Pay Per Click Advertising

Hi now for all of us in the Internet marketing or information publishing arena we will undoubtedly use pay per click advertising at some stage. Now for those just starting out, it can all be a bit confusing so here’s a real beginner’s guide to the main ones – who they are, what they are and what you can expect. But as I’ve identified many times before you really need once you’ve been through this brief outline to go off and have a go, there’s nothing like DIY, you need to see and understand the nuts and bolts of how PPC advertising works.
What Is Pay Per Click?
Pay per click advertising, or PPC for short, is online advertising that works for any organisation whether offline or online and is certainly a method for helping advertisers drive highly targeted traffic to your site or offline business as well. .
Here’s the History Bit
It started in 1997 with Yahoo’s Search Marketing and since then has grown into a variety of different programs. There are a number of different options you can try. The top 3 pay per click search engine advertising programs are Google AdWords, Yahoo’s Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.
Google AdWords
This is probably the top pay per click network and the one you’ll have heard most about. It has an interface that is friendly, clean and easy to use. It takes just a few minutes from the time you create your account until your ads are live and ready to go. It offers lots of different options for your marketing campaign. It costs $5 to get started, and you can bid for as low as $0.01 per keyword, so it’s really flexible.
Free to Use Keyword Research Tool
It also has its own free keyword research tool to help you choose keywords and phrases to target. No for me I reckon its one of the best and real easy to use so even if you don’t use AdWords the keyword tool I would sincerely recommend you check out and use.
Yahoo’s Search Marketing
This is the search engine that started it all. It has gone through several name changes from Yahoo to GoTo, and then Overture, and finally it’s back as Yahoo Search Marketing.
Like Google, this search engine enables you to reach a massive number of users with its ppc advertising, and also offers sponsored ads on all of its searches. It is also a comparatively cheap service and they offer special deals from time to time, just go & check it out.

Microsoft AdCenter
Microsoft’s PPC offering is top notch. Like the others, it has campaigns to help you customize your ad campaign. It also has its own free keyword research tool that lets you really target your customers, you can narrow it down to gender, age, time of day, geographical location, and just about anything else you can imagine. This feature makes it a wonderful all-in-one package.
The Disadvantages Of Pay Per Click
Whilst pay per click sounds very appealing, you should be aware that there are some areas you need to watch out for. You may have trouble winning your keyword bids at a competitive price and within you advertising budget, there’s lots of competition for most keyword phrases, so it can take quite a budget to get ones that you may want if they carry very high traffic levels.
Top Tip - drill down from top line keywords to cheaper less obvious ones and also consider long tail keywords which can produce some really stunning results for not a lot of advertising budget outlay. Don’t forget PPC is about driving traffic and more importantly targeted traffic so your keyword research is the real key to success.
Think Through Your Objectives First
Also a word of caution here, with the boom of ever increasing traffic, affiliate marketing growth etc, these major PPC search engines have instituted tighter regulations and restrictions. This makes it tougher for new marketers to get in on the ground floor especially if your budget is pretty small.
Google is still viewed by many as the reigning king of search engines, but both Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter are cheaper and not quite so regulated.
Since Internet marketing is about targeting smaller niches to make sales, it might be worthwhile to consider using these search engines instead of Google. But here’s my recommendation – try them all out with small amounts of budget, you need to find one you like, feel comfortable using and as I’ve said before it’s about having as many marketing guns in your arsenal as possible.
Before launching a full-scale pay per click ad campaign, test drive each of these search engines and see which one you like best. It’s possible that the advanced keyword research tool offered by Microsoft AdCenter is just what you need to help you get started. You may like one interface more than another. Think about what you want your campaign to achieve, and then choose the search engine that you are most comfortable working with and you believe is going to work best for you. So there you have it the beginner’s guide to pay per click advertising.