When you have a company, regardless off whether that company is web based or brick and mortar, you need to advertise to increase your customer base. Having a web based company brings with it the distinct disadvantage of trying to make yourself stand out among the millions of other web pages online. The Internet is constantly evolving and with those changes come changes to the way people market their web based businesses. One of the methods of Internet marketing that has remained steady through all of these changes is pay per click marketing. Pay per click marketing offers web based companies an affordable and proven method for advertising their web based business.
Pay per click marketing works exactly the way it sounds. Advertisers pay for an ad and that ad is placed on various search engine result pages or content network websites. The advertiser is only responsible for paying an agreed upon fee when a user clicks on their ad. The advertisers bid on keywords that they feel target their key demographic and when an Internet user uses those search terms the pay per click ad pops up as a sponsored ad or link. The pay per click ads are located in the outer margins of the search engine result page or content network page.
When advertisers decide to use the pay per click method of Internet marketing they must know what keywords will best represent their business. The advertisers then bid on those keywords with the company in which they will placing the ad. Naturally, the more popular the keyword is the more it will cost the advertiser per click. Search engines and content web pages organize the pay per click ads on their site in succession by how much each advertiser is paying per click.
Pay per click advertising is not without its own set of unique problems. Knowing how to avoid these problems is key to an advertiser successfully launching a pay per click advertising campaign.
First, advertisers must take the time to carefully select business relevant keywords to bid on. This is essential to your ad being placed within related search engine result pages and or content network pages. Next, you must make sure that your pay per click ad is well written and that the landing page that the ad is linked to is relevant to the ad.
Click fraud is another possible pitfall in the world of pay per click marketing. Click fraud occurs when individuals, an automatic script or a computer program purposely click on an ad with the intention of increasing a companies advertising costs. There are many reasons why this takes place, but primarily it is perpetrated by a businesses competitors in an effort to deplete the companies advertising budget.
Many companies take click fraud very seriously and have developed programs to prevent and detect it. That said, it can be very difficult to prevent click fraud, so it is best to advertise with a reputable company that has established guidelines for compensation if click fraud is proven to have taken place.
Below is a basic overview of how PPC search engines work.
PPC search engines create listings which are based on keyword phrases that people are using in their internet searches. Webmasters who are seeking to market their websites will bid against other webmasters for each keyword phrase. Each of these phrases will have a number one spot, then a second and third spot, and so on. The winning bidder for the number one spot will show up at the top of the search for that keyword phrase. The same thing happens for the winning bidder of the second and third spots, and, well you get the idea. Ultimately then, when somebody types one of the keyword phrases which were bid on into a search engine, the pay per click listings will show up first. The pay per click ads will be easy to spot, as they will be labelled as sponsored links. These sponsored pay per clicks will either be in a shaded area at the top of the search result or in a sidebar on the right (and sometimes both).
One other place that pay per click ads will show up is within the Google Adsense system. You will commonly see these on web sites in a separate box with the notation: "ads by Google". Ultimately then, when someone clicks on an ad, the original webmaster who bid on this ad is charged the bid amount. This charge can be as low as one or two cents, or as high as a dollar or more, depending on the popularity of the keyword phrase.
OK, let's see how we can use PPC to make money with an affiliate marketing website.
First of all, you can use PPC to send immediate targeted traffic to you site. In this case, you will be one of the webmasters described above who will bid on keyword phrases. Once you have an account with a particular PPC search engine, and you complete your keyword bidding, your ads will go live very quickly (usually the same day). When someone does a keyword phrase search in their favorite search engine, and this keyword phrase matches one of the phrases you bid on, your website will show up on page one (usually at the top) for that search. If the user clicks on your ad, they will be taken straight to your website and you will be charged the bid amount. In this way, you can get almost instant traffic to your website. Keep in mind, however, that you need to have a budget for this method.
The second method that you can utilize to make money using pay per click is by incorporating Google Adsense into you site. Before I continue, I want to clarify a couple of terms for you. Google Adwords is the Google pay per click search engine. Google Adsense is the advertising platform that you see on many websites (and the ads here are pay per click). You can join Google Adsense for free, and with a little bit of work, you can have their ads running in a sidebar on your website. This will be an extra stream of income for you. If a visitor doesn't purchase one of your affiliate products, they may click on one of the google ads. If they click on a google ad, you will get paid for this click through. Google will automatically place ads which are only relevant to your website. Once Google Adsense is set up on your site, you don't have to do anything to maintain it. Typically, the people who click Google Ads on your site are not interested in your products so they will leave and never come back. You may as well make a small amount of money from them on the click, before they depart. Typically, Google will pay you between 30 to 80% of the advertisers' bid amount.
In closing, you will definitely want to incorporate pay per click into your overall marketing strategy at some point. Even though it will cost money to run a pay per click advertising campaign, the pay off should be much greater if you go about it correctly. Additionally, if you want to incorporate Google Adsense into your website, it is entirely free so you have nothing to lose. Good luck with your internet affiliate marketing program.
Both Russell Hancock & John Baril are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Russell Hancock has sinced written about articles on various topics from How to Podcast, Wellness and Puppies Dogs. Russell Hancock writes articles on many subjects including Internet Marketing. He owns the rSeek Network of websites which include