So you are ready to start using pay per click (ppc) search engine advertising. A pay per click search engine is designed to get the performance possible to your advertising campaigns.This means that the advertiser will pay the search engine owners for the absolute traffic they are able to deliver to your website by the use of keywords the advertiser chooses to bid on. This also means that the price for the traffic coming from those keywords can go up at any time with competition biding higher for the click.

Example: An advertiser has a web site that advertises vacations to the Philippines.

The advertiser can bid on “vacations to Philippines” as a keyword. Here is where the bidding war comes in. This advertiser wants to be on the first page for the keyword “vacations to philippines” so he will bid 1cent higher then the previous high bidder. How ever so does the previous high bidder. So he also bids 1cent higher. The battle is on who ever wants it more will be the winning bidder. So lets just say the current high bid is $0.25 per click. A bid of $0.26 would gain the top position for the advertiser.

So when ever someone did a search for “vacations to Philippines” the high bidder for the pay per click advertising would be at the top spot. Now lets just say that his advertising was clicked 10 times. The advertiser would then have to pay 10 x $.026 , pr $2.60 for the traffic that was delivered to his website for that day.

The advertiser is paying only for performance. The advertiser will not be charged for the number of times there advertising was shown. You will only pay for actual traffic to your site. These charges are based entirely on the number of times a visitor clicked on the advertising for their pay per click campaign ad.

Thus the name “pay per click”.

So you may be asking why use Pay Per Click Search Engines.

You may want to use Pay Per Click Search Engines (PPC) because they can quickly deliver quality targeted traffic to your website for any keyword. Where as free google, yahoo, msn, and other major search engines you have to fight your way to the top spot through search engine ranking.

Anyone who has ever built a website knows that the design aspect is the easy part to building a profitable website. The tough part is the process need to continue to get quality traffic to the site to make it worth while from a commercial view point. Even if you are a master at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and built a website that search engines love. It will still take alot of time to get that top ranking. It can take as much as two to three months and even longer for the search engine spiders to even find your website to be listed in the search engines. So if you are using your website to make money on the internet that is a entirely too long of a time to wait for good quality traffic.

No traffic means no sales, no income and soon you will give up on your website or just lose interest.

That should not be your objective unless you enjoy building web sites no matter how few people ever visit them.

With Pay Per Click Search Engines (PPC) accounts you will almost immediately drive quality traffic to your website right from the start. So if you are serious about building a business on the internet thats a pretty good reason to use Pay Per Click Search Engines (PPC).

Pay Per Click Search Engine Tips.

1. Use quality pay per click search engines that already have a high volume of traffic. It doesn’t matter how cheap the bid for your key words may be if there is little traffic on the search engine and your key words are never clicked on.

2. Know your market. If you are selling “vacations to Thailand” do some research to find out what words and phases folks who are thinking of traveling to Thailand are actually using in their searches. An excellent tool to assist in this research is Wordtracker . Wordtracker will quickly help you to decide which key words are truly worth bidding on.

3. Quality pay per click search engines will have starting bids from one cent to five cents per key word. It is important to know that about 80% of the traffic for any key word will go to the top three bids. So if you want a lot of traffic to your web site try to position yourself in the top three spots. Just as with real estate location makes all the difference in results.

4. Set up a realistic budget for each search engine. Quality pay per click search engines get a lot of traffic so be prepared for a lot of traffic to your site if you bid on popular key words.

5. Popular key words can be expensive so choose your key words with great care. It is best to stay away from key words that are too general in nature. Thus to continue with the example above bidding on the key word “vacations” would not be wise if you are selling vacations to Thailand. Yes, you would get a ton of traffic but it would be more than likely be too general and you would spend a lot of money for poor results. It is almost always a better strategy to bid on phases instead of one general keyword. Therefore bidding on “vacations to Thailand” would be a far better choice than bidding on “vacations”.

If you are selling vacations to Pattaya Thailand it would be better to bid on “vacations to Pattaya Thailand” than on “vacations to Thailand”. The more keywords that you can find that exactly match up with whatever it is that you are selling and that folks will be searching for the more money you will save (less money will get you in the top three spots) and the better your results will be.

Wordtracker is an excellent tool that can find key word phases that are actually being searched for and that you would probably never think of going it alone.

6. Think about using a lot of keywords rather that a common few.
The common few will be expensive and will likely deliver to your web site a lot of poorly targeted traffic with poor conversion ratios (traffic to sales). People search for the darnest things and those who actually plan on buying something usually search by using phrases. With some effort you can find phrases that are cheap and that will deliver highly targeted traffic…the kind that converts into sales.

7. No matter how much traffic you drive to a web site if you are marketing sorry products or services or if you have excellent products and services but you have a sorry website you are wasting your time and money. Everything must be right to achieve business success. Make sure that your site is “order taking ready” before you turn on your pay per click traffic.

Peter Bernaeyge
The New Media Is You Never Pay Per Click Again