How To Click With Online Advertising
by Mark Vandorone
http://www.fivemarketing.com

As the free search engines become increasingly competitive, not to mention complex, pay-per-click ("PPC") advertising can be ideal for the small business operating in a niche market.

Learn the secrets of PPC search engines and success on the internet could be yours. Be warned, however, a lack of understanding could put your business on the road to insolvency. I can't emphasize this strongly enough. An understanding of PPC can be a great advantage to your business.

If you've ever attended an auction to bid for a piece of furniture or artwork you'll have some idea of how to advertise on the PPC search engines. In this case you're bidding for high ranked spots on the keywords you've identified for your business. Visitors will arrive at your site by clicking on your search engine advert, and each time that happens you'll pay the search engine the value of your bid. A bid can be as low as 5 cents, but some highly competitive keywords can cost several dollars.

Let's talk about the pros and cons of PPC advertising. First the pros :

1. Only when someone clicks on you advert are you required to pay.

2. Can be an inexpensive method of attracting targeted traffic to your site.

3. Anyone can get the top advertising spot if they outbid the competition.

4. You can usually have a PPC advertising campaign up and running in a matter of minutes, and making sales almost immediately.

5. If the results aren't all you expected then you can simply cancel the campaign with immediate effect.

6. Campaigns can be tested and refined very quickly and very easily.

Unfortunately there are some disadvantages we have to discuss too -

1. People may click on your advert just because they can. You will, of course, have to pay for these junk clicks.

2. Competition over that top spot can result in a bidding war, driving up the cost per click.

3. Some of the PPC search engines have rigorous approval processes for adverts. You don't always end up with an advert to your liking, or it could take a long time to get the advert agreed.

4. A misleading or poorly crafted ad can result in traffic that doesn't convert to sales. If you haven't restricted the advertising budget to something you can afford - then in these circumstances you could be on that fast track to bankruptcy.

So how do you start with PPC advertising? First you need to  establish which keywords your potential customers are searching on. No point in bidding for traffic on an inappropriate keyword. There are many ways of doing this research, unfortunately it is way beyond the scope of this article. But this is an important step that shouldn't be missed and I'll be covering it more fully in a future article.

Before you can contemplate making a bid on the keywords you've established it is vital that you know the monetary value of a visitor to your site. That is you must be able to calculate on average how much revenue each visitor generates. Simple math will then tell you how far you can go in the bidding process.

If you want to use PPC advertising to test your sales copy on a new site with no visitor knowledge, then monitor your costs versus sales closely. A daily budget is advisable at the outset. Limit your spending to something you can afford to lose if the worst occurs and you don't make any sales. Raise this as appropriate once you can see the sales conversion rate.

You're almost ready to get going. What I've provided here is an overview of PPC advertising. Use this as the first building block in your quest to master the PPC search engines.

Wishing you every success with your online advertising.

Author Mark Vandorone is the founder and proprietor of Five Marketing, a quality provider of highly targeted traffic for your online advertising campaigns.
For more information go to http://www.fivemarketing.com