from keyword research, to creating landing pages, to using the PPC-Coach tools, and more.

The tools that come with your PPC Coach membership are great as well. Landing Site Generator is a handy php script which makes it painless to set up a landing page. Just modify a few variables in the configuration file and you're up and running. This is an easy way to get started with the Month 1 method.

Youll also get access to the Keyword Tracking System tool which allows you to track a several variables of your PPC campaigns including gross margin, roi and epc for each campaign, adgroup and keyword. Theres the Adwords Magic Tool, which is a web based tool that allows you to input a keyword, and it will spit out thousands of variations in under 30 seconds. Youll save a lot of time using this one. These are just a sampling of the tools accessible to you as a PPC-Coach member.

There are some things that PPC Coach could improve on. For one thing, the main site itself does not look all that appealing. Its kind of spartan and a little disorganized. A lot of the info on the main site is kind of sparse. For example, the Quick Start Guide is kind of useless. I wish it had active links to some of the great content on the forums.

I also think that prospective members would appreciate a trial period for the service. If you don't happen to like what you see with your PPC Coach membership, there currently is no way to get a refund for that initial $50. Still, I think you'll find the quality of PPC Coach to be good enough that you'll probably stick around for awhile.

PPC Coach is aimed more to those new to PPC. The month 1 methods are not really unique and I've seen them described in other places before. I'm sure other people who have been doing PPC for awhile will want to skip to the more advanced PPC methods. Still, the community and the tools are a compelling reason for even the expert PPC marketing to join.

Being a member of PPC Coach will not guarantee you PPC success. The information you will learn will provide the foundation and the tools will save you time. But its up to you to make the most of your membership. That means youll need to ask questions when you need help, and actually get off your butt and start creating PPC campaigns. If youve been looking to get started with PPC and are trying to figure out how to start, then PPC Coach is definitely a program you should look into. If you take advantage of all that PPC-Coach offers, youll definitely start making some money. - 16747

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