I could write a lot of pages, maybe even a book explaining what pay per click marketing is and what it can do for your business, but I will keep this short and to the point. Pay per click (ppc) marketing is an advertising platform in which you bid an amount of money that you are willing to pay for a click. When a searcher does a search at Google all of the ads on the right side of the screen are ppc ads. Google calls them sponsored listings. When a surfer types in a keyword, the advertisers who have bid on that keyword have their ads displayed. When one of the ads is clicked by the surfer he is taken to the advertiser's website. The advertiser is charged at maximum, the amount they've bid. Most of the time they are charged less than what they have bid. But they are never charged more than their maximum bid.

The bids can start at 1 cent and depending on the market and the ppc search engine, go up to $50 or more per click. When starting off I suggest bidding very low. Ten to fifteen cents per click or lower is a good start. The higher you bid the higher in the rankings your ad is shown therefore increasing your ad's visibility and your potential visitors. The downside is bidding high can cost you a lot of money and in some cases bring you way over budget. Be very careful when bidding.

Bidding low might not get you as much traffic as bidding high but it will bring you traffic for much cheaper thus increasing your return of investment (ROI). One way to increase the amount of times your ad is shown (visibility) while bidding low, is to bid on a high volume of keywords. Some marketers bid on hundreds and up to hundreds of thousands of keywords.

This method will take some time. Putting together hundreds or thousands of keywords can be time consuming, but it is an effective strategy for getting quality traffic, without paying a lot of money. The more you work with the ppcs the faster you will get at putting together lists of keywords.

In case you're not sure how to generate that many keywords there are many tools on the net that will help. Some are free and some charge money. One of the best free tools is offered by a company formerly named Overture, which has been bought out by Yahoo! This tool can be found here. http://inventory.overture.com

What can ppc marketing do for your business? Depending on your market, ppc marketing can be a great way to get quality traffic inexpensively, increasing your ROI and profit. It is also a great method for testing products because your ad can ?go live? in as little as 15 minutes and up to 5 business days. Depending on which ppc search engine you use.

Advertising your business at free search engines a.k.a organic search engines can take weeks or even months for your website to be indexed in their directory. It can take a lot longer than that to get a decent ranking on your search terms. The more competitive the keywords you are trying to get listed, the harder it is to obtain a decent ranking. This is one reason why ppc search engines have a huge advantage over organic search engines.

I, as well as thousands of other marketers think the best two ppc search engines are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Google claims your ad can ?go live? in 15 minutes but it usually takes a couple of hours. This is really fast. Yahoo! Usually takes a couple of days.

There are thousands of smaller ppc search engines. Some of them are good and some are not. Some will take your money but will not have many searchers. Google and Yahoo have hundreds of millions of searchers every day. If you think about using a smaller ppc do some research and find out what experiences other marketers have had. There are thousands of forums, newsletters, ezines and info sites dedicated to educating people about ppc marketing. You can learn a lot about Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and a lot of the smaller (2nd tier) ppc search engines at these places.