Driving Traffic with Pay Per Click

Driving Traffic with Pay Per Click
By Christopher J Enders

Pay per click (PPC) advertising programs are excellent resources
for driving traffic to your website.

Internet marketing is a bit different than traditional marketing,
primarily because your marketing efforts have to drive traffic to
your website instead of to a physical store.

For that reason, it is essential that advertisements for your
internet-based business are visible to an audience that will
actually follow an online link that takes them to your website.

Advertising in offline publications is always an option and it
can be effective. However, getting your website listed in the
search engines is by far the most powerful method for driving
traffic to your website.

Getting and maintaining a good rank in the search engines through
the process of search engine optimization can be difficult due to
heavy competition.

Pay per click advertising is a solution to that problem. With
PPC advertising, you bid on the keyword search terms that you
want your site to be displayed for.

Advertisements appear in the search engines as sponsored ads when
an internet user uses the search term that you bid on.

The ranking of the advertisements is generally determined by the
amount of the bid, so the highest bidder gets top ranking in most
cases.

On Google, the popularity of the website is also taken into
consideration, so the highest bid doesn't necessarily get the top
spot.

Pay per click advertising is advantageous to website owners for
several reasons.

First, you can get listed in the major search engines quickly and
easily.

Second, search engine listings produce excellent results in
regard to driving qualified traffic to your website.

Third, you are billed for your advertising on a cost-per-click
basis which means that you only pay your bid amount when someone
viewing your advertisement actually clicks on the link and is
directed to your website.

This is quite different from traditional advertising and some
types of online advertising where you pay for impressions.

With PPC advertising, you don't pay for the number of times your
ad is seen, or has the potential to be seen, rather, you only pay
for responses to the advertisement that actually produce traffic
for your website.

The most popular pay per click programs at present are Google
AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

When you advertise with Google AdWords, your advertisements
appear in Google's search results and on websites that are in the
Google network.

This is really good, because Google is the most widely used
search engine so there is a lot of potential for reaching a large
audience with your advertisements.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing, your advertisements will appear in
several different search engines that the company has agreements
with including the two leading search engines that are right
under Google in terms of usage - Yahoo! and MSN.

MSN is in the process of development and testing for its own
cost-per-click advertising program. Whether or not they will
remove themselves from the Yahoo! Search Marketing program is not
certain.

In addition to the major search engines, there are smaller search
engines, directories and even specialty search engines that
target a very specific audience.

Getting listed in these search engines or directories, either
through paid listings, free listings, or pay per click listings
can be beneficial as well.

There is less competition for listings in smaller search engines,
specialty search engines and directories.

Even though they may not be used as much as the major search
engines, most do have an audience, sometimes a very precisely
defined audience and have potential for producing qualified leads
and driving traffic to your website with minimal costs to you.

Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope,
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advice you're getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing,
or a website owner who wants to make more money from your
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