The fastest and easiest way for most people to get targeted traffic to their sites is the use of pay-per-click advertising.

Pay-per-click (PPC), sometimes called cost-per-click and pay for performance, has been around since the mid-to-late 1990s and has been the way thousands of businesses have been successful.

The basis of PPC is that you have ads places on various Web sites and, if someone likes your ad and clicks on the link to go to your Web site, you pay a pre-defined amount of money. That is, you pay that amount for each time someone clicks, hence pay-per-click.

That is unlike many common forms of advertising when you pay just to have your advertising made available for viewing; traditional advertising in magazines, television, radio, newspaper, etc. used this “pay to show” type of advertising.

When it comes to PPC advertising there is one extremely important thing you must never forget to do. You must be sure to do…
… your keyword research. If you don’t then you are just throwing time and money away.

What is Keyword Research?

If you’re new to getting Web traffic then you might not know what keywords are. They are words and short phases that are highly relevant to your topic or niche or blog or… whatever.

The reason this is important is that the major PPC companies like Google (with their AdWords program) use keywords to decide when and where to display your ad.

Therefore, it is important that you find keywords that are popular, that is, people are doing lots of searches for them. In addition, if you are selling something you want to make sure the keywords are ones that buyers are using.

Of course, the reason you want to do this is that people who are searching for specific things are more likely to be interested in buying something on that topic.

The entire subject is worthy a book so I can’t go into it now but there are some good tools to help you do your keyword research:

• Google: Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and Trends http://www.google.com/trends
• WordTracker: http://www.StreetGuideToWebTraffic.com/Recommends/WordTracker
• Keyword Elite: http://www.StreetGuideToWebTraffic.com/Recommends/KeywordElite

Google AdWords

The most popular and successful PPC program is Google’s Adwords program.

Google provides numerous online tools to help you, including ones that track how many people have clicked on your ad. This is important so you can track how much your advertising is costing you and compare it to how much you are earning.

Then you can decide whether the ad campaign is working and whether you need to ramp it up, change it or drop it altogether.

This is huge topic and here are some good resources available if you want to learn, in depth, how to really profit from AdWords

• My Secrets of Google AdWords book at http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com
• Simon Leung helped set up the AdWords program and his Adwords List Building course is full of great insider information of how to use AdWords within Goggle’s guidelines yet still maximize your profits, get it at http://www.StreetGuideToWebTraffic.com/Recommends/AdwordsListBuilding
• Greg Cesar is a very successful AdWords expert and highly in demand at conferences, his Adwords Profit System goes into all the tricks and techniques he uses, get it at http://www.StreetGuideToWebTraffic.com/Recommends/AdwordsProfitSystem

Yahoo! has a similar service named Yahoo! Sponsored Search, go to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/ to learn more.

Online Comparison Shopping Engines

Another place you can promote your PPC ad campaign is the various online comparison shopping engines. The concept is the same as with AdWords and the techniques as the same as well.

Here are some of the major comparison shopping engines.

DealTime (http://www.dealtime.com): DealTime is one of the major comparison shopping search engines on the web and it integrates product reviews from Epinions. It goes beyond product search to offer helpful information that helps people decide what to buy and where to buy it.

Kelkoo (http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/): Kelkoo, was founded in 2000, is Europe’s largest e-commerce website after Amazon and Ebay and the largest e-commerce advertising platform both in the UK and Europe. Kelkoo now operates in 10 European countries and Kelkoo is a one-stop shopping service, which helps shoppers to find, research and buy products online with confidence using their tools that compare prices and product features in seconds.

NexTag (http://www.nextag.com/): NexTag is the leading comparison shopping site and it enables shoppers to quickly compare prices and find the best deals on millions of products and services; they get more than 17 million people per month.

PriceGrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/): PriceGrabber attracts over 26 million unique visitors each month, and provides a comprehensive environment for them to find and select the right products and shop.

Yahoo! Shopping (http://shopping.yahoo.com/): Yahoo! Shopping it Yahoo!’s shopping site and they have a program similar to Google.

Since there is nothing in the rules and regulations that bind you to an exclusive agreement you can certainly sign up for all their programs. The only cost is the time for research, placing the ads and tracking.

You may, in fact, do well using several different sites so see which ones are best for your products.

Conclusion

PPC is often an affordable and quick way to launch an ad campaign. The cost per click is often low so it won’t be too costly, unless you happen to lots of visitors clicking through, but if your Conversions Pillar is strong then you’ll reap the benefits and more than be able to afford the cost.

Do, however, disregard all the stories of overnight success and people making tens of thousands of dollars overnight.

Those are either false or they are from very established marketers who are experts in PPC.

Plan to start getting traffic soon and, if you did your keyword research well and you are targeting your (well written) ad to the right audience you can expect to start seeing sales but it will take some time before you see really significant traffic and sales.

Please add any comments, questions, feedback, disagreements and anything else below.

Talk soon,

The “Shameless” (but “Ethical”) Marketer
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com

O.Y. I’ve got another free resell rights product for you. It is an audio interview with Albert Hallado and Beau Penaranda talking about traffic, including Google Adwords, Article Marketing, Craigslist Advertising and more. Get it at http://www.StreetGuideToWebTraffic.com/FreeStuff/WebTrafficInterview-MRR.zip

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Get Tons of Traffic with Pay-Per-Click