Post written by Dana Prince

Those who want to be successful online in e-business quickly learn that traffic is a vital ingredient for profit and success. They also learn that there are many ways to capture traffic; although the methods aren’t always easy and they’re not always free. A PPC (pay per click) campaign offers several ways to get traffic to your website. Do it well and that traffic could translate to profit. Do it wrong and it could be an expensive lesson.

 In a nutshell, traffic received via PPC advertising can arrive to your sales landing page and you can then work on converting that traffic into a paying customer. Your ad could be placed in search engines, on websites and blogs, and even in someone’s email. PPC via Google Adwords could be a very profitable proposition.

 What is a PPC Campaign?

 A pay per click campaign involves paying a fee for visits to your website from people. You can arrange this with various search engines and marketing companies. You could pay a fee per click and you could also pay fees per page impression as well.

 Learning how to use pay per click to your advantage could be very lucrative and some websites and entrepreneurs use pay per click quite successfully as part of their search engine marketing strategy.

But how can you Make Money with PPC ads that cost money?

Here are some examples:

  • Open an online store. Set up the website and start a pay per click campaign to drive interested traffic to your store. If the cost per click is low and the profit margin is high, you’ve got great potential.
  • Do affiliate marketing. By being a facilitator that drives traffic to someone else’s site, you can make a commission for every sale. Bid on keywords that relate to an affiliate product and write great ads to drive qualified traffic to the landing page.
  • Create a website and sign up for a Google Adsense account which will put contextual advertising on your website. Once your site displays ads, you can earn money when your site’s visitors click on the ads.

Let’s look at each of the above scenarios a bit more closely:

E-Commerce:

If you sell something in an online store, pay per click ads could be created to drive interested individuals to your store. If you sold shoes, for instance, you could arrange to have your shoe ads shown when people key in specific words related to shoes. Those people may be shopping for a new pair of shoes and land on your online store.

Affiliate Marketing:

Campaigns can be created so that you can direct traffic to a landing page that has your special affiliate code.  When that traffic results in a sale, you earn commission. The concept is used by many online entrepreneurs and by being an affiliate internet marketer, you don’t even have to touch product in order to earn from its sale. By getting traffic for the wholesaler or product creator, you could make commission fees.

Content Sites:

Many blogs and other topical websites are filled with ads. The website owner displays ads on their site and if people click those ads and / or buy something from the resulting page, the content site owner makes a percentage of a fee shared by a company such as Google.

More about Pay Per Click

PPC enables targeted advertising based on keywords and phrases.  Because people may be on a web page due to an interest in a particular topic on the page, relevant ads may also appear. If you’re the owner of a website selling vitamins, for instance, your ad could appear on a search engine results page related to particular phrases as well as in banners on health blogs, health forums, and in someone’s e-mail because of words in their messages related to health, vitamins, or illnesses.  

A PPC advertisement for vitamins might look like this:

Need vitamin C?

Check out our specials on vitamin C. Free Shipping!

URL

The advertiser pays for the click or the showing of the ad (depending on their campaign) and if you, the web surfer, buy something from that site, they’ve benefited from their PPC investment.

A Word of Caution:

A lot of different companies use paid search engine marketing campaigns to gain an edge but not everyone is able to do so successfully. Most use a combination of search engine marketing and organic search engine optimization (SEO) to drive as much traffic to their website as possible. Not all traffic is equal, not all pay per click ads will result in a sale, and not everyone will master PPC and make money at it.

Pay per click can be expensive and just because someone clicks, that doesn’t mean their click will result in a sale. It’s important to learn strategies of successful internet marketing techniques before creating a paid campaign.  Learning ‘as you go’ could be an expensive lesson.

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Filed under: PPC

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