Hello

I am starting a new shopping website and right now I can say for certain that I will have a budget of $300 - $500 a month for online marketing. I am wondering if those out there with experience in this area can tell me if this will be enough to realistically get some serious target traffic?

It all depends upon what volume of traffic you are expecting, the keywords you bid on, what competition there is for those keywords and what position you want to occupy in the ppc adverts.

PPC costs for the top slot for a search all start off at 5 / 10 cents but increase over time as more competitors bid. Some very competitive keywords can attract $5 plus costs for the top slot.

You can reduce the average cost per click by avoiding these very competitive terms and bidding on the long tail of search enquiries where competition and hence ppc costs will be less.

For example do not bid on 'insurance' but perhaps bid on 'pet insurance' or better still 'rabbit insurance'.

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site optimisation | ebusiness | british gas

Start conservative. Spend you ad dollars on niche terms as ebusiness4all stated. As you get some performance data to measure, start edging your way into the more competitive terms as the opportunity presents itself. Watch your ROI as you move along. There is no substitute for good data analysis.

To directly address the question "Is it enough" we would need to know your market segment. But if you are creative enough in your keyword development, it would be possible that you could get some affordable referrals from Adwords or Overture/Yahoo for that matter.

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"In the world of the blind the one-eyed man is king."

There are so many factors involved when estimating a budget. Each website can vary depending on the topic and how competitive the keywords are. If you know what you are doing with adwords a $300 -$500 monthly budget can get you some very good traffic.

One suggestion for you is to know what your visitor is worth. For example, if you are selling a product for $10.00 and your conversion rate is 1% [1 sale out of every 100 visitors]in order to break even the max CPC for a keyword is .10 cents. Each visitor is worth .10 so you wouldn't want to bid any higher than this for keywords.

Another suggestion is before you spend too much money try doing a test campaign. It might cost you $20 to $50 but worth it in the long run.
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