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Pay Per Click marketing is also known as PPC. With PPC, payment is made to the search engine every time a searcher clicks the link in your ad and goes to your website.

The truth be known, it will probably take between six and twelve months to circumvent being purposely filtered out of the SERPS by Google. Even after that, you will still have to wait until your website begins to rank high enough in the search engine results to start receiving clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the SE pages by paying for clicks

Like several other areas of Internet promotion, keyword investigation is a critical part of PPC. You need to know which keywords and keyword phrases the majority of people are employing to seek out what it is that you are trying to sell.

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

PPC has become highly cutthroat for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

PPC is often filled with falsified clicks. Your competitors will click on your ads to drive up your PPC bill to try to get you to stop advertising. There have also been some allegations and 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 is similar to what is experienced in the mail-order business, which is between one half of one percent, and two percent. 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 number much 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 PPC because one hundred clicks times .50 per click = fifty dollars and you just broke even.

Remember, "Gross Profit" doesn't include your cost of doing business. It is only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the example given money was actually lost. You have got to know what your costs are, 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 PPC has been bid up too high by the larger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using PPC promotion.

Watch out for of the companies who will offer to control your PPC promotion 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 might. But they still cannot change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC promotion can work, but you have got to cautiously do the math. Can you make a reasonable profit based on the above calculations 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 promotion might work in your case.

I advise you to stick with niche terms that have not been bid way up. 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.

PPC advertising? Do the math first, and then decide. But be willing to lose money while you find out how to make it work!

Personally, I've found several search engine optimization techniques that are far more effective than PPC. These other techniques have led me to advance my website to the first page on the major search engines for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. A reason that these other methods are far more productive is that they cost little or no money at all. And most people attribute a lot more trustworthiness to websites that rank high in the organic listings versus the sponsored listings.

By using these methods, in less than one year, I've been able to make my site rank better than other sites in my industry that have been at it for ten 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 have used link trading to promote websites.

However, one-way backlinks are far more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I've been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented what I did to drive tons of free traffic to my site to make it successful by relying on article spinning.