Make Money Online with Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the methods website owners use to monetize their
websites. PPC is an advertising strategy that utilizes keywords and keyword phrases to
locate and draw visitors that have an interest in the product or services a website
targets. By attracting visitors to a well-designed site which offers a viable, quality
product or service, a percentage of visitors will convert into sales. Of course, visitors
only convert to sales if they find the destination site's offerings to be convincing and
a good value for the price.
Where Can Website Owners Place PPC Ads?
Perhaps the best-known PPC advertising publisher is Google AdWords. This system provides a
website owner with the ability to select niche keywords that fit into the theme of their
website. These PPC ads are visible on Google search response pages as well as on other
websites that are similar to, but not directly in competition with, the website
advertising. You can easily spot these PPC ads when you see "Ads by Google" in close
proximity to a list of several small ads with hyperlinks on a webpage.
Once known as Overture, Yahoo! Search Marketing "Sponsored Search" is probably the
second best known and most used PPC ad publisher. While there is less flexibility with
this system, it will provide exposure across many search engines.
Rapidly gaining on the other PPC ad publishers, Microsoft adCenter is quickly becoming
another tool of choice for PPC advertisers. Live Search, MSN, Windows Live, and other
Microsoft partner products allow PPC ads to be inserted by adCenter to direct traffic to a
PPC advertiser's website.
Worthy of mention are the smaller PPC ad publishers. FindWhat and Kanoodle are both small
PPC ad publishers. Local PPC, targeted to residents of a specific area searching for a
product or service described on a local business' website, include ReachLocal, Yahoo!
Local Sponsored Search, and CitySearch PPC.
What is the PPC Advertising Process?
PPC advertising is used by a website owner to gain targeted traffic to buy the products or
services offered. The first step of the PPC advertising process is to carefully select
keywords and keyword phrases which internet users enter into search engine queries when
seeking a product or service offered by the advertising website. In other words, if a
website owner is promoting a dog training course, they would select keywords such as "dog
training", "training your dog", "how to train dogs", and other keywords that are
closely associated with their product or service. Obviously, it would do little good to
place a PPC ad about dog training on a website or search results page about parrot
training or automobile parts. A website owner only wants to pay for clicks made by people
who truly have an interest in their products or services.
There are several useful tools for researching and selecting keywords and keyword phrases.
NicheBot is a free keyword research tool. Yahoo! Sponsored Search (formerly Overture) and
WordTracker are two more tools you can use. Microsoft adCenter also have a keyword
research tool available.
Once you choose your keywords, you place a bid or enter a budget amount you are willing to
pay when a person clicks on your PPC ad. That's where the "Pay Per Click" idea comes
from; the internet advertiser pays an amount of money each time a person clicks, not when
the ad is displayed. The PPC ad may be displayed dozens of time, but if no one clicks on
the ad, there is no charge to the advertiser.
The next step is to create carefully worded PPC ads which utilize the keywords or keyword
phrases selected for the ads. Then the PPC ads begin to appear in the web pages viewed by
searcher and, in certain programs, on websites that are related to the keyword or keyword
phrase. Once a visitor clicks on the ad, they are taken directly to the advertiser's
website. From there, the visitor can determine if they wish to make a purchase.
Great Websites Make Sales from PPC Advertising Easily
Once a visitor is taken to an advertiser's website, they will choose to remain and visit
various pages, articles, product descriptions, or to leave the website and navigate
elsewhere. It is really important to PPC advertisers to realize that only by having a
fantastic website that offers something of real value for the visitor's money will that
visitor stay long enough to learn more and, hopefully, to make a purchase. No matter how
great your PPC ads may read, the final test is how a visitor reacts to the destination
website.
When using PPC advertising, the website owner can easily track the responses to various
PPC ads you have listed with various PPC publishers. Soon, a website owner will see what
ads pay off and which need refinement as well as which website pages get the best
conversion rate, turning PPC advertising dollars into sales dollars.
All the best in your success!
Mark Melnik