Pay per click (ppc) advertising can be costly. If you take the standard approach i.e. bidding for popular and competitive keywords, then you're open to high costs and potential click fraud. I know this from experience.

When done correctly, ppc advertising can be a great way of driving targeted traffic to your site, therefore creating more qualified leads. This is especially beneficial if you're selling high end or high margin products or services. It can also work if you're promoting a business opportunity.

Goggle and Overture are two popular ppc search engines that I use and several years of experience have taught me the following points for success:

1) Have a nice, well written website. It's great generating traffic, but if your site is poor quality, the traffic is wasted.

2) Brainstorm a list of keywords. Think 'what type of people do I want to attract and what kind of things might they type into the search engines?