Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Explained

Pay-per-click or PPC is a method for generating traffic wherein you pay for every visitor that go to your site. Your visitors typically arrive to your site by clicking on the link where your advertisement is displayed. You pay whenever a visitor clicks and visits your site, which is why this type of advertising is called pay-per-click.

The cost of each click to your site largely depend on your niche and the keywords you use. A click can cost you a few pennies and it can cost you several dollars. PPC advertising is an easy way you can generate traffic to your site, but you will need to monitor how much you spend and be careful that you aren't spending more than what your budget allows or what you can afford.

How PPC Advertising Works

To see how PPC works, go to Google and do a search on anything. After you click the search button, Google shows you a page that lists results. Now look at the right column on your search results page with the label "Sponsored Links." These sponsored links are actually advertisements. Website and online business owners paid to get their ad and link to their site listed on that page using Google's sophisticated PPC system.

For the sake of illustration, imagine for a moment that you're looking to buy a new charcoal grill. You want to know which companies make the best charcoal grills and you also want to compare the different models. So what you do is go to Google and search for "charcoal grills." Hit the search button and you'll get thousands of results. In addition to the regular search results, Google will display sponsored links on the right column of the search results page.

The sponsored links are ads by companies selling charcoal grills and accessories. Each of these companies paid so that whenever someone searches for the search term "charcoal grill," their ads will show up in the sponsored links section. Companies that bid the highest PPC amount received the most prominent position on the page.

Now think of your own niche. What keywords do you think would a person in your niche use in order to find what you are offering? Armed with this information, you can then use PPC advertising to bring traffic to your site using those keywords.

There are many places online where you can buy PPC advertising, but the more popular ones are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN Ad Center, Chitika and Miva.

Search Engine Results vs. Website Content

If you want to use PPC advertising as one of your online marketing activities, you need to decide where you want your ad to appear. You can either choose to have your ad appear on the search engine results page for your particular keyword or you can choose to have your ad appear on another site whose content is related to your keyword.

In general, you'll get better results by doing your PPC advertising through search engine results. However, it all really depends on what your niche is and your ad. It's a good idea to test both options to determine which one is more effective in your case. 

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