The holiday shopping season has a beginning, middle, and end. You can argue it begins in September and ends in January. No matter what timeframe you have it's still a finite period of time during which a very large percentage of yearly retail sales are made. You have to strike while the iron is hot. It is unrealistic to expect users to locate your online presence by directly entering your website address. More than 75 percent of Internet consumers use search engines and directories to look for products, services and information.



The problem is it takes time to optimize your website and for spiders to magically index your site in relation to the billions and billions and billions of other websites. Well maybe not that many. The question is how do you get people to your website for that brief three or four month selling season. Answer: you buy your way in.

Pay per click (PPC) search engines, also known as pay-for-performance, are engines which allow website owners to determine their sites ranking in that particular search engines results by bidding on keywords. Usually the first three to five search results are used by a network of partner search sites. The result for the site owner or webmaster is a lot more highly targeted traffic and a lot more sales.

PPC has a small setup fee, and higher recurring costs than Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, while SEO can take months or longer to build traffic, PPC will immediately send targeted traffic to your website. You may pay more for the convenience of instantly turning your traffic on and off, but to many it is worthwhile.

Pay Per Click search allows you to effectively connect with customers searching online for your products and services. You select words that relate to your business and your website appears in search results on selected sites when search users enter those words. You pay for each sales lead, not each impression, leading to a high return on your advertising investment. You also control your costs by determining the price you are willing to pay per lead - the more you pay, the higher your listings appear within the search results and the greater the number of potential customers that see your listing. The underlying idea to pay per click search engines is that you find keywords related to your website and then you bid on these keywords and buy high positions on your chosen engine. Your bid amount is the amount you're willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results.

The more times a word or phrase has been searched for the higher you'll have to bid to get high rankings. The only limitation is that your site must be at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on (if you bid for terms that weren't really directly related to your website, people would come to your site, not buy anything, and you'd still pay for the visit. It's like giving the PPC search engines free money, therefore it's vital to always stay relevant). These engines allow you to skip all the search engine optimization stuff and simply pay for visitors.

PPC is perfect for a finite period of time because you can start and stop it when necessary. Benefits of PPC are:

* You only pay for visitors. Unlike banner advertising where you pay each time someone sees your ad, pay-per-click engines only charge you when someone actually clicks on your listing. This means you're getting guaranteed visits.

* Pay-per-click engines provide highly targeted cheap visitors. Often you can buy a good ranking on a decent keyword for as little as 1 cent or 2 cents per click. Overture has of late installed $.05 as the minimum bid however. Popular search terms can cost much more on the big pay per click search engines most notably Google Adwords, Overture.com and Findwhat.com. Even still PPC engines are one of the most cost effective way of driving targeted people to your site. Google Adwords, Overture.com and Findwhat.com are the pay-per-click engines most often recommended.

BizAtomic Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management allows your site to be advertised on various keywords optimized for your business. Using a bidding mechanism, you purchase the right to have your business listed in a set position for your keywords. This process provides instant gratification as your site can be listed at the top of searches instantly.

The BizAtomic PPC campaign is aimed at delivering the maximum ROI for your PPC budget with an eye on high conversions, higher CTR and lower cost of customer acquisition.

The Advantages of PPC (Pay-Per-Click):

* Control: you always know who you are reaching, what keywords you want to run your PPC campaign on, what countries or even what city you want your PPC ads to appear for and what language should they be displayed in. You also control how much you bid for each advertisement and how much you want to spend in total.

* Targeted Traffic: You get to target the right audience without worrying about irrelevant traffic. If you sell blue shoes, you can select your ad to appear only when a search engine user types "Buy Blue Shoes". Of course people need to be searching for the particular keyword.

* Instant: Another big advantage of PPC is that it is instant. The PPC ads appear almost instantly and respond to the changes or modification made instantly.

* Branding: You can choose the words in which you want to describe your business and also have the freedom of having the visitor visit the exact page you want them to see.

* Site Architecture Independent: No architectural changes need to be made to sites to rank on PPC keywords. For example, flash websites can run PPC campaigns without having to worry about search engine crawlers.

If your objective is to increase traffic to your website or increase brand awareness, PPC is one of the most important and safest bets on the search engines.