Pay per Click Advertisements, or PPC, are ads where you pay for the click of an advertisement rather than for the view of it. In a typical advertising setup you pay per thousand impressions, otherwise known as the CPM. This was the old model of advertising and it was really a bit of a shotgun approach. With CPM you are basically putting your ad out in the wild in front of thousands of eyeballs and hoping a few are willing to check out your product or service. You could try to refine your market as much as possible but when you get down to it there was still a risk of putting up an ad for something nobody in that market cares about.

With PPC however you only pay when someone has viewed your ad, which is an indication that they're actually interested in it. If someone's interested in your advertisement and your copy is compelling then it can lead to a much higher conversion rate and drastically improve the sales of your products and services. Not just that, but it can also lead to a lot more newsletter, forum, or other lead inducing sign ups.

One of the major players in the PPC industry is Google AdWords, due to their search and content network superiority. AdWords is simple to use and they give you a decent free credit to get you started. You first create an "Ad Campaign" which groups together all of your ads for a particular product, service, or market and gives you control over the campaign as a whole. From there you create the advertisements themselves which are short textual advertisements that draw the reader into your campaign.

It's best to use short, powerful copy with a strong call to action to draw the reader's attention. You can set keywords to your advertisement as well which specifies when the advertisement shows. Ads show up when someone searches for a particular set of terms or is looking at a website about a particular product. If you're selling cheap airline fares and set "cheap airline fares" as your keyword for an ad, it will show whenever someone searches for "cheap airline fares" in Google.

You can even manage the price you're willing to pay for each keyword so someone searching "luxury airline fares" might still find your ad but at a much lower price since they are less likely to be interested in the cheap side of your service. This allows you to manage your markets like never before and gives you a real refined control over just who sees your ads and how much you pay for the service.