AS A MERCHANT

There are ways to use PPC marketing in your online advertising to create powerful campaigns that attract an army of affiliate partners to do your promotion for you. You will have to pay for the privilege, but it can be a great way to generate almost instant exposure. PPC campaigns in Google start with an AdWords account. From there, you can choose keywords that are good traffic draws or can create your own based on what you think will bring in traffic to your site. You will be responsible for paying your publishers per every click they generate that brings someone back to your site.

THE COSTS OF PPC MARKETING

Unlike PPC publishing, PPC advertising campaigns cost money. You will have to pay whatever you’ve set as cost-per-click on your campaign, whether it’s only $0.01 or more. If you set too high an amount and many publishers market your campaign, you can end up paying a lot of money for your clicks. On the other hand, if you set it too low, no one is going to be interested in targeting your keywords, and you’ll end up with few of your ads appearing anywhere. Pick something that will bring value to the publisher, but will also keep you within your budget.

You can set a daily and a monthly budget so that once you’ve reached your limit, the ads are no longer served up, and thus, you’ll stay within budget. Some people start at $400 per month for an advertising campaign, others go higher like $800 per month. Obviously, the more money you have to spend upfront, the more you will gain traffic and exposure to your sites.

WHAT’S THE REWARD?

For business people, the reward of using PPC marketing with Google AdWords is that you will hopefully get many more new customers. You will be able to advertise more of your affiliate links, and your content may end up placing higher on their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). If you do get top placing in the Google search engine for a keyword phrase that is highly searched, you will end up driving massive amounts of traffic to your site. You should be ready for that possibility by having email capture pages and offers ready to entice your visitors to sign up to your email list.

Once they are on your email list, you will be able to market to them much more effectively. Getting that email address is the start of your sales funnel and is highly important to generate future sales.

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT GOOGLE

Even though Google is the gold standard by which it all started, it is by far not the only player in this field at this time. You can use pay-per-click strategies and campaigns with various search engines from Yahoo! to MSN. Many Internet marketers feel that the Google AdWords program is far too competitive for smaller advertisers, so they try to find programs that can still use PPC, but have less competition. Some social networking sites, like Facebook, are now offering PPC advertising in their Social Ads format that will give you more leeway in determining the traffic demographic your ads will be shown to too.