Using Pay Per Click to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Using Pay Per Click (PPC) is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website! Up until now, we have focused on using free methods, such as article marketing for traffic generation. Pay Per Click can be incredibly effective as well. If you set everything up the right way, it will allow you to see results faster, and it can save you time as well.

First, it's important to understand what PPC is. Perhaps you've heard of Google's Adwords. The idea of PPC providers like Adwords is that advertisers can create small text ads that will appear for certain desired keywords that will entice searchers (and hopefully potential buyers) to click through to your website.

Go ahead and go to Google.com now. Type in a product or a niche that you are interested in. If there are buyers in the niche, the chances are very good that you will see that some ads appear on the right-hand side of the search listings. These are put up by people who are making use of Adwords! Take note of how these ads look and how they are formatted. Which ones entice you to click?

When you take advantage of Adwords, you are basically bidding on keyword placement. Whereas it can take months to appear for a certain key term in the natural search results (especially if your site is not optimized correctly!), you can appear nearly instantly in the paid listings. For example, if you had been trying to rank for the key phrase "natural acne treatments" for quite some time, you could instead put up an Adwords ad for "natural acne treatments" and pay each time someone clicks on your ad. You control the position of your ad based on the quality of your landing page and how much you are willing to spend!

Whether you decide to start PPC right now or not, you should sign up for Google Adwords. In some cases, you can even find coupons to use their service for free for certain period of time. Google is great about taking you step-by-step through what you need to do. Keep in mind, however, that it is not uncommon for those who are new to end up spending a fortune with little result.

That's not because Pay Per Click doesn't work! It's because you need to pay careful attention to how you set up your ads. Make things very tight and targeted. If you are very new, it is recommended that you bid only on exact match keywords that are very specifically targeted to your niche. That way you will be able to test and track conversions easily and ramp up your PPC efforts from there.

Note that Google is not the only PPC network available. Bing and Yahoo (as well as others) offer PPC advertisement as well. However, Google's is the most popular because it has the potential to generate the most traffic for you -- and if you have it set up the right way, the most sales!