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Pay Per Click marketing is known as PPC. With pay per click, payment is made to the search engines each time someone clicks the link in your listing and goes to your site.

The truth be known, it can take between 6 and 12 months to overcome being intentionally filtered out of the search engine results by Google. And after that, you'll still have to wait until your site begins to rank high enough in the SERPS to start getting mouse clicks and traffic to your site. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the search engine pages by employing pay per click marketing

Similar to most other aspects of Internet promotion, keyword investigation is a serious part of pay per click. You must know which keywords and keyword phrases the preponderance of people are using to hunt for what it is that you are trying to sell.

When you start a pay per click campaign, you are actually involving yourself in an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are used by most people, with the highest listings going to the highest bidders. The more that a person is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher that site will be listed in the search results, which are generally at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

pay per click 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 is often filled with falsified clicks. Competitors will click on your ads to drive up your pay per click bill to try to get you to quit advertising and 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 promotion. 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, which is 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 millions of unknowns that can make the one percent estimate 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 fifty cents each, you cannot afford pay per click because one hundred clicks X .50 per click = fifty dollars and you only broke even.

Don't forget, "Gross Profit" doesn't include your overhead. It's 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 must 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 to have the proficiency to help you, and they may very well. But they still cannot change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC advertising can work, but you must cautiously do the math. Can you make a 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 may very well work for you.

I advise you to stick with niche terms that have not 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 $40.00 and $150.00.

Pay per click? Do the math first, and then decide. But 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. These other methods have helped me to promote my ecommerce site to the top of the organic listings on the major search engines 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 nothing. And most people searching the Internet attribute a lot more trustworthiness 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 ecommerce site rank as well as other ecommerce 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 link trading to promote 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 the steps that were taken to drive lots of free traffic to my website to make it successful by relying on article marketing.