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Pay Per Click advertising is also known as PPC. With pay per click advertising, you pay the search engine every time a lead clicks the link in your advertisement and goes to your website.

Let's face it, it can take between 6 and 12 months to circumvent being purposely filtered out of the SERPS by Google. Even after that, you'll still have to wait until your site begins to rank high enough in the search engine results to start getting mouse clicks and traffic to your website. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the search engine pages by making use of PPC

Akin to many other areas of Internet marketing, keyword investigation is a serious part of pay per click advertising. You have got to know which keywords and keyword phrases the majority of searchers are employing to search for what it is that you are selling.

When you start a pay per click advertising campaign, you are actually getting yourself into an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are used the majority of the time, with the highest listings going to the highest bidders. The more that a website is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher that website will be listed in the paid listings, which are most often found at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

pay per click advertising has become highly cutthroat for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

pay per click advertising is often filled with falsified clicks. Competitors will click on your ads to drive up your pay per click advertising bill in order to try to get you to stop advertising. There have also been some allegations and lawsuits regarding fraud that is perpetrated by the search engine companies themselves. And the Plaintiffs won at least one of these lawsuits that I read about.

I could write a lot about this area of marketing. But I think that your interests would be better served if I just "cut to the chase." Conversion rates vary widely by industry on the Internet. But the rate of conversion is similar to what is experienced in the mail-order business, between one half of one percent, and two percent. In the real world, projecting a one percent conversion rate would be fairly safe, though there are hundreds of unknowns that can make the one percent number way too high.

What that means is that out of every one hundred clicks on your links, you might get one actual sale. So if the markup (Gross Profit) on your average sale is $50.00, and your clicks cost you fifty cents each, you cannot afford pay per click advertising because one hundred clicks times .50 per click = $50.00 and you just broke even.

Don't forget, "Gross Profit" doesn't include your cost of doing business. It's only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the above example there was in reality a loss of money. You have got to know what it costs you to be in business, and that includes how much it costs to own your equipment, pay your rent, ISP, etc., plus the value of your time.

The bottom line is that most pay per click marketing has been bid up way too high by the larger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using PPC advertising.

Watch out for of the companies who will offer to manage your PPC advertising for a fee because they cannot change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the experience to help you succeed, and they might. But they still cannot change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC advertising can work, but you have got to carefully do the math. Can you make a reasonable profit based on the above if you pay the current bid price for the keywords and get only about a 1/10th of 1% or 2/10ths of 1% conversion rate (sales rate)? If you can, then PPC advertising might work in your case.

I recommend that you stick with niche terms that have not been bid up to high. Personally, in my industry I'm only willing to pay between 15 cents and 40 cents maximum per click, and my products sell for between forty and one hundred and fifty dollars.

PPC marketing? Do the math first, and then decide. But you should be willing to lose money while you find out how to make it work!

Personally, I've found several SEO methods that are much more effective than pay per click advertising. These other methods have led me to promote my site to the first page on Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. One of the reasons that these other methods are much more effective is that they cost little or nothing. And most people searching the Internet attribute a lot more credibility to websites that rank high in the organic listings vs the paid listings.

By using these methods, in less than one year, I've been able to make my website rank better than other ecommerce sites in my industry that have been promoting themselves for 10 years or even more!

In the longer term, you will want to optimize your site and work on getting backlinks to raise your ranking in the organic listings. Many people use link trading to promote sites.

However, one-way backlinks are much more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I have been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented what I did to drive lots of free traffic to my ecommerce site to make it successful by using article spinning and marketing.