Using pay per click strategies to generate highly targeted traffic to your website is just one of its many benefits. But it has far more applications than most people think.

If you think outside the box there are countless other clever ways you can use paid traffic sources. This article is about four nifty strategies to use pay per click in unconventional ways.

How Tim Ferriss Determined The Title of His NY Times Bestseller For Under $200

One great way to use Google Adwords is to test your ideas. It’s probably the fastest way to determine whether your new idea could work or will be a flop. What’s more you can even refine your product before you actually create or produce it.

Tim Ferriss did this brilliantly for his first New York Times Bestseller “The 4-Hour Workweek”. He wanted to determine the best possible title for his book.

In order to do so he setup an Adwords campaign and created different ads with the book titles as the headline. Among them were “Broadband and White Sand” and “Millionaire Chameleon”.

The description text of the ad was used to test the subtitle of the book. He then bid on different keywords related to the subject of his book including world travel, language learning and 401k.

He spent less than $200 to determine that the title “The 4-Hour Workweek” had by far the highest click-through rate; a great indicator of how catchy the book title is.

This kind of smart testing pays off. There’s nothing better than evaluating your ideas using real data than just opinions of your team.

How To Get Your Dream Job By Spending $6 on Google Adwords

Alec Brownstein had an ambitious goal: to work for one of the top creative directors in New York City. But instead of going down the traditional route, he came up a brilliant way to create attention using Google Adwords.

He created an Adwords campaign and bid on the names of five top creative directors in New York.

His ads looked like this:

He used all of the following people’s names as keywords. They were all people he wanted to work for:

• David Droga
• Tony Granger
• Gerry Graf
• Ian Reichenthal
• Scott Vitrone

Obviously these keywords were not expensive at all. The cost per click in his campaign was 15 cents. His total advertising spend was six dollars.

The result? It created immediate attention. Four of the above creative directors invited him to an interview. He received job offers from both Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone.

And finally he got his dream job at Y&R New York.

How To Build An Email List By Buying Traffic For 2 Cents Per Click

A while ago I was watching the German version of American Idol. At the point of watching it there were only two contestants left.

During commercials I got bored and started a little experiment. I created a very simple Adwords campaign bidding on the names of the two last contestants.

The ads said something along the following lines:

On the landing page I added an Aweber form offering some free information related to the show. That night I had more than 3,000 clicks at a cost per click of 2 cents. I ended up paying around 20 cent for a list subscriber.

So I grew a large email list in no time and send out gossip news related to the two contestants. I monetized the list by including Adsense on the posts that I wrote and also promoted affiliate offers.

That’s of course not the only news trends I have taken advantage of in the past..

How To Get 100,000 Facebook Likes in 30 Days

James Altucher was dissatisfied with the exposure that his media company was getting him for a book launch. So he decided to take things into his own hands by building his own audience using blogging.

And rather than relying on an organic approach he also used a smart approach to invest in Facebook ads. His advertising strategy generated him 100,000 fans within 30 days. At the time of writing this post his Facebook page has 265,000 likes.

So how did he do it and how much did it cost him?

In total he spent about $8,000 over a period of 30 days and generated 100,000 likes from it. That works out to a cost per like of about 8 cents. He used a few different strategies:

• He advertised to friends of his existing fan base. This is always a good strategy when your existing fan base consist of your ideal audience. The friends of your fans are often interested in similar topics.
• On his blog he stated that he’s fine with all English speakers. This leads me to assume that he didn’t only advertise to Facebook users in the US. This combined with clever split testing got his cost per like down to 3 to 4 cents in the end.
• He used targeted mobile ads, differentiating between iOS and Android users. Some of the ads got click through rates as high as 90%. A higher click through rate automatically lowers your cost per click.