Once you have a website, you will want to get traffic to your site. How else will you be able to sell a product, get clicks on your AdSense ads, or get people to sign up for your newsletter? There are many ways to get traffic to your website, but right now we are going to discuss pay per click (PPC).

Pay per click is exactly what it sounds like. When someone clicks on one of your ads and comes to visit your site, you pay a certain amount for that click that brought them to the site. The most well known company that does this is Google AdWords, but Yahoo, MSN, and many other companies do this as well.

The way it works is you create an ad that will show up on search engines as well as on other people's websites. You then pick the keywords that you want your ad to show up for, so that you will get exactly the type of traffic you want. You choose how much you are willing to pay for each click, and you can also set a total amount per day you are willing to spend, so there is no way you can go over your set budget. There are still many keywords where you can pay just 5 cents every time someone comes to your website. If you are selling a product, it might be worth 5 cents each time a person clicks on your ad, and comes to visit your site if many of those visits turn into paying customers.

One nice thing about pay per click is that you know the person that comes to your site is at least somewhat interested in what you have to say or offer, since they clicked on the ad in the first place. This is known as targeted traffic, and these people have a lot more of a chance of becoming customers than any untargeted traffic you can get. If you do a good job of writing your ad, hopefully the people who read and click on your ad will already know roughly what they will find when they get to your site.

Since Google AdWords is the most well known of pay per click sites, you might want to consider trying Yahoo or MSN if you want to pay a little less. While this is not always the case, this can sometimes be true as more people are competing for the same keywords on Google.

Pay per click can be a great way to get traffic to your website, and to find new customers without having to pay a lot. It is definitely something to look into, and one of the many ways you should advertise if you would like to get a lot of traffic (especially targeted traffic) to your site.