Advertise Your Web Site The Smart Way With PPC Programs

So you have a website that brings in only a little bit of traffic and you just can't seem to make any money with the darn thing. You hear about everyone getting rich with their sites and are waiting for yours to become an "overnight success". Well, it won't be overnight, but with the right advertising techniques your site can in time become a cash cow. This article will discuss how you can use PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising to get people to your site immediately and maximize your ROI. The switch from CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) to PPC (Pay Per Click) has made a big difference in the cost effectiveness of banner/link advertising. The great thing about PPC is that you only pay when someone clicks on the link to your site. Let's face it - what good is it if a million people see your banner but nobody ever clicks on it. This way you are guaranteed a certain amount of traffic for your buck which makes for a positive and very trackable ROI. Google Adwords program has risen to the top of the PPC world. You can choose any keyword and bid for a top spot on the right side of Google's search result page. Let's say for example you have a website that sells sporting goods. You first choose keywords that people looking for a sporting goods store might be searching for. Be sure to only choose words that very specific or you'll waste your money. For example, you don't want to choose the word "baseball" because you'll get a bunch of people clicking on your link that may be looking for when the next Yankees game is, kids writing a book report on baseball, etc. Instead you want to choose more targeted words like "baseball equipment". This way you are guaranteed not to waste your advertising budget on people that aren't searching for what your selling. I own a website design company called Bsleek (http://www.bsleek.com). When I first enrolled in Google's Adwords program I wasted countless dollars on words that my potential clients were not searching for. For example, I was using "Web Site" as one of my keywords. I assumed that people that looking to get a web site design would be typing in the word "web site". What I didn't realize was that people using that search word could have been looking for a million other things, like a "web site" about Indonesian Herbs" or a "web site" about celebrity baby names. Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) is very similar to Google Adwords. Along with Google, it is the leading PPC program on the web. Millions of people come to the many sites on the Yahoo network each month looking for what you're selling. 15 years ago we couldn't have imagined something this amazing. Brick and Mortar businesses would have killed for this kind of potential exposure. Too get an idea about what keyword you should choose, both Google and Yahoo have tools to help you choose keywords. Google has a suggestion tool that'll give you a wide variety of keywords to choose from. Yahoo has an even better tool that let's you type in words and see how many searches were done for that word in the past month. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and sign up for these programs and you'll begin to get visitors to your site in less than five minutes. In a year from now, you may be the person that everyone else on the Intranet is admiring and asking, "How did he/she make all this money on the web?"