Pay-Per Click
Often, you do not have the time to build up a high PR website in order to get the top listing in a search engine. A quick way to get your site listed for some of the top keywords is to use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. If done right, this can be a highly effective tool to bring massive amounts of traffic to your website
The concept of PPC is very simple. You create a text-based add and then you bid a certain price for a group of keywords that you want your ad to be displayed for. The bid amount determines the order in which your ad will appear; the highest bidders will have their ads appear at the top of the list.
Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay an amount to the PPC vendor (Google, Yahoo, LookSmart, 7Search, …). The cost is usually based on your bid amount and the clickthrough rate of your add (the number of times an ad is clicked versus the number of times it is displayed). The good thing about PPC is you do not pay unless someone clicks your ad and you get the traffic; you only pay when your ad is performing. However, most PPC vendors have certain clickthrough rates your ad must meet in order to continue to be displayed.
The PPC ads are displayed in search engines when the corresponding keywords are searched for. There are also advertising networks that display ads based on keywords found on a webpage (Google Adsense is an example of this). The types of ads displayed on these websites are based on the context of the page. So a website that has information about building a doghouse will display ads related to building doghouses.
Pay-per click advertising is an effective means for generating traffic to smaller sales websites (or mini-sites) because they do not have a lot of content and therefore do not generally rank well in the search engines.
The most popular form of PPC advertising currently used on the Internet are Google's Adwords. You've likely seen them whenever you do a search on Google (they appear along the right side of the page, or at the very top of the organic listings). If you don't use Google, then you've for sure seen Google Adsense displayed on a number of websites you've visited. Adsense is basically Google's Adwords, but they appear on a website based on its content. Only ads that are related to the content of the site will be displayed.
There are a large number of books and courses that discuss all the secrets to creating high-converting PPC campaigns. At this time, we will not delve too deeply into this topic, but if you're interested in finding out more about PPC, some resources you should find useful have been listed in the Useful Products box on this page.
The key lies in the keywords
Unless you have a massive advertising budget, you will want to avoid the most popular and most expensive keywords (at least at first). Target the more obscure, less searched for terms that only get several searches a day; but make sure they are relevant to your niche. They are cheaper and the competition is much lower (you will often be the only advertiser for that term), and if you have a large enough list of keywords, you will find you still get a lot of targeted traffic.
Finding the best keywords to use in your ad campaign is no different than what you would do if you were researching a new niche or trying to optimize a webpage for the search engines. You basically want to use the keywords that have the most searches with the least amount of competition (refer to the Keywords section for more details).
As you run your campaigns, be sure to track what keywords are pulling in the most traffic and which ones are wasting you money. You can increase your bid amount for the good keywords and get rid of the useless ones. Once you've got a list of strong keywords, you're set to start bringing in the big bucks!
It is very important to test your results. When you first start an ad campaign, it is a good idea to check the conversion of your keywords often so you can remove the keywords that aren't converting and increase the bid amounts for the keywords that are converting well. Neglecting to do this may end up loosing you a lot of money.
PPC is a great way to generate targeted traffic but you will need to keep an eye on it when you're first starting out to make sure you're doing things right. If you keep an eye on what's creating sales and you don't overspend, you will have a terrific way to increase your traffic and generate more sales without being at the mercy of the search engines.
