There are some guaranteed benefits when you get to maximize the PPC strategy. The best thing is the speed—you can have a campaign up and running in a matter of minutes if you know what you are doing.

(This is also the down-side—you can lose your shirt if you don’t know what you are doing!)

You can test ads fast, find out what is working, test your landing pages, you can even take your successful on line ads and salesletters and PPC lets you advertise to the whole of the online community. It is also relatively easy to set up.

At first glance, PPC advertising may seem very expensive.

You might also be concerned about click fraud. Could someone maliciously keep clicking your ad?

Most adserver networks have safe-guards in place and are thus able to recognize fraudulent clicks.

In addition, you might want to protect yourself by only showing your ads on the search engines, not on their whole content network.

You can also set a budget for a certain period. The moment your budget has been used up by a number of clicks and your bids for that clicks, your ads will no longer be displayed until the next 24 hours period, or until you add more money to the account, whichever comes first.

With PPC advertising, you can still basically control your campaign, as you get to create your own ad. You can also manage a very highly targeted audience, and still stay within the bounds of your budget.

After all, they are ALREADY LOOKING for what you have to sell if they type in Wedding Favors and you are advertising your wedding favors store.

Be as precise as possible with your keywords as well, because the more exact, the better. Compare video games, or gamin, to Xbox 360. Or cookie wedding favors. Those buyers are much closer to an actual purchasing decision, so if you can get your ad high enough above the fold to catch their attention, but not so high you break the bank, you have a motivated group of buyers looking for what you have to sell.

Most of the providers of PPC advertising will allow you to specify the target market, either by topic, industry or geographical location. You can also check if your ad gets to be shown at all, and if it is competitive with the rest. You can see your click through rate, and gauge your return on investment.

PPC

PPC means Pay Per Click.
You show your ads on a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN’s live search, and pay a sum of money every time someone clicks on your ad. These are sponsored listings that you see whenever you make a search. There will be a charge whenever a visitor or web surfer clicks on any of your ads.

First you have to decide on your keywords. Next you have to write a compelling ad or two, which you can then run to see which performs best. There is also the bidding process. The highest bidder for the price per click will definitely get the chance to be first listed in the search engine, though with Google, they also have ‘quality scores’ which are supposed to determine relevance, that is, how closely your page is related to the keyword you are trying to bid on. (We offer more specific guidelines on how to make the most of your PPC budget in the PPC section of this site)

In SEO, there is no need for you to pay for the clicks, although it will require you to spend time doing research to get keywords, and a write compelling pages with a favorable combination of keyword phrases and other online page elements aimed at your target audience (such as images, alt and title tags, all of which can also be full of relevant keywords).

The SEO process is a long term one. It requires months, 6 months at the least, before you will see your organic rankings start to climb, unless you are able to convince some very high ranking sites to link to you.

There are some further strategies that will get you up to the top rankings faster, which we will talk about in the SEO section of this site, but once the goal is accomplished, you will definitely get a steady source of profit without a huge budget.

SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Some researches indicate that 60% – 70% of internet surfers and users actually use the Google search engine to find and locate information.

SEO is the process of trying to ensure that internet searchers will find your website, preferably ranked in the top 10 of the search results, or, in other words, on the front page.

Since people searching use keywords, you want to make sure you write keyword rich copy so you can try to rank highly. There are other ways to rank highly, but this is a key one.

To carry out search engine optimization correctly, , you will have to build your own internet site with a page for each keyword you want to be able to rank highly on.

You should also have a well-organized site that is easy to navigate.

One other way to also boost your page ranking is to get links from other reputable sites with high quality scores. The process can involve providing them with compelling copy and making sure that the anchor text used to link back to your site is not just the meaningless ‘click here’ but linked copy using the keywords you wish to score highly on.