Pay Per Click advertising

Pay per click or PPC advertising comes in two main forms. You have PPC affiliate marketing, and PPC search engine placement. As most of affiliate marketing has moved toward PPS (pay per sale), the main emphasis for PPC is now on the search engines. You can bid for high placement on the major (and minor) search engines, although your listing will usually appear as a separate advert outside the main search body text. You must be careful with this form of advertising as it is easy to spend your whole budget without receiving much in return. Targeting the wrong terms can mean a lot of costly traffic that isn't interested in what your selling. To get proper results from a PPC campaign you have to be strict with your keywords, careful with your wording, and monitor your statistics.

Step 1. Refining your keywords

You should have created a long keyword list in the section finding keywords. Now you want to refine this list. When you first created the list you were instructed to remove all the keywords made from searchers that would not be interested in your sites content. Now you need to go through the list and check again. You need to keep as many targeted keywords as possible, but be ruthless with ones that don't properly match. If you are thinking 'We'll there is a small chance someone typing that keyword is looking for my site', get that keyword off the list. Otherwise when you move on to the next step that keyword is going to do nothing but cost you money. Un targeted keywords, or keywords that are to general will eat you marketing budget in a matter of hours.

Step 2. Looking at the PPC search engines

There are several pay per click search engines. The largest being Google AdWords and Overture. They can potentially send you the most traffic, but they are by far the most expensive. We have compiled a list of the top PPC search engines, including minimum deposit and Alexa ranking.

PPC Search Engines
Name	Min Deposit	Alexa
Google	credit	3
Overture	$50	67
Lycos	$50	78
Looksmart	credit	672
FindWhat	$25	944
Kanoodle	$50	1 068
7Search	$25	1 403
Searchfeed	$25	1 907
Epilot	$100	2 051
GoClick	none	2 171
Mamma	$25	2 338
Search123	$25	3 184
Xuppa	$50	4 366
BrainFox	$10	6 960
Enhance	$50	9 244

Although the Alexa ranking will give you a rough idea of how popular these sites are it is not definitive. Each of these pay per click search engines distribute their results to many different search engines and sites. So the real traffic your listings will get depends on how good their distributor network is.

Step 3. First try at PPC

We recommend that before you dive in with the big expensive PPC search providers, you get a taste for how it all works... This step is only available to full members.

Step 4. Looking at the results

Analyzing the results properly will show you where the profitability is... This step is only available to full members.

Step 5. Going for the big fish

Now that you are comfortable with pay per click and it's workings it's time to branch out into the other PPC engines... This step is only available to full members.