Is Pay Per Click your Best Marketing Bet?

You may already have heard of this method to get people to your web site. From my point of view and experience it turns out to be expensive and you have to write the ads yourself, pay for them, and change and maintain them to be the correct ones to work and be the right price in competition with many others.

When people search for a particular topic like healing a headache or other malady, they will see in the column to the right an ad that when clicked on takes the person to their web site selling the book or service on healing headaches.

Advertisers pay a set amount for every time the ad is clicked by a prospect. This is referred to as a click through rate or ctr.

Yes, there are benefits: The opportunity to place your ad directly in front of a prospect at the exact moment they are searching for your product or service is good.

More benefits include your control over the keywords that best represent your product. The PPC model allows you to decide how much you are willing to pay per customer. You only pay for the click throughs, and these are your targeted audience seeking your solutions.

After using Overture and being disappointed, while doing a Google search recently, I noticed the small sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page were a type of pay per click called Google Adwords. I do know people who are successful with this company.

While this search generates targeted website traffic, the downside? You have to study what key words work best, and the best ones are much more expensive than other ones. The popularity and growth of pay per click had also made it expensive.

The Horror Stories of Pay Per Click

Story One. One submitter got hooked because it was fast, exciting and easy.

Within days of learning about pay per click, she was generating 1,000 clicks per day to her various campaigns. She thought she was seeing success in pay per click.

In the early days of ppc, that may have been true because bids on popular keywords were just pennies a click. When her popular keywords were around $1 dollar per click, she actually lost $100