Recently advertising and marketing strategies and tactics have been revamped in a major way. A lot of it has to do with the impact of the Internet and its mass appeal. According to most research done today, the electronic media might be having a more effective impact on the masses than the print media. Advertising, and its daddy, marketing strive to make your product or services visible to the maximum number of buyers.

To show your product to maximum number of people, you need to know where you will find this large number of people who can be your potential customers. There is a huge potential customer market on the internet waiting to be tapped. Logically many service providers are exploiting different channels, by hook or by crook to catch the attention of these consumers on the internet. Search engines are the most common places where any person in quest for a product or a service is headed.

Again, by sheer logic and past self experiences we know that mostly the customers scan only one or at a maximum of two pages of search results of a search engine. He will visit websites and links on these two pages in which he finds keywords closest to what he is looking for. Thereby it brings business to these websites. So an effective marketing and advertising technique is one which allows your website and links to be on these initial pages so as to catch the eye of the person.

You can get good position in the search results using both SEO and pay per click. Smart marketers will use a combination of both. Pay per click (sponsored search) means an advertiser pays a search engine a pre-arranged bid amount every time a searcher clicks on his link and visits his website. The advertiser's bid amount in relation to competitive bids determines how high his link will be in the search results. SEO is a bit more subtle. Rather than pay the search engine per click SEO focuses on proper coding, inbound links, and the use of proper keywords in order to attain a higher rank in the search display page.

Since pay per click results can usually be achieved faster than SEO, it's a good way to start. Some advantages of PPC are:

* By its very nature pay per click offers more flexibility. You can start a campaign immediately. You can set daily, weekly or monthly budgets. You can even set cost per action goals. You can pick the exact keywords you think will deliver the highest sales conversion.

* Instead of possibly spending months trying to figure out the proper algorithm to get you to the front of the search results for keywords you're not even sure convert, you can test your keywords fast with pay per click. You can get results the first day. Imagine that.

* PPC is tailor made for service providers who are after blitzkrieg publicity. Seasonal promotions normally see a huge rush in PPC spending as the time for actual selling is only limited; the producer wants to have a sure shot chance of catching the customer's attention. Similar goes the case for quick response advertisings.

* PPC gives you more time to test your offers. By investing more time testing different offers you can learn you customers better. Find out which ads get them to reach into their pockets and pull out those credit cards. Quickly eliminate ads that don't.

* PPC lets you fail fast. If your ads don't get clicked on it cost you nothing. It's easy to gauge customer demand without a huge expenditure of money and time.

Both PPC and SEO are both viable options. If you can achieve good Search Engine Optimization then by all means do so but don't neglect the power of PPC for a powerful kick start to your online marketing.