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Pay Per Click advertising is also known as PPC. With PPC marketing, payment is made to the search engine each time someone clicks the link in your advertisement and goes to your website.

Let's face it, it can take between 6 and 12 months to overcome being deliberately filtered out of the SERPS by Google. Even after that, you will still have to wait until your website begins to rank high enough in the SERPS to start receiving 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 using PPC advertising

Akin to several other areas of Internet marketing, keyword investigation is an important part of PPC marketing. You must know which keywords and keyword phrases the majority of searchers are most likely to use to search for what it is that you are selling.

When you start a PPC marketing campaign, you are actually involving yourself in 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 person is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher they will be listed in the search results, which are usually at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

PPC marketing has become highly competitive for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

PPC marketing is often filled with fraudulent clicks. Your competition will click on your ads to drive up your PPC marketing bill in order to try to get you to quit competing. There have also been some 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 average conversion rate is similar to the mail-order business, between one half of one percent, and two percent. And in the real world, projecting a one percent conversion rate would be fairly safe, though there are hundreds of unkonwn factors 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 fifty dollars, and your clicks cost you fifty cents each, you cannot afford PPC marketing because one hundred clicks times fifty cents per click = fifty dollars and you just broke even.

Don't forget, "Gross Profit" doesn't include your overhead. It is only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the example given you really lost money. You have got to know what your costs are, 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 too high by the larger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using PPC marketing.

Be cautious of the companies who will offer to administer your PPC marketing for a fee because they cannot change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the proficiency to help you succeed, and they may. But they still cannot change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC marketing can work, but you have got to cautiously 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 marketing may work for you.

I recommend that you stick with niche terms that haven't 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 advertising? Do the math first, and then decide. But you should be willing to lose money while you find out how to make it work effectively!

Personally, I've found several search engine optimization techniques that are much more efficient than PPC marketing. These other techniques have helped me to promote my website to the top of the organic listings on Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. A reason that these other methods are much more effective is that they cost little or no money. And most people attribute a lot more trustworthiness to ecommerce sites that rank high in the organic listings vs the sponsored listings.

By using these methods, in less than one year, I've been able to make my ecommerce site rank better than other ecommerce sites in my industry that have been at it for ten years or 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 reciprocal linking to promote ecommerce websites.

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 get lots of free traffic to my ecommerce site to make it successful by using article spooling.