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Pay Per Click promotion is also known as PPC. With pay per click marketing, payment is made to the search engine every time a lead clicks the link in your advertisement and goes to your website.

The truth be known, it will probably take between 6 and 12 months to avoid being deliberately filtered out of the SERPS by Google. And after that, you will still have to wait until your site begins to rank high enough in the SERPS to start getting clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the SE pages by making use of pay per click advertising

Akin to most other areas of Internet marketing, keyword research is a critical part of pay per click marketing. You have got to know which keywords and keyword phrases the preponderance of searchers are using to search for what it is that you are selling.

When you start a pay per click marketing campaign, you are actually getting yourself into an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are most popular, with the highest listings going to the people who bid the most. The more that a business is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher they will be listed in the paid listings, which are most often found at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

pay per click marketing has become highly competitive for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

pay per click marketing is often filled with fraudulent clicks. Your competitors will click on your ads to drive up your pay per click marketing bill in order to try to get you to stop competing. There have also been some allegations and lawsuits regarding fraud that is perpetrated by the search engine companies themselves. And the Plaintiffs won at least one of these lawsuits that I read about.

I could write a lot about this area of marketing. But I think that your interests would be better served if I just "cut to the chase." Conversion rates vary widely by industry on the Internet. But the average is similar to the mail-order business, between one half of one percent, and two percent. And in the real world, projecting a one percent conversion rate would be fairly safe, though there are hundreds of variables that can make the one percent number much too high.

What that means is that out of every one hundred clicks on your links, you might get one actual sale. So if the markup (Gross Profit) on your average sale is $50.00, and your clicks cost you fifty cents each, you can't afford pay per click marketing because one hundred clicks times fifty cents per click = $50.00 and you just broke even.

Don't forget, "Gross Profit" does not include your cost of doing business. It's only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the above example you actually lost money. You must know what it costs you to be in business, and that includes how much it costs to own your equipment, pay your rent, ISP, etc., plus the value of your time.

The bottom line is that most PPC advertising has been bid up too high by the bigger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using PPC advertising.

Be wary of the companies who will offer to administer your PPC advertising for a fee because they can't change the laws of math or physics. They will claim to have the proficiency to help you, and they may. But they still can't change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC advertising can work, but you must carefully do the math. Can you make a reasonable profit based on the above calculations if you pay the current bid price for the keywords and get only about a 1/10th of 1% or 2/10ths of 1% conversion rate (sales rate)? If you can, then PPC advertising may work for you.

I advise you to stick with niche terms that haven't been bid up to high. Personally, in my industry I'm only willing to pay between 15 cents and 40 cents maximum per click, and my products sell for between forty and one hundred and fifty dollars.

PPC? Do the math first, and then make a decision. But be willing to lose money while you find out how to make it work effectively!

Personally, I've found several search engine optimization techniques that are far more effective than pay per click marketing. These other techniques have led me to promote my website to the first page on Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. One of the reasons that these other techniques are far more productive is that they cost little or no money at all. And most people attribute a lot more trustworthiness to ecommerce sites that rank high in the organic listings vs the sponsored listings.

By using these techniques, in less than one year, I've been able to make my site rank as well as or better than other sites in my industry that have been promoting themselves for 10 years or even more!

In the longer term, you will want to optimize your site and work on getting backlinks to raise your ranking in the organic listings. Many people have used reciprocal linking trading to promote websites.

However, one-way backlinks are far more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I've been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented the steps that were taken to get tons of free traffic to my site to make it successful by using article spooling.