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Pay Per Click advertising is known as PPC. With pay per click marketing, you pay the search engines each time a person clicks the link in your ad and goes to your website.

Let's face it, it can take between six and twelve months to overcome being purposely filtered out of the search engine results by Google. Even after that, you will still have to wait until your site begins to rank high enough in the search engine results to start receiving mouse clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the search engine pages by using pay per click

Similar to most other aspects of Internet marketing, keyword investigation is a critical part of pay per click marketing. You must know which keywords and keyword phrases the majority of searchers are most likely to use to seek out what it is that you are trying to sell.

When you start a pay per click marketing campaign, you are actually getting yourself into an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are most popular, 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 search results, which are most often found at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

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

pay per click marketing is often filled with fraudulent clicks. Competitors will click on your ads to drive up your pay per click marketing 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 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 unkonwn factors that can make the one percent estimate much too high.

What that means is that out of every 100 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 can't afford pay per click marketing because 100 clicks times fifty cents per click = $50.00 and you just broke even.

Don't forget, "Gross Profit" doesn't include your cost of doing business. It is only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the above example there was actually 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 advertising has been bid up too high by the bigger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using pay per click advertising.

Beware of the companies who will offer to control your pay per click advertising for a fee because they can't change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the proficiency to help you succeed, and they may very well. But they still can't change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that pay per click advertising can work, but you have got to cautiously do the math. Can you make a profit based on the above calculations 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 pay per click advertising may very well 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 fifteen cents and forty 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 make a decision. 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 methods that are much more effective than pay per click marketing. These other methods have led 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. One of the reasons that these other methods are much more productive is that they cost little or no money at all. And most people attribute a lot more reliability to sites that rank high in the organic listings vs the paid listings.

By using these methods, in well under one year, I've been able to make my site rank as well as or better than other sites in my industry that have been promoting themselves for 10 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 trading to promote their website.

However, one-way backlinks are much more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I've been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented what I did to get tons of free traffic to my website to make it successful by relying on article marketing.