Basic guide to Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Only a few years back when I started advertising on the Internet and building my first passion-driven web site, I could get good results by submitting to search engines for free, and placing some free ads on the Internet.

Inevitably, as more people start their own business online, free advertising has become a cumbersome task that does not produce good results. I would recommend that you use these paid ads, sponsored links and URL listing in addition to the web site you already created. While your web site may take months to get spidered, indexed and listed by search engines, paid ads allows your business to be up and running in as little as 5 minutes (for PPC) or a much as 3 business days (for paid inclusion and sponsored link programs).

When you do a search on any search engine nowadays, chances are you will notice certain links, either at the top, side or bottom of the page, that is highlighted or has a colored background, giving it special emphasis.

These ads are called Pay Per Click programs, whereby you can pay the search engines to list your site on the search results page. Most PPC programs will allow you to control your ad text, budget and cost per click (CPC). Cost per click is how much you are willing to pay the search engines for each click on your advertisement, and will generally directly determine the ranking and placement of your ads.

Generally, pay per click programs can be activated immediately, and your ads can be up and running in as little as 5 minutes, generating traffic to your web site. Most small business entrepreneurs are attracted to the PPC advertising method because they do not want to spend the time and money trying to get their sites listed in major search engines.

A short list of popular PPC programs:

Overture	Overture Delivers Results You Can't Ignore. Only Overture search listings reach over 80% of active U.S. Internet users with just one buy.
FindWhat	Get found on the Internet. Advertise with FindWhat.com and drive traffic, customers, and profits to your website.
Search123	Is your Search Campaign just skimming the surface? Reach deep into the internet with Search 123.
Google Adwords	Paid version of listing on Google's search engine. A bit more complicated to use, but Google AdWords can produce good results.
Enhance Listings	Sign up with Enhance Interactive (formerly ah-ha.com) and get access to 1.5 billion searches per month. $10 account credit!

All search engines run on their own algorithms (mathematical calculation to determine the ranking and listing of web sites), therefore making the search results unpredictable at time, especially since the search engines constantly change their algorithms, therefore changing where and how your web site will appear when some searches for your product or service. If you are new to Internet marketing, SearchEngineWatch.com will be a useful web site to understand everything you need to know about search engines.

Frustrated with the unpredictable nature of rankings, business owners are turning towards Par Per Click Advertising as a more certain way of getting highly targeted traffic to their website. PPC may have been around since 1997, but recently it has started to turn into an massive industry of its own.

Sponsored Links & Sponsored Listings

On search result pages, either on the search engines themselves or one of their many partners, these appear sponsored links or sponsored listings. The owner of the web site pays the search engines or portals to have his link listed on top of the search engine results themselves.

In most cases the paid advertisements are clearly labeled and separated from the free search engine results. This is to avoid confusion and to maintain an ethical approach to mixing free listings together with paid ones.