Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content sites, such as blogs, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked.

Everyone's goal is to increase sales.  You really should examine pay per click advertising programs, if you haven´t already done so.  Pay per click advertising is a great way to market your business to the large number of Internet users.  An important part of this marketing is keywords. When it comes to pay per click advertising programs, keywords not only have an impact on your success, but they may also impact how much pay per click advertising costs. 

When using a pay per click program, to have your advertisements distributed across the internet, you need to choose a collection of keywords.  These keywords will be what your advertisements are associated with.  They will also have an impact on which websites your ads appear on.  For instance, most pay per click programs try and match up content keywords, from a website, with your keywords, the ones that you selected for your
advertisements.  For this reason, you will not only want to choose popular keywords, but keywords that are related to your online business or the products that you sell.  If you need
assistance, you may want to try using this helpful keyword search tool, which can be found at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/.

Once you have determined what keywords you would like to have associated with your advertisements, you will then want to examine how much those advertisements will cost you.  Different pay per click programs operate in different ways, but most require online business owners to bid on popular keywords.  To get an idea as to how much money certain keyword advertisements are selling for, you may want to use a keyword worth tool, such as the one that can be found at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. This tool gives you an idea as to how much popular keyword advertisements are going for.  It may also help you save money. Having an idea as to what you should pay may end up preventing you from paying too much or bidding too high.

When choosing your max bid, there are a number of important factors that you need to keep in mind.  One of the biggest questions to ask yourself is what are you promoting?  Are your advertisements going to bring internet users to a specific product or the main page of your website?  If you are only promoting one product, you should only count of selling one product. If you are hoping that your customers will make multiple purchases, you may want to determine what your average sale amount is.  This will make it easier for you determine how much you can afford to bid for, while it still being to make a profit. 

It is also important to examine the amount of profit that you would like to make.  For instance, if you are looking to make the largest profit, you may only want to pay ten cents for each of your advertisements.  Say those advertisements were clicked thirty times, you will be charged three dollars total.  Now, say that ten of those clicks result in a sale, an average sale of twenty dollars; you will have made a total of two hundred dollars.  Not bad for only spending three dollars in advertising!  In this case you can walk away with a fairly large profit or you can choose to increase your max bid.  It may result in a smaller profit, but your long-term results, sales overtime, may improve due to exposure and promotion. 

The above mentioned formula is just one of the many that you can use to determine how much is too much to pay for pay per click advertising.  There are a number of other formulas that you can use to come with up the same or similar results.  However you
calculate your profit, it is important that you do so.  Knowing how much you stand to make or even lose will allow you to use pay per click advertising so that it can benefit you and your business.

There are hundreds of Pay Per Click Search Engines you can buy traffic from. Here are some of the most important ones:

Google AdWords - The biggest and best for volume, traffic quality and user interface. Also the most expensive.
Yahoo! Search Marketing - First GoTo.com, then Overture, now Yahoo! Search Marketing. Both high volume and quality with a few bargains still around.
MSN AdCenter - A newly emerging big player with lots of leverage, and arguably the best quality traffic. Look out for an amazing keyword research tool as part of the package.
MIVA - One of the best, yet more underated PPC search engines.
SearchFeed - Strong ROI with a reasonable search volume. Geo-targeting available with 11 countries you can specifically focus on.
ABCSearch - Solid targeting, decent traffic sources, and good customer service.
7Search - A smaller search engine with good quality traffic. Good interface.
The column to the right is an excample of PPC ads from AdWorks.