In 2002 I had been in Sao Paulo, Brazil for about six months when it became quite clear that there was a huge opportunity in the language business. It was estimated that nearly 4 million people actually studied English in Sao Paulo alone. There were also over 1,000 English schools competing for these students so it wouldn’t be quite as easy as one would hope.

I had noticed that while there were many schools very few of them had websites. This isn’t too surprising considering that in 2003 less than 8% of the Brazilian population had access to the Internet on a regular basis. However, I had to figure that those most lucrative students (i.e. the ones that worked for a multi-national company that would pay for their employee’s classes) would have regular access to the Internet.

I approached a number of schools and asked them if they would be interested in obtaining more students. Naturally, most said they would be very interested. I drafted up contracts with a number of providers of English-teaching products and services and I built a very simple website designed to capture prospect information and generate leads for these partners.

Once the site was built and tested, I immediately opened a Google Adwords account as well as a Yahoo pay for placement account. I was lucky because there was a firm out of Argentina that was able to manage all of my PPC campaigns (except Google) with one interface. Back then, there was absolutely no competition and very popular keywords could be bought for about $0.05 per click.

Now, I should mention here that I knew practically nothing about PPC advertising and even though it wasn’t competitive, I did make a bunch of mistakes. I didn’t place a maximum bid price on my keywords so I often paid through the nose when I should have been paying the minimum possible amount. However, live and learn.

The point is that starting off with only Pay per Click advertising on Yahoo and Google, I was able to generate well over 500 unique visitors a day and a whole bunch of qualified leads for my partners – all at a very high ROI.

After I used PPC to test my site components and conversion I began to issue press releases and write articles to build incoming links to the site. However, I never turned off the paid advertising because it was just so profitable.