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Pay Per Click advertising is known as PPC. With PPC marketing, payment is made to the search engines every time a lead clicks the link in your ad and goes to your website.

The truth be known, it will probably take between 6 and 12 months to evade being deliberately filtered out of the SERPS by Google. And after that, you'll still have to wait until your site begins to rank high enough in the orgainc listings to start receiving mouse clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the search engine pages by making use of PPC

Similar to lots of other aspects of Internet promotion, keyword investigation is a serious part of PPC marketing. You have to know which keywords and keyword phrases the majority of searchers are using to seek out what it is that you are offering.

When you start a PPC marketing campaign, you are actually getting yourself into an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are used the majority of the time, with the highest listings going to the people who bid the most money. The more that a business is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher that website will be listed in the paid search results, which are usually at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

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

PPC marketing is often filled with fake clicks. Your competitors will click on your ads to drive up your PPC marketing bill to try to get you to stop advertising and 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 promotion. 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 rate of conversion is similar to what is experienced in the mail-order business, which is 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 unkonwn factors 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 PPC marketing because one hundred clicks X fifty cents per click = $50.00 and you just broke even.

Remember, "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 example given money was actually lost. You must know what your costs are, 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 marketing has been bid up too high by the larger businesses and can be difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using pay per click promotion.

Be cautious of the companies who will offer to control your pay per click promotion for a fee because they can't change the laws of math or physics. They will claim to have the experience to help you succeed, and they might. But they still can't change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that pay per click promotion can work, but you must carefully do the math. Can you make a profit based on the above 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 pay per click promotion might work in your case.

I recommend that you stick with niche terms that have not been bid up to high. Personally, in my industry I'm only willing to pay between fifteen cents and forty cents maximum per click, and my products sell for between $40.00 and $150.00.

PPC marketing? Do the math first, and then decide. But you must be willing to lose money while you learn how to make it work!

Personally, I've found several search engine optimization techniques that are much more effective than PPC marketing. These other techniques have helped me to advance my website to the first page on all of the major search engines for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. One of the reasons that these other techniques are much more productive is that they cost little or no money. And most people attribute a lot more reliability to ecommerce sites that rank high in the organic listings vs the paid listings.

By using these techniques, in less than one year, I've been able to make my site rank better than other ecommerce sites in my industry that have been at it 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 their website.

However, one-way backlinks are much 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 drive tons of free traffic to my ecommerce site to make it successful by relying on article marketing.