Pay Per Click marketing is also known as PPC. With PPC advertising, you pay the search engine every time a lead clicks the link in your ad and goes to your website.

The truth be known, it will probably take between six and twelve months to overcome being deliberately filtered out of the SERPS by Google. Even after that, you will 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 employing PPC marketing

Similar to many other aspects of Internet advertising, keyword study is a critical part of PPC advertising. You need to know which keywords and keyword phrases the preponderance of searchers are most likely to use to hunt for what it is that you are selling.

When you start a PPC advertising campaign, you are actually involving yourself in an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are used by most people, with the highest listings going to the highest bidders. The more that a website 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 advertising has become highly cutthroat for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

PPC advertising is often filled with fake clicks. Your competitors will click on your ads to drive up your PPC advertising bill in order to try to get you to quit advertising. There have also been some 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 advertising. 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 conversion rate is similar to what is found in the mail-order business, which is between one half of one percent, and two percent. In the real world, projecting a one percent conversion rate would be fairly safe, though there are millions of unknowns that can make the one percent number much too high.

What that means is that out of every 100 clicks on your links, you might get one actual sale. So if the markup (Gross Profit) on your average sale is fifty dollars, and your clicks cost you fifty cents each, you can't afford PPC advertising because 100 clicks times .50 per click = fifty dollars and you just broke even.

Don't forget, "Gross Profit" does not include your overhead. It's only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the example given you really lost money. 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 pay per click advertising has been bid up too high by the larger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using pay per click advertising.

Beware of the companies who will offer to handle your pay per click advertising for a fee because they can't change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the expertise to help you, and they might. But they still can't change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that pay per click 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 pay per click advertising might work in your case.

I recommend that you stick with niche terms that have not been bid way up. 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 $40.00 and $150.00.

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

Personally, I've found several SEO techniques that are far more effective than PPC advertising. These other techniques have helped me to promote my ecommerce site 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 methods are far more productive is that they cost little or nothing. And most people searching the Internet attribute a lot more credibility to sites that rank high in the organic listings vs the paid listings.

By using these methods, in well under one year, I've been able to make my website rank better than other sites in my industry that have been at it for 10 years or 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 to promote their website.

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 I took to get lots of free traffic to my ecommerce site to make it successful by relying on article marketing.

Albert Weiss, the author, has documented how he gets a lot of free traffic to his site by relying on article spinning and marketing, as well as other effective SEO methods that you can employ yourself. He will let you know who the real SEO Gurus are on his Free SEO Information Website.