How much capital do you need before getting into PPC?

generally how much money do you need to invest in PPC when starting out? cause ur gonna lose money when ur starting out. do you need a lot? in the thousands?

i have tried with small amounts to no avail

Depends on what you are selling, where you are selling it, etc.

I would say, it depends on what platform you are using.

With facebook - I would say $200, and they are annoying because they charge like every two days.

If it is Google Adwords, or BingYahoo Adcenter I would say No less then $500, but $1000 would be more like it.

The key is to have enough where you are not making decisions based on fear, but based on numbers. Of course the more stats you get, the more accurate.

Good Luck
-Capp

forgot to mention, this is for Facebook.

@capp $200 only? i thought it would be way higher

Actually, it depends on the payout of what you are promoting. It would be different if it's an email or zipsubmitt, or if it's a clickbank product that pays out $30 or $40.

I do a fair bit with Facebook, and it's usually pretty inexpensive.

When you are using Adcenter, or Adwords you are plugging in hundreds of words that people search on, and seeing which ones of these key words get you sales. So you have 100 words at .05 per click. You need each of those keywords to get a decent amount of clicks, then see if those clicks convert before you start to eliminate them. That can take a lot of money.

Facebook, you can set up one ad, then click the similar ad button and tweak something like, and interest, male/femal, age range etc. Then create another and another, sometime changing the pictures as well.
Then you have 10 ads trying to convert the same product. You start off with CPC and which ever ad starts to give you the cheapest clicks, is the one that you stick with, but each click will count towards your overall campaigns EPC. Meaning, if you get 1 sale, per 100 clicks in facebook it doesn't matter if it's over 10 ads or 5 ads.

Typically I find one ad, with one picture that gets a nice CPC. After 100 - 200 clicks if I don't sell anything, then I change the landing page, the wording in the ad, or throw the campaign in the crapper. If it's an email or a zip submit, I will change up every 50 clicks. Once your ad is getting a decent CTR then you can change to CPM.

Now you are making money....I hope.

Hopefully that all makes sense.
-Capp

It really depends on what exactly you are doing with PPC. I generally agree with stuff previously regarding Google and Bing.

If we're talking about arbitrage - one important thing when considering your budget is to note the payment terms (like net 45 and even net 60 isn't uncommon) of the advertiser or ad networks you are selling the traffic to.

So to sustain traffic for something like 45 days before getting paid by the advertiser can require a bit of capital if it's a reasonably sized traffic buy each day.

you can also try using some vouchers to test it out and have a shot.

You tech. could do it with next to nothing