Right?!?! People click like a bazillion times a day! In what crazy world would I pay for someone to click my link?!?
Competition
Well if you’re selling just about any “thing” then there’s a pretty good chance someone else is already selling it or something like it, or something that has the same first name, etc, etc. This is how Google has billions of dollars.
There’s competition for your words, your keywords! So even though you may have the coolest hand-woven dust bunny socks, you’ll have to compete for ranking, and at first (which often feels like eternity) your site may never see a single click! Not even after you paid your cousin $200 for a website, $12 a month for hosting and $15 for a domain and I can’t even get a single F***N click! ARE YOU SERIOUS!!
Reality
Many companies have a marketing budget, so if you plan on selling something online, you had better have one as well. Hell, you don’t even have to be selling something online to expect costs. If you want to have any kind of web presence at all, you should plan on spending something to promote your business.
Options
You’re not stuck, continue to test and see what works and what doesn’t. Change the copy on your site, hone your messaging and optimize the delivery of your site and slowly increase your rankings for your keywords and grow your traffic organically.
Or you open a Google Ads account and quickly realize that this just got REAL!! WTF is a campaign!?!? I’m just trying to get some traffic for my site! What is an Ad Group!?! Audiences!? I WANT CUSTOMERS!! For someone just starting out it can definitely feel overwhelming. Finding help that you can trust can feel equally overwhelming, there are a million people who claim to be PPC and SEO experts and it’s impossible to tell who to trust or who’s just trying to get a piece of your marketing budget.
Expert Advice
In situations like this you’ve got a couple options, either you invest your time to learn the interface and bidding strategy and ad structures (I’d recommend YouTube videos or even online courses) or you ask for some help. As I mentioned before, there are a ton of people who offer PPC consulting services, or you can use Ai to help coach you. You can always start small (budget) and expand as you learn.
Maybe start by compiling a list of keywords that you would expect people to be searching for to find your site or products. Each keyword should be 1-3 words, the more words the less exposure you’ll get (they’re called long-tail keywords) because as you know the keyword “small TV” would be a subset of keyword “TV”. Ideally you want the keyword to match your product or service as closely and specifically as possible, then make sure the content on your site uses those keywords, both in general (content/category pages) and specifically (product pages). Also consider your location, competition, and the keywords you specifically don’t want (exclude those in Ads).