I can say, hand on heart, that I had never even heard of pay per click advertising until just over 18 months ago. I was an occassional web surfer and hadn't noticed those little ads down the right hand side of search results.
I now make my living from pay per click advertising campaigns - promoting both affiliate programs and my own sites. This from a starting position of zero knowledge. I don't say this to boast about how great I am - in fact I found it a steep learning curve - but I say it to inspire you, the reader. If I can do it, anyone can!
I started looking for a way of working from home and stumbled across affiliate programs and ppc. It intrigued me. How could something I'd never heard of possibly work? And yet... here was a way of doing business that made total sense. You only pay for the people who actually click on your ad and who in theory already have an interest in your product or program.
I soon made the classic mistake of thinking traffic (people clicking my ad) automatically equals sales. I eagerly set up my first campaigns with Google and typed in keywords I thought people would be entering into their searches. I had a research tool called Good Keywords (available as a free download from Softnik Technologies) and thought I should pick the most popular words to get the most traffic.
I watched in delight as the number of people clicking my ads grew and grew. Then realised in horror that I was making no sales. AARRRGHH! "I knew it wouldn't work" I muttered, but somehow I just knew deep down that it should.
Back to the drawing board. I devoured ebooks and websites about pay per click internet marketing and eventually the light bulb went off. It's not volume of traffic at all costs that drive your sales up. Rather it is being extremely focussed on tight groups of keywords that you know will send BUYERS. To that end I started ignoring the massively searched terms and instead used the bottom of the lists of keywords found by my software.
This has various advantages. Firstly your competition probably won't bother with these words, so you will appear further up the pay per click advert rankings. Secondly you can find many, many cheap keywords that work wonderfully. The most expensive words are usually the ones everyone wants! Lastly you tend to find some very specific phrases at the bottom of the list, which means you can target your ads to "niche" parts of the market and clean up :O)
One thing I haven't mentioned is your budget. Work out how many clicks on your ads it takes to make a sale. (Do this by running an ad campaign and waiting for say 3 sales) Then look at your profit on that product. It may be common sense - but you must price your clicks so that the number of clicks x price of each is less than your profit!
I also have a golden rule - 500 clicks and no sales means I drop the campaign like a hot potato. I do an ad based on totally different keywords or go and find another product to sell.
I hope this brief pay per click overview has given you some tips and also the belief you can do it. I know you can.
Gaz Hutchinson Internet Marketer
As I say I started in ppc, but more and more I am using free advertising. This includes an amazing "viral" way of getting my sites to the top of search engines overnight. (Yes really!)
For a review of this strategy visit http://www.realmoneysite.com