Pay Per Click marketing is known as PPC. With pay per click, you pay the search engine every time a searcher clicks the link in your advertisement and goes to your website.

The truth be known, it can take between six and twelve months to avoid being deliberately filtered out of the search engine results by Google. Even after that, you'll still have to wait until your site begins to rank high enough in the orgainc listings to start getting clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the search engine pages by employing pay per click advertising

Like most other areas of Internet advertising, keyword investigation is a serious part of pay per click. You have got to know which keywords and keyword phrases the preponderance of searchers are using to search for what it is that you are offering.

When you start a pay per click 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 highest bidders. The more that a website is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher that website will be listed in the search results, which are generally at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

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

pay per click is often filled with falsified clicks. Competitors will click on your ads to drive up your pay per click bill to try to get you to quit advertising and competing. 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 is similar to what is produced 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 thousands of unknowns that can make the one percent number way 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 $50.00, and your clicks cost you fifty cents each, you cannot afford pay per click because 100 clicks X .50 per click = $50.00 and you only broke even.

Remember, "Gross Profit" doesn't 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 above example money was in reality lost. You must know what it costs you to be in business, 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 has been bid up way too high by the bigger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using PPC promotion.

Be wary of the companies who will offer to handle your PPC promotion for a fee because they cannot change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the proficiency to help you succeed, and they may very well. But they still cannot change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC promotion can work, but you must carefully do the math. Can you make a 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 PPC promotion may very well work in your case.

I advise you to 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.

Pay per click 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 methods that are far more effective than pay per click. These other methods have helped me to advance my ecommerce site to the first page on all of the major search engines for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. A reason that these other techniques are far more effective is that they cost little or no money. And most people attribute a lot more trustworthiness to websites that rank high in the organic listings vs the sponsored listings.

By using these techniques, in well under one year, I've made my ecommerce site rank better than other websites 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 link trading to promote their website.

However, one-way backlinks are far more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I have been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented the steps I took to get lots of free traffic to my website to make it successful by relying on article spooling.

Albert Weiss, the author, has described how he gets a lot of free traffic to his ecommerce site by relying on article marketing, as well as other effective SEO techniques that you can employ yourself for free. Visit his Free SEO Information site to find out who the real SEO Experts are.