THE GOLD STANDARD: PAY PER

CLICK

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has been the standard bearer in online advertising models. It all started with the Google search engine that began using keywords that people searched in their engine to determine where to place ads through a content-generated ad placement system. By combining the power of the Google search engine and tracking keywords, advertisers could set up ad campaigns based on very highly targeted niche topics. This insured that when an ad showed up on a site, it was relevant to the audience, who would be more inclined to click on the ad since it would interest that demographic.

ADSENSE VS. ADWORDS

In Google’s program, there are two programs that a person can sign up with to use pay-per-click advertising: AdSense and AdWords. AdSense is the program that publishers of pay-per-click advertising use to generate income by adding Google ads to their online content. AdWords is the program where online merchants can create pay-per-click campaigns using keywords so that publishers can expose them to their markets.

There are ways to make money with either of these models, whether as a publisher or as a merchant. Pay-per-click marketing isn’t just limited to people who publish pay-per-click links and get paid per every click generated. There is far more to making money with pay-per-click marketing than that. However, the most popular and well-known way to make money with pay-per-click advertising is as a publisher, for several reasons.

PPC PUBLISHERS

The main reason that people like to implement PPC publishing as a strategy to make money online is because it costs them nothing, except time, to do. If you have a large enough audience or know how to attract traffic to links, you can make a good amount of money by simply posting links that other people will click on, and thus, create income for you. It does take some understanding of keywords, and we will go over that a little later on. Suffice it to say, for now, if you want to start using PPC marketing in your lineup of potential money makers, then PPC is the easiest way to go. Ads are generated automatically on your sites based on the content that you post.

You don’t have to know much programming, other than cutting and pasting code into Web pages. You don’t have to shell out any money to get involved, and entry into the Google AdWords program is very easy.