There are a lot of so-called gurus that make a living by teaching others how to drive traffic to websites. Creating and running a website could be difficult as it is, but things get even more complicated when you struggle to drive any real traffic to your website. Obviously, most of us want to earn the most profit and incur the least cost in the process. Being involved in SEO and the social media can help you bring down your costs and generate free leads for your business. Google Adwords and other search engine advertising networks can also drive you a lot of traffic. But that doesn’t mean you should jump into new channels without having a plan.

A lot of gurus will tell you that you can expand your business dramatically by learning the art of search engine advertising. There is no doubt that Google Adwords and other networks can bring you quality traffic for a reasonable amount of money if you optimize your campaigns, landing pages, and ads. I understand why a lot of experts claim that you should jump into the Adwords game as fast as possible. Google Adwords could be an amazing source of leads, but it can make you go broke as well. Before taking advantage of such services, you need to make sure you understand what you intend to accomplish by spending money online. There are a lot of fundamental questions that you need to ask before getting started with search engine advertising. You can skip this process and jump right into it, but you’ll be leaving money on the table if you do so.

Here are a few questions that you need to ask before spending a fortune on Google Adwords:

• What do you plan to accomplish with your advertising campaigns?
• Do you plan on getting more exposure for your brand, sell a product, generate leads, or inform your visitors about a specific topic?
• What constitutes a conversion?
• How do you plan to test your metrics to increase your conversions?
• Do you have a specific path of action in place for your visitors?
• Is your landing page relevant to the type of traffic you are planning to drive to your website?
• Are your ads relevant to your landing page?
• Do you have proper call to action in place in your ads or on your landing pages?
• Are you getting the best out of your traffic? Do you have a squeeze box in place to gather your leads’ information?
• Are you cross-selling on your landing pages?
• Have you identified areas that can lead to traffic leakage?
• Do you have an idea what CPA keeps your business profitable?
• Do you have a forecast to show you what numbers you need to hit to break even?

There are plenty of other questions you need to ask before and during your campaigns to make sure you get the most bang out of your advertising bucks. I am not suggesting that you should over-think things. That could only slow you down. But don’t jump in and start spending $1000 a day on a campaign without having some plan. Google Adwords can be the best way to burn a lot of money in a short period of time if you don’t plan ahead. It’s not convenient but it’s a necessity.

Let’s say you want to get into the Internet marketing game. You want to do SEO & PPC to dominate your niche. But how do you go about actually beating folks in each channel. Depending on the degree of competitiveness in your niche, the incumbent may be awfully hard to beat. But you are not really hopeless. First, you need to go through your top competitors sites (top 3) to figure out what is their search strategy (see the below two tools). The good thing about running a business on the Internet is that there is just so much information available on the WWW that you can use to your advantage. You can run sophisticated spying campaigns on your competitors. You can also carefully observe what your competitors are doing and try to do it better.

You will still have to go through your keyword research process, but by using the below tools you can figure out what keywords your competitors are using, and what you can do better. The concept is not something new. Many super marketers use the very same technique to enter and dominate niches at will (full disclosure: depending on your niche, you may have to spend considerable amount of effort and time to achieve dominance in your niche).

Search Engine Optimization & PPC

Once you have used your favorite keyword tool to come up with a list of keywords for your niche, it’s time to go and see what others are doing in your niche. You can use a tool such as SpyFu to figure out what exactly your competitors are ranking for, one what page. The page-keyword breakdown report is very useful as you can figure out exactly what keyword density your competitors are using to get ranked for what keyword on what page. This is powerful information that used to take so much time to dig just a few years go, but innovative spying solutions make it easy to dig up information in a flash. Linkscape by SEOMoz is yet another tool that you can use to dig up information on your competitors. Take our sister website, SEOABC. By feeding the URL to Linkscape, you can all kinds of information, including but not limited to links, domain data, and link juice for that domain (see below).

With the keyword report that you get from SpyFu and Linkscape you can figure out what keywords to target, and what anchor texts to shop for. With SpyFuKombat, you can figure out exactly what areas you have in common with your competitors and what areas you need to work on. Finally, SpyFu will give you the paid listings for your competitors which you could download and take a look at.

But knowing virtually everything that your competitors are doing, there is no reason to do something better and try to top them. It’s going to take some work, and nobody said it’s going to be easy. But a few years ago, you would’ve had to spend a lifetime to gather this information. Now, it only takes about 30 minutes. Times have changed indeed.

Your take: what’s been your experience with SpyFu Kombat and Linkscape?